Aspects of Mental Health
Patients and professionals talk about the mental health issues that have affected them
Patients and professionals talk about mental health issues that have affected them over the course of the 20th Century.
British mental health expert Bob Grove describes the shocking conditions he found when he first visited a Greek psychiatric colony on the island of Leros. He compares the colony to the madhouses of the 18th Century which were the commonest form of treatment for the mentally ill and which persisted right up until the early part of the 20th Century. He worked on Leros for ten years with a European Union programme to try to transform the asylum into a more humane institution.
Ernst Federn talks about the work of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Ernst Federn's father worked closely with Freud at the start of the century. Freud believed that neurotic illness was caused by actively repressing painful or emotionally disturbing memories; this became not just a theory of neurosis but a general theory of the human personality.
Rwandan Pierre-Celestine Rusengatabaro talks about the trauma he suffered in the genocide of 1994 when more than three quarters of a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu extremists. He lost more than 20 members of his family and was forced to flee to Burundi, where he waited in a refugee camp until relatives helped him travel to England.
The American writer Elizabeth Wurtzell has been taking the anti-depressant drug Prozac. When it was launched over a decade ago it was initially hailed as a wonder drug. Elizabeth Wurtzell, who wrote the semi-autobiographical book, Prozac Nation, talks about her depression and the cocktail of drugs she takes to help her through it.
Professor Malik Mubbashar talks about his work in mental health in Pakistan. This century the West has come up with many advances in how to treat mental illness - through therapy and drugs for example. But after being trained in the West, Professor Mubbashar found his expertise lacking to deal with the realities of life in his native Pakistan.
