How to stop over-medicalising mental health - The Economist   

FOR A PLACE with a reputation for buttoned-up stoicism, Britain is remarkably open about mental health. The British are more likely than people in any other rich country to think that mental illness is a disease like any other. Only the Swedes are more accepting of the idea that a history of mental-health problems should not disqualify someone from public office. The importance of good mental health is a cause vigorously championed by everyone from the Princess of Wales to the opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer; employers preach the gospel of well-being. Britons were once encouraged to hide their feelings; now they are urged to seek support.

Much of the rich world has struggled with rising rates of self-reported mental-health problems, particularly since the covid-19 pandemic. But the numbers in Britain are startling. Around 4.5m Britons were in contact with mental-health services in 2021-22, a rise of almost 1m in five years. In the past decade no other European country has seen a greater increase in the use of antidepressants. A National Health Service (NHS) survey in 2023 found that one in five 8- to 16-year-olds in England had a probable mental disorder, up from one in eight in 2017. In 17- to 19-year-olds the figure had increased from one in ten to one in four. The number of people who are out of work with mental-health conditions has risen by a third between 2019 and 2023.

It is good that people do not feel they must bottle things up and the suffering from mental illnesses is real. Awareness of mental health has diminished the stigma of some conditions and revealed that many Britons’ needs are not met. But awareness has caused damage, too.

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Why Europe is particularly good at big science - The Economist   

It is TRITE to see the vast dome taking shape on a lonely desert peak as a temple. But it is also unavoidable. How else to understand so much effort devoted to something truly otherworldly? When its mirrored eye opens to the universe in 2028, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) currently under construction in Chile’s Atacama Desert will be by far the most capable such instrument ever built—quite possibly the most ambitious telescope that will ever grace the surface of the Earth. It will be a great and ennobling human achievement. It will also be a peculiarly European one.

Europe is frequently sidelined as old and timid, unwilling to pull its weight, self-absorbed, incapable of decisions and much worse. In some arenas this is undoubtedly true. But when it comes to the creation of great instruments of knowledge the countries of Europe have a singular gift, one that comes from pooling and integrating the ambitions of its scientists over generations.

The most celebrated of these achievements is CERN, the particle-physics laboratory which straddles the French-Swiss border. It was founded in 1954 to serve an area of “big science” which required resources beyond those of any but the largest European countries. But it was not merely a pragmatic pooling of costs. As a common endeavour, it spoke both to Europe’s past cultural pre-eminence and to its future as a family of nations. By the 1980s, the laboratory thus formed was leading the world. Since the 1990s, when Congress cancelled America’s Superconducting Supercollider, it has been peerless.

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When Women Artists Choose Mothering Over Making Work -    

Why does the act of stepping away from a creative vocation still have the power to shock?

HERE IS THE myth of how the punk singer and poet Patti Smith vanished for 16 years: In 1979, at the age of 32, she said goodbye to her band, the public and New York for a life with the man who would soon be her husband, the guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, in his hometown of Detroit. Soon after, they moved to the suburbs — the very place punks were supposed to be trying to escape, the turf of those enemies, Mom and Dad — and bought a three-bedroom Tudor house in St. Clair Shores, where they raised two children; where they became Mom and Dad. This idyll didn’t last. Fred Smith died young, of heart failure, in 1994 and, after a period of mourning, Patti Smith returned to New York and the music scene. Of her time away from her career, she told The Times in 1995, “There’s no job harder than being a wife and a mother.”

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Kenya is belatedly granting citizenship to groups once deemed foreign - The Economist   

Identity cards are a big deal in Kenya. Without them you cannot marry, register to vote or get salaried jobs. Nor can you open a bank account, go to university or legally buy a SIM card. Walking around without papers can even get you arrested, a hangover from the colonial era when many African workers needed a special pass. Though that is legally dubious, few Kenyans, especially those without documentation, dare challenge the police. “If you don’t have an ID, you don’t exist,” says Mustafa Mahmoud of Namati, a group that campaigns for legal rights for the poor.

For most Kenyans, applying for an ID card is quite simple. A school leaving certificate and a copy of a parent’s ID will usually do. Yet some ethnic groups have still faced discrimination when applying. If your forebears migrated to Kenya during British colonial rule, you were still officially deemed foreign at independence in 1963. Generations later, long after losing touch with your ethnic homeland, for instance if it is Somalia, the government would not recognise you as a Kenyan citizen. Thousands were left in a bureaucratic limbo. The un High Commissioner for Refugees (unhcr) reckons that 16,800 people in Kenya are stateless. But the true number is probably far higher.

In 2016 Kenya’s then president, Uhuru Kenyatta, declared that the Makonde, about 6,000 of whom came up from Mozambique and Tanzania in the 1940s, would “become Kenyans”; several thousand got ID cards. Mr Kenyatta later made a similar offer to the Shona people, originally from Zimbabwe, and to a small community of Rwandans. His successor, William Ruto, said the Pemba, originally from an island north of Zanzibar, constituted “one of the ethnic communities of Kenya”. He ceremoniously handed them some 7,000 ID cards.

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