Mental Health

Midlife for women brings its own challenges when it comes to mental health. Read about the challenges and triumphs we experience.

The key to a fulfilling mid-life career – mastering your dance with fear and confidence

We know mid-life is a uniquely challenging time, but it’s also a key pivotal time. The choices you make now really matter. Author and careers coach, Laura Walker, shares insights from her award-winning research and what you can do to help yourself master the next steps. 

“I realised therapy was less of a challenge than navigating your way towards it.”

Her own experience of traumatic mental breakdown in her family and her training in branding and communications then as psychotherapist has led Maryam Meddin to pioneer a new approach to mental health.

Four simple words were the breaking and the making of me

A straightforward question turned into the crash and burn moment that made Claire Pestana realise what was missing from her life: herself.

Welcome to the parent grief club 

When Kerensa Jennings’ beloved mum died, she became a member of a club she never knew existed or wanted to join, and was left wondering why more people don’t talk about the special searing grief of losing a parent.

I hadn’t planned for the balls to fall to the ground in such dramatic fashion

Life didn’t work out quite the way Caro Giles expected. Here she explains how she found her way to a powerful reimagining of a life far removed from the one she thought she’d have.

Impossible Beauty

Helen McDermott speaks about an issue that haunts both young and women in their midlife. As women we constantly criticise how we look and this can have damaging effects on both our physical and mental health.

How Parents Can Support Their Child Through an Eating Disorder

Throughout her late teen years, Megan Ravenhall found herself in the grip of an eating disorder. Though she feels she has still not fully recovered, Megan reflects on how her parents' support led her to ultimately choose life.

The Secret Strength of Anxiety

Ilona Bannister suffers from chronic anxiety and agoraphobia, two conditions that can be completely debilitating. But she's found that, at times, her greatest struggles have also proven to be strengths. She writes for Noon about the experiences that inspired her new novel, Little Prisons.

“I was spread so thinly that nothing I did ever felt good enough.”

Helen Barnes on how she gave up traditional notions of success, concentrated on her family and discovered the joy of reinventing herself.

How learning to surf at 50-plus changed me

Danielle Cass began surfing age 50 plus and turned from invisible to strong and beautiful

Join us: Catherine Mayer on bereavement and re-embracing life

Journalist Catherine Mayer and Anne Mayer Bird, her mother and co-author, discuss the loss of their husbands and coping with bereavement with Eleanor Mills.

Catherine Mayer on the physicality of grief

Catherine Mayer’s beloved husband Andy died at the beginning of the pandemic, only weeks after her stepfather. Since then she and her mother have been sharing their bereavement journey together, culminating in writing Good Grief, a book which is searing about loss but optimistic on how to re-embrace life. Here is an edited extract of a brand-new chapter about how grief affects body as well as soul.