I know how alcohol can ruin our mental health. So why is it so rarely discussed? | Matthew Todd

It’s amazing to see the British finally begin to talk about our feelings. But even as we mark this year’s Mental Health Awareness week, there’s still an elephant in the therapist’s waiting room: alcohol.

The physical health risks of drinking are well known. Less discussed are the mental health consequences. These are real and significant, and seem to be getting worse. For instance, the number of people admitted to hospital with alcohol-related behavioural disorders has risen in the last 10 years by 94% for people aged between 15 and 59, and by 150% for people over 60.

Alcohol played a key part in my own problems but it took me years to come out of denial about it.

I never drank in the morning or in parks, just in a British way, bingeing along with, well, everybody else. I didn’t question it because no one else seemed concerned.

Presenting to therapists over the years with anxiety, patterns of self-destructive compulsive behaviour, swinging between thinking I was the most important and the most worthless person on the planet, they barely asked how much I was tipping down my neck. And it was a lot.

The more I drank to medicate my low self-esteem, the worse my anxiety got and the more I drank to dull it. Years passed and I couldn’t see I was stuck right in the classic “cycle of addiction”.

Eventually a friend of mine who had gone into Overeaters Anonymous sheepishly suggested I might have a problem. I resented it hugely. I was successful with a good job. There was no problem.

Eventually, it was a work incident that woke me up. As editor of Attitude magazine, I believed it would be culturally significant to have Harry Potter on the cover of a gay magazine. When Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry in the film franchise, agreed, the only gap in his schedule for a shoot was early on a Sunday morning, which was annoying. Saturday night was my favourite time to go out. But fine. I could do this.

‘The next thing I remember was waking up, empty cans everywhere, with a bunch of messages on my phone asking where I was.’ Photograph: David Jones/PA

I decided not to drink the day before. No wine at lunch, nor during the play I went to see, and then straight home. All went well. Just as I was about to go to bed, ready for the shoot the next day, curiosity got the better of me and I logged on to a dating site, just to check my messages.

The next thing I remember was waking up, empty cans everywhere, with a bunch of messages on my phone asking where I was. Daniel and his publicist couldn’t have been nicer when I arrived with my lame excuse, insisting I go home to bed and that the shoot would be OK, and he found time later in the week to do our interview. Disaster was averted but it was the wake-up call I needed.

Since finally giving up alcohol, I’ve learned many things. First, that addiction is everywhere. That it is not about the drinking (or whatever the substance is), but the feelings underneath. Usually there is some kind of childhood trauma that needs to be addressed. I’ve learned that it isn’t about when or where you drink but about whether you can easily stop once you’ve started. I’ve also learned that there is an astonishing lack of understanding about addiction in general, not just from the public but sometimes by professionals who, being human too, often have their own issues to deal with.

The positive news is that despite alcohol being a socially acceptable carnage-causing drug that is pushed on us from an early age, it too is beginning to be talked about less furtively. Brad Pitt spoke in an interview last week about his struggles, Colin Farrell recently spoke on Ellen about being 10 years sober. Daniel Radcliffe himself has spoken about his problem drinking.

Last year I did another interview, with Robbie Williams and singer John Grant talking about their life-saving experiences of recovery from alcohol, drugs and sex addiction – and this time, I wasn’t late for it. Studies continually show a link between alcohol abuse and violence, domestic abuse and suicide, so talking about it is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

The British drink too much. Alcohol must be next on the mental health agenda.

I know how alcohol can ruin our mental health. So why is it so rarely discussed? | Matthew Todd

Are you affected by the NHS stopping gluten-free prescriptions? | Matthew Holmes

The NHS is to stop prescribing gluten free foods to patients suffering from digestive conditions such as coeliac disease as part of its latest budget cuts.

GPs in England will also be told not to prescribe medications such as those for upset stomachs, travel sickness and haemorrhoids in the drive to eliminate waste from the NHS’s £120bn annual budget.

If you have coeliac disease, we’d like to hear from you. Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said it no longer needs to prescribe some foods as they are on sale in supermarkets, but those who are already struggling for money and are helped with the cost of prescriptions could be hit hard. Are you affected?

Share your stories with us in the form below and we’ll use some of them as part of our coverage.

Are you affected by the NHS stopping gluten-free prescriptions? | Matthew Holmes

Fresh hope for Kandahar newborns as Afghan healthcare gets a shot in the arm | Matthew Green

Among the tiniest of the premature babies slumbering in incubators at the Mirwais hospital, one bore a name chosen by hospital staff. At five days old, “Fatima” had been abandoned by her mother after being born so early that her family assumed she was destined for the grave.

Had her relatives grasped the welcome transformation unfolding at the government-run medical centre in Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan, they might have held their newborn a little tighter.

Where once children crowded three to a bed, single occupancy is now the norm. The number of nurses making the rounds among the rows of infants has doubled, and new incubator units help neonatal specialists nurture the most fragile of lives through their first, vulnerable days.

While much of the news from southern Afghanistan over the past year has been dominated by reports of Taliban advances, the creation of a new paediatric unit at Mirwais hospital has opened a new front in a different campaign: the struggle to reduce extremely high mortality rates among Afghan infants.

Luis Tello, a Spanish paediatrician seconded to the unit by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said the expanded facilities had already helped to persuade more Afghan mothers that, with the right care, even the weakest babies might survive.

“For me, the most astonishing improvement is with [premature] newborns. Before, nobody was taking care of them,” said Tello, speaking in a ward where young children lay on crisp white sheets, mothers at their bedsides. “But we’ve managed to change people’s minds.”

The new unit, which opened in September, is housed in a former nursing clinic in the hospital grounds, converted in a year-long project funded by the ICRC. It has 186 beds, including 15 for mothers – twice the number in the old paediatric wing.

The number of incubators has risen from six to 10, while another new ward caters for children suffering from thalassemia, a hereditary, incurable blood disease prevalent in southern Afghanistan that can be ameliorated with transfusions and medication.

By reducing overcrowding, the unit has dramatically cut the risk of contagious diseases skipping between patients. Staff who might previously have had to discharge barely improved infants to make room for even sicker children can now allow everyone time to recover.

“We won’t force them to go home early,” said Dr Muhammad Sidiq, the unit’s director. “We can let them stay here until they are completely cured.”

The unit is a tangible sign of broader progress in improving infant and maternal health. In contrast to the bleak picture on the battlefield in much of Afghanistan, years of painstaking efforts by the government and donors to improve access to basic healthcare, and train community midwives to assist at births – the vast majority of which take place at home – are yielding significant results.

I’m better off than some people – they’ve lost both their legs and arms

Abdul Matin, 22, student

In 2000, Afghanistan had one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, with almost 10% of babies dying before their first birthday, according to UN data. Since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, the picture has changed.

According to a comprehensive health and demographic survey, published by the Afghan government in May, the nationwide mortality rate for all infants fell from 66 to 45 deaths for every 1,000 live births between 2001 and 2015. Similarly, for all children under five, the death rate per 1,000 fell to 55 from 87.

Despite these achievements, infant mortality rates still remain high in many areas, partly due to a lack of basic education about the importance of hygiene during births. Tello explained that deadly sepsis infections could result from the common practice of using a knife to cut an umbilical cord on the sole of a shoe.

Beyond Mirwais, meanwhile, large numbers of rural women have no access to even basic clinics. Some of the mothers arriving at the unit with infants swaddled in shawls had travelled hundreds of kilometres from remote areas. Escalating violence in many parts of Afghanistan has also made facilities harder to reach: a UN study published in April documented reports of 125 security incidents affecting access to healthcare in 2015, compared with 59 in 2014 and 33 in 2013.

While the fighting begins to intensify each spring in Afghanistan, paediatric illness also follows a seasonal cycle, with diarrhoea more common in the summer and pneumonia and other respiratory diseases rife in winter. Doctors have witnessed a marked increase in malnutrition this year, possibly tied to the increasing numbers of people uprooted by fighting in the south. Some of the victims have been brought to a new therapeutic feeding centre in the unit for the most severely underweight.

Making a brisk round of the new wards, checking on patients and issuing rapid-fire instructions to nurses wearing gowns and surgical masks, Tello soon encountered one of the deadliest killers. Holding up a chest x-ray from a tiny boy named Hekmatullah, he scrutinised an image of a ribcage dotted with hundreds of tiny lesions – telltale signs of miliary tuberculosis.

“He’s lucky because he has this x-ray, which is very clear for TB,” Tello said, before hurrying to the next ward, where another listless child was battling pneumococcal meningitis.

That such children can even reach Mirwais hospital reflects the shifting contours of the war in the south. At the height of the US troop surge in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, intense fighting in Kandahar province flooded wards and corridors with casualties bearing blast and gunshot wounds. As the vast majority of western forces withdrew ahead of a security handover in 2014, the locus of the conflict in the south shifted into neighbouring Helmand and Uruzgan provinces, which continue to provide the hospital with a steady stream of war-wounded.

In the main hospital, a 22-year-old student named Abdul Matin was undergoing treatment after losing his right arm when a mortar round crashed into his family home in the district of Marjah in Helmand province a month earlier. Sitting up in a bed near other patients lying swaddled in bandages concealing even more grievous wounds, he greeted his injury with a certain degree of resignation.

“This is the situation,” he said. “I’m better off than some people – they’ve lost both their legs and arms.”

Despite the overwhelming challenges many patients face, Tello and his colleagues are starting to offer hope for sick children that many families might once have imagined possible. Though young “Fatima” did not survive, many more Afghans may one day look back and thank the staff at Mirwais hospital for giving them a second chance when they were most in need of help.

Fresh hope for Kandahar newborns as Afghan healthcare gets a shot in the arm | Matthew Green

Hurricane Matthew: Haiti needs vaccines to stop deadly cholera spreading | Dr Anita Zaidi and Helen Matzger

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9,000 people died in Haiti’s last cholera outbreak. We must act fast in disaster-affected hotspots to help prevent history repeating itself

Six years ago, as the country attempted to rebuild following a massive earthquake, cholera began spreading in Haiti. And it didn’t stop.

Adults and children – many of whom contracted cholera by drinking untreated water from familiar rivers and streams – lay listless in hospitals packed to capacity with emergency cases. The death toll mounted. The months passed. The cases continued. Stories of pregnant women and tough little girls and boys struggling to survive became the norm and were well recorded by partners on the ground, who were bearing witness to what is now considered the worst cholera outbreak in recent history.

Related: Hurricane Matthew: preparations and aftermath – in pictures

Related: UN makes first public admission of blame for Haiti cholera outbreak

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Hurricane Matthew: Haiti needs vaccines to stop deadly cholera spreading | Dr Anita Zaidi and Helen Matzger