All in the Mind

In April next year changes to the way the NHS in England will make GP groups responsible for 65 billion pounds of health budgets. These groups will decide what services patients need for all clinical services including mental health. But are all GPs confident of their expertise in mental health to do this? And what safeguards are in place to ensure enough good quality mental health is delivered to...

The BBC Stress test was launched in June with BBC Lab UK, with the aim of answering one of the big questions in mental health - what is the cause of mental illness ? More than 32,000 Radio 4 listeners took part, making this one of the largest studies of its kind in the world. The early results are in and Peter Kinderman, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool, tells Claudi...

London Taxi drivers have to learn 25 000 streets and 20 000 landmarks to qualify and get the Knowledge. New research by Professor Eleanor Maguire from University College London has followed trainee taxi drivers over the years they learn the knowledge and found an area of their brains important for memory and navigation grows in response to learning. Does this mean all our brains have this plastic...

Zoe from South Wales spent twelve years with undiagnosed Bipolar Disorder. The personal cost to this mother of three was devastating, as, over the years, she was told she had Post Natal Depression and treated with anti-depressants. It's long been recognised that Bipolar Disorder could be both misdiagnosed and under-diagnosed and Dr Nick Stafford describes a new pilot project in Leicester to screen...

In May this year All in the Mind featured an intriguing Dutch study which reported that when there's a lot of rubbish in the street we're more likely to stereotype other people. Earlier this year it was found that the co author, Diederik Stapel had made up the data. As well as fooling us, he fooled the journal Science. Now the three Dutch universities involved have published their interim report o...

Riots started in Tottenham in London on August 6th this year and spread to 35 different locations across the Capital and towns and cities across England, including Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool and Nottingham. Parliament was recalled and there was a rapidly growing consensus among politicians and the media, that the riots were the result of pure criminality. The riots were criminal, the ri...

Daniel Kahneman Widely regarded as the world's most influential living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, reflects on his lifetime's research on why we make the "wrong" decisions. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his pioneering work with Amos Tversky on the irrational ways we make decisions about risk. He directly challenged traditional economic orthodoxy that we are rational, logical and self...

"Nudge" was the best-selling book that David Cameron famously ordered his shadow cabinet to read over their summer holidays. The previous Labour government had already shown some interest in the new science of behavioural economics, but as Prime Minister, Cameron put the ideas of University of Chicago behavioural economist, Richard Thaler, at the heart of his government, and set up the world's fir...

How can a good night's sleep improve your memory? Why does the answer to a crossword clue suddenly appear first thing in the morning after a night's rest? In this week's programme Claudia Hammond talks to psychologist, Kimberly Fenn about what happens in the brain when we sleep and why it can significantly improve our memory. Hysteria or conversion disorder is surprisingly, not confined to medical...

After the fall of Nicolai Ceausescu in Romania, news of how babies and children were treated in Romanian orphanages horrified the world. Images of infants, silent and malnourished, rocking in their cots, hosed down with cold water, prompted an outburst of collective outrage and thousands of would-be parents rushed to adopt. But little was known then, in 1990, about the long-term effects of such ex...

People with severe mental disorders are at much greater risk of dying prematurely compared to the general population. How much are the drugs for some mental illnesses contributing to their risk of disease? Anti psychotic drugs can cause people to rapidly put weight on and increase the risk of developing conditions like heart disease and diabetes. Claudia talks to psychiatrist, Dr Alex Mitchell abo...

What makes somebody become an arsonist ? Every week in England and Wales sixty five people are either killed or injured by somebody who has deliberately started a fire. But surprisingly little is known about the different kinds of arsonists, apart from the worrying fact that once they've shown an interest in fire, they then tend to carry on risking life and property by starting more. Claudia Hammo...

New research from the only NHS funded clinic to treat pathological gamblers is the first of its kind to study the psychological profile of UK gamblers. Claudia finds out about the results of their new study into the links between impulsivity and irrational beliefs, superstition and ritual and why some people may go on to become problem gamblers while others don't. Dr Luke Clark from Cambridge Univ...

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....

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 Kinderma...

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 sis...

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...

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 t...

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...

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 earthquak...

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...

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...

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 t...

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 participat...

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,...