Nature and nowness under lockdown

ABSTRACT

The Natural Health Service is part memoir, part reportage, and part exposition of the latest research interrogating the role of wildlife and fresh air in helping people cope with mental health problems. Absorption in something as simple as the minibeast activities of a garden pond is, for McAnulty, healing “my head is pretty hectic most of the time, and watching daphnia, beetles, pond skaters and dragonfly nymphs is a medicine for this overactive brain”. Dara McAnulty Elaine Hill The limitations of the evidence base demonstrating conclusive benefits of nature on mental health cause Hardman wryly to observe, “Am I merely a slightly more plausible-sounding version of a homeopath, preaching to my friends that ‘All I can say is that jumping into a partially-iced lake has really helped me'?” Yet if we truly value the patient experience in medicine, then writer-patient narratives are themselves a form of evidence. Just as we slash and burn rainforests, driving mass extinctions, wipe out coral reefs, and melt polar ice caps, so too can one microbe, infinitesimally small, cause human societies to grind to a halt.