Most people have heard of therapy dog programs that provide companionship to people in hospitals, nursing homes, or special education schools. The dogs' company makes difficult situations less burdensome and has shown benefits for the mental and physical health of the participants. What may be less well known is that these dogs can also help children learn to read.

"With her breasts exposed," literally and metaphorically, is how writer Núria Esponellà has experienced the breast cancer she was diagnosed with in October 2023. Literally because it has been demanded of her by mammograms, tactile examinations, radiotherapy sessions, radiotherapy sessions... because, as she explains, with the disease she has learned to value the essential things and, like someone throwing away their bra, to shed the armor and limiting and useless thoughts in order to feel free and love herself and her body, including her breasts marked by aging and the scars from the operation. With bare breasts It is also the title of her latest book, where the writer bears witness to the pain she has suffered, but also to the courage and positivity with which she has faced the illness.

It may seem silly. It is the tapping, a self-help technique that involves using fingertips to perform acupressure while counteracting negative emotions with breathing exercises and positive affirmations. A technique that has generated skepticism among some mental health professionals.

People with schizophrenia can now face the voices they hear in their heads head-to-head. Thirty percent of patients with this disease who take antipsychotics continue to hear these voices despite their medication. Until now, many therapies focused on finding ways to distract the mind and avoid thinking about them. Now, a new virtual reality treatment aims to confront them and shows positive results. The new therapy, tested at the San Juan de Dios Health Park, has improved the symptoms of the disease in 90% of cases and gives hope to all those who live "with constant anxiety," according to Susana Ochoa, European leader in Avatar therapy and project director.

After almost half a life of addictions, the Argentine musician Maximiliano Calvo He entered a detox clinic. Music, rock and roll, touring, the nightlife, and bad company led him to drugs. He also suffered from a "low self-esteem," which, he explains, he tried to cover up with an "exaggerated ego" to hide his feeling of being "the smallest man in the world." From his first line at 17 until now, at 32, he made a name for himself on the music scene as the opening act for Arcade Fire, Fito Páez, and Roberto Carlos, and, settled in Madrid, accompanying Jorge Drexter. "Outside, I lived with an increasingly louder volume, while inside there was a little voice, my monsters, and I saw myself as a failure," he recalls a few minutes before starting perhaps the most intimate and atypical tour he could have imagined during those years of excess.

Anabel González is a psychiatrist and medical doctor. She has written several books analyzing how what happens to us affects us, but in her latest publication she does exactly the opposite: she addresses how things that haven't happened to us shape us. She makes this clear in the title itself, What didn't happen (Planet).