Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry and social justice.

Our podcasts are made possible in part by a grant from the Thomas Job Fund.

Hello, this is James, and welcome to the podcast.

And this week we are discussing something that is close to my heart, and that's the impact

of mental health-related podcasts on their listeners.

I'm joined today by Dr. Sharon Lambert and Nisha O'Quilter from University College Cork in Ireland,

who have studied the motivations and experiences of mental health-related podcast listeners.

Their recent paper is entitled podcasts as a tool for enhancing mental health literacy

and investigation of mental health-related podcasts, and it appears in the journal

Mental Health and Prevention. In this interview, we discussed the importance of mental health

literacy and ask if the need for honest mental health experience is being met from the

recording studio rather than the consulting room. Sharon and Nisha, thank you both so much for joining me today for the Mad in America podcast.

And so excited to have you both to talk about a really interesting recent paper of yours

entitled Podcasts as a tool for enhancing mental health literacy.

But if it's okay, before we get to talk about

the paper, I just wondered if it's okay if I could ask you both to kind of introduce yourselves

and maybe say a little bit about what you do at University College Cork. Yes, so my name is Sharon

Emberton. I'm a psychologist and an academic researcher. So I am researching and teaching

and applied psychology in UCC and my areas of

interest are the relationship between psychological trauma, traumatic experiences in a very broad sense.

So that includes things like poverty and social exclusion and how that impacts on thinking and learning and behavior,

but I'm particularly interested in how people design and deliver services so that everybody

...