For 20 years, William Sieghart has cured the sad and the sick with poetry. Now he'll do the same for you

CONDITION: making mistakes ALSO SUITABLE FOR: regret · living in the past · self-recrimination · self-loathing

PRESCRIPTION: The Mistake by James Fenton

Mistakes can bring out the worst in us – especially our own. To begin with, accepting that we've done anything wrong can be very difficult. Even if we manage that, we then have to guard against becoming so obsessed with the mistakes we've made and the damage we've caused that it paralyses us completely.

When you look back along the corridors and colonnades of your life and see mistake after mistake, hypocrisy after hypocrisy, it is easy to...