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

You articulated a lot of what I think about this.

And for me, that is the greatest possible boon that I could get out of this book.

If I could get people from all the kind of spectrums of these discussions to agree

that the system we use should be focused on the patient easing suffering.

It should be focused, we should be thinking more about relationships and the social and economic situations that make people ill and unwell.

And we should think far less about serotonin levels and pharmaceutical prescriptions.

And so if that is an outcome for this book, that people realize that humans are embedded in networks of relationships, and relationships have always been far more important to our mental health than brain chemicals, that will be a big win for me.

No, we only met before the event.

Yeah.

Well, just, I think you'll probably have more to say about the forensic situation, but you know, the DSM, even as recently as 1980, the DSM-III said that it was explicitly not to be used for insurance or forensic purposes.

So these tables were set up specifically to exclude the situation that I would now argue is their only function.

So they were set up in order to create diagnostic tables, which would point to causes, which would lead to specific treatments.

And we now know that they don't do that.

So we're 46 years down the line from the DSM-3.

They haven't done that.

So for me, it's really fascinating.

And I completely agree with you that in a forensic situation, you need to have something like the DSM.

because you have to have something that people can argue over in court about, does it meet this criterion or does it not?

And similarly for research, do they make it into that study or do they not?

You need something objective like that.

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