Gavin Francis

speaker

523 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 13 Jun

Gavin Francis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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London Review Bookshop Podcast · Gavin Francis & Philippe Sands: The Unfragile Mind · 13 Jun 2026 podcast

And it's kind of, it's really, we all want to make a world which is as safe and supportive for children as we possibly can.

And that

It was a small survey, a thousand children done by Channel 4 for a documentary.

So I don't know, you could argue about the methodology of it, but essentially there is starting to be, and this is only in the very early days of the research, but there is starting to be some quite worrying research emerging

that is so counterintuitive, which is that mental health awareness campaigns may occasionally, if they're done badly, we don't know exactly how you do them well, how you do them badly, but they seem to sometimes make mental health worse.

So if you get a whole load of kids and you give them a mental health awareness program, there seems to be some cases in the literature whereby then you go back a year later and the ones who had the mental health awareness program are feeling worse.

And they're reporting more distress.

And they're unhappier than the ones who didn't get any.

So there obviously needs to be a lot more research into why that might be.

Was it just that campaign was done very badly?

Or is it that it was in some way encouraging kids to dwell on things that maybe the ones who didn't get the mental health awareness campaign weren't?

I don't know.

And as someone whose only interest is easing suffering and helping have a supportive, nourishing community for our children,

I'm just fascinated by how that plays out because that's just emerging.

And we know that, for example, in adults,

That has now been definitively shown that rushing to debrief and do trauma counseling after a trauma can often exacerbate feelings.

So there's a very famous case done with women who'd suffered atrocities in the war in Bosnia who had trauma counseling and their problems later were worse than ones who didn't have trauma counseling in terms of long-term enduring reported effects.

So, and Bruce Perry talks about this a lot as somebody whose whole life is talking about trauma in children, that actually debriefing children after traumas is counterproductive and usually worsens their long-term outcome.

And the thing that helps most in children is supportive and loving relationships.

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