Professor Jim Lucey: My experience is that mental health can be lost and found

While we may all be mentally, emotionally and physically depleted, now is an opportune time to formulate a new way of living, according to Professor Jim Lucey's new book

Young woman at home longing at window. Spring landscape outside, blue sky with clouds and trees. Cozy pink pajama. Self isolation concept illustration

If there was ever a time we needed hope in our lives, it is now. And Professor Jim Lucey is doing his best to give us some. His cheerful and pragmatic manner certainly helps to lift my own mood when he chats to me from his home office in the garden of his Dublin home, where he has just completed his ‘virtual’ rounds.

In his latest book, A Whole New Plan for Living, Lucey, a consultant psychiatrist at St Patrick’s University Hospital, Dublin, and clinical professor of psychiatry at Trinity College, focuses on how to achieve balance and wellness in a changing world. He says while it is difficult to look forward in the midst of so much uncertainty, it is imperative that we still continue to plan for the optimisation of our health — physical and mental.