The second and a half that changes the conversation Through my counselling, I have developed a description of healthy versus unhealthy arguing. I call it reaction v response. The message arrives at twenty to five on a Friday. It is three lines long, it is from somebody you have to keep working with, and the […]
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Part 2: Safety, sexual violence, masculinity, and the case for calibrated concern In Part 1, I looked at how the word “crisis” has drifted from its original meaning, a short and decisive turning point, to a label we now attach to almost every long-running social problem. I also looked at the evidence on mental health
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Part 1: What happened to a powerful word, and what it means for how we think about mental health and climate change Mental health crisis. Climate crisis. Housing crisis. Loneliness epidemic. Crisis of masculinity. Crisis of trust. If you have followed the news over the past few years, you could be forgiven for thinking that
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What every young man should know about relationships, self-blame, and the stories we’re sold online By Brian R Basham Over the past few months, I have been working with males between 20 and 40 who have come to counselling as their partners have instructed them to ‘get some help’. Instructed may be too nice a
Men: You Might Not Be the Problem Read More »
By Brian R Basham Scroll through mental-health content on almost any platform and “quiet BPD” appears within minutes. It is pitched as the version of borderline personality disorder nobody sees: the person who turns the storm inward, apologises for existing, and falls apart privately while looking composed to everyone else. For many readers the description
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By Brian R Basham There is a phrase men pass around the way soldiers pass around a canteen: “happy wife, happy life.” It comes out with a rueful grin, usually after someone has surrendered a preference, an opinion, or an entire weekend. Everyone nods. Nobody argues. That, as it happens, is precisely the problem. On
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Telling three common experiences apart The words stress, anxiety, and depression are often used as if they mean the same thing. They are related, they frequently overlap, and one can lead into another. They are also genuinely different, and telling them apart matters, because each responds best to a slightly different kind of support. This
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As a counsellor, I am often met by clients at the first appointment with them telling me their anxiety is out of control. I then guide the conversation to define what anxiety is and to try to parse out what is causing them to be anxious. To provide some ideas for them and others, I
Anxiety: a personal case study Read More »
By Brian R Basham — July 2026 NOTE: Claude AI was used to assist in the development of this post In 1988, J. G. Ballard published Running Wild, a slim novella about an atrocity in a gated English estate: every adult at Pangbourne Village murdered in twenty minutes, every child vanished. The police psychiatrist who
Running Wild in Victoria: What a 1988 Novella Saw Coming Read More »
A while ago, I posted a reminder that your employees are not computers (see here). However, recent events over the past week or so have me sitting behind the keyboard to remind you again. If you reduce the number of employees to reduce costs to demonstrate to shareholders that you are managing the assets responsibly,
