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How Mad Are You? - EMDR - Aids Orphans

Claudia Hammond explores new research into Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing.

HOW MAD ARE YOU?
How Mad Are You?, a two-part Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ 2 Horizon programme, ends this week. It features ten people who are put in a house together: half of whom have previously been diagnosed as mentally ill. They're given various tasks to perform - including performing stand up comedy and cleaning out a cowshed - while a panel of experts observes them and tries to guess who has the diagnosis, and who doesn't. Can a TV programme like this help to demystify psychiatric disorders, or will it just reinforce stereotypes? One of the members of the expert panel, Richard Bentall, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Bangor, tells Claudia Hammond why he decided to take part.

EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, or EMDR, is a therapy which involves talking about a traumatic incident whilst moving your eyes backwards and forwards. It's one of the therapies recommended by NICE, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, for treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but the treatment does have its detractors, mainly because critics can't see how moving eyes can effect an individual's ability to process trauma.

All In The Mind sits in on an EMDR session with Dr Sandi Richman, a consultant clinical psychologist at the Traumatic Stress Service at the Maudsley Hospital in South London and an EMDR practitioner and trainer. And Claudia Hammond speaks to Dr Ray Gunter, an experimental psychologist at the University of Calgary, about his new research on how EMDR actually works.

AIDS ORPHANS IN SOUTH AFRICA
In South Africa children whose parents died from AIDS are suffering from such elevated levels of mental health problems that the rates are even higher than for children whose parents were murdered. There are 1.4 million such children now, a figure set to almost double in the next decade.

In the largest-ever controlled study of children orphaned by AIDS in South Africa, Dr Lucie Cluver, Lecturer in Evidence-Based Social Intervention at Oxford University, interviewed 1200 children and she tells Claudia Hammond what she found.

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30 minutes

Broadcasts

  • Tue 18 Nov 2008 21:00
  • Wed 19 Nov 2008 16:30

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