Posts by Jean M. Ward

It’s not a new argument, but there has been a lot of talk lately about how much taxes the rich should have to pay. I think we can all agree that they should have to pay as much or more than the rest of us do, since they’re benefiting off the backs of our labor....

Pretty much everyone struggles with mental health at one point or another. It’s easy to think that certain issues, like depression, only affect women and not men, or only affect white people and not people of color, but that just isn’t true. There’s more that unites us than divides us, and mental health is one...

According to BetterHelp.com almost 15 million Americans suffer from depression symptoms annually. And those are just the ones reporting it. Depression can hit anyone of any age, race, or religion. It doesn’t discriminate. And yet, perhaps because their community has experienced so much trauma, the black community often doesn’t acknowledge the reality of mental health...

We all think we know a lot about the places that we see on TV. Sometimes we might be right. Other times, well… We’ve got the TV version just about right. That was the case when a British Twitter user went viral last April for displaying his knowledge of the whole United States. Part tongue-in-cheek,...

I’m not the best at geography. I know that there’s a town in the UK called Cheddar and they invented the delicious cheese. I know that Downton Abbey was set in Yorkshire which is north-ish but filmed… somewhere in the middle? Nearish to Stonehenge? What I’m saying is that I would never attempt to do...

When things go wrong, my husband often likes to say, “Nice idea. Shame about the execution.” I believe it comes from soccer. Well, sometimes things are the opposite. Sometimes they are a terrible idea, fabulously executed. Thus began the r/ATBGE subreddit, for exhibiting just this sort of situation. Here are some of the most amazingly...

Sometimes, not matter how hard you try, your efforts just don’t quite hit the mark. Kind of like the classic “nailed it” and cake fail memes, where a good idea is poorly executed. At other times, the best possible implementation of an idea can’t make up for a bad idea. Here are 13 mostly beautiful...

I don’t know about you, but when I hear antisocial personality disorder, I immediately think of people like Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson. But just because atrocities have been committed by sociopathic people doesn’t mean that all people suffering from this disorder will go on to commit atrocities. To be diagnosed with this disorder, a...

There is a lot of misunderstanding out there about different mental health disorders. Especially when these disorders are misrepresented in TV and movies, right? One example is Antisocial Personality Disorder. People with this diagnosis can be described as sociopaths, but not psychopaths, as some people assume. The two may share some traits, like recklessness and...

JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, along with The Hobbit, have inspired a cult-like following among readers and movie-goers for decades. Personally, I enjoyed the movies but never finished the books. (I’m sorry 😬) And I haven’t joined my mother in semi-annual rewatching events. So when a Tumblr user wrote an essay about the...

Not getting enough sleep can really start to take a toll on every aspect of your life. Most of us aren’t getting enough of it, either because of work, life, or staying up out of revenge despite being tired. Different people can function on different amounts of sleep, but at some point we all hit...

Diagnoses of mental health disorders are never easy. It can be especially difficult for a parent to receive the diagnosis about their child. The desire to protect your child coupled with the guilt of potential heredity can be an overwhelming thing to grapple with. These 13 parents share what it’s like to hear that your...

Despite countless evidence to the contrary, people often dispute that the gender wage gap is real. There are rules designed to hide it, such as not discussing salaries, but most women can cite an example of a time they were paid less for the same work. Recently, Aussie surgeon Dr. Nikki Stamp went viral for...

We often fear what we don’t understand. And it doesn’t help that less well known mental illnesses often become the butt of jokes or dramatized horrors in movies and TV. But at our core, we’re all just people, living our lives and struggling with our struggles. Sometimes those struggles are visible, and sometimes they’re not,...

Being married is great, but as my happily single friends are quick to point out, remaining single can have its merits too. A lot of the time, singletons seem to get a bad rap, as society sits around waiting for them to follow the socially expected path of getting married, having children, the end. Comedian...