Latest news with #AmIBeingUnreasonable
Metro
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
This woman thinks celebrating your own birthday is narcissistic — is she right?
Be it a birthday, an anniversary or simply surviving a tough week, I've always loved finding an excuse to celebrate. But according to the internet, this makes me a 'narcissist'. Taking to the Am I Being Unreasonable forum on Mumsnet, one woman sparked a heated debate this week when she proclaimed: 'I think celebrating one's birthday is a very narcissistic thing to do.' She confessed she'd never understood the need to celebrate a birthday as an adult, as she thought it was just 'attention seeking' behaviour. 'Look at me…it's my day, make me feel so special blah blah blah,' she continued. 'I find it all so narcissistic. People getting extremely offended if their birthday is forgotten. Do you really care if someone has just got a year older?' For the most part, the comments read like variations of the iconic Come Dine with Me line: 'Dear Lord, what a sad little life, Jane.' Some branded the woman's view 'miserable' and and argued that birthdays were just meant to be 'a bit of fun'. A few also pointed out that getting older is a 'privilege' not everyone is afforded. However, there were some who agreed with the original post, saying adults who celebrate their birthdays were 'childish' and 'cringe'. While others said they didn't want to 'make a fuss' and felt 'awkward' about celebrating themselves. 'I like birthdays but some people do go over the top,' a fellow Mumsnet user posted in response. 'I have a mate who got her whole garden decked out in a certain theme and booked a DJ for her last birthday, which was her 34th, so not even a big birthday. She organised it all herself. A bit self-indulgent, but if it makes her happy that's up to her.' Someone else shared: 'It is one thing, if others decide to celebrate your birthday. Lovely! But to insist on it and winge on if others forget? Get over yourself. I've always thought throwing your own birthday party is very cringe too.' Metro asked registered members of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) for their thoughts. And the good news is celebrating your birthday doesn't make you a narcissist – at least, not in the diagnosable sense of the word. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is estimated to affect around 1% of the population and is characterised by a grandiose sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy, an intense need for admiration, a deep envy of others, the belief they're unique and deserving of special treatment, and a preoccupation with brilliance and unlimited power. While many of us display some of these traits from time to time, it's considered pathological when it's a pattern of behaviours which impair a person's daily functioning – with others often caught in the crossfire. According to the NHS, a person with a personality disorder 'thinks, feels, behaves or relates to others very differently from the average person.' Therapist, LJ Jones believes most people who throw around the term 'narcissism' have little understanding of what the disorder actually is. But she's clear that celebrating your own birthday isn't an example of this. 'We all know that certain someone who is elaborate, extravagant or simply stretches their birth date to span the whole month; however, this does not warrant a diagnosis of narcissism.' She adds that celebrating your birthday only becomes cause for concern in 'extreme cases of self-obsession'. 'It only becomes over-indulgent when it's rooted in entitlement or a need for admiration at the expense of others,' she explains. 'For example, expecting everyone to bend over backwards, purchase expensive gifts, or reacting with anger when attention isn't given, or gifts aren't bought. Using your birthday to feel superior in such ways are possible red flags, but still not necessarily an indicator that a person is narcissistic. There are many other considerations, including people's unconscious need to stand out on social media.' Debbie Keenan, a senior accredited psychotherapist, agrees that celebrating your birthday isn't narcissistic. However, she claims there is a line where a person's behaviour could veer towards it. She explains: 'Celebrating your birthday isn't narcissistic, unless it stops being about joy and connection and starts being about attention and entitlement. Clinical narcissism is a deeper pattern of behaviour, constant validation-seeking, lack of empathy, and a sense that the world revolves around you. How you chose to celebrate another trip around the sun could reveal something else about yourself though. For counsellor Georgina Sturmer, it can be an indicator of your attachment style. There are four main attachment styles according to attachment theory, which are Secure, Anxious-Preoccupied, Dismissive-Avoidant and Fearful-Avoidant). These are thought to influence how we form and maintain relationships throughout our lives. Georgina says: 'A securely attached individual is likely be flexible and enjoy the festivities without needing to go over the top. By contrast, someone who has a preoccupied, or anxious, attachment style, might seem quite needy in how they approach celebrations. 'Festivities and attention might be an important part of how they seek reassurance and attention from others. ' At the other end of the spectrum, someone who has a dismissive, or avoidant, attachment style, might shy away from festivities all together. 'The spotlight might feel intrusive or awkward if we feel more comfortable on the outside, looking in,' says Georgina. She continues: 'This isn't black and white, it's about understanding the reasons behind the behaviour.' Experts actually told us it's 'healthy' to celebrate yourself. More Trending LJ Jones adds: It is totally normal and healthy to want to acknowledge your own existence, joy, and milestones,' she tells us. 'Some people might appear to go more 'over the top' but perhaps they weren't made much of a fuss of from caregivers during their childhood or adolescence.' So, as Debbie Keenan says: 'Throw that party, enjoy your birthday week and mark the moment however you like. It's not narcissistic, it's just being human.' Do you have a story to share? Get in touch by emailing MetroLifestyleTeam@ MORE: I bought the online poison that killed my son – it was easy MORE: People are sharing their favourite 'mega walks' — these are the best routes in London MORE: The one phrase that will make your doctor realise there's something seriously wrong
The Guardian
04-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Malpractice season two review – relentlessly tense TV that will leave you terrified
Two years ago, former NHS doctor Grace Ofori-Attah created the relentlessly tense first series of Malpractice, a tale of an A&E doctor whose errors under impossible pressure, combined with the inexperience and equal stresses of others, resulted in the death of a patient. Then things escalated. It took in topical medical subjects – primarily the creeping problem of opioid addiction – alongside social issues, including the manifold effects of the pandemic, the prevalence of burnout, the bureaucratic inefficiencies that hinder staff and patients, the institutional buck-passing and arse-covering that greet any type of mistake, and the potential for corruption that exists in any large organisation. It asked how much we should expect of people trapped in a system starved of resources, how much human fallibility we should tolerate in healthcare. It was fast and in every sense furious, written as leanly and cleanly by Ofori-Attah as only someone with direct experience of a particular environment can. Only one episode of the new series is available for review but it looks to be shaping up just as well as the first. Psychiatric doctor James Ford (Tom Hughes) needs to be in two places at once: doing an assessment on shaky new mother Rosie (Hannah McLean), whose GP Dr Sophia Hernandez (Am I Being Unreasonable's Selin Hizli), contacts him about as the on-call psychiatrist during Rosie's postnatal checkup, and attending the sectioning of a troubled, crack-addicted pregnant woman at her home where the police are already waiting and threatening to leave if they have to do so much longer. Ford does the assessment first. He asks all the necessary questions. Can we accurately judge if he is rushing things? If he is paying enough attention to the answers? To Rosie's body language? Can anyone? Hernandez is certainly annoyed he leaves it to her to go through the medications he prescribes Rosie, but surely this is a legitimate division of responsibility when he has another vital job to get to? Hernandez seems demanding and dislikable. How much does that colour how we evaluate their point of view? These seeds of doubt already sowed, we move on to the sectioning visit and the necessary savagery involved in removing someone from her home against her will. The patient, Toni (Seraphina Beh) is placed in psychiatric care, where Hernandez and Ford – both with Toni and her baby's best interests at heart – clash again over how to manage the pregnancy and delivery. The frequent lack of clear clinical pathways is where dramas like this – Cardiac Arrest, Bodies, This Is Going to Hurt – are most confronting and terrifying. We want to think doctors know everything. No one wants to admit that this is impossible or that what we are really doing is trusting them to be the best at weighing options and risks, but never able to banish the latter. But the meat of the thing is in the fate of Rosie. The lack of clarity around her medications leads to her being insufficiently sedated during an episode of postpartum psychosis and to – in a courageously quiet, underplayed scene – tragedy. Possibly one that could have been avoided if Ford hadn't massaged the truth about how long it would take him to get back her ward (he is supposed to live within half an hour of the hospital – he is staying with his sister 45 minutes away), but equally possibly not. And so we meet again doctors Norma Callahan and George Adjei (Helen Behan and Jordan Kouamé) from the Medical Investigations Unit as they launch a 'fitness to practice' inquiry against Ford and we come again to the questions of culpability and moral responsibility that suffused the first series. The closing scenes suggest that we will not be done out of the many twists and turns the original Malpractice so brilliantly delivered, complete with revelations about the characters that complicate their moral standing in our eyes, their motives, their decision-making processes, the capacity they have to be at their best at any given moment in jobs that demand constant perfection. The new series promises to be as addictive and unsettling as the last, with another good cast and Ofori-Attah still with plenty of material. Malpractice can surely run and run – which is great news for viewers, if less so for doctors and their patients out in the real world. Malpractice season two aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now
Wales Online
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wales Online
ITV Malpractice full cast list - where you've seen the stars of medical drama before
ITV Malpractice full cast list - where you've seen the stars of medical drama before The cast of Malpractice series two has a serious pedigree in some of the UK's most iconic dramas including Happy Valley, Line of Duty, This is England and more Malpractice returns for it's second season on ITV and will feature new characters and new storylines. (Image: (Image: ITV) ) The long-awaited second series of Malpractice is finally here and kicks off on May 4, 9pm on ITV. Fans of the drama will be swept back into the turmoil of the West Yorkshire hospital where an unplanned investigation kicks off. Viewers will meet new cast members including Tom Hughes as Dr James Ford, a psychiatrist who becomes the subject of this season's inquiry. Meanwhile, Selin Hizli and Zoë Telford assume significant supporting roles. You can find out who the cast are and where you've seen them before, below. After the success of the first series, which provided a real insight into the workings of an emergency department, it's expected that viewers will be left wondering whether the series is based on a true story or influenced by real-world events in any way. You can read more about that, here. For the latest TV and showbiz gossip sign up to our newsletter . The official show synopsis reveals: "As the team dig further into the events of that night, what appears to be a series of poor choices by one doctor spreads beyond the psychiatric unit to a hospital seemingly at war with itself. Article continues below "With the MIU investigation closing in, can Dr Ford save his already fragile career from a string of apparently damning mistakes? "Is Dr Ford a doctor with a God complex or a victim of the institution? "And can the MIU uncover the truth of what happened, despite hostility from all sides?" Cast list of Malpractice series two Tom Hughes (Victoria) as Dr James Ford Selin Hizli (Am I Being Unreasonable) as Dr Sophia Hernandez Zoë Telford (Teachers, Unforgotten) as Dr Kate McAllister Jordan Kouamé (Wolf Hall, Dope Girls) as Dr George Adjei Helen Behan (This Is England '88 and '90, The Virtues,) as Dr Norma Callahan Hannah McClean (Blue Lights) as Rosie Seraphina Beh (Top Boy) as Toni Campbell-Brown Rick Warden (Trigger Point, HappyValley) as Eric Sawers Ace Bhatti (Line of Duty) as Dr Arun Mansoor Jessica Layde (Endeavour) as Bernadette Tobi Bakare (Death in Paradise) as Kwame Produced by World Productions (Line of Duty, Vigil), in partnership with and distributed by ITV Studios, Malpractice was filmed on location in Belfast with support from Northern Ireland Screen. Article continues below The new series begins on ITV1 at 9pm on Sunday 4th May, with the second episode airing on Monday 5th. The third on Tuesday, May 6 with episodes four and five planned for the following week. You can catch up with Malpractice on ITVX.
Evening Standard
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Malpractice season two: who's in the all-new cast?
Hizli will also be playing one of the medics in the new series, Dr Sophia Hernandez. Hizli has been on our screens a lot recently – she's featured alongside Daisy May Cooper in both series of Am I Being Unreasonable, which they co-created and wrote together. She's also played Karen in BBC sitcom Things You Should Have Done.
Telegraph
11-03-2025
- General
- Telegraph
How Mumsnet transformed Britain
Twenty-five years since it launched, Mumsnet has evolved from advice forum to campaigning giant to pillar of online British life. There you will find informed and occasionally eccentric advice on an astonishing range of subjects: pregnant guinea pigs, husbands who 'dunk their penises' in mugs after sex, how to deal with post-natal depression, the Lucy Letby case, the war in Ukraine. It's all there. 'The thing that makes me happiest is that it gives ongoing support and community to complete strangers every day,' says founder and CEO Justine Roberts. 'A lot of the internet is an unfriendly and quite depressing place these days, but there are large pockets of mums that give the lie to the fact that humans are polarised and essentially self-interested. People go out of their way every day to help complete strangers.' While other early internet forums have been superseded by social media, Mumsnet has endured. Today it employs 70 people and turns over nearly £9 million in revenue. With more than eight million monthly users, it is far and away the UK's most popular parenting website. Mumsnet is also one of the most influential political forums in the UK, with the power to help politicians rise and fall and bring fringe issues to mainstream concern. MPs on the rise expect to submit to a Mumsnet Q&A. A rich lexicon has emerged from the more than six billion words on the site, particularly a potent battery of acronyms, including AIBU (Am I Being Unreasonable, the most popular topic on the site), SAHM (stay at home mum), DH (Darling Husband), SWI (Shagging with Intent), LTB (Leave the B------). Several policy changes have been brought about by Mumsnet activism. In 2011 the Mumsnet campaign for Better Miscarriage Care led to a change in NHS guidelines. The following year they turned their attention to sexual assault with a 'We Believe You' campaign. Other initiatives have fixed a spotlight on anything from school funding to pandemic support and getting retailers to stop selling products that project adult sexuality onto children. Just as important as any single campaign, Mumsnet serves as a permanent reminder to anyone seeking election that parents, and mothers in particular, are a powerful and motivated group of voters. Roberts has been careful never to reveal how she votes, although she has not ruled out some kind of direct political career. But the overall political stance that emerges from the forums is a compassionate, common-sense kind of conservatism, rooted in the members' experience of what works when it comes to doing best by your family rather than grand ideology. Ignore them – and Mumsnet – at your peril. It all started in 1999, when Roberts went on a first family holiday with her nine-month-old twin sons. It was not a triumph. 'I made some very, very poor choices – about where to go, what time zone, how far the flight was,' she recalled recently. 'And the resort, as it turned out, wasn't at all family-friendly, even though it was supposed to be.' It must rank as one of the most successful disastrous family holidays in British history. This was during the first dotcom boom, when everyone had an idea for a business that would harness the power of the internet to meet some pressing need and make everyone rich. Not all of them worked out. For every there was a for every Google an AskJeeves. Sitting around the pool, commiserating with other parents about what a mistake they had all made, Roberts had a 'lightbulb moment'. She could create a forum where parents who had already made similar mistakes could share their accumulated knowledge. After earlier work in investment banking and journalism, Roberts was ready to make the change. A few months later, in early 2000, after she had enlisted a friend, Carrie Longton, to be a co-founder, Mumsnet was born – a place where strangers might answer the 'awful lot of questions' Roberts had, and for which 'my immediate circle of family and friends couldn't provide all the answers'. The site's early growth was slow and steady, spreading by word of mouth as mothers, often at home feeling stressed and lonely, discovered in Mumsnet a reliable source of good-humoured wisdom and advice. It got a publicity boost in 2006, when Gina Ford, the strict-parenting guru, threatened to sue to have the site taken down for 'defamatory' postings. 'That was stressful,' Roberts recalls. Another stressful moment was the infamous 'penis beaker' thread, a discussion about post-coital hygiene, technically titled 'Do you dunk?', which went viral around the world, drawing so much traffic that the site crashed. If it caused a headache on the server front, it was also a reminder of one of Mumsnet's key strengths: it is extremely funny. A 'Mumsnet Classics' thread collates some of the most popular threads over the years. To browse the site is to marvel at the unusual scrapes people get themselves into. Husbands especially. One ate a suet ball intended for the bird feeder thinking it was an 'artisan scotch egg', another got annoyed because his wife was so moved by the Sistine Chapel she started screaming, another started speaking like a pirate in the bedroom. One exceptional thread detailed being unable to leave the house because a 'tiny elderly Korean lady' was sitting in a deckchair in the garden. 'People don't think mums are funny,' says Roberts. 'It's a nice by-product over the 25 years that the humour on Mumsnet may have changed a few minds.' David Cameron was the first party leader to realise Mumsnet's political potential when he did a live chat in 2006 after returning to work following paternity leave. A few years later, the site was sufficiently influential that the 2010 General Election was dubbed 'The Mumsnet Election'. In late 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown weathered a squall of bad headlines when he was apparently unable to answer what his favourite biscuit was during a live chat (his staff claimed he hadn't seen the questions). In the run-up to the vote, political parties advertised on the site and all the leaders submitted to wide-ranging policy questions. Brown described Mumsnet as a 'national institution'. In 2022, Roberts interviewed the then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson during the Partygate scandal. Johnson, who had been Roberts' neighbour in Islington years ago, and who had been accused of ducking rigorous media interviews, appeared to be caught off-guard by the forensic and forthright nature of the questions, both on the rule-breaking gatherings held in Downing Street and how he balanced work and family life. But the site has also made headlines for other reasons. In 2011, a user called Riven Vincent posted saying that she had asked social services to take her severely disabled daughter into care. 'I can't cope,' she wrote, adding that she only had six hours to herself per week. Her case attracted more than 1,000 sympathetic responses and made front-page news. The same year, Roberts launched Gransnet, a similar site aimed at the over-50s. Mumsnet has a policy of not accepting advertising from any business it perceives to run contrary to its mission to make parenting easier: gambling companies, or products that play on gender stereotypes. Moderators ensure that nothing illegal is posted, but Mumsnet's neutral approach – and its policy of allowing users to post anonymously – has not been without incident. Some of the opinions posted on the Feminism: Sex and Gender topic, where users discussed transgender issues, led to the New York Times calling Mumsnet 'transphobic'. Undeterred by these kerfuffles, Mumsnet continues. The latest campaign, Rage against the Screen, wants to 'inform parents about the dangers of smartphones and social media', which are 'poisoning' children, and pressure the Government into enforcing strict age limits on social media. Popular threads this week included one user asking for advice over her 'husband's food preferences', which are 'driving me crazy', and another asking: 'AIBU To be uncomfortable after my manager went on a rant about how much she hates Meghan Markle during a team meeting?' In a third post, which prompted 80 replies within two hours of being posted on Tuesday, a 26-year-old woman asked whether she was 'expecting too much from my partner' given her concerns about how little he contributes to their household workload, while expecting her to do his washing, and make him breakfast and a packed lunch each day. Although Roberts is threatening to age into the Gransnet demographic, she says she has no plans to retire. 'I've always thought the whole mission was that if you can tap in to the wisdom and friendship of others, and the people who have been there and done that, then it will make your parenting job easier,' Roberts says. 'That remains our thought today, tapping into the wisdom of eight million women. 'Very little of [Mumsnet] is about parenting any more. It's about women's everyday lives and the challenges they face. It's a window on everyday life and it's dominated by women, and that's quite unusual on the internet.' Twenty-five years on, Mumsnet is still providing its millions of users with answers. But it is asking the big questions, too.
