Mothers’ pride
The Fat Ladies' Club started as five women comparing notes on their pregnancies. Then one of them died - and they turned into a publishing phenomenon. Sabine Durrant reports.
Bringing up baby
Feeding on demand and co-sleeping are out. Timed feeds and controlled crying are in. Is this the end of liberal parenting, asks Kate Worsley.
Students’ Mental Health Needs: Problems and Responses, edited by Nicky Stanley and Jill Manthorpe
Student life is a time of change and adjustment, and students' families as well as staff need resources to help them provide support for students experiencing mental health difficulties. Based on recent research findings and drawing on the experiences of professionals, academics and service users, this book explores how the needs of students can best be met bystudent and community mental health services. All of the contributors to this chapter have lost a son or daughter to suicide. Each of the stories is unique, as are the attempts to understand what led up to the child's death.
The witch report
Roy Porter's Madness: A Brief History is a vivid account of how fads and fashion have marked the theories and treatments of insanity
Body language
Tim Radford looks at The Oxford Companion to the Body and learns all about facial expressions, faeces, fainting, Fallopian tubes and farting
Sisters of mercy
How do you ask a nun for her brain? John McCrone finds light shed on Alzheimer's in an astonishing study, Aging With Grace by David Snowdon
Doctors’ disorders
Tim Radford revisits a dark age of quacks and quips in Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain 1650-1900 by Roy Porter
The fright of your life
Spiders, snakes, premature burial - Harriet Stewart faces our worst fears with Phobias: Fighting the Fear by Helen Saul and Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear by Jan Bondeson
Drowned at midday
Ian Penman hails a perplexed investigation of melancholy in The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression by Andrew Solomon
Down but never out
Poetic, vital, witty - who'd have thought depression could make such an uplifting read? Andrew Solomon anatomises his breakdowns in The Noonday Demon