History of Psychiatry Podcast Series

History of Psychiatry Podcast Series

Rab Houston was born in Hamilton, Scotland, lived in India and Ghana and was educated at the Edinburgh Academy and St Andrews University before spending six years at Cambridge University as a research student (Peterhouse) and research fellow (Clare College). He has worked at the University of St Andrews since 1983 and is Professor of Modern History, specialising in British social history. He is a fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland’s national academy), and a member of the Academia Europaea. He is married to a senior university manager and lives in Edinburgh. In his spare time he likes any form of active meditation. http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/staff/rabhouston.html https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/psychhist/

Episodes

The 1966 Aberfan disaster

December 6, 2021 • 22 mins
In this podcast, Professor Houston talks about the psychological impact on those affected by the Aberfan disaster of 1966. The podcast expands on an interview Prof Houston gave to BBC Wales as part of a series of podcasts recently produced about the disaster. It is strongly advised that you listen to podcast 7 of the BBC series prior to listening to this podcast. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p09z3n7y Further reading: https:/...
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Devolved psychiatries - Professor Rab Houston

June 17, 2021 • 28 mins
Devolved psychiatries - Professor Rab Houston by Professor Rab Houston
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Professor John Crichton

January 7, 2020 • 47 mins
Prof John Crichton - Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist and Chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Scotland. What is a forensic psychiatrist? Far from the media stereotypes forensic psychiatrists are not so different to other doctors but working at the most extremes of human experience. Any one of us may have a mental health problem. Very rarely that problem may result in an inability to control ones actions and may lead...
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Prisoners or Patients? Criminal Insanity in Victorian Scotland

September 5, 2019 • 48 mins
This is a 50 minute audio file of a talk I delivered at the National Records of Scotland on 7 August 2019, in connection with my hugely successful exhibition that they kindly hosted: ‘Prisoners or Patients? Criminal Insanity in Victorian Scotland’. It explains the records I used and the development of the criminal justice system’s attempts to deal with those who had committed serious offences, but were found to be...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Professor Rory O'Connor

May 7, 2019 • 41 mins
Professor Rory O’Connor, Suicidal Behaviour Research Laboratory, University of Glasgow Suicide and self-harm are major public health concerns with complex aetiologies which encompass a multifaceted array of risk and protective factors. There is growing recognition that we need to move beyond psychiatric categories to further our understanding of the pathways to both. As an individual makes a decision to take their own life,...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Chris Williams

April 15, 2019 • 55 mins
In this podcast Professor Chris Williams, a researcher and teacher in the area of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) introduces CBT as a self-help form of therapy. It gives people the tools help themselves. Although correctly described as a form of psychotherapy, another way of conceptualising CBT is as a form of adult learning. That perspective can help make sense of recent advances in CBT where key CBT principles are communicate...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Michael Brown

February 5, 2019 • 51 mins
Chief Inspector Michael Brown: ‘Police, policing, and mental health in the UK’. Police services all over the world are essential as a de facto mental health service, especially around crisis care. All have struggled with untoward incidents involving the use of force, or deaths following police contact, which have framed – perhaps distorted - discussion. Reviews of these incidents have concluded that police office...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Dr Fionnuala Williams

October 9, 2018 • 48 mins
People with learning disability were understood and treated very differently in the past from the present. While attempts were always made to help them, this was against a background of pessimism about their prospects. Much progress has been made in the past half century in positive attitudes towards this group, with closures of the large institutions in which they were often housed and better integration into the community. Noneth...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Dr Ruth Allen

May 8, 2018 • 39 mins
Social workers and care in the community Social workers have a crucial part to play in improving mental health services and mental health outcomes for citizens. They bring a distinctive social and rights-based perspective to their work. Their advanced relationship-based skills, and their focus on personalisation and recovery, can support people to make positive, self-directed change. Social workers are trained to work in partnersh...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Prof. Chris Frith

May 1, 2018 • 25 mins
In the podcast I talk about my research on the biological basis of schizophrenia using brain imaging and my attempts to understand symptoms such as hallucinations in terms of brain based cognitive processes. I describe what schizophrenia is like from the point of view of clinicians and from the point of view of patients. I suggest that the experiences described by patients in history are very similar to those described today. Fina...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Prof. Uta Frith

April 24, 2018 • 25 mins
Autism is a neuro-developmental disorder with a prevalence of about one in 100 births. Although we assume that this disorder has always been with us, and Rab Houston and I identified a case from the 18th century, it was not given a label until the 1940s. Hans Asperger, a Viennese pediatrician, and Leo Kanner, an American child psychiatrist, both used the label ‘autistic’ to characterise the condition. It took another th...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Prof Douglas Blackwood

April 17, 2018 • 33 mins
Symptoms of schizophrenia develop in more than 1:200 people, in all cultures, while 2- 4% of the population may experience major depression at some time in their life. Mild and moderate depression are, of course, much more common. Sometimes illnesses run in families and show higher concordance among identical compared to non-identical twins suggesting an important genetic contribution to risk. Molecular genetics now gives us the to...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Prof Nancy A. Pachana

April 10, 2018 • 28 mins
People in both the developed and the developing world are living longer, and in better health, than in any prior point in history. However, mental health professionals, especially psychologists, need to prepare for this upcoming increase in older persons – whom they will encounter in all areas of practice. There is an urgent need for practitioners to upskill, and students to embrace, key principles from gerontology (the scien...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Dr Calum Munro

April 3, 2018 • 36 mins
Eating Disorders are understandable as a way of coping with uncomfortable feelings. A temporary sense of reward or emotional detachment can occur due to maladaptive eating. The disorders are driven by fears about being unacceptable. Beliefs about people with eating disorders being selfish or overly concerned about beauty, still seem to arise. In reality they tend to have an excessively low opinion of their appearance and are usuall...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Prof. Danny Smith

March 30, 2018 • 37 mins
Bipolar disorder is a complex psychiatric disorder of mood and behaviour that has been recognised for thousands of years. It probably affects about 1 in 50 individuals worldwide and is characterised by episodes of depression alternating with episodes of mania. In this podcast we discuss the presentation, diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder. We highlight the strengths and limitations of current diagnostic classifications and...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Prof. Alex Baldacchino

March 27, 2018 • 53 mins
In this podcast, Professor Rab Houston speaks to Alexander Baldacchino, Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Addictions, University of St Andrews and Clinical Lead and Consultant in Addiction Psychiatry with NHS Fife. This podcast will hopefully provide the right incentive for listeners to understand better the finer details pertinent to the topic of substance misuse disorder and dependence. Listeners will be taken through some o...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Mental Health Nursing, Gerry Hastie

March 20, 2018 • 32 mins
Gerry Hastie trained between 1993-96, when nurse training programmes were changing from being delivered by the Local Health Authority to Higher Education. He has always been a mental health nurse and has worked in care home settings, long term in-patient care settings, acute admissions, addictions and the community. In this podcast he illustrates his personal journey to doing what he does, and what it takes to be a mental health n...
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Dr Miles Mack RCGP

March 13, 2018 • 37 mins
In the first podcast of our new series, Professor Rab Houston is in conversation with Dr Miles Mack, Past chair of RCGP Scotland and a GP partner in Dingwall, Scotland. General Practice is the backbone of the British NHS and GPs provide a vital role in providing medical health care to patients registered to their practices. They provide continuity of care and a comprehensive approach, both in the first point of care and coordinat...
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Colonial Psychiatry 4 - How and why? Practising psychiatry in colonial Africa

February 13, 2018 • 12 mins
I argued in the last podcast that medical theories in colonial Africa had a strong racial element to them, which buttressed colonialism. In this final podcast of my mini-series I’m going to explore how these ideas related to the actual practice of psychiatry in colonial Africa. I broaden my perspective to include not only Malawi, but also Natal and Uganda. I try to nuance some of cruder understandings of colonial psychiatry b...
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Colonial Psychiatry 3 - How and why?: Ethno-psychiatry and racism

February 6, 2018 • 10 mins
If you have listened to my series of podcasts on the history of psychiatry in Britain and Ireland you will know that psychiatric relationships are at least partly about power and about the assumptions medical practitioners made concerning those they treated. In the old world, class and sex were important differentiators. In a colonial setting there was an added dimension. Daniel H. Tuke, a British expert on insanity and visiting m...
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