Healthy Mayo Messages

In ancient Ireland, the hearth fire meant far more than warmth. It represented safety, gathering, identity and belonging. A home without a fire was considered abandoned long before it stood empty. Loneliness today can feel something like that — not always dramatic, but a quiet cooling of human connection.This is Teresa from Mental Health Ireland reminding you that your mental health is just as important as your physical health.

Carl Gustav Jung once wrote: “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.” It is a remarkable insight because it reframes loneliness completely. A person can sit in a crowded office, a busy café, even a family home, and still feel unseen if the deeper parts of themselves remain hidden. This is Teresa from Mental Health Ireland reminding you that your mental health is just as important as your physical health.

Human beings are wired for connection. Long before modern psychology, survival depended on belonging to a tribe. To be excluded even once meant danger. Neuroscience now suggests our brains still respond that way today.Researchers at University of California, Los Angeles found that loneliness activates some of the same neural pathways as physical pain. In other words, connection is not simply emotional comfort. It is biological safety. This is Teresa from Mental Health Ireland reminding you that your mental health is just as important as your physical health.

In 1909, a little-known biologist named Jakob johna von Uexküll( ucks cull) published a short, unusual book called A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. In it, he made a simple but unsettling claim: every living creature inhabits its own version of reality. To find out more tune into Teresa from Mental Health Ireland.

A spider’s web along a fence might not seem like much. But it catches more than insects. It gathers wind-blown dust, slows erosion, and, when rain comes, returns that material to the soil—creating, over time, a thin line of greater fertility. More plants grow there. More life follows. To find out more tune into Teresa from Mental Health Ireland.

Every day, many new mothers continue to struggle in silence.In Ireland, around one in five women will experience a mental health difficulty during pregnancy or in the first year after birth—that’s roughly 15,000 mothers each year. And yet, up to 70% will hide or downplay what they’re going through. To find out more tune into Teresa from Mental Health Ireland.

My mother used to say, don’t answer back, bite your tongue when your brother annoys you, let them taunt you don’t give them the satisfaction of a reponse — and how very hard that was to do — but there is something in that which tends to stay with you, because it points to a form of kindness that isn’t obvious or visible, and isn’t always recognised as such. To find out more tune into Teresa from Mental Health Ireland. 

Would you imagine that not everyone who is struggling is actually mentally ill — that a large proportion of what we are seeing, in everyday life, in GP surgeries, in workplaces, in communities, is something both more common and more immediate, something that Harry Barry describes very directly when he says, “so many people… they weren’t mentally ill… but they were very, very emotionally distressed.” .To find out more tune into Teresa from Mental Health Ireland.