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Jenni Fagan is a poet and novelist. Her debut novel, The Panopticon, saw her named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists (2013), a once-in-a-decade accolade. She has recently adapted the screenplay of The Panopticon which will be put on by National Theatre of Scotland in 2019 and the film version is due to go into production in 2019 too.

Her work is published in ten countries, in seven languages. Available works include four published collections of poetry, two fiction novels, a film, anthologies and essays.

She’s written for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4, The New York Times, The Independent, and Marie Claire among others and is currently completing a PhD with a critical thesis on Kafka.

Susan Swarbrick is Columnist and Senior Features Writer for The Herald. Her father was a psychiatric nurse at Bangour Village Hospital and she has fond memories of meeting patients and playing as a child in the grounds of the hospital which was close to her home town of Dechmont, West Lothian.

Dr John Crichton grew up on a farm in West Lothian. His career in psychiatry was influenced early on when hearing about his father’s traumatic memories of war and after his uncle took his on life. John’s grandfather Robert Crichton CBE was Convenor of West Lothian Council and Chair of West Lothian Hospitals' Board from the establishment of the NHS to 1961; and was a frequent visitor to Bangour. John trained in psychiatry at Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridge.

After his PhD, John was a clinical lecturer in Learning Disability at University of Cambridge before becoming clinical lecturer in Forensic Psychiatry at University of Edinburgh.  In 2000 he became a consultant at the newly opened Orchard Clinic, Scotland’s first medium secure psychiatric unit and later supported the creation of the Forensic Mental Health Managed Clinical Care Network, becoming its Medical Director. 

He created the ‘Matrix of Security’ and risk management traffic lights system – used across Scotland to enhance patient safety.  John was instrumental in bringing about the national training program in Forensic Psychiatry. In 2017 John was elected Chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Scotland and Vice President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists UK.

Dr Gillian Allmond recently finished a PhD thesis on colony asylums in Scotland and Ireland.  Bangour Village formed a large part of this research and Gillian was particularly interested in the physical and material aspects of the asylum, for example, why the asylum was built where it was, how the buildings were situated in the landscape, and what motivated the choice of architecture, internal layouts, decoration and furnishings.  

The research entailed several trips to Bangour which helped Gillian to understand the therapeutic effect that the asylum builders of the Edwardian period were trying to achieve.  Gillian has published a paper  in the  journal 'History of Psychiatry' about Bangour Village and hopes to bring out further publications in the future.  

Gillian's grandmother was a patient in the Argyll and Bute Mental Hospital for many months in the 1950s and 60s, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and Gillian attributes some of her interest in asylum history to an awareness from an early age of the impact of mental illness and institutionalisation on individuals and families.