Mindfully Healing

Around one million people around the world take their own lives each year. Hopelessness and emotional pain are the two main reasons why people commit suicide, research finds. Common beliefs about suicide were not strongly supported by the study. People were less likely to mention the following reasons: Financial problems, as a cry for help, or to solve some kind of practical problem. Instead, it was more because the emotional pain they were in was unbearable and they felt that it would never go away. Professor David Klonsky, study co-author,

Better emotional control is linked to lower levels of depression and anxiety. The key to healthy emotional control is to be flexible, new research finds. People with lower levels of depression and anxiety tend to vary their emotional control strategy successfully depending on whether the situation can be explained. Dr Peter Koval, one of the study’s authors, said: “Our results caution against a ‘one strategy fits all’ approach, which may be tempting to recommend based on many previous findings regarding reappraisal as a strategy for regulating emotion. Simply using any

Every week almost one-quarter of Americans use this drug. Acetaminophen — commonly known as Tylenol in the US and paracetamol elsewhere — reduces people’s empathy for the pain of others, new research finds. Acetaminophen is an ingredient in over 600 different medications, including being the main constituent of Tylenol. The ubiquitous painkiller does not just kill pain, it also kills our fellow-feeling. Dr Dominik Mischkowski, the study’s first author, said: “These findings suggest other people’s pain doesn’t seem as big of a deal to you when you’ve taken acetaminophen. Acetaminophen