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, ...
Jun 28, 2011•28 min
What exactly is stress and how does it affect our mental health? In collaboration with BBC Lab UK, this week's All in the Mind is launching a pioneering online scientific experiment to test the nation's mental health and well being. Complete the test online and you can get personalised feedback about your own levels of stress, your coping strategies and tips on how to manage stress. Peter Kinderman, clinical psychologist at the University of Liverpool explains how the experiment will help us und...
Jun 21, 2011•28 min
Siblings with mental health problems - while parents often care for young people with mental health problems it can also raise issues for their siblings. They might have fears for their own mental health or worry about the change in their relationship to their brother or sister. How easy is it to share worries about your own mental health if you feel it's minor in comparison to your brother or sister? And what of the future and the responsibilities you may one day inherit from your parents. The ...
Jun 14, 2011•28 min
Compassion for our fellow human beings is something that's long been taught by different faiths and traditions. But could it be used as a tool within therapy to improve mental health? There's a growing interest in compassion-focussed therapy - both for other people and for oneself. It has its roots in the understanding of how the brain evolved. At the moment it is being used most often with people from neglectful or abusive backgrounds. Professor Paul Gilbert, who's the Director of the Mental He...
Jun 07, 2011•28 min
This week: the exclusive results of new research on the emotional, physical and sexual violence happening in teenage relationships. Two years ago Christine Barter, the NSPCC Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, published a research on how teenage boyfriends and girlfriends treat one other. Nearly three quarters of girls and half of boys reported some form of emotional bullying by their partners, while one in three girls reported some form of sexual violence. This week she discuss...
May 31, 2011•28 min
Can mess encourage racism? New research by Dutch researchers has found that in a messy and disordered environments people think more in stereotypes and even racist thinking. Claudia Hammond speaks to Professor Siegwart Lindenberg, a social scientist at Tilburg University in Holland, who also explains how the experiment examined unconscious negative responses to race too. In a messy railway station, people sat on average further from a black person than a white one, whereas in the clean station t...
May 24, 2011•28 min
Thousands of people across the world who survive devastating earthquakes are living with the trauma of the disaster compounded by the experiences of aftershocks. Claudia Hammond talks to Metin Basoglu, a psychiatrist who has developed a method of mass psychological treatment for survivors of disasters like these, based on his research with over 10,000 people who lived through the Turkish earthquake of 1999. Could a single session of this kind of therapy really make a difference? How strong is th...
May 17, 2011•28 min
Why is being ostracised a painful experience? This is one of the questions Professor Kip Williams explores in experiments in his psychology lab at Purdue University, along with measuring aggressive behaviour which ostracism can stir up in someone given the silent treatment. He tells Claudia Hammond that the tools of his trade include a computer game called Cyberball and bottles of hot chilli sauce. An 'All in the Mind' listener describes her state of mind when she attempted suicide several years...
May 10, 2011•28 min
New research conducted by Matthew Longo at the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London has found that feelings of claustrophobia could be related to our sense of personal space. And it could be determined by the length of our arms. Suicide and Bereavement: On average there is one death from suicide in the UK every 90 minutes. This means of course that a higher number than this find themselves bereaved in the most shocking of circumstances. It is such a unique kind ...
May 03, 2011•28 min
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, Londo...
Apr 26, 2011•28 min
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 indicator...
Apr 19, 2011•28 min
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 Lo...
Dec 21, 2010•28 min
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.
Dec 14, 2010•28 min
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 Wayn...
Dec 07, 2010•28 min
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
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
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
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
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
