History of Psychiatry Podcast Series

In this block of podcasts I’m going to look again at the language used to describe mental problems, the ways lay and pro... Read more

In this podcast and the next four, I’m going to look at what patients made of entering and being in what we call mental ... Read more

Early modern Europe saw an unprecedented craze for hunting, prosecuting, and executing witches, tens of thousands of who... Read more

Autism is a neuro-developmental disorder with a prevalence of about one in 100 births. Although we assume that this diso... Read more

One of the themes of these podcasts is that the boundaries between medicine and other disciplines in the past were much ... Read more

Gerry Hastie trained between 1993-96, when nurse training programmes were changing from being delivered by the Local Hea... Read more

Bipolar disorder is a complex psychiatric disorder of mood and behaviour that has been recognised for thousands of years... Read more

Only a small proportion of modern physicians are psychiatrists and they are far outnumbered by nurses and social workers... Read more

I have been asked by the Scotland Malawi Mental Health Project to prepare a short series of podcasts to act as a compone... Read more

If you have listened to my series of podcasts on the history of psychiatry in Britain and Ireland you will know that psy... Read more

People with learning disability were understood and treated very differently in the past from the present. While attempt... Read more

This podcast returns to mental medicine. It sets out the forces behind the emergence of psychiatry: the rise of asylums,... Read more

As a young woman in 17th century London, Hannah Allen suffered from severe depression or what was then known as melancho... Read more

Last week’s extract was a series of diary entries showing how a clergyman sought to help a young woman with learning dis... Read more

IMAGE: Head of Military Man by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, 1682-1754, oil on canvas. Credit: SuperStock/ Universal Imag... Read more

People with learning disabilities were often slow to acquire the ability to read and write – which were not normal skill... Read more

Last week I looked at some regulations from Cardiff District Asylum at the start of the twentieth century. One of their ... Read more

This week, we continue the story of John Philip, a humble legal clerk who lived in a world of fantasy, delusion, and obs... Read more

We begin our exploration of the voices of the mad with the story of the Rev. George Trosse, an English nonconformist min... Read more

You might recognise my voice from listening to some or all of my previous set of 44 podcasts about the history of psychi... Read more