Richard Bentall on the causes of mental ill health
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2021
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For a long time people who heard voices or suffered paranoid delusions were thought to be too crazy to benefit from talking therapies. As a young man working on a prison psychiatric ward, Richard Bentall thought otherwise. Together with a small group of clinical psychologists, he pioneered the use of the talking therapy CBT for psychosis and conducted rigorous randomized controlled trials to find out if and why it worked. Turns out, having a good relationship with your the therapist is at the heart of why therapy succeeds, regardless of the type of therapy practised.
Richard talks to Jim Al-Khalili about his quest to understand psychosis and how his own mental health has suffered at times. He's interested in how adverse life events affect our mental health and has shown that people who suffer abuse, bullying and victimization as children are three times more likely to have a psychotic episode later in life. A large survey of our mental health, launched by Richard and colleagues on day one of the first lockdown has revealed that lockdown and Covid-19 has not led to a tsunami of mental illness that many feared. 10% of the population has seen their mental health improve. Producer: Anna Buckley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I'd like to introduce myself. |
| 0:03.7 | My name's Stevie Middleton and I'm a BBC Commissioner for a Load of Sport Podcasts. |
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| 0:28.8 | dedicated sports fans across the UK. |
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| 0:41.2 | Hello, I'm Jim Elkeleely and this is the Life Scientific Podcast. |
| 0:45.7 | Today we're tackling misery head-on. |
| 0:48.8 | What causes mental ill health and why do people hear voices and have paranoid thoughts? |
| 0:55.0 | Richard Bentall pioneered a new way of thinking about psychosis. |
| 0:59.6 | Madness, he says, is in the world not in us. |
| 1:03.2 | It's part of human nature and is caused as much by adverse life events as it is by our genetic |
| 1:09.3 | inheritance. |
| 1:10.7 | Early in his career as a clinical psychologist, he rejected the idea of schizophrenia and argued |
| 1:16.1 | that it was a mistake to view it purely as a medical condition that could be treated with drugs. |
| 1:21.8 | He went on to pioneer the use of CBT or cognitive behavioural therapy for people who hear voices |
| 1:28.8 | and have paranoid delusions. |
| 1:30.9 | At a time when almost everyone, psychotherapists included, believed that people like this were |
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