Meeting People
Amul Pandya converses with independent, adventurous and sometimes courteous free spirits. Creativity is an act of rebellion. Whether they are entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, investors, chefs, or corporate antagonists, Amul's guests all share a common disposition of not just pushing boundaries but re-drawing landscapes.
Meeting People
#18 Health Beyond Medicine: Professor Paul Crawford's Interdisciplinary Revolution
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Paul Crawford is the pioneer and world's first professor of Health Humanities. Our conversation covered his years of work on how creative practices can enhance well-being in and out of the clinic.
Alongside his academic work, he's also an entertaining fiction writer. His second novel, The Wonders of Doctor Bent is out this week. Without wishing to sound dramatic, I was inspired to learn about his writing practices and was moved by the impact this field has made in the health and wellbeing of patients in recent years.
The scope for further impact is great and this conversation gave me a thorough re-grounding in the importance of thinking outside the conventional mental silos we put our minds in.
You can find out more about Professor Crawford here: https://www.paulcrawfordauthor.com/ or on X: https://x.com/ProfessorPaulC1.
This podcast was produced by Matt Cooper (https://www.thisismattcooper.com/) with music composed by Loverman (Spotify).
Introduction to Health Humanities
Speaker 1Hello and welcome to Meeting People with me, amol Pandya. Meeting People is a podcast where I have long conversations with rebellious, adventurous and sometimes courteous free spirits. Professor Crawford, good morning, or Paul, if you don't mind.
Speaker 1No, that's fine, Amol yeah, Thank you for sparing the time. Now you're a category creator, which is something that appeals to me very much and the thesis of this podcast, and just for people watching, I'm going to hold up a copy of your first novel, I believe, Something called Nothing Purple, Nothing Black, which I finished recently, and I'm also excited to say your second. Is it your second novel? Yeah, it's come out this week, so I'm afraid I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it's on the Amazon pre order. But I thought just to kick us off. You're obviously not. You're not just a writer, you're. You've created this category called health humanities. You've created this category called Health Humanities To kick us off, to set the scene. Can you just talk to us about the anecdote or the story of the Wallace and Gromit collaboration? Can you talk to us about that? And then we'll take it from there.
Speaker 2Well, firstly, thank you for mentioning the first novel. That's many years ago now, 2002. And all these years later, after doing lots of non-fiction, the Wonders of Dr Bent is out there. And there's a reason kind of why. That relates to health humanities, the idea of health humanities and the recent work with Aardman. But let's start with Aardman, wallace and Gromit, because for many people, you know, they can't escape the brilliance of Aardman, can they? I mean, you know Shaun the Sheep, et cetera, et cetera. My own children have been brought up with these characters and, as you can see from the grey hair, you know I spent a lot of time watching Morph in the 1970s.
Speaker 2So I was quite surprised when I got a call from Aardman whether I could meet up in in London. They wanted to discuss something with me, so you don't refuse that type of invite. So turned up in London and the exec producer said to me you know, we've seen your work in Health, human, which is all about advancing the arts and humanities for human health, and we'd like to work with you in mental health. You know, are you game? Are you up for this? Of course.
Speaker 2So I led an application for a million pounds funding, built a large team, production, clinical and research with a large number of young people to co-create new animations to support conversations about life's challenges. It went out in the pandemic and reached over 17 million within the first four months, won lots of prizes, as these things do. Rather, disappointingly, we didn't get an Oscar do. Rather disappointingly, we didn't get an oscar um. And and we'd been primed for that expectation because on the first, in the first meeting in the executive office at artman, uh I I was sat next to dave sproxton, the um, you know who's dave?
Speaker 1who's dave?
Speaker 2sproxton and peter lord set up at artman ah, of course dave sproxton actually invented Morph.
Speaker 1And then Wallace and Gromit, and then Chicken Run and Shul and the Sheep and all the rest.
Speaker 2Absolutely so just spotted notifications coming on.
Speaker 1That's all right, don't worry, yeah.
Speaker 2So I kind of pinch myself. Really, Amal, you know, as a professor, academic writer, you don't necessarily expect to end up, yeah, as Aardman doing this kind of work.
Speaker 1Climbing down from that ivory tower and sort of being in amongst the populace, directly in the digital realm.
Speaker 2Yeah, actually it's quite interesting you say about the ivory tower. I never felt I was in an ivory tower In all my life's work. I don't know if I was walking around the tower and just happened to, you know, get to be a professor without that kind of very strong sort of presentation of being in this intellectual place. I've just got on with it from the point of view of what can we do, how can we make changes, how can we help our fellow human beings?
Speaker 1Yeah, and your kind of academic work was compressed into what was effectively five 45-second videos. In many ways, I mean, I'm sure there's lots that had to, by definition, be left out, but that exercise of producing to such a high standard I'll record, I'll link to the videos and the show notes to make sure everyone takes what's up with everyone?
Speaker 1what's up with everyone. It will take three minutes or so of your day to kind of have a look and they're really well made and kind of very powerful, impactful. Certain things like feeling the need to be perfect uh and actually you know you don't have to be perfect all the time or worrying about someone else being, you know you're feeling like a failure or whatever it is, and you kind of compress the, the mental health challenges that come into sort of short segments, uh, um, with young people it was. It was very impactful to see it. So I think what we can do now is just sort of step back and go to the top of the funnel before you kind of compress it into this. What is health humanities? Health humanities is a discipline that you are the father, founding father of, which is much you know is a very large discipline that I've come across. Can you define it for us? How did you get to putting that category together?
Speaker 2Okay, so my history from an academic perspective has been very much about literature, language and so on and working in mental health for many years. So when I started at the University of Nottingham, I'd completed my PhD in literature and I'd also been trained in linguistics and I'd also been trained in linguistics and as soon as I landed I set up a health language research group to advance interdisciplinary research in health language beyond simply doctor-patient interactions, because there are many, many other players in health in our society. That ended up with me getting a personal chair for that work, for my work in health language.
Speaker 1Sorry, just to kind of health language. Is that more than how you talk to a patient or someone suffering yeah, it's everything. So it's all that, or someone?
Speaker 2suffering. Yeah, it's everything. So it's all that communications, written, spoken, behaviors, also context and environments in which communication occurs. So all that was going on. And there was this thing called medical humanities, which I became increasingly aware of, to the point where I started to see that medical humanities was largely about using history, philosophy, literature to add to training, training curricula for doctors. So you know the lives of doctors in the 18th century, you know, etc. Etc. And I thought actually there are many more uh components and players uh to to health than than the medics alone.
Speaker 2And I found it curious that, um, the arts and humanities here was either directly medical related or medicalising, and so I felt there needed to be a shift. So I spoke to back in 2006, I spoke to executive members of the Arts Humanities Research Council, one of our key councils, research funders in this area, and I said you know we already have quite a lot of medical humanities and welcome like support, that, etc. Right, and I'm interested in how the arts and humanities can be more inclusive in this regard in terms of health related, how it can be more applied to actually, you know the care side, you know what you can do with the arts and humanities to improve people's lives. To improve people's lives and also moved to a more democratising model whereby it's not simply a medical direction for everything in health, but arts practitioners, the general public, everybody, creative industries, the whole caboodle are also generative and involved and active.
Speaker 1So you're pushing for, let's say, for example, you've been given a cancer diagnosis and your kind of world has been rocked or you're suffering from schizophrenia or something like that You're encouraging the normalisation of using creativity, humanities, art, literature, to kind of in the, in the kind of care process, so not necessarily the treatment process but the kind of the package that comes around um to be included, more realistic kind of, with a bit more emphasis than just a clinical, medical kind of approach that we have so.
The Wallace and Gromit Collaboration
Speaker 2So the history of this is is, is you know, in terms of the arts and humanities, in the clinical settings and so on? We have, you know, um the whole occupational therapy, expressive therapies and so so on. That's been going for many years. Um what's the? The idea I was proposing was that we're looking bigger than that. We're looking at not simply the clinical. We're not looking at simply interventions or injectables, as I call them. We're also looking at how people can be involved and self-help and other help beyond that. So, getting towards a creative public health idea and the involvement of different assets social and cultural assets, creative industries, that we're not simply seeing health as a matter for hospitals and clinics.
Speaker 1Okay.
Speaker 2And that gathering of cross-boundary thinking was put forward by me as Health Humanities. Got it and it wasn't easy to start off with, to get space for that.
Speaker 1Well, that's exactly what I wanted to ask you about. You're operating at the intersection of multiple disciplines, you know, not not just like disciplines within science or within humanities, but you're actually crossing the boundary between the two of those. And so do you find you've?
Speaker 2you've kind of irritated people on both sides, uh, who kind of say you know, you stop bringing science into my or social science into my field, or stop bringing your kind of wishy-washy stuff into my scientific method has that been a pushback you've had not not exactly um on the wishy-washy side, um, I I'm interested in evidence from the, the, you know, through the two paradigms of knowledge, the science and the interpretation, and you know I don't have a hierarchical, hierarchical view of that. They are kind of parallel universes in a sense. So I never really had a problem with that because I I co-wrote a book on the philosophy of science and and health care.
Speaker 2So I I always felt I had a certain amount of, I had a sort of flapjacket on for that type of approach. I could, I could tough that out when that came my way. What was interesting for me was, you know, the whole business of bank accounts.
Speaker 1Okay.
Speaker 2So you know research, science, interpretation, universities, you know knowledge, formation, money, funding, vested interests. So when I opened up the lid on the limitations of medical humanities in the early 2000s and suggested a bigger frame that wasn't necessarily medically led, the stink came, I think, from that whole business of how is this going to alter our income streams.
Speaker 1Okay.
Speaker 2And established kind of medical humanities had a number of pushbacks on that. Fortunately and I say fortunately for everyone the communitarian, if you like natural play of Health Humanities and what that thought leadership was doing meant that lots of people take, took it up worldwide. It's now. It's now global and you know I don't have the white cat and the big computer screen trying to control this, this whole manifestation yeah but it is interesting that um, if you will, a non-institutional communitarian development won through.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2And health humanities is, I would say, as known now as medical humanities within the space of two decades.
Speaker 1And it's interesting what you're just zooming back to, the kind of you don't put the interpretation side of things and the science side of things in a hierarchy, you kind of see them side by side. Do you just more generally sort of zooming back, think the explanatory load on science has become too burdensome? We've kind of over emphasized, we look for empiricism everywhere, particularly in softer stuff, that that leads to the desire for quantification. Yeah, where in things that cannot be quantified. So, like the whole einstein thing of not everything that counts can be counted, not everything that can be counted counts yes, the, I mean, you know science is important.
Speaker 2I mean, if you need a laparotomy, you need that to be, um, you know, scientifically, um, uh, you know, tested and you know all these things which, um, we about science, we love for good reasons. However, the downside is action paralysis. Okay, we see lots of positive effects, you know, for lots of behaviours and phenomena, and then you know from the science side and this often happens on the medical side, well, has that had a randomised control trial? Because that's the gold standard.
Speaker 1Double-blind.
Speaker 2Everyone likes to chuck in if it's double-blind, whatever that means yeah and one it's a dominance of the injectables, idea that everything must be medically injectable and tested through RCTs, et cetera, et cetera. Well, that's right with medications and things that go into your body and so and so forth. But the idea that the only health available, the only health approaches available, are rubber-stamped with with this kind of imprimatur, you know that's it.
Speaker 2Um means there's action paralysis I mean, for example, I give you a really clear example that came to me a while ago. Um is a. A guy went to his gp, um and and he's for help about his health, and his GP recommended a walk in the woods. And the guy was saying about this, this has really transformed my life. I'm so grateful for the GP. Well, that's all well and good on an everyday level. You know, people go to the GP for lots of things and sometimes now GPs will kind of do the social prescription, social cultural prescription. All well and good with that and fine with that. But what that told me was just how people are so reliant on individuals who have been rubber stamped as having that kind of scientific um aura to to actually advise quite commonplace, well understood ways of getting benefits in your life.
Speaker 1It's, it's almost sort of the tyranny of the, of the quantifiable, and so far as yeah he's like if, if that doctor had.
Speaker 1I mean, the other way that could have played out is I'm sure a lot of doctors think like this and maybe that's the right, wrong example. But if I, if I recommend a walk in the woods, uh, and then this guy causes someone harm or kills himself or whatever, then I'm going to be in a lot of trouble, whereas if I, if I go down the, you know, there's an 80 chance of him not killing himself if I prescribe him an antidepressant and then he can have that injectable I'm I kind of my, my downside is covered or my ass is covered, and so, because I can point to the quantifiable rather than this, the kind of the, you know, let yeah, the rather than your feeling there's an insufferable, you know, sort of um avoidance of the obvious.
Speaker 2I mean, you know, do I need to go to see my gp to see if smiling will help me, you know, or do I have to sort of get some sort of scientific permission before I? I, you know, I smile or smile, you know, to someone else? I, I just think that the health humanities was a great disruptor I know we've heard that that term in all the wrong contexts recently but a great disruptor in terms of, hey, who is on stage when it comes to health? There are many, many, many people on stage, including the public themselves. Why are the public not in public health? Why are the public left out of public health? Why aren't the ideas and the innovations and the energies of wider society playing into health?
Speaker 2There are I don't know how many. Do you know, amal? I think there's something like 900 hospitals in the UK, something like that, and one can imagine a fairly sort of finite number of clinics and GP surgeries, and there are thousands of choirs out there. There are thousands of reading groups out there, there are thousands of theatre groups out there. The social and cultural assets in this country outstrip anything we've got in in terms of centralized health care. So we need centralized health care, don't we? We need it. Okay, I get it. However, the health of the nation cannot simply be resolved through that route. We have to look at all the other stuff that's going on and mobilize that as well.
Speaker 1And this is one of the criticisms I've looked in, I've come across on Health Humanities, is that it does it serve as a distraction from clinical knowledge and practice, practice. So, okay, sure, like I'm being flippant with my examples, to kind of make the point, but you know, if your arm is half dangling out of your shoulder socket, you don't want the doctor to kind of go look, what you need to do is listen to a choir for 10 minutes exactly join a scene group, but we.
Creating the Health Humanities Discipline
Speaker 1I think this, this is the problem with mental health as a category of of um health as a category of of um sickness or wellness or health is we just don't. It's very hard to diagnose and it's very hard to isolate and pinpoint with with specific solutions. So you've we've obviously seen this sort of cam Cambrian explosion of awareness about mental health and everyone's campaigning.
Speaker 2But it sounds like you're saying there's still a big bottleneck in terms life, you know, and it seems to me that we're limiting the palette to a couple of colours when there can be many more. So, in terms of clinical operations, in terms of evidence-based healthcare relating to conditionality, all good, all good, all good. But then we also need to look at the possibilities for how the social and cultural assets play in there or help or assist, whether they add to the repertoire of clinical practice, for example, or how we, how we empathize that's that side whether the arts and humanities can influence the architecture, the environment for comforting people and for making them recover better, etc. All these things. And then we play out into society generally how would we survive without the arts and humanities? I mean, what would the world be without those things? And we learnt in the pandemic. We learnt in the pandemic that creative practices are so important to our health and well-being. But just to come back on that clinical point you made, because that was interesting, we need to retain our faith, as it were, in that whole enterprise of science and health, of course, but we shouldn't overlook that there are other evidences, and also scientific evidences for not necessarily going down the obvious route.
Speaker 2I'll give you an example. Back in 2013 to 18, I ran a big programme 1.5 million programme called Creative Practices Mutual Recovery. This was program called creative practices mutual recovery. This was about 13 projects, I think, some international where creative practices were to support within patient, family, carer and practitioner groups and across those groups to to support recovery. So mutual recovery became quite an idea. It's actually carried on as a good idea. I think about that reciprocity around shared arts and humanities and the royal college of Music worked in this program with me and they did a really tight study, as far as I was concerned, on the benefits of group drumming and they did all the cytokine markers, saliva samples, cortisol levels, etc. Etc. And group drumming showed to be as good as anything out there on the market for low to moderate depression.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2So you know it's also driving the science of the arts and humanities applied in clinical areas, but it's going beyond that as well.
Speaker 1And the other thing that's appealing to that example for me is that what's the downside? Not that much. If you go to a group drumming thing and it doesn't work, you're OK. You get put on SSRIs or something. You just don't know how you're going to react to that. You're going to create a dependency or benzodiazepine or whatever these kind of big, you know injectable solutions that the clinical side of things have for for things like depression have. You know that there's a side effect and downside to that, whereas you know your, your, your risk, you know you're the risk management in these things it's better to start with things like solutions from the creativity space before going to the clinical space.
Speaker 1Almost.
Speaker 2Yeah, well, I mean, the clinical space is actually us. Yes so what I'm?
Speaker 1getting wrong here is I keep siloing you, and what your whole thing is is to remove the silos and to put, put, put yourself into the tent well, is it?
Speaker 2it's, yes, I mean well, it's the portability of um, of the clinical. So so hospitals and clinics, they're there and people think about that's clinical, but actually it's the people that make the situation clinical. You know where they're situated, where they are. So I've always felt that the health humanities has a winning edge because it's not a replacement strategy, it's not kind of getting into that kind of neoliberal sort of, you know, let's make everything more efficient and cheaper and cut costs and so on and so forth, and let's replace, you know, medicine and its operations, pharmacy, etc. Etc. Replace it with the arts and humanities. This is I don't know actually where that kind of nonsense came from, but it's been obfuscatory. What really Health Humanities has been about is how can the resources in front of our noses often very low, low cost anyway, like a pencil and paper, or making a mark on a wall if you want to draw, or other creative practices.
Speaker 2How can these factor into your life, or how can you make use of these, and how can they have meaningful impacts for your health and well-being, your sense of self, your identity, your connectivity with others? That's it, and I think there's been a lot of achievements in this regard over the last two decades. We hear more and more from parliamentary meetings and committees and you know policymakers, you know policymakers. There's more and more chat about how the arts and humanities are what I call a shadow health service yeah, can we therefore talk about creativity in general?
Speaker 1yeah and the reason why I feel partly through the fault of perhaps the education system or just the paradigm that we live in, the way that we're brought up the hangover from the kind of the industrial age or the 19th century in many ways, is that sort of creativity is often seen as this thing, thing for a select few like I don't know if you know that the waggle dance, uh that um, um bees have have you've heard of this explore exploit thing, um that as people like rory go on about. But I can just very quickly when bees find a um a source of show people the root.
Speaker 1They do, they don't. They do the waggle dance and they're. But some bees I think about 20 or 10 don't do the one, don't follow the waggle dance. They go off and just go into random places and then they're the ones that find the new flowers. Yeah, because if everyone followed the waggle dance, you just exhaust that pollination source Brilliant and then the problem with that is that's great.
Speaker 1The problem with that is it tells if you transfer that to human beings, you say well actually 80% of us or 90% of us should just be clocking in, clocking out in a factory or doing mindless clerical work, and it's the select few that have the right to, or that have, are empowered or encouraged to kind of to do drawing or do writing or reading and creating music, whereas I feel like this democratization of creativity needs to happen in an internet age, but like because it'll just make us all better off for it, and I feel like the education system has not been that helpful in encouraging. You know, oh, you're good at drawing, you go off and draw. You're good at maths? You don't, you know, you go and do maths yeah, it's terrible, it's terrible.
Speaker 2So. So what we've had is we've had a shift in public management of everything. We've had a shift to what I've called production line mentalities. Um, you know, he went into the hospitals, as you know, became quite target driven, made and continues to maintain a lot of threat cultures which are they are diminishing compassionate responses across society and that kind of actuarial approach. You know, production line factory style came into the universities and we're currently stuck with a lot of that in the university sector, now monetizing everything and, uh, you know dry, you know measuring, measuring the pig to see if it makes weight.
Speaker 1Has that encouraged more silo type behaviour? So you're a kind of pushback of that because you're more likely to get funding. If you're going to do a more and more niche thing, it's not quite as dark as that.
Speaker 2So it's quite interesting In that kind of sector, the university sector, they are struggling with the fact that a lot of the structures and processes are and remain anti-intellectual, ironically. So you know particular outputs for particular disciplines, monographs versus co-authored stuff, you know quantitative evidence, giving an extra gold star on top of that, whereas interpreting and understanding society and humans and so on much harder to get over the bar, as it were, in terms of appreciation or credit. So those sort of structures and processes about intellectual work means that there are fake boundaries, unnecessarily unnecessary blocks to more imaginative, innovative, generative knowledge creation.
Speaker 2So there's a rhetoric of interdisciplinarity going on in the UK and elsewhere. That's encouraging. And, to be fair, ukri United Kingdom Research Innovation is, I think, getting it because they are looking more and more to big questions which require interdisciplinary teams to answer rather than compartmentalising knowledge so much. So there are moves to shake this up, I think, but I would say some institutions are perseverating with traditional notions of purity, traditional notions of hierarchy and superiority in terms of knowledge formations.
Speaker 2It's almost like there are a lot of comfort blankets out there operating Pattern recognition or habit pattern recognition or habit, you know, a kind of inability to, an inability to be open to the possibility that one your own discipline is interdisciplinary and not as pure and segmented as you thought, and that you may find better ground, more fruitful ground, if you actually walked out of your office and walked to somebody else's space, or actually didn't, didn't sort of literally box yourself in so just get yeah.
Speaker 1going back to the creativity side, so what? What is creativity to you? Yeah, um this broadly or in abstract terms.
Speaker 2Yeah, Creativity, I think, is tuning into multiple and variant informations in the world and looking to see. It's almost like one of those, you know, kaleidoscopes that you give to your kid with all the colours and if you take all the little coloured beans out of the end they all seem pretty. You know, limited oh, there's a limited number of things there, but when you turn the little machine and look through it you see all sorts of different manifestations and shapes and patterns and possibilities. And I think that's where creativity comes, whether that's in painting and art in writing comes, whether that's in painting and art in writing, and in just thinking about our world and thinking about how things are and how things could be and I guess AI now is is like a super annuated kaleidoscope.
Speaker 1Yeah, I had I had that on my kind of list of things I wanted to pick your brain on. So why don't we jump into that now, Like? The hope is that it can create sort of mental bandwidth for people to therefore have like with any technology. You know you're trying to move away from doing as much drudgery and drone work as possible Going back to my B analogy but if, therefore, we can you know AI is basically a supercomputer that kind of does a lot of that pattern recognition and puts it together and creates a song in the style of um of dr draper with the lyrics of shakespeare, and then you kind of put this sort of which um. How are you seeing that? As a tool or as a source of, of challenge perhaps?
Speaker 2well, I think we're in a period where challenges and difficulties and catastrophes are almost like our daily breakfast. I mean, we're just getting that kind of very dismal 24-hour injection of news going on very dismal, 24-hour injection of news going on. And AI, as with all developments, as much as it seems to be a gift and a joyful possibility, it quickly turns sour as a potential threat. It's going to kill you, it's going to kill everybody it's going to take over the world, and so on.
Speaker 1We'll take all our jobs.
Speaker 2Yeah, exactly so we've had the luddites earlier in history and, and we'll have them again, I'm sure, with ai um, and I don't know what the play out of that is, because we seem to be jumping in big steps now, as an acceleration of knowledge potential, I think, and even though that's come from us as human beings, it seems to be leaving us behind and we're almost holding on to the tail of this and wondering what it is. We're holding on to, yeah, and an unfolding and, and we don't quite know, um, whether that should be tamed or whether it should be, uh, experienced, I think.
Speaker 1I'm very optimistic. It'll create a whole new set of possibilities and categories that we don't even know or could think about now, a bit like with the invention of electricity. You couldn't have told someone like people will think in that paradigm. Oh no, that's going to be bad for you know the gas lighters or whoever it is. You know and um, but you all the things that that created that you couldn't possibly predict, even all the way up to the internet, for example. And we'll learn through a new paradigm which will hopefully empower us and also help us get over this issue of you know, creativity is not for me or I'd be a miss. So-and-so told me at school that you know I better stick to the PE because I'm no good at. I'll give you an example perhaps my I'm terrible, yeah, sorry, I think my my older brother, for example, he can. He's got a natural drawing of talent, let's say ability.
Speaker 1He can draw figures uh whereas I, you know, whereas if I try, it just doesn't look the same. But you wind the clock forward to today. So that had that impact at school level where you decide, well, I'm just not going to do that, I'm never going to do that. Today I've got kids and they're always asking me to draw things. So I get these sort of kids' books on how to draw a cat and it's basically okay, you draw a triangle, you draw another triangle, you draw a semicircle and whatever, and then you've got this little nose and and then, and you follow a set of rules like a much like ai dust, and then all of a sudden, you, you know, you've got a cat in front of you that actually looks fairly decent, um, and I really enjoy it.
Speaker 1I kind of, and the kids love it, and I'm like, oh, I can draw a cat and maybe next time I'll do the triangle slightly lower and make the you know whatever, and it'll look like the cat's sort of laughing or something and, um, but had I listened to you know, had I, the rest of the population, had we all listened to Miss So-and-So back at school, or like, oh, my brother can do it, I can't do it, I'm useless. You know. I better, you know, stick to something else or find something else. That creativity just is therefore on, is locked up in a box for the most of the population, and almost would you say that if we could normalize it from an early age, we almost wouldn't need health humanities to be kind of a well, a formal formal approach I don't think.
Science, Interpretation and Evidence
Speaker 2I don't think, um, this whole area of creativity, of how the arts and humanities relate to us, are valuable in society, can be boiled down into school curricula or boiled down to a kind of a linearity that we can do this step one, step two, step three, you're all excellent, okay.
Speaker 2Step one, step two, step three, okay, you're all great singers. To be honest, what I think, I think the challenge we have going forward, seems to be unlocking from some of the very simplistic notions of empowerment and some of the what I see is an obscene focus on the individual, individual accountability, individual responsibility, individual success, celebration of the individual, you know, cult of personality. We've seen a real big dose of that going on, aren't we around the world? So I think, going forward, we need to unlock from some of these kind of mantras about being empowered. I think we need to somehow be allowed to be less and to be more reflective human beings, to to not have that stress and threat of insignificance hanging over all of us all the time. And you know ones that perhaps get their foot onto a red carpet, whoa, fantastic. And everybody else, well, that's you know, okay, just a jobbing life.
Speaker 2I think there are real, there are stories that are fabula, sort of operating here, which are uncritically, I think, consumed.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2It feels to me that people have somehow been groomed, shall we say? Say into um a psychology of themselves and people around them.
Speaker 1Uh, which is to do with a unit of you know, the unit, one unit, the unit of account? Yeah, here is. Is the individual in the global south? It's the family, maybe, or it's the, the village? Yeah historically um. So we need to you know. Are you an influencer?
Speaker 2yes, you know. Are you an influencer? Yes, I mean, you know you need to be an influencer, you need to be, you know, prominent. You need to have all that measure of success to be successful as a human being so when you wrote your, your novels, you touched on this earlier.
Speaker 1Um, you know, did you? You found that a lot of people are asking you. You know, you know. How much do you want to sell? How many copies do you think it's going to get?
Speaker 2well, I think I think that's a kind of default position in society. As I say, I think that's a mantra that many people will fall into and the first thing they'll say have you sold a lot? I'm not interested, this isn't the key thing for me. So those mantras are really disappointing. I kind of see them as part of like donut world have a donut, have a donut, have a donut. You know and you know, was your book a donut? Did it go into the airports? You know? Was it a big-selling donut?
Speaker 2I don't care. I don't care what I care about, because my first literary agent was a Jewish emigre. He was a child caught up in Kristallnacht in Berlin. He escaped to the US and then came to London and he was my first proper literary agent. He's gone now, bless him. But he was not only a wonderful person but a great advisor, and he gave me a number of key pieces of advice, and one of them that stood out for me was when he said always remember to only submit to publication fiction that you believe to be significant, that you believe to be at the best possible quality, to be something in itself and of itself, regardless of whether anybody reads it.
Speaker 1Yeah, so it's the old, old, it's almost the old marathon test. Would you run a marathon if you couldn't tell anyone about it exactly? Write as if no one's going to read it for yourself obviously there has to be a point, but yeah.
Speaker 2I think the two steps there. You have to anticipate readers, to get the scaffold in place in the fiction, to create the kind of hallucinatory journey that's successful, you know, from a readerly perspective, actually becomes a big readership or whatever. That is really in many ways outside of your control. You have to be focused on what you're going to put on the stage and of course one hopes it will be received and prove useful or people will enjoy it or they will get something from it. But you cannot demand an audience to come in don't do what you think will sell some people do, I mean some people are genre writers.
Speaker 2I'm not a genre writer. I draw on genre in my literary fiction. But a genre writer you know looking for, let me just get this just right, because that will unlock, um, you know, marketing people. They will love that and they will do that and so on. Do you know what? I've never wanted to be in that world? And it's not. It's not what I am for. If, if I'm successful, well and good, I'm not going to, uh, turn down the possibility of more readers, okay, but I think it's a sad day when that's that's the life so, going back to the day job, yeah, and the let's take an example um that you've written about.
Speaker 1What can we learn from florence nightingale? Oh, well, for a start that project okay, so let's remind sorry, let's remind people who, for us, we know there's a lot of people you know we it at school at some point, but it'd be useful to have a primer again on who she was as well. So include that however, order you want because she popped up.
Speaker 2She was born in 1820, and she lived in Derbyshire for a lot of her early life and returned to Derbyshire for periods of her life and she died in 1910. And most people know of Florence Nightingale in relation to the Crimean War in the middle of the 19th century and the reason they know about her is because in that period in the 19th century, war reporting really started in the Crimean War, so newspapers were full of stories, photography was coming in, etc. Etc. And Nightingale herself was from a very rich and influential family so she had all the springboards. She needed to be, if you like, the original influencer, or one of the original influencers really, and long before social media. But people will think about that burst of popularity and fame around her looking to treat wounded soldiers in Istanbul you know, sevastopol when they came over from battle.
Speaker 2However, most of her important work was done after the Crimean War Right, public health, the hospital design, the advance of nursing, sanitation, ventilation all those aspects, the use of statistics came obviously from that experience of war and death and how to improve hygiene and so on. All that came and all that work went on on her return and so on. All that came and all that work went. On her return and that is a period that most people don't realise Florence Nightingale was largely housebound. She had a kind of post-COVID syndrome from the infection of brucellosis on pasteurised food we don't know which food milk or meat. So she worked mostly from her bed for this period. So we're talking the middle of the 1850s through to 1910 when she died. When she died, most of that time she was housebound and suffering fatigue, depression, pain, and so I always say to colleagues in the university side don't knock working from home, because Florida's Nightingale was a great example of a real mover and shaker from her pillow.
Speaker 1Well it just removes any excuses you know you might have in many ways, like oh, I just don't quite feel up to it today. Or, you know, I can't concentrate in this desk. I want to go to the cafe, I need to go to the cafe, I need to go to the library and then to go to the cafe. I need to go to the library and then all of a sudden, you kind of you've lost half of it. You're listening to my university life here, but she can you know she's got that desire to contribute, as you mentioned, and she's going to do it from her bed, her sick bed, if she needs to.
Speaker 2Yeah, she used that to good effect in terms of managing visitors, managing important people, keeping them waiting and all those sorts of things. So it worked for her on one level. But she also struggled with the, as we all did during the lockdowns, also struggled with the, as we all did during the lockdowns. You know, she struggled with that kind of relentless um four walls, um situation so that takes us on.
Speaker 1You've done some work on cabin fever, is that right?
Speaker 1yeah I mean obviously in. We're such socialized creatures, right, you know the in prison, you know to to people who are generally, as a part of the subset of the population, less interested or willing or have a track record in conforming to what society wants from them, rightly or wrongly. The first thing you do to them, if they're not behaving, is you put them in solitary confinement. Well, not the first thing, the ultimate thing, because it is such a punishment and it's the same with kids, right, a lot of disciplinarians will advocate, you know, a tool of discipline will be to exclude your child from the room and put her in a.
Speaker 1You know and also perhaps into schools yeah so, and you see the impact it has on kids when you try and threaten that and they kind of fear that kind of. So what, what? What can we learn from from cabin fever?
Speaker 2so so much let me. Let me just tell you a little story about that, because I was actually um in lockdown, um, my wife at the time was was overseas um, and it didn't take long for me to feel the struggle, um in terms of the social isolation, the, the purpose to my day, etc.
Speaker 2One of the first things I did was buy a monocular and a bird book online so I could actually extend my eye out of my space and into the trees and the beyond. I thought that that was a good idea. But I was speaking to my son, who's a brilliant data analyst in Canada, and I said to him Jamie, do you actually? I can't seem to read anything or see anything about the folk syndrome cabin fever. I can't even read a history about it. I mean, it's a common term. People talk about cabin fever. I can't see anything. Can you double check for me? Can you look and see using your data analysis skills? He came back to me. He said it's pretty much like empty.
Speaker 1There's much, and if you'd asked ChatGPT? He said it's pretty much like empty. There's this much, and if you'd asked ChatGPT it would have made something up. So you anyway, yeah.
Speaker 2Jamie's all onto AI and data analysis, don't you worry. But in that period that's how quickly we're moving right we didn't talk about AI much in that period. That's worth thinking about, isn't it much in that period that's worth thinking about, isn't it? I said, look, why don't we write a book together, son? Why don't we write a history of cabin fever? Because there must be one out there. Let's find it. So we investigated that and we identified that cabin fever. We thought initially it's to do with ships, it's to do with cabins on ships, right, the confinement in a cabin on a ship. That's what it's about. And we found it wasn't. It was to do with um, irish cabins, the very, very small kind of one-room cabins in Ireland in the mid-19th century where there was a big outbreak of typhus.
Speaker 1Wow.
Speaker 2Right and the typhus spread because people were crowded into small cabins in Ireland, small cabins in Ireland.
Speaker 2And then what happened was when many Irish left Ireland and went to North America, they took typhus with them to North America but they also took their cabin building skills and those cabin building skills went into all that pioneering that went on in the north, there and in the remoteness, building cabins fever to a real sense of the isolation, the psychological fever of being isolated, confined for long periods, of wintering out and so on. That's where the history comes. And then we looked at NASA space research. We looked at penal research about solace confinements, penal research about solitary confinement and we looked at all the deleterious impacts of confinement and being forced to be solitary or together in a constrained environment. And then we looked at the antidotes.
Florence Nightingale and Cabin Fever
Speaker 2And you know NASA's been working hard on this. You know with its commercial space flight people about going to mars. But the whole world went to mars in the pandemic it went on it. It was an analog station for for understanding the impact on people's mental and physical health of being confined for long periods and we're still mopping up the mental health impacts of that of billions of people actually being in forced confinement.
Speaker 1There's a good Tom Hanks film, Cast Away Right. Have you seen that? I don't know if you've seen that but, it's a. It's a great. Obviously, you know he's a lot. Most people have seen that spoiler alert. But yeah, he's on an island and he ends up forming a relationship with a with a volleyball, I think that's right not not a not a physical relationship, but like a friendship and he's got a he was a.
Speaker 2He was a more deformed ball than the volleyball.
Speaker 1Yeah, oh yeah and and he's his, because he cut his hand and it bled and he put his hand on the ball and threw it at anger.
Speaker 2It was.
Speaker 1Wilson Exactly, and there's a really sad moment when he's escaped from the island and Wilson floats off and he can't leave the boat and he's shouting after Wilson and you just feel his like. And he's back after Wilson and you just feel his like. And he's back on terra firma with society and he looks at all the food waste and things like they have a party when he's back and he sees all this uneaten food that people are scraping.
Speaker 1there was a bit also in the film where he tries to commit suicide but he can't, like he can't hang himself. It doesn't work and it's probably one of the a good creative manifestation of of solitary isolation.
Speaker 2Yeah, it was. I mean it's, it's iconic, isn't it? And you know the. The impacts are real, and and antidotes are real as well. So Impacts are real and antidotes are real as well.
Speaker 1Okay. So how do you, if you've been in isolation for a long period, how do you kind of, what's the antidote to that?
Speaker 2Well, I mean, you know, in our book we sort of we corralled the antidotes that seem to be out there based on the evidence One of them that's key from NASA. Actually, nasa research in their analogue stations and also space experience is purpose to the day. So we've recently had, I think, a couple of astronauts stuck up in the space station with failed return flights and they will be busy for around the clock and they will be given, if you like, busyness. They will be given lots of tasks because having purpose is a key protective.
Speaker 2And a lot of people during the pandemic, the lockdown situations, people were having to be very creative. They were actually turning to a lot of creative life to maintain their mental health, as you know, and they tried to get structure and purpose to their days. That was a very protective move. But not everybody was in the same situation. Not everybody could reach to those resources. We had a lot of domestic violence going on in that intense cauldron of isolation and we also had a lot of people who really struggled to find those antidotes. Creative practices, creative engagement is an antidote. Obviously, access to nature is an antidote. Obviously, access to nature is an antidote difficult in space, of course, but here on the earth. That was another one.
Speaker 1I think the lockdown policies really demonstrated the the differences we have in various strata of society, because you had people who were like you know, I had a cracking lockdown, did loads of gardening, got loads of sun, learned to bake, did a lot of barbecues, got through loads of books and you know. And then you had people half a mile down the road in a high, high rise tower with three kids you know, who weren't at school, and domestic violence exactly it was I think that sadly wasn't included in the calculus no, exactly, exactly right.
Speaker 2And they and a lot of people were alone together. A lot of people were alone together yes, you had a partner.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah so no, you're quite right, for some, some people could turn, they had the mentality to turn to sanctuary. Many other people, their mentality turned to the prison, as one might expect. You know the prison-like situation, the sort of thing that hostages people on solitary journeys by boat and other experiences can sometimes feel that pressing, pressing of the walls, that limitation. So some people were able to, naturally, I think, switch to sanctuary and others not. Some were, if you like, in a situation which made that very difficult in terms of their lived accommodation. So we saw lots of impacts here.
Speaker 2I think that certainly impacted on my writing of the recent novel the Wonders of Dr Bent, which is about a maverick leading psychiatrist who tries to humanise a high security setting. And I guess you know that whole experience of the damaging effects of prison-like environment must have been very much on my creative mind at the time and infused the novel in that that way. So, um, it's, it's an interesting. Interesting area to continue to look at is how we are in particular places and spaces and what the what the result of that is on our, on our mentalities. How do we, how do we recover from mental trauma? How do we recover from the oppressive quality of our environments?
Speaker 1um, that's and does that? That creation of purpose translates beyond, you know, social isolation to other mental health. You speak to any, you go to a self-help book or you speak to any kind of whoever out there at the moment is dominating, the sort of spiritual coaches, and gurus out there, yeah like there's a lot of. You know. Have a target, have a goal, have a name, work to it, write it down.
Speaker 2Okay. So I guess the world has started to move more and more to packaging everything, everything's packaging. You know packaging well-being, packaging everything, and you know we have well-being packaging everything, and you know we have to be part of that, making resources available. I think that's important, whether you know whether it helps people to have a format or have a, you know, an aid memoir, or you know their technology talking back to them about their health or how many times they should do this, or oh, you've been in, you've been in a four wall situation for three hours now. You know, or you you haven't looked up from your computer screen.
Speaker 2okay, yeah these nudges and okay, yeah, but I would say the new challenge for me, as I see it in these very fast-moving changes we're having, is how we deal with proliferation. How do we avoid being overwhelmed by informations, by nud nudges, by everything um? So dealing with proliferation hasn't really um come to the fore. It's like we're all tumbling and and turning under a big wave of change yeah we're not quite sure how to emotionally adjust to that.
Speaker 2So we had the pandemic like tight lockdowns in the space, and then almost immediately following, it seems we've got this kind of like it's proliferating. You know everything's.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah of like it's proliferating. You know everything's yeah, yeah, it's it almost. You get these protocols of. You know you want to get sunlight 10 minutes from waking up and then you want to do an hour of journaling and then you've got to kind of have a cold plunge and then do 20 minutes of meditation and then then you can do an hour's work and then say hang on, I've got a job to do, I've got life to live and I've got kids running around to get to school, and it's just like. This packaging thing is a good observation, because it's too many easy, neat solutions out there for people who don't have the bandwidth to even start processing it.
Speaker 2I think so I think we kind of post ad hoc. You know, ad hoc seems to be, you know, old times.
Speaker 1So can you tell me about your writing process, particularly for fiction? You know you're not a full-time fiction writer, you're um. So how do you do it? Do you do it in the morning, when, before your day starts, you're kind of the day job begins, or do you commit? What's the package? Yeah, but what works for you, uh, in, you know, in terms of, or what even makes you want to do it like you know? Is it another medium to kind of get your work across, or is it purely again? For, as we talked about earlier, I just want to do it Like you know. Is it another medium to kind of get your work across, or is it purely again, as we talked about earlier, I just want to write this as a way of almost an autodidactic tool to kind of focus my thoughts.
Speaker 2I guess it could be all of those things. For most writers, you know, writing full-time is a bit of an interesting idea because I think, like I, writing full-time is a bit of an interesting idea because I think that I'm kind of tuned into when I'm feeling in a mood, or I feel I have particular ideas I want to convey, or I have a mission with a piece of writing. All those things may come in in quite irregular patterns for me. So it could be, you know, I'm just ready, ready to, I don't know, chill with, with reading a book. And then when I get, you know, on the bed and I open the the book for a little nighttime read, I'm thinking crikey, crikey, that's now, that is something, now that is something. And I'll reach over and I'll tap away and then and may find I, you know, turn half a chapter before I fall asleep or or I've just made a note for the morning.
Speaker 2So I don't have a schedule. I don't, I don't smoke, I, I don't live in an attic, I don't I don't do kind of writerly poses, in particular garments, uh, you know, and I go to cafes a lot, so that's a writerly thing to do. But one thing I do do is I write. A writer is somebody writes. I write and I've written for most of my life. You know, I sometimes scare myself by looking back at all my back catalogue of files, deletions, revisions. How many versions of a novel did I get to, you know? And when I look at the, the textscape of my life that is the hidden textscape, not the actual published textscape it's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1So you're writing anyway all the time, and a novel is a kind of fallout of that. I mean, I guess the danger is there's a there's a tension in that, you know, for a lot of people, unless they have that package or you know, and therefore it won't get done and maybe therefore they shouldn't be doing it yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2So we're all different, right. So some people will need packaging, will need frames for self-motivating and so on. I've never really had a writer's block. They talk about that a lot. I've never found that myself.
Speaker 2And novels are different to what I've been doing in the kind of academic world or, you know, literary criticism or the linguistic stuff or mental health stuff I've been writing or the history stuff. The novels is more about conversation, because it's where you envisage and anticipate a kind of a shared experience with the reader. So I write the frame, I write the frame, I put the scaffolding up. But the hallucination apart from my own, when I'm writing, the hallucination is for the each reader, and and what they bring to it and how they work on my scaffold is, um, is for them, I, I. They will probably read something quite different to my authorial intention. They may have transference issues with one of the characters. They may like this character for the wrong reasons, if that makes sense, and they may not like this character. I don't know. They may find this is important. I don't know. They may find this is important. That's important. It's a beautiful thing. I mean fiction is the, as I think David Lodge said, the writer and critic, the greatest repository of consciousness.
Speaker 2And what do you think makes a good villain A good villain, that's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1Sorry, not a good villain, but what makes a good villain?
Speaker 2I thought you were talking about Donald Trump for a minute.
Speaker 1No, I think a lot of stories are only as good. You know, heroes, we kind of crack. They can be flawed, they can be kind of roguish or they can be kind of pure, but a story is often as good as villain in many ways.
Speaker 2What grabs in? What grabs in a villain? I think, probably for me. Um, I say these kind of stereotypes that we work off. I find the scariest people, the ones that are not quite so visible or they seem to be what they are from your first take. So people think that's perfectly reasonable person. They're doing this, they're doing that, yeah, but, um, they are operating in a parallel sense. They are they are actually entirely different to what they are to you, or what they seem to be.
Speaker 1So there's an almost. I mean you struggle there's a jarring dissonance in some ways. I think there was a villain in a couple. I don't know if you ever watched Luther, the detective series.
Speaker 2I didn't watch that.
Speaker 1no, I saw the adverts for it's a in the latest series as a psychologist and a surgeon very middle-class and they are. They practice in kind of sexual violence, abducting people, and one of the things that made them, you know, a powerful villain was that it was. You just wouldn't think it like they were educated. They had that. They had all those kind of tip marks that you would associate with someone that you would just intuitively trust. You know, if they offered to give you a car ride, you would take it because you know it's in the volvo or whatever that's pretty scary, right, and and sadly, sadly, it reflects um many realities yeah um, the, the from a writing perspective, though, it's always um.
Speaker 2You always have to be agile, I think, as a writer, to what we might think of as fixed expressions, creatively, you know, because you people are watching so much netflix these days. I, yeah, I think that um they start to, um, you know, predict what's coming in in in this particular film you know this, this guy is, oh, he's so kind it's just, you know, predict what's coming in this particular film.
Speaker 2You know, this guy is, oh, he's so kind. He's just, you know, he's just picked up that puppy and you know, and he's helped a poor guy have a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He's out on the street. What a guy, what a guy, what a guy. And you're thinking, mm-hmm, okay, I think this one's going to be the bad guy, I think this one's going to be the bad guy. I think this one's going to be the villain. So you know, the great thing with writing is as much as some of these fixed expressions or fixed positions operate in literature writers will always disrupt or subvert or undermine or play differently.
Creativity and Mental Health
Speaker 2It's almost like chess They'll find different strategies for both entertaining but also informing and illuminating in terms of ideas, in terms of ideas. So I think that's the great offer of meaningful novels, if I can put it that way, kind of the novels that are keen to engage in ideas, non-donut novels. I think that's the joy of them, because when you buy one, when you pick one up, when you you stroke the cover and and read the blurb and see if it sits with you and your, your current wishes for for reading, when you take that out the bookshop, um, it's like a mystery tour straight away. You have no idea what kind of scaffolding is going to be in this one.
Speaker 2Now, of course, you get a little bit of kind of shall we say obviousness about this, because thriller section, crime section, romance right. So some people go into the donut world on this. Then the other side of it is like mystery tour that this book is not like situated, quite like that. Or you know the suspicion that this is supposedly a thriller or supposedly this or supposedly that. But you when you read it, you know yeah you don't know where it's taking you.
Speaker 1Yeah, can I ask you about the character uh crystal? Yeah, in your first novel, um Crystal, in your first novel again, I mean, it's not really it's not a huge spoiler alert for people who are going to go and read it but there's a character who suffers from schizophrenia and one of the things he wants to his voices command him to do is to go and waste people's time, and I kind of it really resonated with me as a kind of you know, I've been in a rush many times and when and you kind of the sort of the thoughts that come to you when you think someone's purposefully wasted your time, when you're trying to get somewhere quickly.
Speaker 1it's bad enough. When someone does it accidentally it's bad enough when someone does it accidentally. It was a very powerful kind of character trait that this manifestation of this guy's mental illness was to kind of go and waste people's time and that was the way he could sate his voices. How did you come to that, Was that?
Speaker 2an experience you had in the clinic.
Speaker 1Was that someone you treated? No, that was the an experience you had in the clinic did you did?
Speaker 2was that someone you no, it wasn't treated or no, that was the operation of the brain.
Speaker 1That is not my own yeah, the muse, the brain, that is not my own found its way to, to that idea.
Speaker 2I mean, part of part of the deal seems to be in working with a brain that's not your own is to recognise, or you have this kind of sense that the effort is to recognise. When the thought in the brain that's not your own comes up and I certainly recognise that gosh, gosh, that's painful. I actually could feel that viscerally, the tension of somebody being stopped, for example, at the start of the book no big spoiler alert for the start of that book being stopped to get their train when there's a time pressure, um, I could feel the pain of that. I could actually sense that and I thought well, you know, as you say, sating the kind of uh, the command, you know, hallucinations and and so on, the way that this character was actually led by their mental health difficulty, that kind of transaction that you know I waste people's time and the kind of threat that I'm living under reduces I thought I'm having that.
Speaker 1It's a really bad thing to be thought of. As you know, it's one of those non-harmful or, like you know, it's one thing to be violent and, putting aside the kind of criminal categories of harm, being accused of being a time waster is and you manage with that character to. You know, we kind of deeply empathise with him at the same time, which is also kind of this dual occurrence which is quite powerful. But you know, as you say, I really felt the kind of I could really empathise with the victims of his time wasting in a really kind of almost frustrating sense.
Speaker 2Yeah, I've always been interested in the doubleness of victims, especially in regard to major mental health problems like schizophrenia. Mental health problems like schizophrenia, where people do terrible things when they're under the kind of that condition. I've been interested that the there's a doubling of victimhood in the sense that the, the individual who, with that distorted view of reality, does terrible things also is a victim of themselves as much as the people out there that they also impact on. And I think that kind of theme is really important, that kind of how we, you know, do we always need to be a prime and punishment society where we prime people to be dangerous? Actually, very often Humiliating people increases violence, leaving people with paranoid schizophrenia to fend for themselves on the street and in shabby accommodations very often.
Speaker 2And then we go oh, they've done something terrible. Oh, you know, cal, surprise, I mean you know. But then the punishment comes in there. So, like the Wonders of Dr Bent is quite an interesting follow-up novel, even though it's like 23 years later, where you know the, the whole business of. How are we dealing humanely with people with diminished responsibilities who do terrible things? Do we have the right supports and interagency set up to ensure there isn't a double victimhood here, and I'm not convinced we're there at all and in fact recent cases show we're as a society, we think we're much better than we are in relation to mental health interesting.
Speaker 1Have you? Have you read um resurrection by tolstoy? I haven't, no no, okay I really recommend it.
Speaker 1Um, he's one of the he writes it. Later in his life he's become much more cranky and spiritual. But this book, this novel, is about an aristocrat who kind of um to many of his peers accuse him of turning into a do-good and he goes around, sort of he's trying to give his land away to his peasants and they don't want it. They're kind of confused. But then he kind of gets into prison reform and obviously some of the stories they talk about in 19th century Russian prisons, particularly to the kind of the mentally afflicted, but just the kind of injustices that would happen, the treatment, and he said, look, look, it doesn't stop bad behavior. It's no deterrent factor.
Speaker 1And he comes from a very spiritual kind of christian perspective which is, like you know, we're all sin, we're all fallen, we're all very sinful creatures. We therefore do not have the ability to kind of pass judgment on someone else's sin and lock them up and detain them. And you know, we need to be more discerning. And obviously we've come a long way since you know prison conditions or kind of um, the treatment of people who cause harm, uh, publicly has got a lot better. But you're arguing that actually we need to be even more discerning and try and figure out that yes, they've.
Speaker 1Someone is a victim of their behavior, but they are also a victim of their own behavior, and there are things that are caused up which we couldn't possibly understand yeah, and it's, you know, multifactorial.
Speaker 2So you know, people with serious mental health problems often live in the most deprived environments, with financial constraints and difficulties, with less access, I think, to the resources that will keep ourselves healthy, low, stressed and so on. So that's why I said like kind of, uh, kind of thinking of dostoevsky's prime prime instead of crime. You know, prime and punishment. I think we are in a prime and punishment society and I think that is not advancing us very far at all. So, yeah, I mean, certainly it's been emotional for me with the wonders of Dr Ben coming out, because, as we know, what can you tell?
Speaker 1us. I mean, you've told us a bit about it already.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1Is it what? Do you mean yeah, what can you give away without giving away? Yeah, no no, i's.
Speaker 2I mean, it's really. It's a tale of two lives coming together, um, the one is jason hemp. He's a an english lecturer, and he tries, as an amateur detective, to uh avenge the death of his twin brother, and he basically enters a world that he doesn't understand and is very, you know, difficult and challenging, shall we say. So I don't want to give any spoilers. And his world comes into that of Dr Bent, who is a refractory, maverick character, a goth psychiatrist who rides a.
Speaker 2Harley. But he's a leading thought leader, a leading person in psychiatry who's directing Foster Hall, a high security facility, People who are a, you know, a grave and immediate risk to the public and their worlds come together. Dr Bent is a wounded healer and we see that kind of, I guess, battle between that past and the present and he's a reforming doctor. He attempts to make Foster Hall a more humane and comforting and comfortable place for people who've arrived there with hospital orders for diminished responsibility, like recently the individual Valdo Callacane in Nottingham who did such terrible things. So I mean the novel predates that horrible event of Valdo Callacane, that horrible event of Valda Calacane, but I guess bears on it because there's a tension in the novel between the ethics of reform and the ethics of punishment.
Speaker 1Amazing. Well, and it's out this week, which is very exciting.
Speaker 2It's out there. We got some slight delay. Came in because there was a cyber attack of the major UK book printers.
Speaker 2Oh wow, but yeah, it's actually that, I think, the publication date. Official publication date now is the 18th of March. Your lovely paperbacks can be pre-ordered and hopefully this one will turn into a film. Nothing Purple, nothing Black had a film deal with Jack Emery, the British producer, but he became very ill and his production company folded. Unfortunately, jack is actually OK. He survived, but his production company didn't. So I missed the film, I missed the silver screen then Hopefully it'll come back with the wonders of Dr Bend well, everyone, you heard it here first.
Speaker 1So, uh, well, somewhat reasonably first. Um, as you know, I like to wrap these conversations up with a closing question. I ask all guests yeah in that you have a a 10-year time frame to make a prediction, because predictions are nothing more than tax-free entertainment for us to kind of enjoy Something you'd like to happen or something you think will happen like in the true sense of prediction, something that you think will happen in the next 10 years, or both Okay.
Speaker 2I think individuals worldwide, I hope will lose their addiction to celebrity.
Speaker 1Interesting. You think that will happen or you hope it will happen?
Speaker 2I think it will have to happen if if societies are um to be happier yeah, I mean you mentioned this earlier, didn't you?
Speaker 1kind of the desire to be an influencer for its own sake, like there's a big push amongst young people to kind of you know the gamification of of your phone and you know getting likes, retweets, re. You know followers and you end up doing banal, stupid things like eating as many burgers as you can in a 10-minute window or something At some point. You'll build a following by doing meaningful work and you'll get lots of likes if you create value.
Speaker 2I think the issue for me is that existing these days seems to be kind of. It seems to be necessary to fully exist these days, to be part of an elite, a celebrity elite. Everybody else is junk.
Speaker 1Yeah, the rest of us are just.
Speaker 2We're junk we're.
Speaker 1It's moving towards a split between those who are seem to be meaningfully existing and those who are non-entities, and it's damaging the mental health of the world um, what was I can't remember who it was who said most of man's problems are caused by the inability to sit in a room on your own for an hour Exactly, and just be at. I mean that ability to be at ease with yourself and who you are.
Speaker 2Exactly.
Speaker 1Well, hopefully your work will carry on pushing us into that direction and into a tradition of purpose rather than kind of ego for the sake of it or following for the sake of it. Um, um, where can people find you, paul? You're? You're on twitter.
Speaker 2You're an x, I believe I'm easily you can find it, if anything, easily on google paul crawford authorcom. Um, and I am not a celebrity and if, if, if readers should make me one, then it's a shared event because, yeah, well, thank Please.
Speaker 1Keep up all the good work you're doing. It is very valuable. We need people to link disciplines together, to kind of spot things that fall between the cracks and kind of try and join them up, and that is the sign of a true creator. True creator and there's also the very purpose of why this podcast exists is to speak to people like you. So I'm really grateful for the time. Would love to have you on again soon and in the meantime, please, everyone, visit paulcrawfordauthorcom or Google Paul Crawford, university of Nottingham, and let's all buy that book Give us the name again, sorry.
Speaker 2The Wonders of Dr Ben. The Wonders of Dr Ben. The Wonders of Dr Ben. Yeah, and thank you. Thank you for the conversation. I forgot it was a podcast.
Speaker 1Great, that's all I want. That's all I want. I'll take it. That's as much a compliment as I can hope for. Thank you everyone for joining. See you next time. Yeah, take care this has been meeting people. I've been your host, amal pandya. This is a podcast produced by mass cooper with music composed by loverman.