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By Dr Danielle Baillieu Perhaps it was the dog who nudges you outdoors on a grey morning, or the cat who settles beside you when the day has been long. There is often one animal whose presence simply makes home feel more like home. If you have a pet, take a moment to think about what that relationship gives you. And if you don’t, you may still know the particular comfort of being with an animal you love. For many people, that bond is profound. But what does the research say a

27 Oct 2026 · @Dr Baillieu Psychologist You'd just know. Right? A lipstick mark. A phone lighting up at 2am. A feeling in your stomach that something is off. Here is the awkward truth from the research: it rarely works like that. And the biggest surprise is that a lot of people who cheat are not unhappy at home. Stay with me. This one changes how you see the whole thing. The telly everyone is talking about If you have been anywhere near ITV this week, you will have felt the

By Dr Danielle Baillieu You leave a meeting holding two versions of what just happened. In the first, your manager moved the deadline, criticised you for missing it, and later insisted it had never changed. In the second, you wonder whether you misunderstood everything. Maybe you are too sensitive. Maybe you are seeing a pattern that is not there. That second version is where the real damage starts. When someone with more organisational power presents themselves as the only r

An email lands: “Just circling back.” Three words, perfectly ordinary. Your stomach drops anyway. You reread it, replay yesterday’s conversation and become certain you’ve let someone down. Three days later, the feeling is still there. If that sounds familiar, the pain deserves to be taken seriously. This article does that without pretending a popular label is a confirmed diagnosis. The short version: your pain is real, “RSD” is shorthand rather than a diagnosis, and there are

16 Oct 2026 It's 6pm. You said "just five more minutes", and somehow forty have slipped by. Or you're late for the third time this week, and someone suggests, helpfully, "Why don't you just set an alarm?" If that lands with a thud of shame, stay with me. Difficulty sensing time can be a real and impairing experience for some people with ADHD. The research shows timing differences on average. It does not show that every late arrival is caused by ADHD, or that one simple trick

Oct 12, 2026 · @Dr Baillieu Psychologist It is Saturday evening. One of you has looked forward to going out all week: the buzz, the people, the change of scene. The other has been counting down to the moment the front door closes and the world goes quiet. So you have the argument. "You never want to do anything." "You never let me rest." Both of you end up feeling unloved and a little lonely in the same room. If one of you has ADHD and the other is autistic, this pattern is v

“My whole role in the family was to be fine.” (participant, quoted in Chapman et al., 2026) It is a sentence that can sound like competence. Sometimes it is competence. Sometimes it is a survival strategy. When your brother or sister is autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, family life may quite reasonably organise itself around their communication, sensory, behavioural, educational or care needs. Appointments are arranged. Meetings happen. Professionals ask questions. Parent

Draft for review only — not for publication or scheduling If you have reached midlife and suddenly feel that your usual systems no longer work, you are not imagining it. Menopause does not create ADHD, but hormonal transition can expose or intensify executive-function difficulties that you have spent years compensating for. The “masking debt” of midlife For many women, ADHD has been hidden in plain sight. You may have achieved highly, arrived early, over-prepared, copied ot

Draft for review only : not for publication or scheduling Hair pulling can be incredibly difficult to explain to someone who has never experienced it. People often say to themselves, “Why can’t I just stop?” They may promise that this will be the last time, hide thinning areas of hair, avoid hairdressers or photographs, or feel ashamed when somebody notices. Yet trichotillomania is not simply a bad habit or a lack of willpower. Trichotillomania, sometimes called Hair-Pulling

A neurodevelopmental assessment can bring profound clarity. It may finally explain executive dysfunction, sensory processing differences, attention regulation, communication patterns, impulsivity, or the exhausting daily work of masking. An ADHD or autism diagnosis should not, however, become a full stop. Sometimes a child’s anxiety, low mood, obsessive fears or behavioural changes are quietly folded into the neurodevelopmental profile. The distress becomes “part of the ADHD”

You can be surrounded by people and still feel profoundly alone. You may share a home, a bed, a friendship group or a busy workplace, yet experience a hollow space where emotional understanding, tenderness or reliable support should be. This is not a personal failure. Loneliness is a complex psychological and relational experience, not simply a measure of how many people are physically nearby. A useful distinction is between social loneliness, emotional loneliness and social

Returning to school, college or university after a long summer break can feel oddly disorientating. On paper, September is meant to symbolise a fresh start. In practice, for many children, teenagers and young adults, it can feel like being dropped into a fast-moving current before your internal system has fully rebooted. The timetable returns. Homework appears. Emails accumulate. Group chats restart. Deadlines, forms, uniforms, packed lunches, transport arrangements, reading

If your child avoids food because of texture, smell, fear of choking, low appetite or previous pain, you may have encountered ARFID: avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. So, what is CBT-AR? CBT-AR is cognitive behavioural therapy developed specifically for ARFID. It is one of the most developed and clearly manualised ARFID-specific treatments currently available. “Leading” does not mean universally proven or guaranteed to work. The evidence is promising, but much of it

Draft for review only , not for publication or scheduling Short answer: no. If your child is eating very little, losing weight or becoming nutritionally compromised, the answer is not to apply more pressure. It is to seek the right medical and psychological support. Most parents who ask, “Should I force my child to eat?”, are not cruel. They are frightened. They may have tried encouragement, routines and gentle exposure, while watching their child’s food list shrink. Someone

Vomiting is unpleasant for everyone. However, for some children, the fear of being sick becomes much larger than an ordinary dislike. It can begin to organise meals, school attendance, bedtime, travel and family life. This fear is known as emetophobia, or specific phobia of vomiting (SPOV). It may involve fear of vomiting oneself, seeing someone else vomit, feeling nauseous or being in situations where vomiting seems possible. In a treatment-seeking clinical sample, emetophob

The short answer Yes. Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID) appears to occur considerably more often among autistic people than in the general population. Nevertheless, an autistic child having a narrow diet does not automatically mean that they have ARFID. That distinction matters enormously. Many autistic children have strong and consistent food preferences. They may prefer one brand, one texture, one temperature or one particular arrangement on the plate. Thes

Short answer: The signs of ARFID cluster in four places: what happens at the table, what happens to the body, what happens to the child's world, and what's driving the avoidance. A short food list on its own isn't ARFID. A short food list plus real impact usually is. Most parents arrive at the word ARFID after years of being told to relax, that he'll eat when he's hungry, that she's just being fussy. By then they've usually stopped mentioning it at appointments. Which is a sh

Short answer: Picky eating is common, tends to peak in the preschool years and usually softens with time. ARFID is an eating disorder in which food avoidance is severe enough to affect a child’s growth, nutrition or life. The dividing line isn’t how many foods a child eats. It’s how much the eating is costing them. Almost every parent of a toddler has stood at a kitchen counter holding a plate of something they’ve been asked for and then rejected. That’s normal. Really normal

The question behind the question If you have ADHD, you may have wondered whether therapy creates lasting change: or whether the benefits disappear as soon as the sessions end. It is an understandable concern. ADHD affects attention, working memory, planning and task initiation across the changing landscape of everyday life. A strategy may work beautifully in one season, then become harder to access when sleep deteriorates, demands increase or stress pushes your nervous syste

When psychological therapy does not help, it can be tempting to conclude that you have failed, or that therapy itself is pointless. For autistic adults, that conclusion may be especially painful when the therapeutic approach has not been adapted to your sensory, communication, functional or cultural needs. A 2026 study offers a more nuanced picture. Rather than describing one average response, researchers examined how depression and anxiety symptoms changed across 7,175 autis