How else might we purge, or prune, for the oncoming Spring? Clutter is common after the excesses of the festive period - so why not welcome the length...

The funniest thing about today? My dad picked me up in an old transit van, full of newspaper, rubbish and dust from his working week and he said to me "You don't mind me picking you up in the van do you son? You must remember us always driving around like this when you were a boy?"

I meet so many people frighteningly close to their own date with ending it all. So many. Far too many. I came very close to my own, so close, far too close. That date when it is too late to say the unsaid because the unfinished has now been finished.

Peck's praise of AA isn't some feelgood therapy technique to make addicts feel better about themselves. It is backed up by some really interesting points and can be read in his book Further Along the Road Less Travelled.

Hairdressing is often the opposite of a beautifying moment and rather a minefield of emotions but sometimes very illuminating ones. Next time check out how you feel when you get your haircut. If you don't like what you see you might want to switch the hairdresser's chair for a therapist's.

"Wait for the guy who wants to show you off to the world?". Exactly how does this work? I'm confused. Is he in to wife swapping? Husband swapping? That's just what I need, I've falling in love with a porno director and he wants to "show me off".

A quick social media scan tells me that the Beau is on holiday with the 'beautiful family' from whom he continues to pretend he is estranged. He'd got quite courageous in the weeks leading up to it, calling me on weekend lunchtimes to say he "happened to be in the area".

Work instead becomes a place where you may struggle to cope, trying to get through your day whilst holding your thoughts about your divorce at bay. It's the same work, same school, same kids, same summer but an altogether different perception of it all.

Recently I have been seriously considering selling everything I own.

When I was little I was unsure about everything and fretted about anything. If the cat was sick. If my teacher wasn't on form. If my parents were unhappy. Sometimes I would come away from talking to someone who was negatively charged and feel inexplicably down. They would say something slightly critical and I would feel annihilated.

I sat, staring in the mirror, amazed at what I had discovered. I was my own worst enemy. I was the one holding me back. For some unknown reason, my su...

In the 21st Century we can live such busy lives that it's very easy to lose awareness of the ability we all have to control our emotions, our state of mind and the skill of planning for happiness. Rather than just letting life happen to you, how much better might it be to consciously steer it, through your actions, thought and feelings, in a more positive direction?

My introduction to the sex addiction issue was recent and rather brutish. I came across an article in the Daily Telegraph's blog with this provocative title: "Sex addicts should drop the psychobabble and admit that they're just promiscuous losers".

When I was a student I thought cannabis was a harmless pastime, no worse than alcohol, and I was encouraged by the fact that it's not addictive. Many years later I ended up working for an addiction rehab clinic in Scotland where I found out that not only is cannabis addictive but the skunk version of the drug is known to send as many as 20% of users into a psychotic state.

The truth is everyone has stuff from childhood. In fact the perfect parents do not exist - if they did you would never leave home. Also we ALL develop systems and coping mechanisms that come from past experiences or traumas.

Let's be honest, January is a gloomy old month. Christmas and new year frivolity are in the distant past, but everyone's broke because we're still paying for them.

In psychiatry, we make a distinction between "normal" grief and "abnormal" grief. The latter condition has other aliases such as "pathological grief" or "morbid grief". Should psychiatrists meddle in such a natural human reaction?