Jussi Valtonen - How to Know What We Don't Know

Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Mad in America

Mental Health, Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 212 Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2020

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jussi Valtonen is both a novelist and a psychologist. As a novelist, his work has been compared to both George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World for the way it weaves together social commentary and science fiction to jolt readers into confronting difficult questions about the soon-to-come worlds we are creating in the present. His research as a psychologist investigates how changes to the human brain impact how we think, experience, and make sense of the world. This includes recent investigations of the role of psychiatric drugs and polypharmacy on cognitive decline and functional impairment.

Valtonen is from Helsinki and studied English, philosophy, and psychology in Finland before coming to the US to study neuropsychology at Johns Hopkins University and NYU. He was also trained in screenwriting at the University of Salford in the UK and has worked as a journalist and science reporter.

He has written three novels and a short story collection. Carried by Wings (2007) was given second place in Bonnier's novel competition, and received a warm reception from both critics and bloggers. Valtonen's recent book, They Know Not What They Do (2014), won the Finlandia Prize, Finland's highest literary honor.

In this interview, Valtonen discusses how he found psychological science and literature to complement one another, the blind-spots in current psychiatric practice that harm patients, and how novels can help us to ask questions about the world we're creating.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.
0:12.0	Hello everyone, I am joined today by Dr. Yusie Waltonin. Dr. Vultzinen is an author and psychologist from Helsinki.
0:20.0	He studied neuropsychology at Johns Hopkins, where he was a Fulbright scholar.
0:24.7	He studied screenwriting in the United Kingdom, and he has also worked as a science reporter.
0:28.9	We're here today to discuss some of Dr. Vultonin's academic work, including one of his most recent publications.
0:35.0	Polypharmacy induced cognitive dysfunction and discontinuation of
0:38.3	psychotropic medication, a neuropical case report, as well as his literary work, including
0:43.8	his novel, They Know Not What They Do, which won the Finlandia Prize, Finland's highest literary honor.
0:49.4	Dr. Vultan, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me.
0:53.6	Just to get into it, firstly, I think listeners would love to hear a little more about your various interests.
0:59.0	You are, as I've described, both a psychologist and a novelist.
1:03.0	How did you get into each discipline, and how do you believe the two of them feed off each other?
1:07.0	It's true. I've been leading this crazy double life for quite a while, and I,
1:13.7	to be perfectly honest, I was never sure how long I'd be able to pull it off, and it hasn't always
1:20.8	been quite easy. I mean, I would strongly recommend against you doing anything like this, because
1:26.0	having even one job that's incredibly demanding
1:29.9	and monopolizes all your intellectual space, I mean, that would seem more than enough for
1:35.8	anybody. But I guess I'm a little bit comforted by some of the examples you can find in
1:42.4	the history of literature like Jakov, who famously was a medical doctor and also wrote tons of short stories that revolutionized the history of literature and also plays.
1:55.6	And so I guess personally I've found that there's something, there's something about science that's
2:05.5	incredibly interesting and satisfying and fascinating.
2:09.3	I feel like there's also something lacking from, I don't know, from the perspective of
	...

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