Psych

Anti-stigma work has an awkward edge, and the head of Britain’s largest mental-health charity has just named it. In an interview with the Guardian, Dr Sarah Hughes — chief executive of Mind for four years, nearly four decades in the sector — said mental-health organisations have “failed to acknowledge” that a small minority of people with severe mental illness do commit serious violence. Her phrase for the omission is precise: the sector “softened the truth.” ...

In 2004, Willoughby Britton was a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology and a devoted meditation teacher who thought of herself as a “double agent” — using science to promote a practice she believed in. So when her sleep study came back showing that the meditation group slept worse than the control group — more awakenings, more micro-arousals, more time in the lightest sleep stage, with more practice correlated with worse sleep — she didn’t publish it. Promoting meditation mattered more than scientific ethics, and reporting the result would mean “harming the dharma.” ...

“Somatic” merely means “of, relating to, or affecting the body” — but lately it is appended to everything: somatic psychotherapy, somatic yoga, somatic dance, viral “trauma-release” workouts. Faith Hill’s survey of the boom is a fair-minded tour of a wellness industry that promises to finish the job talk therapy started. The pitch is bottom-up rather than top-down: instead of reworking your thinking, you tune into your chest, your throat, your hips, and let the body release what the mind has been circling for years. ...

Most frameworks for political persuasion assume the problem is information: someone believes a false thing, you supply the true thing, and the belief updates. The people running Leaving Maga assume the opposite. Their founding premise is that abandoning a political identity works less like changing your mind and more like leaving a high-control religious group, quitting an addiction, or recovering from an illness — that it requires rebuilding an entire structure of belonging, not swapping out a set of opinions. The non-profit, launched in 2024, has built its whole method on that premise. ...

Richard Kyte, an ethics professor in La Crosse, Wisconsin, started meeting two increasingly isolated colleagues for Wednesday-morning breakfast at a local cafe in 2011. Fifteen years on, the meetup still runs — now at a tavern after the cafe closed — and some of the most reluctant participants are the most engaged. “When you’re talking about adding a close friend,” Kyte says, “that’s a huge change in the quality of your life.” ...