Joseph Firth - The Role of Exercise and Nutrition in Early Psychosis

Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Mad in America

Mental Health, Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 212 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2017

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

This week on MIA Radio we interview Dr Joseph Firth. Dr Firth is a postdoctoral research fellow at Western Sydney University. His research focuses on the role of exercise and nutrition in first episode psychosis in young people.

In this interview we discuss:

That Dr Firth completed his PhD in Manchester, UK, which focussed on the role of exercise in the treatment of psychosis in young people.
That he now works on a programme of adjunctive and novel treatments for psychosis, particularly the role of exercise and nutrition and including technology and mobile health.
How results show that exercise can reduce symptoms in young people such as the cognitive deficit, lack of motivation and social withdrawal and that these are symptoms that the medications don't really help with.
That, in the very early stages of psychotic illness, there are currently few interventions other than therapy, so exercise and nutrition could have a role in reducing the need for antipsychotic drugs and even potentially affect the onset of psychotic symptoms.
That qualitative research has shown that young people report that their symptoms are reduced or become less troubling when they exercise.
How exercise and nutrition have key roles in reducing the health inequalities that are seen in young people treated with antipsychotic drugs.

To get in touch with us email: podcasts@madinamerica.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry and social justice.
0:13.4	Hello, this is James, and welcome to the Madden America podcast. Before we get started, I just
0:18.6	wanted to thank everyone for taking the time to listen in
0:21.2	and also to ask that if you like the podcast, please consider leaving us a review in iTunes
0:25.9	as it really helps to get more listeners. Thank you.
0:28.9	Okay, this week Madden America's Associate News editor, Bernalyn Ruiz, interviews Dr. Joseph Firth,
0:34.9	who speaks to us about his research work at Western Sydney University.
0:39.0	Welcome to the Madden America podcast. I'm Bernal and Ruiz, and I'm a doctoral student in
0:44.0	psychology and an associate news editor for the MIA science in the news section. For those who
0:51.3	haven't checked that part of the website before, we provide daily coverage
0:54.4	of the latest mental health research that challenges the predominant biomedical paradigm in
0:59.0	psychiatry and psychology. So today, I'm fortunate enough to be interviewing Joseph Firth,
1:05.4	postdoc research fellow at Western Sydney University. So thank you, Joseph, for being here with us today. Thank you for having me.
1:13.3	Great. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and what brought you to the field of
1:19.5	psychology? Okay, sure. So with psychology, I just, I originally did my undergraduate degree in
1:26.7	psychology at the University of Sheffield in the UK.
1:30.7	And then after completing the degree, I worked with young offenders for a little while,
1:34.6	young ex-offenders, particularly ones with mental illness, as a well-being worker.
1:39.2	So then I took an interest in the clinical side of psychology from that and then saw a PhD opportunity at the University
1:45.1	of Manchester looking about how exercise could be used to treat young people with psychosis and
1:50.6	that's always been a very big interest for me both physical exercise and the treatment of psychosis.
1:57.0	So and then I got involved in psychiatric research at the University of Manchester.
	...

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