Epidemiologists and public health experts have tended to suggest that the way out of this pandemic labyrinth is to find a vaccine. But could that be just the beginning of another dispute?
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For Brexit architect Dominic Cummings, the real prize of Brexit is to position the UK as a leader in a global genetics arms race.
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There’s a revolutionary shift taking place in UK mental healthcare, from a biomedical to a trauma-informed approach. But every new model has its potential limits and flaws.
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The old religions said life inevitably involves suffering. The new religion of health and well-being says ‘you should be happy and healthy. If you’re not, that’s a disorder. Here’s some CBT or some pills. Now you should be happy and healthy.’
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Nathan Filer’s excellent new book, The Heartland, humbly points out the flaws in psychiatry’s definition and treatment of schizophrenia. But it still shares psychiatry’s habitual contempt for spirituality.
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Trauma begets trauma, and it builds up through the generations like a mountain of shit. Can we shovel it away…or use it as compost?
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In response to my last post, ‘Is there a trans bubble?’, a trans queer person called Kate, who is a regular reader, got in touch to say that she disagreed with some of my points. Here’s Kate’s response, followed by some questions from me and answers from her.
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Spiritual emergencies are moments of awakening and ego-dissolution which can be both ecstatic and deeply disturbing, even quasi-psychotic. With the right tools and support, we can navigate them to a richer and more meaningful life.
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Milan Scheidegger is one of the most interesting young researchers in psychedelics, because he integrates several different perspectives. He's a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Zurich, who's spent a decade studying the effect of psychedelics on subjects in a laboratory, and on a meditation retreat.
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Psychosis. Scary word isn't it? These days we think nothing less of a person if they publicly disclose they get depression, or anxiety. We applaud them for being brave, although they're not really risking anything.
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This is the best time ever to be alive and human. Global life expectancy has doubled in the last century, from 31 to 71. A century ago, 20% of babies died in childbirth, now it's less than 7%. You're far, far less likely to die violently than in the Middle Ages, the 19th century, or even in the 1960s.
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Depression is the leading cause of ill-health worldwide, but therapy is little known or practiced outside the West. If psychotherapy is going to become more popular in the non-western world, it needs to build bridges and find cultural parallels in local spiritual traditions. This is totally doable.
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Life can be stressful in Kolkata - the crowds, the poverty, the heat, the constant cacophony of car-horns. And that's just for me, a pampered western tourist. So how do the locals cope? More to the point, to what extent do locals seek therapy for mental health problems like depression, or for general life advice? To find out, I interviewed two Kolkata therapists, Mansi Poddar (left) and Charvi Jain (right), both of whom have successful local practices.
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One of the things I want to argue in my next book is that ecstatic experiences have been pathologised in the secular west, to our detriment. People still experience ecstasy - by which I mean moments where we go beyond the self and feel connected to something bigger than us, usually a spirit but also sometimes another individual or group - but we lack the framework to make sense of such experiences.
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It is quite easy to make noise in our culture. The internet and online media are like a giant echo chamber, and within a few days one angry tweet can turn into an ear-splitting feedback scream of indignation. Because of that, we can become entirely focused on making noise in our culture - getting retweeted, getting on the news, getting publicity somehow or other.
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There are lots of reasons to be anxious at the moment: the recession, ISIS, ebola, the rise of far right parties across Europe. But there's one big reason to be cheerful, and to be proud of UK public policy: mental health.
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Yesterday I finished a pilot course in practical philosophy at Low Moss prison. It’s an eight-session course that introduces people to the ideas and life-philosophies of various ancient philosophers, including Socrates, the Stoics, Plato, Rumi, the Buddha, Jesus and Lao Tzu. I've been running it in partnership with New College Lanarkshire, which runs the learning courses in west Scottish prisons.
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A few months back I was giving a philosophy workshop in a mental health charity. It was one of my less popular events - only one person turned up, a Romanian man who had recently moved to the UK and was finding it tough. We talked about Socratic philosophy, about the idea of engaging your inner voice in a rational dialogue, and the man (let’s call him Anghel) quietly told me that he heard voices.
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One of the things that has happened in our culture over the last 300 years is the shift from theology to morality to psychiatry. Conditions that were once deemed vices are now considered diseases. Gluttony has become obesity. Despair has become depression. Lust has become sex addiction.
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Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove's special advisor, has penned a 237-page Jerry Maguire-style memo, a few weeks before leaving office, which outlines his vision for England and Wales to become a sort of 'school to the world', much as Pericles suggested Athens should be.
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I’ll admit it, I was slightly nervous. I’d been invited to give a philosophy workshop in HMP Dumfries, a prison in west Scotland. Plummy-voiced and puny-framed Englishman that I am, I wasn’t sure what they’d make of me. Mincemeat, maybe. Anyway, I figured it was a low-security prison, otherwise they wouldn’t be inviting philosophers to give workshops, right?
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Why do 20% of American soldiers develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and only 3-5% of British soldiers? It’s one of the great conundrums of contemporary psychology / psychiatry - and one of the most contentious, touching as it does on sensitive issues of our countries’ moral characters, and how well our governments care for their soldiers.
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Five years ago, the British government launched a mental health initiative called Improving Access for Psychological Therapy (IAPT), which hugely expanded the provision of talking therapies within the National Health Service, with the aim of getting therapy for depression and anxiety to just under one million adults a year.
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It’s been five years since the launch of the government’s flagship mental health programme, Improving Access for Psychological Therapies (IAPT).
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I've just been at a three-day seminar at the Institute for Government, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to help academics learn how to influence public policy. The seminar brought together 15 academics in disciplines ranging from literary criticism to design and urban planning.
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Big day today. I’ve finally finished my report on grassroots philosophy groups, which you can download here: Connected Communities- Philosophical Communities.
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There's a new spirit of self-help and mutual improvement blowing through public health policy. I first felt its breeze in Scotland's national mental health strategy, which was published in August, and which made much of its 'person-centred approach' to mental health in Scotland.
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