Whether you embrace or loathe it, Valentine’s Day is hard to ignore. Radio advertisements remind you to order the chocolates, shop isles are drowning in red and pink and your social media feed is probably filled with special offers and date night ideas.

With the worldwide shortage of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medicines due to increased global demand and manufacturing problems, many patients and parents are feeling despondent in their unfruitful search for medication.

As a child, we were creative for most parts of the day shaping clay, drawing, building forts, engaging in imaginative role-play with toys, and galloping around the house on pretend horses.

It’s true that society has created certain standards for mothers. It naturally doesn’t help that we as women have also set our own standards that are incredibly high and drive us in constant pursuit of being the “perfect mother and woman.”

Change is inevitable, yet we all fear it because we don’t know the outcome. We prefer to know, to find peace in the knowing, and as a result find it hard to move on when something comes to an end.

At the start of 2021, I joined the worldwide Facebook post, whereby the first 5 people who shared my post and committed to paying it forward would receive a random gift from me throughout the year. I sent cupcakes to Gauteng and Durbanville, and coffee vouchers to Stellenbosch.

Emotional baggage is a collective term for all our unresolved past emotional experiences and issues, traumas, and stresses. We carry these experiences, inner criticisms, insecurities, deep (perhaps shameful) secrets, and past relationship pains, with us.

2020…do we need to say more? COVID-19 has flipped our world up-side-down and changed a world that was safe, secure and known, even with all its life challenges, overnight to one of unfamiliarity, chaos and an enormous amount of discomfort and additional stressors. 

The Tinder Swindler on Netflix has been fascinating to watch, don’t you agree? One can almost not believe this is real life! But the sad truth is that although most of us would argue that something similar would never happen to us, cases such as these are not as uncommon as we think.

Every time I read a Facebook post or a WhatsApp on a support group, where a mother asks where she can find CBD oil for her child with ADHD (or as a colleague of mine remarked “for everything from asthma to hemorrhoids”), I cringe.

Often the seed of a blog is planted months earlier, and then has to mature until it is ready to sprout. But sometimes, we keep the soil very hard and dry, preventing the seed from pushing the fresh shoot above the soil – we are not granting the story permission to be told

Early during 2016 I read the book “The happiness project” (Rubin, 2009) in which the author went in active pursuit of happiness.

What a blessed couple of weeks! Although having loads of the usual pressures, our dream to launch Goldilocks and The Bear Foundation became a reality.

Not a day in my practice goes by without a patient complaining about their weight gain. So often the antidepressants are blamed.

“The medication doesn’t work anymore,” is a sentence I often hear. But why would your medication stop working? Is it even possible?

One of the most goose-bump moments in my practice was when a mom told me during a follow-up consultation that she heard her little girl laugh again. Only then did she realise how long the house had been silent.