If diets are ‘for the thick who are tired of it’ (as a Times leader recently claimed) which dieting option would suit your personality? Published in The Times January 3rd 2004 1 – Slimming Club This is a reliable diet for sociable extroverts. Those who would love...
Psychotherapist Phillip Hodson considers the wider perils of the therapeutic hug The Times - 6th December 2003 Up to 12 New York firemen face divorce because they have fallen in love with widows of comrades slaughtered in the Twin Towers. Following a century’s old ‘liaison’ tradition in their Department,...
Published in The Times – October 25th 2003 Their collective ages add up to 275. But official wisdom makes them forever young ‘because they are in politics’. They bounce about like a quintet of Mick Jaggers. For their respective parties, they live and breathe the air of novelty...
Published The Times September 27th 2003 A wise old psychiatrist once said to me that a parent’s place is in the wrong. Nowadays, I fear a parent’s place is in the dark. It doesn’t take too many Internet horror stories like that of 12-year-old Shevaun Pennington...
Something’s happening in the nation’s psyche and the website Friends Reunited (which allows school contemporaries to get back in touch with each other) is responsible… Published The Times September 13th 2003 Current trends show that Friends Reunited is the fastest-growing and largest organisation in Britain. Fifteen per...
The New Statesman - 21st July 2003 I've worked as a psychotherapist for over 20 years. In that time, there haven't been too many traumas, apart from the day I fell off my own chair and had to re-interpret my position. But there have been ample traumas about...
When You Haven't Been Having Sex for Some Time…. Published in Aura Magazine 1st July 2003 Sun, sea, sand and hopefully sex? That's the implicit promise of the travel brochures. But it does depend on the co-operation of the travelling public. Imagine a day on a...
Published in The Independent 17 June 2003 When I was an advice columnist for the News of the World, the problems did not come only from the readers. I found myself under increasing pressure to angle the page toward the perceived tastes of the readership. The...
Emotional Time Lords have the power to travel from our past lives and wreak havoc in the present. But unlike Doctor Who, you don't need a Tardis to escape. Published in The Observer August 25, 2002 'Ian', a middle-aged politician who normally copes successfully with his peers,...
We share the pain of the bereaved, but there is so little comfort we can give Published in The Observer August 18 2002 No death is more sad. Parents don't expect their children to die. Imprinted in every mother and father is the confident hope that we will...