All in the Mind

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

Last refreshed: June 30th, 2026 at 9:30 AM

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Episodes

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

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 may...

Nov 30, 2010•28 min

Preventing Flashbacks - Taste and Music - Therapeutic Design

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 memor...

Nov 23, 2010•28 min

Cognitive Psychology - Testosterone and City Traders - Suicide Bombers

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 ...

Nov 16, 2010•28 min

Young Offenders - Twenty Four Hour Memory Loss - Worrying

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...

Nov 09, 2010•28 min

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

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, ...

Nov 02, 2010•28 min

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