Involution Labs

Category: Culture & Society

  • Between Safety and Risk

    Exploring Another Way of Reading Freud

    Freud’s psychosexual stages can sound strange when reduced to notes about sucking, toilet training, masturbation and forbidden desire. Perhaps part of the difficulty lies in what he meant by sexuality. He was not always describing sexuality as adults experience it. He was trying to connect bodily pleasure with attachment, frustration, independence and identity.

    Freud may have noticed something important about the emotional intensity of childhood while interpreting that intensity through the sexual framework he had developed. What might happen if we viewed his theory through a different lens?

    What if some of what Freud understood as sexual desire could also be explored as attachment, separation and the gradual movement from safety into risk?

    The oral stage: can I trust the world?

    During infancy, much of a baby’s experience centres on the mouth. Babies suck, taste, bite and chew. Through the mouth, they receive nourishment, comfort and contact while also beginning to explore what exists beyond themselves.

    Freud wondered whether experiences during this period could influence later habits such as smoking, nail-biting, chewing pencils, kissing or overeating. These associations remain speculative and should not be treated as straightforward explanations of adult behaviour.

    Yet the oral stage may still offer an interesting question:

    Will the world respond when I need something?

    A baby depends on others for food, warmth and reassurance. The person who repeatedly responds may become the baby’s earliest experience of safety. This is often the mother, though it could be any consistent primary caregiver.

    Perhaps the importance of the mouth is not only that it provides pleasure. It is also where trust and dependence first meet the outside world.

    The anal stage: what may I control?

    During toddlerhood, children become increasingly aware of bodily functions. Toilet training introduces ideas of holding, releasing, timing, privacy and approval. Something that once happened automatically becomes an area in which the child may exercise control.

    Freud connected experiences during this stage with later tendencies towards rigidity, withholding, disorder or carelessness. His proposed connections are difficult to establish, but the symbolism may be more useful than the personality categories.

    Could this stage be partly about discovering what belongs to the self?

    The toddler is also learning to say no, mine and I’ll do it. Retaining and releasing might form one small part of a much larger movement towards autonomy.

    The questions raised during this period may continue in different forms:

    What belongs to me? What can I control? When is it safe to let go?

    Perhaps the struggle is not really about cleanliness or bodily waste. It may be one of the first negotiations between a child’s emerging will and the expectations of other people.

    The phallic stage: why the phallus?

    Between approximately three and six, children often become curious about bodies, anatomical differences, reproduction and the taboo language surrounding bodily functions. They may touch themselves, ask direct questions or display jealousy when a parent gives attention to someone else.

    Freud called this the phallic stage. The term immediately places the male body at the centre of development, which raises questions of its own. Why should agency, movement or power be represented by the phallus? Does that reflect something universal about childhood, or something about the culture and period in which Freud developed his theory?

    If we temporarily treat the phallus as a symbol rather than an anatomical organ, could it represent outward movement, agency or the courage to venture beyond the familiar?

    And if the mother—or another primary caregiver—has become associated with safety, could the child be negotiating between the desire to remain protected and the impulse to explore?

    This does not mean that mothers necessarily provide safety while fathers provide risk. A father may be the child’s safest person. A mother may encourage independence and adventure. One parent may perform several functions, and these experiences can also come through grandparents, siblings, teachers and the child’s own curiosity.

    Still, the symbolic contrast raises an interesting possibility. Could development involve learning to move away from safety without believing that love will be withdrawn?

    Another reading of the Oedipus conflict

    Freud believed that the young boy unconsciously desired his mother and experienced his father as a rival. Fear of the father supposedly led the boy to identify with him, contributing to the development of the superego and a male identity.

    A related idea, later called the Electra complex by Carl Jung, described the girl as desiring her father and competing with her mother. Freud’s understanding of girls and women was strongly shaped by the assumptions of his time, and many aspects of the theory are no longer persuasive.

    Young children may say:

    “I’m going to marry Mummy.”

    “Daddy belongs to me.”

    “Don’t kiss her. Kiss me.”

    How should we interpret such declarations? Do children mean desire in anything resembling its adult sense? Might they instead be expressing attachment, possessiveness or anxiety about losing a special position?

    A young child may not yet understand marriage as an adult partnership. Marriage might simply mean permanent love: You will always belong with me.

    What Freud described as rivalry could perhaps also be a response to discovering that the caregiver has relationships and desires beyond the child. The child is no longer the centre of that person’s entire world—if they ever were—and this may be difficult to accept.

    The third person in the relationship, traditionally represented by the father, interrupts the imagined completeness of the mother-child bond. But could this interruption also open the child’s world?

    If the caregiver exists separately from the child, then perhaps the child can gradually become separate too.

    The question may not always be:

    Which parent does the child desire?

    It could sometimes be:

    Can I become separate without losing the person who makes me feel safe?

    Latency: practising life beyond the family

    Freud proposed five psychosexual stages rather than four. Between the phallic and genital stages, he placed the latency period, roughly covering the school years until puberty.

    He believed sexual energy became less visible during this period and was redirected into learning, friendship, play and competence. Another interpretation might be that the child is practising how to belong beyond the original family.

    Friends become increasingly important. Teachers and other adults acquire influence. The child discovers skills, rules, hierarchies and social identities that do not come entirely from home.

    Perhaps the question of this stage is:

    Can I enter a larger world without losing myself?

    Even this will vary enormously between children and cultures. Some children may experience school as expansion; others may experience it as conformity or separation imposed before they are ready.

    The genital stage: intimacy after separation

    Freud’s genital stage begins around puberty, when sexual interest develops in a more recognisably adult form. He believed that successful development would lead towards mutual heterosexual relationships.

    His treatment of homosexuality as the result of unresolved development is outdated. Sexual orientation should not be understood as a failed resolution of childhood conflict.

    There may nevertheless be something worth exploring in Freud’s interest in how early relationships affect later intimacy. Could adults sometimes look to partners for the safety, approval or completion once sought from parents? Might some conflicts arise when a partner is unconsciously expected to repair an old wound or provide unconditional parental reassurance?

    Not every adult difficulty needs to be traced back to childhood, and human relationships are unlikely to fit one developmental explanation. Yet it may be useful to ask what we are hoping another person will provide.

    Can we experience intimacy without possession? Can we depend on someone without asking them to become our entire source of security? Can love include both attachment and freedom?

    Do we carry safety with us?

    Perhaps the mother and father in psychoanalytic theory can sometimes be read as functions rather than fixed people.

    The maternal function might represent being held, nourished and welcomed. The paternal or phallic function might represent separation, uncertainty and movement into a wider world. These descriptions are culturally loaded, however. They may reveal as much about traditional ideas of motherhood and fatherhood as they do about childhood itself.

    Perhaps we do not need to preserve the gendered division in order to explore the underlying movement.

    A child may need both secure attachment and opportunities to venture. Too little safety could make exploration frightening. Too little freedom could turn protection into confinement. But even this balance cannot be prescribed in the same way for every child.

    Might healthy development involve leaving and returning repeatedly? A child wanders away, looks back and discovers that the trusted person is still there. Over time, perhaps some experience of safety becomes internal. The child may venture further because connection no longer depends entirely on physical closeness.

    Adults may continue making similar movements. A new relationship, migration, parenthood, bereavement or a change of identity can return us to old questions:

    Is it safe to leave?

    Will I still belong if I change?

    Can I enter the unknown without abandoning where I came from?

    I do not know whether this interpretation explains Freud better or simply takes his theory somewhere else. Perhaps his sexual reading and this attachment-based reading illuminate different parts of the same emotional territory. Perhaps neither can fully contain the complexity of childhood.

    But changing the central question may allow another conversation to begin.

    Instead of asking only what or whom the child desires, we might ask:

    How does a child leave safety without losing love?

    And perhaps growing up is not a final departure from dependence. It may be the continuing practice of moving between safety and risk, attachment and freedom, home and the world beyond it.

  • We Questioned Catholicism. We Must Scrutinise Islam Too.

    There is one issue I keep coming back to, and that is the covering of women and girls.

    I understand that some adult Muslim women will say that wearing the hijab is their choice, and I do not believe the state should tell an adult woman what she may or may not wear. But I also think we have become too reluctant to ask what’s behind that choice.

    Because choice is not always as simple as saying, “I chose this.”

    If removing the hijab would mean conflict with your family, rejection by your community, shame, intimidation, or fear, then we should at least be honest enough to ask how free that choice really is.

    And for me, the question becomes even more difficult when we are talking about girls.

    I struggle with seeing a young girl covered for reasons of modesty while boys of the same age run around without the same restrictions. What exactly are we teaching her?

    Why is the girl being asked to cover herself?

    If the concern is the way men or boys might look at women and girls, then surely the responsibility should be placed on the person doing the looking. Men should control their eyes and their behaviour. A girl should not grow up believing that her body is something that has to be hidden in order to manage somebody else’s thoughts.

    That is an unequal burden, and we should be able to say so.

    A young girl does not make religious decisions with the independence of an adult. She learns what is expected of her from the people she depends on. If girls are taught from childhood that modesty requires them to cover themselves in ways that boys do not, I think a society committed to equality has every right to question that.

    That is not the same as attacking Muslims.

    Nor do I believe every Muslim thinks alike. Islam is a vast religion encompassing people with completely different attitudes to democracy, women’s rights, secularism and religious law. Many Muslims want exactly the same freedoms that I do.

    But political Islam is something different. When religious doctrine becomes a political project, when it is used to determine law, restrict speech, control women’s behaviour, punish people for leaving a religion, or demand authority over individual freedom, then we should be prepared to oppose it.

    These beliefs and practices are not beyond criticism simply because they are rooted in Islam.

    Ireland eventually learned to question the authority of the Catholic Church. We learned, painfully, what can happen when religious teachings about women, sexuality and family life are given too much power and too little scrutiny.

    It would be a strange lesson to take from that history if we concluded that Catholic doctrines may be challenged, but that Islam where it extends beyond private faith into law, politics, gender roles, education, and social norms must be treated with silence.

    The principle should be the same for everyone.

    An adult woman should be free to wear a hijab. But she must be equally free to take it off. And a girl should be free not to wear one in the first place.

    She should be able to change her mind and reject the teaching behind it.

    She should even be able to leave Islam entirely.

    And she should be able to do all of those things without threats, punishment, intimidation or being cast out.

    That, to me, is the real test of freedom.

    Not whether someone is permitted to obey a religious rule, but whether they are genuinely free to say no.

  • Defending Shared Culture Without Apology

    • Shared culture matters for social cohesion. Traditions like Christmas and New Year’s are part of the country’s cultural fabric and help communities feel grounded and connected.
    • Talking openly about those traditions is normal and legitimate. It is not exclusion, hostility, or oppression — it is everyday social life.
    • Participation is a choice. People who do not celebrate or do not want to engage can opt out, but that does not give them the right to police or reshape the conversation for everyone else.
    • Feeling excluded is not the same as being excluded. Discomfort is sometimes the price of living in a shared society, and adults are responsible for managing their own feelings.
    • Inclusion rhetoric often overreaches. It can turn ordinary behaviour into a moral problem and treat ordinary working people as if they need constant correction.
    • Security threats and cultural pressure are real. When public celebrations are cancelled, restricted, or constrained because of fear, people notice — and they have every right to talk about it openly.
    • Mainstream media and institutions do not always trust ordinary people to make up their own minds. They filter, delay, frame, and soften reality, then lecture the public about misinformation. People are entitled to find that patronising.
    • Working-class people are too often dismissed rather than heard. Concerns raised by working-class communities are frequently labelled uneducated, populist, prejudiced, or racist instead of being addressed on their merits. But people who live directly with the consequences of social, economic, and cultural change are entitled to raise legitimate concerns without being caricatured or morally discredited for doing so.
    • Rapid social and cultural change affects the existing population too, and integration cannot be one-way. Ireland has changed significantly in a relatively short period of time, particularly over the past decade and even more so in recent years. Some newcomers underestimate how substantial that change can feel to Irish people, who are often expected simply to accept it without question. People who move to a country have a responsibility to understand and adapt to the society they have joined. They are entitled to keep their own beliefs, customs, and traditions, but they should not expect the wider society to reorganise itself around their sensitivities. Those already living there are equally entitled to speak openly about the pace and consequences of change without automatically being treated as hostile to immigrants or immigration.
    • Standing up for shared culture is not racism or privilege. It is about fairness, honesty, personal responsibility, and keeping a society functional instead of fragile.

    A healthy society should be capable of respecting difference without becoming afraid of its own traditions. Cultural confidence and tolerance are not opposites. People can welcome others without apologising for who they are, and newcomers can be respected without being told that the society they joined must constantly reshape itself to avoid causing discomfort.

    Shared culture only survives when people are willing to defend it openly. That means speaking plainly, accepting disagreement, and refusing the idea that every uncomfortable opinion or cultural difference is a form of harm. A functioning society requires tolerance from everyone — not just from the people expected to give ground.

  • Europe as a Practice: A PeaceCraft Reflection on the Future of the Continent

    Europe was born many times — from the ashes of empire, from the silence after wars, from the courage to imagine cooperation where there had only been conquest – and is still becoming. Yet peace on paper has never been enough. Europe can’t only be governed; it must be crafted.

    1. Europe as Conscious Strength

    Europe knows that power without ethics corrodes, and ethics without courage collapses. Europe condemns power politics in others while becoming more comfortable exercising power itself.

    2. Europe as Listening

    We talk too much and understand too little. The continent that invented diplomacy must rediscover the art of deep listening. Listening is not only openness to the world; it is the willingness to hear uncomfortable truths from one’s own citizens.

    3. Europe as Home

    Europe’s challenge is not only political fragmentation, but the erosion of familiarity and shared rhythms of life. Cohesion weakens when people no longer recognise the places they call home.

    4. Europe as Stewardship

    Our relationship with the Earth must mature from extraction to guardianship. With realism, sustainability can become a cultural instinct. Europe must learn to protect the land without pricing ordinary people out of life. The forests of Scandinavia, the fields of France, and the rivers of the Balkans are not only landscapes to preserve; they are part of how Europeans live.

    5. Europe as Bridge

    Europe often speaks the language of values while acting through fear, dependency, or strategic interest. A continent uncertain of itself struggles to build stable relationships with others.

    6. Europe as Healer of History

    Europe must learn to speak about itself truthfully: no myth-making, no permanent guilt, and no selective memory. Its history contains empire, colonisation, and oppression, but also resilience, invention, struggle, and renewal. A people given stories instead of truth eventually lose confidence in who they are.

    7. Europe as Culture

    Europe often treats culture as entertainment or status, rather than inheritance. Yet culture is where values are transmitted, memory is preserved, and belonging is formed. A society that neglects culture eventually loses confidence in itself.

    8. Europe as Deep Democracy

    Democracy is more than elections; it depends on the freedom to question, dissent, and disagree. Citizens do not lose trust only when they are ignored, but when they feel certain concerns cannot be voiced at all. Europe needs less managed consensus and more honest conversation.

    9. Europe as Secular Courage

    Europe must be willing to examine Islam as more than private faith. Its foundational texts and traditions address law, government, punishment, family life, social order, and relations between believers and non-believers. When these teachings are advanced as rules for the wider society, they become political claims and must be scrutinised accordingly.

    Freedom of religion protects the individual’s right to believe, worship, question, convert, or leave. It does not oblige a secular society to accommodate religious authority over civil law, freedom of expression, equality between women and men, children’s rights, sexual freedom, or democratic government.

    Europe should not protect Islam from criticism. Ideas do not possess rights. Europe has spent generations questioning its Christian institutions, confronting fascism and communism, and distrusting nationalism. Yet Islam is often approached with a caution that can become intellectual appeasement. Criticism of Islamic doctrine is too readily recast as hostility towards Muslims, giving ideas a protection that people—not belief systems—should possess. Islam must be open to the same rigorous scrutiny Europe has already directed towards its own religious and political inheritance.

    Peaceful coexistence cannot depend on silence. It requires a clear civic settlement in which one law applies to everyone, no sacred text stands above democratic scrutiny, and no accusation of offence is allowed to become a veto over inquiry. Europe can welcome people from every background without surrendering the secular freedoms that make such coexistence possible.

    10. Europe as Human

    Europe likes to imagine itself as a sanctuary for reflection, compassion and human values. Yet people increasingly experience precarity, isolation and pressure. Ideals mean little when everyday life becomes unaffordable, fragmented or rootless.

    Vulnerability should not be assigned according to migration status. Newcomers may be vulnerable, but so are citizens living with poverty, housing insecurity, inadequate services and the consequences of decisions about which they were never meaningfully consulted. Compassion that overlooks the people already struggling is not social justice; it merely redistributes neglect.

    Governments have a primary democratic responsibility to the people they govern. That responsibility includes protecting social cohesion, access to housing and services, public safety, and citizens’ ability to influence major changes affecting their communities. When these duties are neglected while rapid migration is presented as an unquestionable moral obligation, people may reasonably feel that the social contract has been breached.

    A government does not prove its humanity by extending compassion abroad while abandoning responsibility at home. A humane Europe must be capable of protecting people seeking refuge without treating its own citizens as obstacles to compassion. Human dignity cannot be sustained through selective empathy.

    11. Europe as PeaceCraft

    Europe was built from the ruins of war, yet increasingly speaks the language of power. Security matters, but a continent that forgets diplomacy loses something of its purpose. Peace is not weakness, nor is it naïveté. It is the difficult work of negotiation before conflict becomes irreversible.

    PeaceCraft does not ask Europe to avoid conflict by refusing to name it. It asks the continent to establish the terms of peaceful coexistence clearly: one civil law for everyone, freedom of belief and disbelief, equality between women and men, protection of children, open criticism of every ideology, controlled borders, democratic consent and reciprocal integration. These are not expressions of hostility. They are the boundaries that allow difference to exist without becoming domination.

    Peace is not maintained by asking only the established population to accommodate, or only newcomers to surrender their inheritance. It requires reciprocity—but reciprocity does not mean that every value is negotiable. A democratic society may welcome cultural difference while refusing coercion, parallel authority and any doctrine claiming supremacy over civil freedom.

    Conclusion: The Next Renaissance

    Europe will not renew itself through slogans, nostalgia, guilt, or managed consensus. It will renew itself through honesty: about power, history, belonging, limits, and what holds societies together. A continent uncertain of itself struggles to offer anything to the world. Europe does not need to become something new. It may first need to remember what it is.

  • The Eleven Principles of Honest Reasoning

    1. Attack the argument, not the person.
      Character does not determine whether an argument is true.
    2. Represent opposing views fairly.
      Understand the strongest version of an argument before criticizing it.
    3. Seek evidence that could prove you wrong.
      Don’t only collect facts that confirm what you already believe.
    4. Follow the evidence, not your preferences.
      Conclusions should come from the weight of the evidence, even if they’re uncomfortable.
    5. Distinguish facts, interpretations, and opinions.
      Know the difference between what happened, what it might mean, and what someone thinks about it.
    6. Extraordinary claims require proportionate evidence.
      The stronger the claim, the stronger the supporting evidence should be.
    7. Correlation is not causation.
      Just because two things occur together doesn’t mean one caused the other.
    8. Admit uncertainty.
      “I don’t know,” “The evidence is mixed,” and “I may be wrong” are signs of intellectual honesty, not weakness.
    9. Apply the same standard to every claim.
      Don’t demand rigorous evidence from people you disagree with while accepting weak evidence from those you agree with.
    10. Be willing to change your mind.
      The purpose of reasoning is not to defend beliefs but to discover what is most likely true.
    11. Truth is determined by reality, not by popularity, authority, tradition, or emotion.
      A claim is not true because many people believe it, an expert says it, it has always been believed, or it feels right. Those may be reasons to investigate, but reality is the final judge.

  • The Children We Were, The People They Are

    A few years have passed since I wrote my first 500 words of wisdom, and one thing has not changed: I still stand with children.

    Perhaps that is because I remember being one.

    Adults often tell children to enjoy their freedom before work begins, but childhood is not always free. Children spend most of their days in school, followed by homework, expectations and activities arranged by adults. Their time is managed, their behaviour assessed and their distress frequently dismissed as a phase.

    Growing up can be magical. It can also be exhausting.

    My children helped me recognise parts of my own childhood that I had learned to overlook. Their teenage struggles were not inconveniences to manage. They were experiences to understand. Parenting, for me, became less about shaping children into successful adults and more about protecting the space in which they could discover who they already were becoming.

    A parent leaves a mark, whether they intend to or not.

    My children are not my legacy, because they do not belong to my story. They have stories of their own. But being their mother has changed me more profoundly than anything else I have done. They have brought me more joy than any story I have written—and I have written quite a few.

    I still consider myself a beginner. Not because I have achieved nothing, but because I am still curious. Expertise can become another identity to defend. Curiosity leaves the door open.

    As I entered what I once called my second rebellion, I began coming out in more ways than one. Menopause was not an ending. It was a refusal: of shame, silence and the idea that a woman becomes less valuable as she ages.

    Grey hair, wrinkles and a changing body are not evidence that life has gone wrong. They are evidence that life has happened.

    My identity has changed too. I once wondered whether I had lost my Swedishness. I had not. It had travelled with me, becoming entangled with my Karelian roots and my Irish life. We do not have to choose one place from which to belong. Sometimes belonging is what grows between places.

    I have also spent much of my life thinking about death. My children used to think it strange that I practised dying each night and returning each morning. But death gave shape to life. Having survived times when I did not want to be here, I no longer see my continued existence as something ordinary.

    It is not always easy to make peace with living.

    I once wanted to disappear completely. Perhaps I wanted freedom from being remembered. I understand that differently now. We do not control what remains of us. We live in other people’s memories, in stories, in digital traces and in consequences we may never see.

    What we can do is live honestly while we are here.

    Tell your children your stories, including the ones that make you uncomfortable. Let them see that adults make mistakes, change their minds and continue becoming. Listen when their version of events differs from yours.

    Allow them to be gloriously themselves, especially when they challenge who you thought they would be.

    Perhaps that is what authentic parenting asks of us: not to create children in our own image, but to meet them as they emerge.

  • Change Is Freedom, and Freedom Is Change

    If you are here, you have a right to be here.

    You do not have to earn your existence through achievement, obedience or usefulness. Worth is not a prize awarded to those who perform life correctly. It begins with being alive.

    Children arrive as people, not unfinished adults. They deserve love, safety and guidance, but also respect. Their wisdom is often ignored because it does not arrive in the language of authority. We ask children to listen, but how often do we listen to them?

    Parenting can change the world because it is one of the first places where power is learned. A child discovers whether love is conditional, whether their body belongs to them, whether questions are welcome and whether disagreement is dangerous. Families can take many forms. What matters is not how closely they resemble tradition, but whether the people within them are free to grow.

    Love is not control.

    Education should expand a child’s relationship with the world, not reduce it to obedience. Yet many schools reward compliance more easily than curiosity. They teach children to compete before they understand what they are competing for. By the time formal education ends, many people have learned how to meet expectations but forgotten how to recognise their own interests.

    This does not mean learning has failed. Learning continues wherever curiosity survives.

    Question what you inherit. Not because everything old is wrong, but because nothing becomes true simply by being repeated. Systems are created by people, and people can change them. What feels permanent may only be familiar.

    Choice is a human right, but no choice exists entirely outside circumstance. Freedom is not simply doing whatever we want. It is understanding what shapes us well enough to decide what we wish to carry forward.

    Being yourself is not a final achievement. The self is not something hidden inside us, waiting to be uncovered once and for all. We are always becoming—through experience, relationships, mistakes, loss and change. Differentness does not need to be corrected. Belonging should not require disappearance.

    Make friends across the imaginary borders we are taught to defend, but also learn to be present with yourself. Self-knowledge is not self-indulgence. It helps us recognise when we are living from desire and when we are living from fear.

    Do not turn pain into a moral failure. People reach for substances, distractions and escape for many reasons. Judgment rarely heals what understanding has not yet reached. Sometimes we save ourselves. Sometimes another person helps us remember that we are worth saving. Most often, healing is something we do together.

    Talk about death, because death gives shape to life. We do not need to pretend certainty about what comes next. It is enough to recognise that endings are part of being alive—and that awareness can make the present more vivid.

    Look after your body, your mind, your sexuality and your capacity for joy. Pleasure is not the enemy of wisdom. Laughter is not a distraction from seriousness. Gratitude, empathy and forgiveness are forms of wealth, but even these should not become obligations used to silence anger or avoid truth.

    Find the language that connects you to something larger, whether you call it God, nature, humanity, mystery or cosmic love.

    Change is not the loss of freedom.

    Change is how freedom remains alive.

  • Can Menopause Trigger Suicide?

    Yes, it can.

    Not because menopause itself causes suicide, but because the hormonal changes of perimenopause and menopause can trigger severe depression in some women. That depression is unlike anything many women have experienced before, yet it remains poorly understood and far too often dismissed.

    Menopause and suicide are uncomfortable subjects, but they belong in the same conversation. For too many women around the world, this stage of life pushes them into a darkness they never imagined possible.

    Menopause Is More Than One Day

    There are three stages of menopause: perimenopause, menopause and postmenopause. The entire transition can last around ten years.

    Technically, menopause is just one day—the point at which a woman has gone twelve months without a period. The years leading up to it, known as perimenopause, are when hormones fluctuate the most. This is when many women experience their most severe symptoms.

    As oestrogen and progesterone decline, the brain is affected too. Hormonal changes influence neurotransmitters such as serotonin, which helps regulate mood and emotional wellbeing. For some women, these fluctuations can trigger anxiety, panic attacks, depression, feelings of hopelessness and, in some cases, suicidal thoughts.

    Women who have experienced depression, severe PMS or postnatal depression may be particularly vulnerable. Others are caught completely off guard, having never struggled with their mental health before.

    Induced Menopause

    For women who enter menopause suddenly through hysterectomy or other medical treatment, the transition can be even more devastating. Instead of hormones declining gradually, they fall abruptly, leaving many women to cope with overwhelming physical and emotional changes almost overnight.

    Menopause-induced depression is not simply about feeling low. Many women describe it as unlike any depression they have known before. It can feel as though the mind has turned against the body, making everyday life frightening and unrecognisable.

    Yet menopause continues to be brushed away as little more than hot flushes and mood swings. Women deserve better than that.

    The Silence Is Costing Women

    We prepare girls for puberty. We educate women about pregnancy and childbirth. Yet millions enter menopause with little understanding of what hormonal change can do to their mental health.

    That has to change.

    Menopause education should begin in schools as part of sex education, but it cannot stop there. Women already in their late thirties and forties also need information through healthcare services, public awareness campaigns and targeted screening.

    Knowing what is happening to your body and brain can be the difference between seeking help and suffering in silence.

    We Must Link Menopause and Mental Health

    We routinely screen women for cervical cancer and breast cancer because early intervention saves lives. Why are we not taking the same approach to menopause?

    A menopause check, particularly for women entering their forties, could identify those at greater risk and connect them with support before they reach crisis point.

    We cannot continue separating menopause from mental health. The hormonal changes are real, the depression is real and, for some women, the suicidal thoughts are real too.

    Simply diagnosing depression without recognising the role of hormonal change is not always enough. Women deserve healthcare that recognises the whole picture.

    There Is Help

    Every woman experiences menopause differently. Some move through it with relatively few symptoms. Others find it completely overwhelming.

    There is no single solution. Hormone therapy helps many women. Others benefit from counselling, medication or a combination of treatments. Lifestyle changes, social support and simply being believed can make an enormous difference.

    The important thing is recognising that menopause-induced depression is real and treatable. No woman should be made to feel she simply has to endure it.

    It’s Time We Started Talking

    For decades, menopause has been reduced to jokes about hot flushes. Meanwhile, countless women have been battling panic attacks, despair, brain fog, loss of confidence and thoughts they never believed they could have.

    We know far more about the physical symptoms than we do about the psychological ones. That imbalance has left too many women feeling isolated, ashamed and misunderstood.

    It is time we stopped treating menopause as an inconvenience and started recognising it as one of the most significant hormonal transitions in a woman’s life.

    We must also start talking openly about menopause and suicide. Not to frighten women, but to save them.

    The more we understand the connection between hormonal change and mental health, the more women will recognise the warning signs, seek help sooner and realise they are not alone.

    Menopause is a natural stage of life, but there is nothing trivial about it. Women should not have to suffer in silence, and they certainly should not lose their lives because we were too uncomfortable to have this conversation.

  • Old Age Doesn’t Have to Be a Sexless Destination

    When we talk about ageing, we talk about health, pensions, housing, and care.

    We rarely talk about sex.

    The silence is revealing.

    Older adults are still portrayed as vulnerable, dependent, and increasingly disconnected from desire. Popular culture celebrates young bodies while treating older sexuality as embarrassing, amusing, or invisible.

    Yet the evidence tells a different story.

    Many older adults continue to experience attraction, intimacy, desire, pleasure, and love throughout their lives. The desire for connection does not disappear simply because someone turns sixty, seventy, or eighty.

    The problem is not ageing.

    The problem is ageism.

    Ageism teaches us that growing older means becoming less relevant, less attractive, and less fully human. It encourages younger people to fear ageing and older people to internalise limitations that may never have existed in the first place.

    The pandemic exposed this clearly. Older adults were often spoken about as though they were a single vulnerable population rather than individuals capable of making decisions about their own lives. Protection frequently slipped into paternalism.

    The same dynamic exists around sexuality.

    Older adults are offered care but denied desire.

    Love but not lust.

    Companionship but not eroticism.

    Yet intimacy remains important throughout life—not only because sex can be pleasurable, but because touch, affection, connection, and desire contribute to wellbeing, identity, and quality of life.

    Growing older should not require giving up an essential part of being human.

    Old age is not a waiting room for death.

    It is still life.

    And life deserves pleasure.

  • The Labelling Paradox: How Society Creates Deviance

    What makes someone deviant?

    The obvious answer is behaviour. People break rules, violate norms, and challenge expectations. Yet sociology suggests something more unsettling: behaviour alone is not enough. A person only becomes deviant when others decide they are.

    A child skips school. A teenager experiments with drugs. An employee questions authority. An immigrant struggles to fit in. Whether these actions are seen as mistakes, phases, acts of independence, or signs of deviance depends largely on who is doing the judging.

    Deviance is not simply discovered. It is assigned.

    This is the central insight of labelling theory. Society does not merely respond to deviance; it helps create it. Once a person is labelled delinquent, difficult, unstable, disruptive, or dangerous, the label often becomes more influential than the behaviour itself.

    The label follows them.

    Teachers become cautious. Employers become hesitant. Neighbours become suspicious. Opportunities narrow. Over time, people may begin to see themselves through the eyes of those judging them.

    The act becomes the identity.

    Labelling and Power

    Labelling is never neutral.

    Those with greater social power are usually the ones who decide what is normal and what is deviant. Adults label children. Professionals label clients. Majorities label minorities. Institutions label individuals.

    The ability to define reality is a form of power.

    This does not mean all labels are wrong. Some behaviours are genuinely harmful and societies need ways of responding to them. The question is not whether labels exist, but who gets to apply them and whose interests they serve.

    The same behaviour can be interpreted very differently depending on who performs it.

    A wealthy teenager’s rebellion may be dismissed as youthful experimentation. The same behaviour in a poorer neighbourhood may be treated as evidence of criminality.

    The act remains the same. The reaction changes.

    When Difference Becomes Disorder

    One of the most powerful forms of modern labelling occurs through the language of illness.

    In many cases, this has reduced suffering. Behaviours once treated as moral failings are now understood with greater compassion. Yet labels can also become limiting.

    When every difference is interpreted as a disorder, people risk becoming identified by a diagnosis rather than understood as individuals.

    A label intended to explain can sometimes become a cage.

    The challenge is to distinguish between genuine suffering and simple human variation.

    Not every difference is a disease.

    Why Deviance Matters

    Durkheim argued that deviance serves an important social function. It clarifies boundaries, challenges assumptions, and sometimes drives social change.

    Without people willing to question accepted norms, societies stagnate.

    Many ideas we now celebrate were once considered deviant.

    The danger is not deviance itself. The danger lies in confusing conformity with virtue.

    A healthy society needs people willing to ask difficult questions, challenge dominant narratives, and test established boundaries.

    Not because they are always right.

    But because the freedom to dissent protects everyone.

    The Real Question

    Perhaps the most important question is not:

    Why are some people deviant?

    But:

    Why are we so eager to label them?

    Because every label reveals something about the person receiving it.

    And something about the society applying it.