PODCASTS

Silence is frequently considered negative or harmful in both everyday life – for example, when we are silenced – as well as in psychiatry, where poverty of speech is a symptom of depression and pressure of speech is a symptom of mania. In Silence in Mood Disorders: A Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2027),  Dan Degerman argues for the need to consider silence in mental disorders in a nuanced way that recognizes different forms of silence and different, including positive, ways silences of speech and inner speech can be experienced. The poverty of speech in depression may lead to the fetishizing of silence-breaking that can cause more distress to a patient who simply does not have anything they want to say, while the pressure of speech in mania may involve disruption in a multicomponent capacity to reliably initiate and maintain silence that is usually habitual and occasionally deliberate. Degerman, who is a research fellow  at the University of Bristol on the Epistemic Injustice in Health Care Project, provides an analysis of different types of silence, discusses first-person experiences of being silent in depression and mania, and points to ways in which philosophers and clinicians can enrich their understandings and practices involving silences. 

Pain Talking: When Illness Changes Your World

What happens when illness changes not just your body, but your whole experience of being in the world?

In this episode of Pain Talking, I speak with philosopher , whose work brings together philosophy and her own lived experience of serious illness.

Havi describes what it was like to be diagnosed with a rare progressive lung disease, to live with severe breathlessness and oxygen, and later to undergo a lung transplant. From this experience, and her philosophical work, came the idea of bodily doubt — what happens when the body you once trusted becomes uncertain, when freedom narrows, and when the world no longer feels quite as familiar as it did before.

We talk about what illness can take away: spontaneity, freedom, confidence, ease, the ability to simply get up and go.

But we also talk about what can still be found.

Meaning.

Connection.

Possibility.

Ways of flourishing within constraints.

For anyone living with illness or persistent pain, I think there is a great deal here that may feel familiar. You may hear words for experiences that have been difficult to explain. And perhaps some reassurance that what happens to your sense of self, body and world really matters.

For clinicians and therapists, this is also an important conversation.

Because understanding illness is not only about disease, tests, scans or symptom scores.

It is about understanding something of what it is like to be the person living through it.

Havi and I talk about listening properly, taking the first-person experience seriously, seeing the whole person, and why asking “how do you feel?” can sometimes open up far more than asking for a number on a scale.

There is sadness in this conversation.

There is honesty.

And there is hope.

If you are living with illness or persistent pain, or you work with people who are, I think this is well worth your time.

BBC Radio 4: Free Thinking

Do we have a responsibility to inform ourselves about the state of the world? Is the experience of some people valued more highly than that of others? 

Matthew Sweet investigates the ethics of knowledge in Radio 4's round table discussion programme. 

With: Quassim Cassam, philosopher and author of Intellectual Vices. Havi Carel, a philosopher who's worked extensively on imbalances of knowledge in healthcare and other areas. Ian Kidd, philosopher specializing in the ethics of knowledge. Ebony Reid, author of Trapped Lives. Marianna Spring, the BBC's misinformation correspondent 

Producer: Luke Mulhall 

Royal College of Psychiatrists:

Agency in youth mental health

Psyche:

For some with mental illness, it's not always good to talk.

Ethics Untangled:

How Should Clinicians Communicate with Young People Experiencing Mental Health Difficulties? 

DEPTH work: 

Understanding delusional beliefs - How compassion and curiosity can help a polarised society

 Philosophy and Therapy:  

Work discussed in this episode
• Eleanor Byrne, Striking the balance with epistemic injustice in healthcare: the case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis
• Eleanor Byrne, Understanding Long Covid: Nosology, social attitudes and stigma
• Eleanor Byrne, Affective scaffolding and chronic illness
 

BBC Radio 4: Free Thinking

Matthew Sweet explores the secret languages of the internet and beyond, with Marianna Spring, Daniel Herskowitz, Lisa Bortolotti and Hugh Cullimore. 

Podcast: Philosophy of Psychiatry

Discussion based around the notion of mental disorders and how they are viewed in the field. We also discuss the blurred lines between delusions and irrational beliefs, agency in mental health (where Professor Bortolotti talks about one of her studies done on young people in the UK) and how we should be looking into individual agency.  

Podcast: The Philosopher's Nest

On confabulation, the University of Birmingham and the Philosophy Garden

Podcast: Free Thinking - Epistemic Injustice

 Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, was once considered one of the more abstract areas of philosophy, far removed from the concerns of every-day life. Now, philosophers like Miranda Fricker have developed epistemological concepts that can help us recognise, understand, and address areas where disparities in knowledge feed into wider social and political disadvantages, for example indigenous people articulating their relationship with land using Western legal concepts like ‘ownership’ or patients trying to describe symptoms not addressed by medical text books. Shahidha Bari talks with Miranda Fricker, Havi Carel and Constantine Sandis.