Health | The Monthly

Current Issue Modern madness

DSM-5 and the mental illness make-over

By Nick Haslam

Over the past century psychiatry has described conditions that would have once been medicalised, moralised, criminalised or perhaps dismissed as harmless eccentricity. The concept of “mental disorder” now contains a centrifugal assortment of ills that number in the hundreds. This expansion has been accompanied by equally significant cultural change. Increasingly, we view suffering

March 2013

Sir Gustav Nossal: The Fifty Year Revolution in Global Public Health

By

Professor Sir Gustav Nossal AC CBE takes us on a guided tour through the remarkable changes that have occurred in the sphere of global health over the past 50 years. These include...

What can stop obesity?

Fat City

By Karen Hitchcock

In the late 1980s I spent a year in the US as an exchange student. The exchange organisation allocated me a local support person named Emily. Emily was white and loud and the fattest person I had ever seen outside a caravan park. She looked different from the rare very fat people I’d seen in Australia. She smelt good and her climate-controlled house meant she did not sweat. She was very well dressed. Her husband was some kind of profe

How the rebirth of general medicine will save lives

Last Resort

By Karen Hitchcock

June is 83, lives alone and still drives herself to the shops. When she doesn’t answer the telephone one morning, her daughter drops by to check on her and finds her lying naked in bed, in a soak of urine, staring at the ceiling. June turns her head at her daughter’s call but does not seem to recognise her, nor does she respond to questions. Her daughter

Robyn Davidson on Health Retreats

Tide of Improvement

By Robyn Davidson

Sometimes fortune gifts you things you did not know you needed. Tyringham Clinic was one of those. Out in the luminous green, motorway-laced flatlands behind Milton Keynes, England, it was a Palladian pile that had known better times. At the front was a gravel

Fasting at a ‘Fat Farm’

Life Juices

By Helen Garner

At 5 pm on Boxing Day we sweep up the drive of the establishment my sister refers to as “the fat farm”. Its modest buildings are set in an old, deep garden: lawns, curved hedges, huge native trees. Our rooms give on to bushland that chinks all day with bel