Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine. What went wrong? In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms: 1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder. 2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology. 3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it. The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress. This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does. Link to paper: michael-inzlicht.squarespace…

Academics: please consider signing the open letter in support of Prof Michael Ben-Gad docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F…

This week is the 42nd anniversary of one of the most shameful days in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran when 10 Bahá’í women were hanged in Shiraz simply for their faith. The online photo of the the event, itself a reconstruction by a French photographer, is too horrific to share. Two years ago the #OurStoryIsOne campaign was launched connecting it directly to the #WomanLifeFreedom movement to remind the people that all minorities inside and outside Iran are united against this terror driven by an ideology that thinks so little of women and the sanctity of life. #Iran #IsraeliranWar

A Palestinian man who joined protests against Hamas in Gaza is tortured and murdered by Hamas. I expect we'll be seeing a lot of pro-Palestinian marchers in London and on university campuses, and plenty of condemnation on the BBC about that, won't we? 🤔 jpost.com/israel-news/articl…

How and why do @metpoliceuk and @SadiqKhan think that allowing so much jew hate to fester unchecked wouldnt end in acts like this . I feel sick . im steeped in anti jewish hatred of 1936 in Londons East End with my @MOV1936 - whats changed. Do we have ANY allies ? Will this just get worse ?

🚨 #HateCrime #Antisemitism 👧 14-year-old girl rushed to Hospital with head & facial injuries following an attack in #StamfordHill. 🥀 Young Jewish girls on their way to a rehearsal were pelted with glass bottles by a male on a balcony at Woodberry Down Estate N4. 💔 This attack on innocent young Jewish girls has shocked the community. 🚑 1 girl was badly injured and rushed to @NHSUK Royal London Hospital by @Hatzola Ambulance volunteers. 🛡️@Shomrim are supporting the victims & their families whilst @MPSHackney investigate this abhorrent HateCrime. 📞 CAD 9166 25/11/24.

Still the most important Shakespeare production around. It forces us to look at homegrown mob-like anti-Semitism.

RT @Fathom_Editor: This is where we are at in the UK. The July 2024 riot by Romanians in Harehills, Leeds - a bus was set alight, Police ca…

Unemployed doctors and we are still training PAs as fake doctors

RT @AzatAlsalim: 2 years ago, 16 years old Nils Shakarami was sexually assaulted and killed by lslamic regime in Iran. Never forget that th…

If my country had a rule that all women have to be swathed in a black veil to even go outside, I probably wouldn’t have gone with this visual.

Why does the NHS have a CEO and leadership team when they are treated as immaterial to its performance?

Vaping is the single best way to stop people smoking. All the polling evidence is that far too many smokers don’t actually know how much safer it is. This kind of language is not just stupid, but lethal.

The illiberalism and cronyism of government-funded Creative Scotland has been an open secret for years, but 'literature officer' Dr Alice Tarbuck's deliberate effort to damage @msjlindsay's career (detailed below) shocks even me. Article✍️ @euanmccolm. scotsman.com/news/opinion/co…

Please read this superb piece about why doctors are fighting back against @DHSCgovuk, @NHSEngland & @gmcuk. Their replacement of doctors with PAs is a wholesale assault on patient safety, expertise & standards in medicine. Thanks, @pwhitakerwriter 👏 newstatesman.com/politics/he…

Proof positive of the old saying “whose bread I eat, his song I sing”. Surrendering the principle of free speech to buy favour with the CCP is a terrible indictment of some of our universities & Government @bphillipsonMP @Keir_Starmer Today’s Sunday Telegraph:

Horror in Tehran: I am furious, outrage and heartbroken to see how 14-year-old teenagers being savagely attacked by the morality police for not covering their hair. This video, released by a reformist website, coincides with the execution of a protester Reza Rasaei who stood against the murder of another girl Mahsa Amini by the morality police. The timing of this video’s release, while the execution goes unmentioned, has ignited anger among Iranians. The international community must amplify the voices of women who say no to the police and the gender apartheid regime, and of our brothers who are hanged for supporting us. #UnitedAgainstGenderApartheid #NoteToIslamicRepublic

I will be following this with great concern

Watch how bravely this Iranian woman fights against the hija police in metro. This viral video became her “crime,” and tomorrow #SepidehRashnu must go to jail for 3 years and 11 months. Recently, the government in Iran, sentence 3 women to death and also returning women like Sepideh to prison for the crime of exposing morality police. If the international media and community loudly support us, we might be able to stop the regime from executing women and imprisoning them for simply demanding freedom. Please be our voice. #سپیده_رشنو

Delighted to be nominated for British Podcast Award for my investigative series White Smoke: America’s Chemsex Killer. It tells story of Ed Buck, a rich donor to Democratic Party, who for years lured Black men to his home abused them with meth. 2 died. But for years no arrest