Here you may learn about the science and literature behind (and about!) mental health & heritage.
Feel free to browse our monthly book and poem recommendations as well as the news/reports section, which includes reports and articles on this fascinating world.
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by Dean Burnett
One in four of us experience a mental health problem each year, with anxiety and depression alone affecting over 500 million people worldwide.
Why are these conditions so widespread? What is it about modern life that has such an impact on our mental health? And why is there still so much confusion and stigma around these issues?
In Psycho-Logical, neuroscientist and bestselling author Dean Burnett answers these questions and more, revealing what is actually going on in our brains when we suffer mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and addiction.
Combining illuminating scientific research with first-hand insights from people who deal with mental health problems on a daily basis, this is an honest, entertaining and reassuring account of how and why these issues occur, and how to make sense of them.
by Matt Haig
Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived, from the internationally bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive and How To Stop Time.
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?
Despite 21st-century fears of an 'epidemic' of loneliness, its history has been sorely neglected. A Biography of Loneliness offers a radically new interpretation of loneliness as an emotional language and experience. Using letters and diaries, philosophical tracts, political discussions, and medical literature from the eighteenth century to the present, historian of the emotions Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is not an ahistorical, universal phenomenon. It is, in fact, a modern emotion: before 1800, its language did not exist. And where loneliness is identified, it is not always bad, but a complex emotional state that differs according to class, gender, ethnicity and experience.
Looking at informative case studies such as Sylvia Plath, Queen Victoria, and Virginia Woolf, A Biography of Loneliness charts the emergence of loneliness as a modern and embodied emotional state.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?
Meet Harold Fry, recently retired. He lives in a small English village with his wife, Maureen, who seems irritated by almost everything he does, even down to how he butters his toast. Little differentiates one day from the next. Then one morning the mail arrives, and within the stack of quotidian minutiae is a letter addressed to Harold in a shaky scrawl from a woman he hasn't seen or heard from in twenty years. Queenie Hennessy is in hospice and is writing to say goodbye.
Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.
Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled existence. Except, sometimes, everything...
Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist, Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, a Tamil boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age.
Yann Martel is the author of Life of Pi, the #1 international bestseller and winner of the 2002 Man Booker (among many other prizes). He is also the award-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (winner of the Journey Prize), Self, Beatrice & Virgil, and 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. Born in Spain in 1963, Martel studied philosophy at Trent University, worked at odd jobs—tree planter, dishwasher, security guard—and traveled widely before turning to writing. He lives in Saskatoon, Canada, with the writer Alice Kuipers and their four children.
Headstrong, high-spirited, and already widowed, Isabella Walker became Mrs. Henry Robinson at age 31 in 1844. Her first husband had died suddenly, leaving his estate to a son from a previous marriage, so she inherited nothing. A successful civil engineer, Henry moved them, by then with two sons, to Edinburgh's elegant society in 1850. But Henry traveled often and was cold and remote when home, leaving Isabella to her fantasies.
No doubt thousands of Victorian women faced the same circumstances, but Isabella chose to record her innermost thoughts - and especially her infatuation with a married Dr. Edward Lane - in her diary. Over five years the entries mounted-passionate, sensual, suggestive.
One fateful day in 1858 Henry chanced on the diary and, broaching its privacy, read Isabella's intimate entries. Aghast at his wife's perceived infidelity, Henry petitioned for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Until that year, divorce had been illegal in England, the marital bond being a cornerstone of English life. Their trial would be a cause celebre, threatening the foundations of Victorian society with the specter of "a new and disturbing figure: a middle class wife who was restless, unhappy, avid for arousal.
This is the stunning new novel from bestselling author Mike Gayle, for fans of The Keeper of Lost Things and Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. A powerful and bittersweet story of an unexpected male friendship and an unlikely love story, a thought provoking storyline told with Mike's distinctive wit and insight, touching on issues which affect us all. This uplifting tale reminds us of the simple courage at the heart of every human being.
We spend years in school learning facts and figures but the one thing we're never taught is how to live a fulfilled life. That's why we need The School of Life - a real organisation founded ten years ago by writer and philosopher Alain de Botton. The School of Life has one simple aim: to equip people with the tools to survive and thrive in the modern world. And the most important of these tools is emotional intelligence.
Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women. Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War.
It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with "woman’s work,” including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the "girl’s book” her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely
If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn’s first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep
If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning.
Many people are looking for
Happiness behind any door
Happiness they want to find
Happiness of any kind.
Happiness is not something outside
It is an attitude you can provide
Your happiness is not down the road
And, it doesn’t mean an easy load.
Happiness is found in you
How you look at life and what you do
You decide each day, you see
How happy you will be
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
The Museums, Health and Social Care Resource suggests heritage activities and identifies how these activities could specifically support quality of life, health and wellbeing in older people.
learn more
Nature Mental Health is a monthly online-only journal publishing original, peer-reviewed research from the breadth of sciences exploring mental health and mental health disorders.
learn more
Heritage is inextricably linked to mental health and well-being, often generating positive emotions and a sense of connection, but also capable of triggering distress, trauma and negative memories.
The report summarises our work using cohort study data to explore the impact of the arts on population health
A UKRI MARCH Network Plus funded project, carried out between November 2020 and May 2021, in partnership with Historic England, saw an expert panel develop best practice guidelines for organisations offering heritage projects as interventions for people who live with mental health issues.
This report commissioned by the Baring Foundation and produced by the Restoration Trust showcases work from 18 heritage and arts organisations using a wealth of heritage assets, and the creativity of artists, to improve mental health and community connections.
The National Academy for Social Prescribing (NASP) has published an evidence note briefly looking at the link between mental health and social prescribing.
This paper presents a first, comprehensive realist review of wellbeing benefits and pathways through which those emerge. Benefits related to exposure to or engagement with historic places are discussed, attempting a classification of academic papers and empirical published studies, according to various types of place experiences (range from experiencing to living in a historic environment).
The global “COVID-19” pandemic resulted in national lockdowns and the closure of museums to visitors. The pandemic had considerable negative impact on individual, community, and society wellbeing and changed museum practice, specifically through increased online presence. This pilot research sought to start to understand the impact online museum provisions had on individual wellbeing during the pandemic.
This paper describes a collaborative research partnership between museum educators and art therapists. Twenty-two visitors at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum were randomly assigned to either a control group or an experimental group based on an art therapy informed protocol. Those in the experimental group created art based on their emotional response to the exhibition contents, engaged in reflective writing and participated in a discussion group.
The empty former cottage hospital of Winsford is a building like no other in the world. The result of a philanthropic dream shared by a rich widow and a leading Victorian architect, in the 119 years since the ailing people of north Devon were first welcomed under its slate roof, the place has aided many a recovery, including shell-shocked soldiers seeking sanctuary from first world war trenches.
This article reports a cross-disciplinary literature review focused to identify if and how history and heritage have been linked with public health.
Widely varied opinions suggest history, heritage, and historic places are valuable assets for improving the human condition.
The Australian Government Intergenerational Report 2023 projects that the population of Australia will age over the next 40 years. Rather than viewing this as a problem, we should recognise this as a time of unprecedented opportunity to tap into a vast human reservoir of wisdom, experience, and optimism.
Activities, social networks, and technology use helped mitigate the health effects of social isolation during COVID-19
We estimate the direct causal effect of loneliness on a variety of health outcomes using a sample of second-generation immigrants among older adults drawn from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. In an effort to account for the endogeneity of self-declared loneliness, we explore the link between loneliness and a specific trait of maternal cultural background strongly associated with quality of relations and use the latter as an instrument for loneliness
All sinopses (from the Monthly Book Recommendation section) have been retrieved from www.goodreads.com
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