Mental health talks from the University of Oxford

Mental health issues, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, are being discussed more openly than ever before, which is certainly a step in the right direction. But how do we separate the facts from the myths? How can we improve our own mental wellness and help those around us? How can we recognise when a normal bout of low mood, stress or anxiety has become a more serious problem?

The University of Oxford has some of the world’s leading researchers who work to better understand the causes of mental conditions and develop effective evidence-based treatments. The Experimental Psychology Department at the University has brought them together in the Our Mental Wellness webinar series to share their knowledge and answer your questions about how we can look after each other’s mental wellness in our community.

Each highly engaging talk has a main speaker followed by a Q&A that includes an expert panel for some of the talks. The entire Our Mental Wellness series can be watched anytime at

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMfAfjAWEyuOBtviJSn1o9YbBnEHTDHh1, including:

• Managing Stress and Overcoming Anxiety. Associate Professor Jennifer Wild outlines seven key tools to transform the stress and anxiety in your own life and the science of why they work.
• Overcoming Sleep Problems. Professor Colin Espie answers questions such as… What is sleep for? How does it work? How can we overcome tricky sleep problems?
• Managing Depression and Low Mood. Professor Willem Kuyken discusses stigma, strategies for working with depression, how to support others with depression, and how to access available evidence-based treatments.
• Understanding and Managing Eating Disorders. Dr Rebecca Murphy discusses treatments and provides guidance on what you can do if you, or someone you know, is struggling with eating problems.
• Coping with Trauma. Professor Anke Ehlers will discuss helpful and unhelpful ways of coping with our emotions and memories after trauma.
• Overcoming Mistrust and Paranoia. Professor Daniel Freeman answers key questions…What is paranoia? How common is it? What is the latest scientific understanding of the causes? And what can we do to tackle it?
• Overcoming Social Anxiety. Professor David M Clark discusses what we know about the processes that maintain social anxiety and shows how they can be targeted in treatment.
• Coping with Grief after a Bereavement. Dr Kirsten Smith explains some of the key processes that can block the natural resolution of grief as well as some evidence-based suggestions for managing them.
• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: Too careful, too nice and trying too hard. Professor Paul Salkovskisexplains how Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) works and what needs to happen to overcome it.
• Understanding and Managing Troubling Mental Images. Dr Hannah Murray discusses how negative mental images can affect us, how images can be addressed as part of psychological therapy and how, in our day-to-day lives, we can transform our own troubling mental images.