Thought Cloud

Next week is Perinatal Depression and Anxiety Awareness Week (15-21 November 2015). It’s common for pregnant women and new mothers to feel overwhelmed, anxious, depressed, frustrated and just plain exhausted. But if this is all you feel and there are few positive feelings at all, it becomes [...] Read more

Stress has been getting some pretty good press lately. A number of recent books and articles have been selling its benefits and urging us to embrace it as our friend. Is that possible? A pounding heart, tense muscles, quickened breathing . . . stress is the automatic ‘fight or flight’ survival [...] Read more

In Australia, 1 in 5 women will experience depression and 1 in 3 women will experience anxiety in a lifetime. Anxiety and depression in our community is more common than you might think. When life isn't going to plan and problems seem overwhelming, it can feel like you are alone in the world. In [...] Read more

Having completed a PhD looking at mothering of infants 2013, I got to look at the history of mothering. These are the fascinating things I found and how the past can apply to our decisions around babycare today. Over the past two centuries, society has come to expect a great deal from mothers, and [...] Read more

We’ve come a long way from the days when there was an expectation that we should button our lips and keep our emotions under wraps--and when a lack of any serious attempt to deal with emotional issues allowed medical quackery to flourish. In the past, desperation forced people to turn to [...] Read more