Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Robin Bailey, Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology, University of Cambridge

Some mental health conditions, such as anxiety, depression and ADHD, have become more accepted in society. People can now talk about them at work, at home and online and often be met with understanding.

This change matters. It makes it easier to ask for help and harder for employers and institutions to pretend mental health problems do not exist.

Public sympathy is uneven. Some conditions are widely understood, while others are still judged harshly.

As some conditions become familiar, they set the template for what mental illness is supposed to look like. Presentations that do not fit that picture are more likely to be perceived differently.

The recent Baftas Tourette’s incident showed how quickly behaviour can be moralised when it breaks a social rule.

Research on Tourette stigma finds public understanding is often limited and stereotypes continue to shape how the condition is perceived. Tics can be mistaken for deliberate misbehaviour, especially when they are seen as offensive or involve taboo words or racial slurs.

Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and some personality disorders, including borderline and narcissistic personality disorder, tend to attract less empathy and more suspicion. A big part of the difference is familiarity, whether the behaviour fits a story people already understand. When it does not uncertainty can tip into fear.

Fear is the driver

That difference shows up in research. In a study testing stigma across nine diagnoses – measured by how much people wanted to keep their distance from someone with each condition – depression and anxiety drew the least stigma, while schizophrenia and personality disorder drew the most. Across diagnoses, fear was the most consistent driver of stigma.

Part of the sympathy gap can be recognition. People often sense something is wrong without knowing what to call it. When experiences or behaviour cannot be named, it becomes easier to explain it as “mad, bad, or dangerous”.

A cross-cultural study asked people to read short vignettes and name the condition. Around seven in ten correctly identified ADHD, but only around a third correctly identified bipolar disorder.

That is where the hierarchy of sympathy does its damage. Anxiety and depression can be recognised as suffering.

Other presentations are morally reinterpreted as defective personality. Mood swings are seen as selfishness, suspicion as nastiness, hearing voices as dangerousness and rapid shifts between closeness and anger as manipulation.

Personality disorder labels are especially vulnerable to this moralising. They are often heard not as descriptions of distress but as verdicts on character.

Borderline personality disorder, for example, is often misread as attention-seeking or manipulation rather than recognised as a pattern of intense fear, instability and emotional pain. That misreading can contribute to people being dismissed, not taken seriously, or even denied care.

Narcissistic personality disorder is routinely stigmatised and used as shorthand for cruelty or selfishness. Clinically, it is typically conceptualised as a rigid coping style that can mask underlying insecurity and fragility.

This split shows up online. A study analysing tweets about several mental and physical health conditions found mental health terms were more likely to be used in stigmatising or trivialising ways, and schizophrenia was the most stigmatised mental health condition examined.

On social media, anxiety and ADHD are more likely to be met with sympathy, but “psychotic” is used as an insult, and “bipolar” as a joke about someone whose mood has changed.

Personality disorder terms get used similarly: “narcissist” becomes a throwaway label for a bad relationship, and “borderline” a smear for being too much. Diagnosis turns into name calling.

Trivialisation and stigma are different, but they converge. They turn illness into a social weapon and make it easier to respond with ridicule or fear than with care.

The term “trauma” adds another twist. When distress is framed as trauma, it often attracts more sympathy because it fits a clear story something bad happened, and the person is suffering – for example, surviving a natural disaster.

But public attitudes are more complicated. A multi-study paper found many people still hold negative views of trauma survivors, including beliefs that they are permanently damaged, unpredictable, or dangerous.

Many diagnoses that attract suspicion, including psychotic disorders and some personality disorders, are also strongly linked to trauma histories. The difference is not just cause. It is whether the label makes distress look like an understandable injury, or a frightening personality.

There are parallels in physical health too, where severe illness can equate to more sympathy. Cancer, stroke or dementia are often seen as serious and largely outside a person’s control, so they attract support.

But blame changes the picture. When illness is seen as linked to behaviour, such as smoking, sympathy can fade.

In mental health, the pattern can look reversed. The most severe conditions, including psychotic disorders and some personality disorders, are often treated as if they reflect character or choice, even though they are strongly linked to factors beyond control such as biology and development. People who have the least control over their symptoms often receive the least sympathy.

Much has been done to raise awareness. But until empathy and understanding extend to forms of distress that are often perceived as frightening, disruptive, or hard to make sense of, the hierarchy will persist.

Robin Bailey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The worse your mental health problem, the less sympathy you get – why? – https://theconversation.com/the-worse-your-mental-health-problem-the-less-sympathy-you-get-why-274651

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rebecca Payne, Clinical Senior Lecturer, Bangor University

It’s an increasingly common scenario. You fill in an online form to request an appointment with a doctor, and back comes a link asking you to upload a photo of your ailment. You pick up your phone, a couple of clicks and it’s sent. While you wait for a call back, your GP is studying your image.

But do you look pixelated? Have the colours been adjusted? Has the phone erased a rash or smoothed your skin? Does the doctor see you as you really are, or as your phone camera thinks you should be?

New research from our team suggests the answer is often the latter. Smartphone cameras and software routinely alter images in ways that can mislead doctors, and in some cases, put patients at risk of misdiagnosis.

Remote consultations are now routine in many health systems. No longer an emergency pandemic stopgap, general practice is increasingly offered in a “hybrid” way, with patients receiving care in different ways, some in person, many remotely.

Across Australia, North America and parts of Scandinavia, video appointments are commonplace. In the UK, patients are often asked to upload photos through online platforms. Photos are used to diagnose conditions such as eczema or warts, assess responses to treatment and assess how unwell someone appears, informing decisions about if, and how urgently, they need to be seen in person.

For many people it’s a quick and convenient way to receive care, reducing travel times and avoiding time spent waiting for a call to be answered or hanging around in a germ-packed doctor’s waiting room.

Safety incidents in remote consultations remain relatively rare. But previous research by members of our team showed doctors sometimes miss important clinical signs, leading to misdiagnosis or delayed care. Examples include mistaking a malignant skin lesion for something benign, or failing to recognise colour changes, like jaundice or the blue tinge of low oxygen levels (cyanosis).

Doctors often blame themselves when this happens. Our latest research suggests something else is at play. We found that automatic image processing and compression on smartphones can distort clinically important visual information. Colour signals shift. Fine detail disappears. Subtle changes in the skin become harder to detect.

In other words, it isn’t just human error. It’s the technology.

Smartphones are designed to make photos look good, not to preserve medical accuracy. They automatically adjust exposure, balance colours, sharpen edges and compress files. These features are perfect for social media, but problematic for healthcare.

Lighting conditions in people’s homes add another layer of uncertainty. So does the quality of the screen at the doctor’s end. Night-mode settings, poor quality displays and poor calibration can all change how an image appears. Together, these factors can make people look healthier than they really are, flatten rashes, soften swelling or alter the colour of lesions.

Some patients are particularly vulnerable. We already know that some medical devices, such as pulse oximeters, perform less accurately in people with darker skin. Image distortion risks compounding those inequities as those with darker skin are more likely to have clinical findings missed.

Other cases where findings may be missed are where clinical findings are subtle, or when AI-based filters are used. People with lower digital literacy, or those who struggle to communicate their symptoms clearly, are also at greater risk when something is overlooked.

So, what can be done?

As patients, there are simple steps that help. Turn off filters. Use good lighting, daylight if possible. Check that the photo resembles what you actually see before sending it. Include a written description alongside the image. And if it seems your doctor is seeing something different from you, say so.

Medical teams also need to be aware of the limits of patient-generated images. That means checking back: “I can’t see any changes here. Are you noticing something different?” And when there’s doubt, arranging an in-person review.

Screens should be large enough and of sufficient quality. Night-mode settings should be switched off. Image uncertainty should be treated like any other clinical uncertainty.

But is it fair to leave all this to patients and already stretched medical teams? There’s a strong case for wider change. Smartphones could include a dedicated healthcare mode that disables filters and warns users when image quality is too poor for clinical decisions. Video platforms and upload systems could flag inadequate lighting, low resolution or excessive compression before images are sent.

As digital consultations become embedded in everyday care, image quality needs to be treated as part of patient safety infrastructure, not just a technical detail. Smartphones were built to make us look good. Medicine requires something different: accuracy.

If the health service is going to rely on smartphone cameras for clinical decisions, how those cameras are designed, regulated and used may need a rethink. Because convenience should never come at the cost of care.

Rebecca Payne receives funding from a University of Oxford Clarendon-Reuben Scholarship and works on a project funded by Health and Care Research Wales

Zengbo Wang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Smartphone photos may be misleading doctors and putting patients at risk – new research – https://theconversation.com/smartphone-photos-may-be-misleading-doctors-and-putting-patients-at-risk-new-research-276119

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gabriella Penitente, Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Science, Sheffield Hallam University

When Olympian Alice Kinsella talks about returning to elite competition after giving birth, she isn’t simply planning a comeback; she’s pushing into territory that gymnastics has rarely explored.

Increasingly, athletes are returning to training and competition after childbirth, often sooner, stronger and with greater public visibility. This challenges the long-held expectation that women must retire to have a family. Although this shift is now becoming well established in several sports, such as long-distance running and team sports, others remain constrained by narrow ideas about when peak performance should occur.

Women’s artistic gymnastics sits at the sharp end of this debate. For much of the modern Olympic era, the sport became synonymous with “little pixies”:
exceptionally young champions, lightweight bodies and careers that peaked
early then ended quickly.

Over the past 20 years, the age at which gymnasts reach peak performance has slowly risen from teenage years to early 20s, bringing elite success into overlap with the years many women plan to have children. When these timelines overlap, athletes may feel pressured to choose between motherhood and peak performance. This is because research in gymnastics has not yet properly studied what happens to the body during and after pregnancy. That imbalance highlights a wider gender gap that has shaped sports science.

As gymnasts themselves begin to stay in the sport longer, return after maternity leave and challenge these assumptions, science has a responsibility to respond.

We still don’t know what it takes to return to elite performance in sports like gymnastics, where power, precision and impact tolerance are non-negotiable.

Unlike endurance sports, where training load can often be increased gradually, gymnastics requires athletes to perform highly technical skills under significant mechanical stress and to face substantial psychological demands related to fear regulation and confidence.

In elite gymnastics, the margin for error is tiny. Performance depends on strength, fine coordination and the ability to control the body under extreme physical and psychological demands. Even small changes in how a gymnast moves or lands can dramatically affect performance and increase the risk of injury.

Gymnasts generate a spring-like push in a fraction of a second through their feet and hands, striking the vault with forces of up to three times their body weight. Then, they land with 15-20 times body weight through their legs and spine, all while balancing on a beam no wider than a smartphone.

They make danger look graceful. In fact, even though gymnastics has no physical contact, almost all elite gymnasts (90%) are injured each season, putting gymnastics in the same risk range as football.

When mothers fly

Pregnancy-related changes in body mass distribution, joint loading and neuromuscular control influence how gymnasts land, generate force and regulate movement. For example, changes in core and pelvic stability can alter how forces are absorbed during landing, while small shifts in balance or timing can affect take-off accuracy and rotation in flight. These changes can affect injury risk, confidence and technical consistency.

In 2018, the International Olympic Committee published for the first time guidance on returning to exercise after pregnancy, but it offers little insight into how performance-critical capacities are rebuilt.

In artistic gymnastics, examples of return post-pregnancy have historically been rare and often overlooked. One of the earliest and most striking cases is Uzbekistani artistic gymnast Oksana Chusovitina. She gave birth to her son in 1999 at age 24 and returned less than a year later to compete at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. In the years following childbirth, she won World Championship gold on vault in 2003 and went on to compete internationally for more than two decades. Chusovitina showed how narrow gymnastics’ ideas about age were, but for years she was treated as a one-off.

Real change began in the mid-to-late 2010s. Gymnasts stayed in competitive career longer and average ages rose. Changes to the International Gymnastics Federation, which governs competitions in all disciplines of gymnastics, code of points rewarded experience. Between 2003 and 2016, elite female gymnasts became an average 3.3 years older, shifting from about 17 years old to 20–21. Gymnasts like Simone Biles (US, 28), Rebeca Andrade (Brazil, 26), Becky Downie (UK, 34) and Ellie Black (Canada, 30), to name a few, were winning medals in their late 20s and early 30s.

British Olympian Alice Kinsella represents something new. Her planned return after childbirth isn’t just about coming back. It’s about how she’s doing it, with structured scientific support, tracked as part of an academic case study. Kinsella’s approach turns a risky return into something that can be understood, supported and repeated by other gymnasts.

Not all attempts have been successful. Aliya Mustafina, a Russian double Olympic champion, gave birth to her daughter in 2017 at the age of 24 and returned to competition within 16 months, aiming to re-establish herself at the highest level during the next Olympic cycle. Despite her experience and determination, persistent injuries limited her ability to compete, and she ultimately retired in 2021. There is no evidence these injuries were caused by pregnancy, but her experience shows how fragile post-pregnancy pathways in gymnastics still are.

More recently, gymnast Jade Barbosa provides further evidence of this shift. A three-time Olympian and a member of Brazil’s historic bronze-medal winning team at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Barbosa welcomed her first child in late 2025. During pregnancy, she publicly shared aspects of her training and has stated her intention to return to competition.

These stories show that attitudes are changing. More gymnasts are pushing back against the idea that they have to choose between performing at their best and becoming a mother.

Why this matters

For years, performance research has focused mostly on men, partly because women’s bodies change more over time due to hormonal fluctuations, making results harder to compare. Pregnancy and recovery after birth add further challenges, alongside ethical concerns and limited funding. That is why case studies like the one planned around Kinsella are vital.

Elite sport influences how people think about women’s bodies. If returning to sport after having a baby is always described as exceptional, it can make staying active after childbirth seem unrealistic for most women.

If post-pregnancy return becomes normal rather than exceptional, the timeline of female performance changes permanently, and so do the expectations placed on women in sport.

Gabriella Penitente does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Elite gymnasts are no longer retiring after pregnancy – sport science needs to catch up – https://theconversation.com/elite-gymnasts-are-no-longer-retiring-after-pregnancy-sport-science-needs-to-catch-up-275167

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Toni Beardmore, Lecturer in Human Geography, Aberystwyth University

Many people can recall moments when they have been mocked, judged or subtly excluded because of where they are from, how they speak or because they seem out of place in certain settings. These moments rarely look like overt discrimination. Instead, they might take the form of jokes, assumptions or signals that someone doesn’t belong.

Class-based discrimination might be dismissed as harmless banter or attributed to personality clashes, but research on social interactions shows that what is labelled banter can quickly cross into harmful or exclusionary behaviour.

One reason for this is that class discrimination frequently operates through culture – in the everyday norms and expectations that shape how people are perceived and included – rather than through explicit rules, such as those that define unacceptable conduct. It is therefore rarely recognised as discrimination in the same way as sexism or racism. This makes it both harder to challenge and easier to overlook, even though it remains widespread.

Research on accent bias particularly illustrates this. A 2022 report by the Sutton Trust found that one in four professionals have been mocked or singled out in the workplace due to their accent. Among senior managers from working-class backgrounds, almost 30% had experienced this treatment in the workplace. Similarly, almost a third of university students reported the same in education settings. In social settings, these figures rise to almost half in both professional and student groups.

These findings matter because they show that class-based stigma doesn’t disappear with professional or educational success. Regardless of economic or social mobility, class-based cultural markers such as accent continue to shape how people are perceived and treated.

Research shows that class inequality is not just about material assets and occupation, it’s embedded in more subtle ways. It shapes our confidence our self-worth and our sense of our place in society. This is sometimes referred to as the hidden injuries of class. These injuries arise not from cultural differences themselves, but from the stigma and exclusions attached to them. This covert dimension of class helps explain why class discrimination is often felt, but less often addressed as such.

Discrimination that defies definition

Part of the challenge is that social class is hard to define. Unlike income and occupation, it is not a single measurable attribute. Class is fluid and contextual, shifting across spaces and relationships. Someone might feel working class in a professional space but middle class at home, and vice versa. A person might occupy spaces associated with a higher class, but hold cultural markers associated with groups historically excluded from them.

This fluidity means that class is noticed but not easily stated and measured. It’s signalled through accent, vocabulary, tastes, humour, norms and values and it shapes how people are judged, without those judgements being widely recognised as discriminatory.

Due to class being signalled through cultural markers, subtle judgements about people’s background are often tolerated. Class-based mockery also remains unusually acceptable. While explicit comments about race, disability or religion are widely recognised as harmful, remarks about someone sounding “common”, “too posh” or “out of place” often pass without challenge. This normalisation helps sustain class discrimination by framing exclusion as a personality difference.

Why it matters

The consequences of class discrimination are far from trivial. When people are made to feel out of place at work or in education, it shapes whose voices are taken seriously, who is encouraged to network, who is seen as promotion-ready and who is treated as if they belong. Over time, these patterns produce inequalities in progression, leadership and representation. Because these processes rarely break policy, they remain difficult to challenge through existing frameworks.

This is part of a broader challenge: legal and institutional systems tend to work best when disadvantage is visible, stable and clearly measurable. Class resists these criteria. It shifts across contexts, operates through culture as much as economics, and is often felt before it can be named. The hidden injuries of class, therefore, fall through the cracks between personal experience and institutional accountability.

One reason for this is that, unlike race, gender and disability, social class is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. This means there’s no formal duty to monitor class-based disadvantage or discrimination.

This gap has prompted growing calls from professional bodies and advocacy groups to take socioeconomic background more seriously in equality policy. But translating lived experiences of class into fixed legal categories remains difficult, given how fluid class identities are.

Whether or not class becomes formally recognised in law, the underlying issue remains. Many people continue to experience exclusion, stigma and disadvantage linked to background rather than ability or achievement, often in ways that remain invisible to institutions.

Understanding class discrimination therefore requires moving beyond income statistics or occupational categories alone. It means paying attention to how class is lived: how people are read, judged and positioned in everyday interactions. It also means recognising that some of the most enduring inequalities operate not through formal barriers, but through judgements about who belongs and who does not.

Naming these processes does not solve them, but it does make them harder to dismiss. Recognising how class shapes everyday experiences of belonging is a necessary step toward understanding inequalities that persist even when formal barriers have fallen.

Toni Beardmore does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Mocking people for their class is discrimination – so why don’t we treat it as such? – https://theconversation.com/mocking-people-for-their-class-is-discrimination-so-why-dont-we-treat-it-as-such-275649

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steve Schifferes, Honorary Research Fellow, City Political Economy Research Centre, City St George’s, University of London

The decision by the US Supreme Court to rule most of Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs illegal will have far-ranging consequences for the president’s economic agenda. Although the administration will find other ways to increase tariffs, their usefulness as a weapon of economic warfare will be diminished. And the issue – among the most unpopular of the president’s economic policies – will cause him serious political damage.

Trump’s first move following the ruling has been to impose a 15% tariff on all imports. Imposed under a little-used law, the tariff rate is fixed and time-limited to 150 days before needing congressional approval. It would take only a few Republicans to block its extension. And the midterm elections are looming.

Using a flat-rate tariff means that some countries that settled earlier and got a better deal – including the UK – are now worse off, while others that had a higher tariff rate imposed on them have, at least for now, benefited. It also could mean that those that pledged to invest hundreds of billions in the US economy – including Japan and the EU – may now question whether their commitment still stands.

Trump’s ability to threaten instant retaliation to any country that crosses him will also be constrained by the other two legal routes he can use to raise tariffs. Both provisions would require time-consuming, detailed investigations into specific industries or countries, and rates once fixed cannot as easily be changed.

The domestic political fallout from the Supreme Court decision is also substantial. Two thirds of the US public disapprove of Trump’s tariff policy, with large sections believing that his tariffs are inflationary.

Democrats are already calling for the money raised to be returned to consumers. And businesses, including small firms hit hard by the tariffs, are suing the government. If the US government can no longer rely on the income from tariffs – which rocketed to US$287 billion (£211 billion) this year – it would put further pressure on the fast-growing federal budget deficit. This is already US$2 trillion and projected to rise to US$3 trillion by the 2030s, as a result of Trump’s large tax cuts.

Nor have Trump’s tariffs achieved their objectives. The trade deficit was slightly larger in 2025 than the year before, with US$1 trillion more goods being imported than exported. Tariffs have not boosted jobs: manufacturing employment fell by 80,000 and unemployment is up to 4.3% compared to 4% in January 2025.

The bigger problem for the president is the overall performance of the economy. The Republicans have only a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, and most observers are predicting that the Democrats will gain control in November. Trump’s ratings on his performance on the economy have been slipping, with 55% now disapproving. And 65% disapprove of his handling of inflation.

He now faces an uphill struggle in the State of the Union address to convince the public that the economy is back on track under his leadership.

Weak growth and high inflation

There is still debate over how much the tariffs have contributed to inflation, but the US economy is only growing at 2.2% a year, its slowest rate since 2020.

Inflation is the main concern of US voters, with figures putting the rate at 2.9% – well above the Federal Reserve target of 2%. Estimates by economists suggest that companies are increasingly passing on the cost of tariffs to consumers, which may well be driving inflation. Recent job figures may have provided some more positive news, but voter worries about high prices may be hard to shift.

Trump’s next battle is for control of the US Federal Reserve. This independent agency sets short-term interest rates and manages the US currency – Trump wants it to sharply cut interest rates to boost the economy. But Fed chair Jerome Powell is reluctant to cut rates too quickly when inflation is not yet contained.

Powell’s term is due to end in May, and the president has nominated a new chair, Kevin Walsh, who backs his policy of more interest rate cuts. But he will need to convince a majority of the other 11 members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee to go along with these.

Trump, as well as being openly critical of Powell, also fired (in an unprecedented act) Fed governor Lisa Cook, a supporter of Powell who was appointed by President Joe Biden. This decision is being challenged in the Supreme Court, and in a preliminary hearing several judges appeared to be sceptical of its legality – including Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative who voted in favour of Trump in the tariff case.

Financial markets could wobble if Trump succeeds in taking political control of the Fed. Its independence is seen as vital for ensuring non-partisan and credible management of interest rates and inflation. But if Trump does force the Fed to cut rates further, this could add to the inflationary pressures and damage the Republicans’ path to retaining power in the midterms.

After one year back in power, Trump’s failure to deliver his promised transformation of the US economy (and especially to tackle inflation) is having serious political consequences that could damage his freedom of action. The Supreme Court’s ruling has thrown US tariff policy into turmoil and weakened the president’s ability to dictate to other countries on both economic and political issues.

If the Supreme Court also backs the independence of the Federal Reserve, Trump’s bid for complete control of US economic policy will face another major setback. But the most important limit on the president’s powers would be a defeat for the Republicans in the midterm congressional elections in the House of Representatives, leading to a divided Congress that will no longer rubber-stamp Trump’s policies.

Steve Schifferes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Supreme Court’s ruling leaves Trumponomics facing major challenges – https://theconversation.com/the-supreme-courts-ruling-leaves-trumponomics-facing-major-challenges-276792