Author Archives: Morag Allan Campbell

The last podcast argued that apparent changes in the diagnosis of mental disorders probably had more to do with developments in science and society, than with shifts in the incidence… Read more »

Have you met Julia yet? Sesame Street has just introduced a character called Julia, who is autistic.  Julia is a little girl with orange hair and a little toy rabbit,… Read more »

Controversial, notorious, radical, revolutionary – flick through the reviews of Robert Mullan’s Mad to be Normal and you’ll find the same words used again and again to describe RD Laing,… Read more »

Looking back in time, we might think that life was easier, but that the transition from small-scale, largely agrarian societies brought about by industrialization and urbanization during the nineteenth century… Read more »

We conclude this block of podcasts by showing what insights can be gained into the mind of the suicide, using historical evidence. The podcast sets out how survivors struggled to… Read more »

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 »

The depiction of mental illness in the press has always been highly selective.  On the plus side were public relations pieces about public asylums in the local or regional press… Read more »

Perceptions of madness and those who care for it have always been shaped by representations in mass media. Nowadays we have radio and television as well as the internet and… Read more »

The last two podcasts have shown how mad people are different before the law. Psychiatry has certain legal privileges in how it handles patients. The implications of these two facts… Read more »

Historical fiction, when underpinned by rigorous research and an informed understanding of context, can be a useful way to explore individual issues.  As the subject of this week’s podcast is… Read more »

All parts of Britain and Ireland had laws to safeguard the physical welfare and supervise the management of the finances, of adults with a mental illness or impairment. These laws… Read more »

For centuries the development of psychiatry was shaped by social norms, political climates, and legal frameworks. This block of podcasts examines psychiatry’s relationship with the law, both from a sufferer’s point of… Read more »

What do the doctors of tomorrow think about mental illness and psychiatric care?  Rab Houston reflects on a recent visit to a leading Scottish medical school. A couple of weeks… Read more »

The place of nursing staff in psychiatric care past (and present) remains under-researched. Yet patients’ day-to-day lives were profoundly affected by those in regular contact with them. Until formal training… Read more »