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 that will happen about the way that we're approaching these problems too, which is fine.

So because...

One of the recurring themes, as I'm sure you picked up in this book, is that I really want to celebrate the value of humility in science and in medicine and in medical practice.

And some of the very best doctors I've ever known have been the most humble.

you know, really capable of changing their minds very easily if they're presented with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary of what they thought.

And we could do with a little bit more humility in our discourse around ideas of mental health, because we're according and reifying these concepts, we're according them far too much certainty as if they were categories of nature rather than elements of our culture.

Facts.

Hmm.

The book only comes out today, but you know, you referred to Guardian Long Read that came out a couple of days ago and the responses I've had to that have been really reassuring to me in the sense that my biggest anxiety probably is that some people might take my thesis that these categories

are we give them too much unjustified faith.

We put too much unjustified faith in them.

My thesis that actually they're elements of culture rather than facts of nature, some people might interpret that as that I am somehow trying to say that these problems are not real.

or that mental health, the big rise in mental health problems that we're seeing among people is in some way not real.

And that is definitely not what I'm saying.

That doesn't come across it.

Good.

Because what I've been really gratified with so far is that people on all sides of the debate, or if it is a debate or a discussion, from people who do feel, people I don't agree with, who feel that we've got over-diagnosis, versus people who believe

quite radically that the whole system should just be put in the bin and none of these categories have any validity or utility at all.

Both those ends of the spectrum, I've heard people coming and saying, that was a great piece.

That made a lot of sense.

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