Public Mental Health Education
Mental health guides,
written by a psychiatrist
Evidence-based mental health education for the public: practical guides, careful explanations, and clinical thinking written for everyone. These resources inform; they do not diagnose the reader.
Practical patient resources
New · medication education hub Psychiatric medication, explained without fear Start with the question you actually have: benefit, side effects, monitoring, dependence, withdrawal, pregnancy or everyday safety. Open the medication hub → New · private printable worksheet Twelve conversations before marriage A calm reflection guide with no score, compatibility result, login, answer storage or data submission. Use the worksheet →The ADHD Library
Fifteen guides covering assessment, the conditions that imitate ADHD, late diagnosis in capable adults and in women, emotional dysregulation, autism alongside ADHD, an evidence-labelled language guide, treatment planning, and how ADHD medication choices work in India.
Adult ADHD Assessment Online in India
What a rigorous adult ADHD assessment actually involves, what video consultation can and cannot establish, and how structured assessment protects against both overdiagnosis and underdiagnosis.
Read the article →Is It ADHD, Anxiety, Depression or Something Else?
Poor concentration is where many different problems surface. How the patterns differ, what a proper assessment checks first, and why a questionnaire cannot settle it.
Read the article →ADHD, Bipolar Disorder or Borderline Personality?
Three conditions that share impulsivity and emotional intensity, how the timeline separates them, how often they genuinely co-occur, and why the wrong label is not harmless.
Read the article →High-Functioning ADHD: When Coping Stops Working
Why capable adults are diagnosed late, how compensation hides impairment, the life changes that make coping fail, and what evidence a fair assessment should look for.
Read the article →ADHD in Women and Girls: Why It Is Often Missed
How referral patterns, inattentive presentations and masking delay recognition, why anxiety and depression are often diagnosed instead, and what assessment should examine.
Read the article →ADHD Recognised After 40
Establishing childhood onset decades later, what must be excluded before the label is applied, whether medication is safe after forty, and what treatment realistically achieves.
Read the article →Autism and ADHD Together in Adults
Why both could not be diagnosed together before 2013, how often they co-occur, which one is usually missed, what changes in treatment, and where Indian disability law sits.
Read the article →Emotional Dysregulation and Rejection Sensitivity
The part of adult ADHD the diagnostic checklist leaves out, what rejection sensitivity really is, how it differs from a mood disorder, and how much medication actually helps.
Read the article →ADHD Language Guide: 84 Terms with Evidence Labels
Shuffle one of 84 ADHD terms, click the word, and reveal its meaning, practical use case, evidence status and important limits.
Read the article →After an Adult ADHD Diagnosis: Building a Treatment Plan
How to choose functional goals, judge medication and CBT fairly, reduce environmental friction, monitor benefit and build an illustrative first 90-day plan.
Read the article →ADHD Medication in India: Availability and Rules
Which medicines are actually marketed here, why methylphenidate is a controlled Schedule X drug that cannot be prescribed online, and what monitoring involves.
Read the article →Methylphenidate vs Atomoxetine in India
A direct comparison of speed, evidence, side effects, prescription rules and the practical reasons one medicine may fit better than the other.
Read the article →Non-Stimulant ADHD Medication in India
Atomoxetine, clonidine and bupropion: how well they work, how long they take, what needs monitoring, and why a non-stimulant is sometimes the right first choice here.
Read the article →ADHD Medication Safety: Side Effects and Risks
What the first weeks usually bring, what trials show about blood pressure and growth, what the evidence really says about addiction risk, and what to report quickly.
Read the article →ADHD in Children: What Indian Parents Should Know
What an assessment involves, what treatment looks like at different ages, what CBSE and CISCE actually offer, and what the evidence says about diet and brain training.
Read the article →Other Guides
AI and attachment, sleep, mood, anxiety and panic, intrusive thoughts and hidden OCD compulsions, sexual health, psychiatric medication and what a first consultation is like.
Predictive Algorithmic Dysphoria (PAD)
A proposed name for distress after an AI companion changes or disappears, built around identity discontinuity, learned social predictions and disenfranchised grief.
Read the concept note →Is Seeing a Psychiatrist Confidential in India?
What a psychiatrist can and cannot tell your parents, employer or insurer, whether it goes on a record, whether medication is automatic, and what to say when you get there. Answered against Indian law.
Read the article →Your First Psychiatric Consultation: What Actually Happens
A calm walkthrough of what to prepare, what the psychiatrist asks, confidentiality, diagnosis, online appointments, treatment choice and what happens after the first visit.
Read the article →ERP Therapy for OCD: What Actually Happens
How a fear hierarchy is built, why reassurance and mental rituals matter, what a course of ERP involves, and how therapy and medication decisions fit together.
Read the article →How to Stop Sleeping Pills Safely
Why benzodiazepines and Z-drugs should not be stopped abruptly after regular use, how supervised tapering works, and why the original sleep problem must be treated too.
Read the article →Lithium: Blood Tests, Interactions and Toxicity
How to time a lithium level, which kidney, thyroid and calcium tests matter, which common medicines interact, and which symptoms need urgent assessment.
Read the article →Antidepressant Withdrawal or Relapse: How to Tell
The timing and symptom clues that help separate withdrawal from recurrence, why later dose reductions may need to be smaller, and when symptoms need urgent review.
Read the article →How Long Should You Stay On An Antidepressant?
The minimum period after remission, what raises it, what the ANTLER trial showed about stopping, how to tell withdrawal from relapse, and how tapering should actually be done.
Read the article →Postpartum Depression: Symptoms, Causes and Treatment in India
How it differs from baby blues and ordinary exhaustion, why around one in five Indian mothers is affected, what assessment checks beyond mood, and what treatment realistically involves.
Read the article →PMDD: Symptoms, Diagnosis and Treatment
How PMDD differs from PMS and premenstrual worsening, why daily tracking across cycles matters, and how psychiatric and gynaecological treatments are combined.
Read the article →Psychiatric Medication in Pregnancy and Breastfeeding
How medication and relapse risks are weighed, what relative infant dose actually means, and why infant age, health and the specific medicine all matter.
Read the article →CBT-I for Insomnia: What Treatment Looks Like Week by Week
Inside a structured course of insomnia therapy: the sleep diary, stimulus control, sleep-window work, cognitive treatment, online delivery and safety adaptations.
Read the article →Low Mood or Depression? How to Tell
How persistent depression differs from an ordinary low period, which warning signs need faster help, and why bipolar and medical causes must be checked before treatment.
Read the article →Botox in Psychiatry: Where the Evidence Actually Is
Chronic migraine, heavy sweating, jaw clenching and depression. Which uses of botulinum toxin are licensed and evidenced, which are narrower than they sound, and which are still only research.
Read the article →Botox for Depression: What the Research Shows
Botulinum toxin has been trialled as a treatment for depression. What the studies actually found, the blinding problem behind the headlines, and why it is not yet established.
Read the article →Is Erectile Dysfunction Psychological?
Why erectile difficulties are often mixed, how performance anxiety can become a loop, and which medical, medication and cardiovascular factors a careful assessment should not miss.
Read the article →Do Psychiatric Medicines Cause Dependence?
Why antidepressants do not usually produce craving or intoxication but can cause significant withdrawal, which medicines carry dependence risk, and what responsible prescribing looks like.
Read the article →Psychiatric Medication, Weight Gain and GLP-1 Drugs
Why some psychiatric medicines cause weight gain, what the randomised trials on semaglutide actually show in people taking antipsychotics, and the lithium and clozapine safety points that get missed.
Read the article →Antipsychotic Side Effects and Health Monitoring
A practical monitoring timeline for weight, glucose, lipids, movement and prolactin, with clozapine safeguards and urgent warning signs.
Read the article →Ozempic, Mounjaro and the Mind
Food noise, mood, the feeling of flatness, alcohol, body image and what returns after stopping. What is established, what is only being said, and the four things worth checking first.
Read the article →Antidepressants and Sexual Side Effects
How common they are, which medicines carry the highest and lowest risk, what the trials support for managing them, and what regulators have actually concluded about PSSD.
Read the article →Stress, or an Anxiety Disorder? How to Tell
The clinical signs that stress may have become an anxiety disorder, why physical symptoms and avoidance matter, and what a responsible assessment should rule out.
Read the article →Social Anxiety Disorder: More Than Shyness
How fear of judgement differs from ordinary shyness, the avoidance and safety behaviours that keep it going, what assessment checks and what evidence-based treatment involves.
Read the article →Box Breathing: What the Evidence Shows
What randomised trials actually found about paced breathing, why carbon dioxide explains the dizziness of a panic attack, which forceful techniques to avoid, and where the evidence stops.
Read the article →Panic Attacks and Panic Disorder
What the body is actually doing during a panic attack, when attacks become a disorder, what needs excluding medically, and why breathing exercises are not the treatment.
Read the article →When Do Bad Nights Become Insomnia Worth Treating?
The clinical threshold for chronic insomnia, what persistent sleeplessness can signal, and why cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia is the main evidence-based treatment.
Read the article →Intrusive Thoughts Do Not Make You Dangerous
Disturbing, unwanted thoughts are common and rarely discussed. When they may be part of OCD, why thought is not the same as intent, and how ERP-based treatment works.
Read the article →Pure O OCD and Mental Compulsions
Why “Pure O” usually includes hidden rituals, how mental review and reassurance maintain the cycle, and how ERP targets what nobody else can see.
Read the article →The Cost of Looksmaxxing
How appearance optimisation can shift from self-improvement into compulsive self-surveillance, self-rejection, and an identity organised around a score. On young men, mirrors, and the psychiatry underneath a trend.
Read on X →Essays and Curiosities
Shorter pieces on the history of psychiatry, the psychology of persuasion, and the odd corners of memory research. Written for anyone curious about the mind, not only for patients.
The Fear Is Sold First
Psychiatric drug advertisements from the 1960s to the 1980s look like horror posters now. Their method does not: amplify the problem, then arrive with the product as relief. Where that structure shows up in India today, and one question worth asking.
Read the essay →The Shed Where Lithium Was Found
A psychiatrist working alone in a disused kitchen outside Melbourne, a hypothesis about urine that was wrong from beginning to end, and a salt he used only because it dissolved.
Read the article →Tetris in the Emergency Department
Twenty minutes of a falling-blocks game within six hours of a car crash, and fewer intrusive memories that week. The cognitive science behind it, and what it does not mean.
Read the article →Why You Forget What You Came For
The doorway effect, the replication that complicated it, and why this particular kind of forgetting is a feature of normal memory rather than a warning sign.
Read the article →New essays are published periodically
Follow along for writing on ADHD, sleep, relationships, and the mind in modern India, announced on Instagram and X when published.
Instagram →X / Twitter →Articles are educational and do not replace a clinical consultation. For personal concerns, book a consultation.