Rab reflects on similarities between the treatment of mental disorders in low-resource countries today and in Britain two or three centuries ago. I have often talked to both academic scientists working on the… Read more »
In this podcast Rab outlines historic patterns of suicide and explores attitudes towards it. Historic suicide resembles modern in important regards such as the predominance of males among those who… Read more »
Before the nineteenth or even twentieth century a lot of what we know about suicide in England and Wales comes from the records of coroners’ inquests. This reliance on inquests… Read more »
On Tuesday 14 February 2017 I had a long, friendly, and stimulating meeting in Edinburgh with the well-known and successful American novelist Rachel Simon. Rachel is the award-winning author of… Read more »
One prominent idea in the modern media is that madness and creativity are linked, but this notion is not new and seems to have originated with the Greek thinker Socrates… Read more »
Modern understandings of asylums, mental disorder, and psychiatry are strongly influenced by the medicalised identities portrayed in film. This podcast sets out some examples of the interaction between sociology, psychiatry,… Read more »
In the current block of podcasts, we are exploring how psychiatry has been portrayed in the mass media, and the ways in which literature, art, film, television and the internet… Read more »