All In The Mind

The placebo effect demonstrates that the mind-body interaction can be powerful. Placebos can turn on the body’s natural biological processes to relieve a range of conditions, and in the future deception may not even be necessary.

How far would you go to reveal your true, super-smart inner self? Athletes have used substances and techniques to enhance their performance physically. Now there are ways to boost your intelligence—which we don’t suggest you try it at home. But David Adam did—to try and cheat his way into Mensa using smart pills and brain hacks. But this also brought moral dilemmas.

Neurodiversity is a radical social movement challenging the notion of what’s normal and what’s a disorder. What better place to explore neurodiversity than in the arts and theatre—we hear from actors on the autism spectrum and a synesthete using her perceptions of colour and music to create art.

Some exciting news has just been published in the Psychiatric Journal JAMA about the potential mental health benefits of psychedelic drug research.

It’s likely that within the next 5 years researchers will know whether the psychoactive drug commonly known as ecstasy—methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA—can be used to treat psychiatric disorders.

Trauma has a deep impact on the lives of survivors. It’s associated with mental and physical health problems, including substance abuse, and neuroscience is showing that a traumatic memory is quite different from a normal memory. Mental health services now realise that early trauma must be taken into account as an essential part of recovery from mental distress.