She’s one of Britain’s greatest ever athletes – yet has often felt like a failure and fraud. She talks about her Olympic golds, the misery that came with them, and the joy she has found since she retired Victoria Pendleton is driving us to the stables in Dorset. We’re off to see her two horses, Vesper and Sarah. She has two bags with her – one containing her cycling gold medals, the other crammed with carrots and apples. She is convinced she’s going to feed the horses the medals. At times, you sense she wouldn’t mind. Ask Pendleton for her greatest achievement in sport, and she’ll tell you abo ..read more

Researchers shed light on how psychedelic compound in drug can distort sense of space, time and self during a trip The psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms not only gives people a day trip – it can influence the brain for weeks, researchers have found. Experts say the study helps explain why taking psilocybin – the active ingredient in the drug – can result in a distorted sense of space, time and self during a trip, as well as shed light on the mechanism by which it can help in the treatment of severe depression ..read more

Art and counselling are helping women and girls in Kenya to process anger and forgive family members, who are often the ones who subjected them to genital mutilation The first of Sara Sori’s portraits depicting women at various stages of life shows a young, happy girl. “If you harm [a girl] at this stage she is ruined for ever. And this is the stage where I was violated,” says Sori, from Isiolo, in northern Kenya, who was forced to undergo female genital mutilation as a child. Another portrait shows a girl with her mouth sewn shut, “giving in to what life has dictated for her and to prevent he ..read more

Juan Ignacio Fernández Hoppe’s documentary tries to pin down a true record of the father he lost aged eight, but the struggle to find it is what compels attention What are the pieces that make up a life? This thorny question lies at the heart of Juan Ignacio Fernández Hoppe’s riveting, emotional documentary, whose structure resembles a detective story. When Hoppe was only eight years old, his father Juan José Fernández died on a lonely beach in the Uruguayan resort town of Salinas. Along with the official authorities, Hoppe’s psychologist mother accepted the cause of death to be drowning, but ..read more

One of the continent’s leading medics, Jean Kaseya, has made it his mission to help the 116m people in African countries with mental health conditions Jean Kaseya would hear regularly from his younger brother, an army officer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, until the day in 2018 when all contact stopped. “Suddenly, we didn’t have any information,” remembers Dr Kaseya, director general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC). It was two years before an acquaintance approached the family to say his brother, Dieudonné, was alive, but in jail in the north of ..read more

UK researchers say study shows stopping long-term use of the drugs is possible at scale without costly therapy Almost half of long-term antidepressant users could stop taking the medication with GP support and access to internet or telephone helplines, a study suggests. Scientists said more than 40% of people involved in the research who were well and not at risk of relapse managed to come off the drugs with advice from their doctors ..read more

71% of patients found to experience a relapse compared with 43% who received the pills twice a week Slow-release ketamine pills have been found to prevent relapse into depression, in a trial that could pave the way for a new treatment option for patients with severe illness. Ketamine is already used as a treatment for depression when conventional antidepressant drugs and therapy have failed. But ketamine is currently only administered intravenously, which requires supervision in a clinic, and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence ruled that a ketamine-like nasal spray should no ..read more

Prof John Read and Dr James Davies argue that a recent review’s findings are not relevant to the majority of real-world antidepressant users, while readers offer their own experiences of using the drugs You recently reported on a research review, which claimed that only about 15% of people experience withdrawal effects when coming off antidepressants and that only 3% experience severe withdrawal (Antidepressant withdrawal symptoms experienced by 15% of users, study finds, 7 June). We believe this to be misleading. A previous review we conducted, mentioned in your report, found that the overall ..read more

When Grace Campbell decided to terminate her pregnancy, she felt relief at being able to exercise a right so many women had fought for. But nothing prepared her for the depression that came after. Here, the comedian reflects on the physical and emotional toll There it is,” the doctor said, without warning. I turned, the cold jelly sliding off my stomach, to face the screen he had swivelled towards me. There it is, he said, nonchalantly, like he was pointing at the Eiffel Tower as we walked along the Seine. There it is, like he’d found his car in a festival car park. There it is, as he showed m ..read more

New research shows that severe withdrawal symptoms are far less common than thought. Depression needs treating I have been prescribing antidepressants since 1991. Like most medications, they are imperfect tools: they have side-effects and don’t work for everybody. Some patients report negative effects, or that their depression does not improve, and they may require changing to a different antidepressant. For those they do help, antidepressants undoubtedly improve depression and reduce the risk of suicide. Very rarely, in my clinical practice, do patients complain that they cannot stop their me ..read more