There’s a particular type of patient I’ve been seeing more of lately. They sit in my consulting room, wringing their hands, describing a creeping sense of dread that wasn’t there before.

‘I don’t want to get on the Tube,’ one woman told me last week. ‘I know it’s silly, but every time I’m on a train, I’m looking at everyone, wondering…’ She trailed off, but I knew what she meant. The shocking stabbings on that Doncaster to London train had shaken her badly.

I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had recently that begin with,’Did you see the news about…’ followed by another horrifying incident.

The prisoner mistakenly released from Wandsworth. The knife attacks linked across multiple locations. It feels relentless, doesn’t it? As though we’re living through some sort of moral collapse, a descent into lawlessness where nowhere is truly safe anymore.

But here’s the thing that might surprise you: We’re not. Actually, statistically speaking, we’re living in one of the safest periods in modern history.

As 2005 robbery has fallen by 60 per cent in the UK. Burglary is down by two-thirds. Overall violent crime has halved. Yes, halved.

If I’d told my younger self, fresh out of medical school in the early 2000s, that crime would plummet like this, I wouldn’t have believed it.

So why does it feel so terrifying? Why are my patients – sensible, rational people – suddenly afraid to travel, to go out after dark, to let their children catch the bus alone?

The answer lies partly in the nature of modern details. We’re not just hearing about violent incidents in our immediate vicinity anymore; we’re hearing about every single one that happens across the entire country, often within minutes of it occurring. Social media algorithms, designed to keep us engaged, serve up the most shocking content as that’s what makes us stop scrolling and read it.

Our brains,evolved to respond to threats,can’t distinguish between a danger in our postcode and one 200 miles away.

It all registers as: Threat nearby, be vigilant.

What worries me particularly as a psychiatrist is how these news cycles can pour petrol on the flames of existing anxiety disorders. The catastrophic thinking that characterises anxiety (‘something terrible is going to happen’) finds validation in every news alert. 

I’ve seen patients, who were managing their anxiety well, suddenly spiral after a weekend of being bombarded by social media coverage of violent incidents.

Their underlying condition doesn’t create the fear out of nothing; the news stories provide a hook for it to latch on to, making everything feel more urgent, more immediate and more threatening.

So what do we do? How do we function when our nervous systems are jangling w

Why We’re So Bad at Spotting Liars, According to ‘The Traitors’

The recent finale of The Traitors, which saw Alan carr triumph, was a masterclass in exactly why humans are such magnificently terrible lie detectors.

Time and again, someone would voice a suspicion about a Traitor, only to be talked down by the group.

alan’s victory reveals something crucial about how we assess trustworthiness.The Faithfuls came into that castle with 15 years of pre-existing beliefs about who Alan Carr is: relatable, funny, a bit ditzy, unthreatening.

Even when suspicions arose, the group couldn’t shake their fundamental perception of him.

This is what psychologists call the ‘halo effect’: when one positive trait (in this case, likability) influences our judgment of someone’s other characteristics, including their honesty.

The genius of Alan’s win is that he weaponized his own public persona. We struggle to believe someone who makes us laugh, who feels like a friend, could be systematically deceiving us.

Alan didn’t fit their mental template of what a Traitor looks like.But his entire career has been built on making people feel comfortable, at ease, and entertained. Those same skills translate perfectly to this game.

The brilliance of The Traitors is that it’s not really a game show about deception. It’s a behavioral experiment that reveals how easily our social instincts can be exploited.

We trust faces over facts, emotion over evidence, and pre-existing perceptions over present reality.