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BBC Radio 4


The show on how we think, feel and behave. Claudia Hammond delves into the evidence on mental health, psychology and neuroscience.


All in the Mind

John, an infantry officer for 19 years, was held up at gunpoint, bombed and saw friends and colleagues killed in action. He tells Claudia Hammond about the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that he suffered when he left the armed forces. And in the first-ever UK study of military personnel in a theatre of war, in Iraq, to test mental health, the military is revealed to have experienced less psychological distress than police or fire officers. One of the study's co-authors, Professor Simon Wessely, Director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research, describes the mental health lessons that are being being learned from the front line.

Antidepressants and Morality: 
Molly Crockett from the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cambridge says how a particular group of anti depressants, SSRIs, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, have been found to increase morality by raising the levels of Serotonin in the brain. 

Community Treatment Orders:
Introduced two years ago to enable people with mental illness to leave hospital and continue their treatment at home, new figures show ten times more CTOs have been issued than original Department of Health predictions. Reka, who has a diagnosis of bi-polar disorder, describes her experience of spending a year subject to a CTO, compelled to take injections of anti-psychotic medication which she says left her "like a zombie". Anthony Deary from the Care Quality Commission, Tony Maden, Professor of Forensic Psychiatry from Imperial College in London and Dr Tony Zigmond, mental health law lead for the Royal College of Psychiatrists discuss the reasons for the ballooning use of CTOs. 

Producer: Fiona Hill.

Battlefield Military Mental Health - Antidepressants and Morality - Community Treatment Orders

Psychologists at the University of Exeter have found that young offenders are two to three times as likely as everyone else to have had a head injury. 
Huw Williams, Associate Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology at Exeter University spoke exclusively to Claudia Hammond about the implications of his study.

Twenty Four Hour Memory Loss:
A few years ago a film came out called 50 First Dates. It starred Drew Barrymore as a woman who had had a car accident which resulted in her losing her memory for the days' events every time she went to sleep. Now its happened in real life, a 48 year old woman asked Dr Christine Smith of the Department of Psychiatry at University of California San Diego for help. Dr Smith's account of this unusual case study has been published in the journal Neuropsychologia. 

How to Stop Worrying: 
Ad Kerkhof is a clinical psychologist at VU University in Amsterdam. He written a book aimed at any of us who worry, explaining how we can train ourselves to stop worrying.

Young Offenders - Twenty Four Hour Memory Loss - Worrying

Forensic Science, Psychology and Human Cognition: 
When the Oregon attorney, Brandon Mayfield, was arrested for the Madrid bombings six years ago, the FBI's fingerprint examiners claimed they were 100% sure that his fingerprints were on the bag containing detonators and explosives. But they were wrong. And this sensational error has drawn attention ever since, to the widely held, but erroneous belief, that fingerprint identification is infallible.
Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have challenged forensic science as a whole to raise its game; and acknowledge that errors in fingerprinting and other forensic disciplines are inevitable because of the architecture of cognition and the way our brains process information. 

Claudia Hammond talks to Dr Itiel Dror, cognitive neuroscientist, whose groundbreaking studies first drew attention to the fact that individual forensic examiners can be swayed by context and affected by bias. Jim Fraser, Professor of Forensic Science from the University of Strathclyde and the Forensic Science Regulator for England and Wales, Andrew Rennison, discuss the steps being taken to amend procedures and protocols. 

Testosterone and City Traders: 
Dr John Coates used to work on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, and during the Dot Com bubble became convinced that he was witnessing hormone surges and slumps in his fellow traders that amounted to clinical levels. His subsequent research at the University of Cambridge has established the size of the changes in the naturally occurring steroids like testosterone and cortisol changes and he's now trying to demonstrate in the laboratory how these changes actually affect decision making and the willingness to take risks. 

The psychology of Would-be Suicide Bombers and Organisers of Suicide Missions:
In the first study of its kind, Ariel Merari, Professor of Psychology at Tel Aviv University, has analysed failed suicide bombers in prison in an attempt to establish what motivated them to volunteer to kill themselves, and others.

Producer: Fiona Hill.

Cognitive Psychology - Testosterone and City Traders - Suicide Bombers

Flashbacks are intrusive memories that can plague people after a traumatic incident. Now there's a possibility that playing certain kinds of computer games in the hours after the traumatic event could prevent images flashing back into the mind when they're not wanted. Emily Holmes at Oxford University wants to develop what she calls a cognitive vaccine. This would be used in the hours straight after an event - not as a treatment for post traumatic stress disorder, but to prevent disturbing memories from taking root.

Taste and Music:
Professor Charles Spence is the Head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory based at Oxford University and is investigating how the brain can match up sounds and tastes.
And one restaurant in Switzerland is making music a crucial part of the dining experience with specially-composed tunes accompanying each course. 

Therapeutic Design:
Most people with dementia want to stay in their own homes for as long as possible, provided they can cope. Researchers from Stirling University have found that the adoption of simple design tricks can extend that period at home. The university's Dementia Services Development Centre has designed a dementia-friendly home and Director Professor June Andrews told Claudia that it's all about trying to see a home from the point of view of the person with dementia.

Producer Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Preventing Flashbacks - Taste and Music - Therapeutic Design

John O'Donoghue's first admission to a psychiatric hospital came when he was 16 years old. He experienced the final days of the huge old asylums like Claybury and Friern Barnet well as ECT, homelessness and prison. He tells Claudia Hammond about how education turned his life around. He's a poet and now teaches creative writing. This year his memoir, Sectioned: A Life Interrupted, scooped the MIND Book of the Year prize. 

Digital Memories: 
When family members die, many of us inherit photos and maybe even old love letters. But in the digital age, with huge amounts of data stored on hard drives, servers and even in the cloud, how will our family members make sense of our digital legacy ? Dr Richard Banks and Dr Abigail Sellen from the Microsoft Research Laboratory at Cambridge University talk to Claudia Hammond about technology heirlooms, digital curation and the emotional importance of memories.

Mental Illness, fairness and the Work Capability Test: 
All In the Mind hears from Linda in Carlisle, Cumbria, who suffers from depression, panic attacks and agoraphobia but failed the new, compulsory medical assessment and lost her benefits. Sue Thomson from DACE, Disability Association Carlisle and Eden tells Claudia Hammond how her organisation is overwhelmed by the number of people who've been judged as being fit for work after the controversial new medical, but who want to appeal. And, in the wake of Professor Malcolm Harrington's critical report into the WCA, Jane Harris from Rethink calls for the mass migration of claimants on Incapacity Benefit onto the new benefit to be halted, until the current medical assessment can be judged as being fit for purpose.

Producer: Fiona Hill.

Life in and out of Asylums - Digital Memories - Work Capability Test

Portraits of the Mind
Portraits of the Mind, is a collection of images visualizing the brain from antiquity through to the present day.

How to map the brain.

The Human Connectome Project is a major new project which will map how different areas of the brain connect to each other and help understand what makes us human. 
Others say we would learn more about our minds by looking at the minute detail, at how brain cells communicate with each other within individual circuits. Gero Miesenbork the Wayneflete Professor of Physiology at Oxford University and Tim Behrens from the Human Connectome Project explain what each of these approaches can tell us about human behaviour. 

Online Psychological Support for Cancer 

There are 7 Maggie's Centres around the country providing a sanctuary for people with cancer, or those caring for someone with cancer. But not everyone can travel to a centre, perhaps because of distance, health reasons or work. For those people there is now a new online service which provides not only support but crucially a clinical psychologist takes part in every session.

Wiring the Brain

Adoption 
These days the secrecy surrounding adoption has lessened and many children are interested to know where they come from and may receive letters from their birth families or even meet up with them. Claudia Hammond reviews the evidence for this approach and also looks at how social networking could change adoption.

Adoption and Social Networking

One in four of us is said to have a mental health problem. It's a statistic that's almost as well-used and well-known as the entreaty to eat your five a day. But where has this near-ubiquitous statistic come from, and is there research that backs it up ? 

Claudia talks to neuroscientist, Jamie Horder, about his personal quest to find the original source for the one in four figure and to Til Wykes, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Rehabilitation at the Institute of Psychiatry King's College London and Jerome Wakefield, Professor of Social Work at New York University and co-author of The Loss of Sadness, about the complexities of measuring rates of mental illness. 

Providing mental health care on remote islands is a difficult business, and territories on the other side of the world present particular problems. Eleven years ago, Dr Tim McInerney began visiting the Falkland Islands and became their "remote" psychiatrist. He manages his case load by telephone and then twice a year, takes a trip out there, to visit his patients and the small group of staff who help run mental health services. 

On his latest visit, as a new Mental Health Act is just about to be introduced by the Port Stanley Council, he takes with him an All In the Mind recorder, and keeps a diary. He talks to service users who describe the challenges of being ill, when everybody, everywhere, knows who you are. 

Programmes like Who Do You Think You Are on BBC1 are extremely popular, and more and more people are tracing their family trees. Claudia hears from Peter Fischer, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Graz in Austria, about intriguing new research suggesting that thinking and focussing on your ancestors, can make you smarter!

Producer: Fiona Hill.

Mental Illness - The Remote Psychiatrist - Who Do You Think You Are?

Presenter Claudia Hammond starts a new series of All in the Mind by joining mothers and babies at a travelling, high-tech language lab in a Children's Centre in London's East End.

The testing session is just one of many to be carried out over the next two years in the communities of two of London's most deprived boroughs, Tower Hamlets and Newham. 

Parents and babies are being invited to participate in a novel psychological study to investigate whether researchers can pick up very early indicators of later language or attention problems in infants as young as 6 months. The babies will be retested and assessed again when they are two years old.

The travelling 'babylab' is a high tech computer screen, set up in local children's centres. The baby sits in front of it and is played various videos and sounds aimed at testing how sensitive he or she is to speech and other aspects of their environments. The computer screen also contains a camera and eye movement tracker, so as well as testing the infants it also records all their responses to what they are seeing and hearing. 

For example, at 6 months old, babies should be very interested in looking at faces and mouths when people are speaking, learning which mouth shapes match particular speech sounds. At this age they are likely to know the difference between the look of a mouth saying 'ba' as opposed to 'ga'. This is part of their earliest language development. If they are not able to make these and other discriminations, it could be a sign of language and other developmental problems to come. 

This seems to be the case from studies of babies in formal university laboratories. But this new project aims to find out whether reliable predictors of language and learning difficulties can be picked up with testing equipment out in the real world. And in particular in communities at the lower end of the socio-economic scale. Children from this section of society are at greater risk of language and other developmental problems than children in better-off areas.

The community testing sessions are also aimed at increasing parents' understanding and appreciation of how their babies learn about language and the world around them, and demonstrating just how clever their infants are - even at 6 months.

The research project is run by the University of East London and Birkbeck College London. The psychologists hope their findings will in the future allow the identification of individual children with potential problems at the youngest age possible. The idea is that the earliest that weaknesses are identified, the greater the chance the children can be helped to catch up in the development of their communication and social skills.

London's East End Baby Language Lab

Professor James Fallon tells Claudia Hammond his tale of self-discovery: a story with some dark and disturbing turns involving psychopaths and brain scans, family skeletons, some very personal genetic revelations and the power of parental love.

Two people who experience mirror-pain and mirror-touch synaesthesia explain what it's like to see someone being hurt and feeling the sensation of pain or touch in the same place themselves. Michael Banissy, a neuropsychologist at University College, London talks about his research on this strange phenomenon. He looked at what's happening in the brains of these people and discovered that they are also extra-empathetic emotionally.

With spring in full blossom and summer on the way, Claudia talks to Harvard psychiatrist John Sharp about the sometimes profound impact of the passing months and changing seasons on our emotional lives. He began to notice seasonal changes in his patients and that inspired him to survey research on how the time of year influences state of mind. The result was his book 'The Emotional Calendar'.

Professor James Fallon's Self-Discovery - Mirror-Pain - Spring

Nobody knows exactly how many people experience mental illness in Hong Kong, but as this former British colony undertakes its first-ever survey of mental health, it's widely believed that rates will match every other developed, industrialised country. 

And when that data comes in, as Claudia Hammond reports in a special All In The Mind from Hong Kong, the gaps in mental health care will be exposed. 

For years, the reality of mental illness in Hong Kong has remained hidden: a combination of shame, stigma and denial. Claudia hears from those who have experienced mental distress about the discrimination they suffer, and talks to mental health campaigners and professionals about the urgent need to expand and modernise the service to meet the soaring demand for mental health care.

Producer: Fiona Hill.

Mental Health in Hong Kong

Mental Health in Hong Kong

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