麻豆约拍 - Radio 4 - All in the Mind

Survivors Poetry:
The Survivors Poetry movement is now 15 years old. It was originally funded by The Arts Council to encourage people who've come through mental health problems - known as survivors - to write, perform and produce anthologies of poetry. That funding has now ended. To discuss the movement, and its therapeutic benefits, Claudia is joined in the studio by one of its founders, survivor and poet Joe Bidder, and by Professor Femi Oyebode, Head of Psychiatry at Birmingham University who's running a new course for trainee doctors looking at mental illness and literature.

Victorian Medical Asylums:
A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry this March suggested that people with schizophrenia are twenty times more likely to commit suicide today than a hundred years ago. Joining Claudia to discuss how much we can really tell from historical records, and what such a figure says about the psychiatric profession today, is Dr Trevor Turner, Consultant Psychiatrist at the 麻豆约拍rton Hospital East London, who wrote a commentary on this research which puts forward a different interpretation.

Fear, Phobia and identity:
We look at different approaches being pursued to treating fears and phobias. New research has found that a simple tablet containing the stress hormone cortisol, might be able to block a person's phobia of say, spiders. Claudia is joined by Professor Dominique de Quervain from University of Zurich , who is overseeing a trial of the pill.

This isn't the only way that neuroscientists are tackling our fear by using drugs to change our memories. One day you might be able to choose to rid yourself of any traumatic memories you might have. To discuss how this might be done is John Aggleton, Professor of Psychology at Cardiff University . He outlines two approaches - one in blocking the process by which emotional memories are laid down following such a trauma, eg in hospital or ambulance an injection could be given - another targeting the memory retrieval system, or reconsolidation, which would allow you to tackle the recalled memory and therefore its original.