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 I repeatedly argue in this book that antidepressants do help.

We know that lithium is a really effective medication for bipolar illness.

And we know that there's lots of situations in which prescriptions are absolutely life-saving and many situations in which therapy is absolutely life-saving.

And so I'm in no way...

I'm in no way ever even approaching the implication that because these problems are cultural, they are in some way not real.

They absolutely are real.

And it's just because everything is cultural in terms of our mental experience.

We use language, which is a cultural phenomenon to make sense of the world and that massively influences how we see the world and how our roads to get better and our roads to happiness might be.

So I want to reassure you about that.

Thank you for the question about identities.

And you asked in particular about how I approach issues relating, for example, to gender dysphoria.

You know, I think it's a really interesting debate, a discussion our society is having not about gender dysphoria or trans issues.

What's interesting to me is that because of the NHS, the argument is about resource allocation and scarcity.

And so

the great distress that comes as people say, I have to perform my distress in order to get the treatment I need.

But that is because we have an NHS which is struggling for resources.

And so if you're in a different resource setting, that question goes away because in a lot of the world, people

You could argue they shouldn't have to, but they raise funds for and pay for their own gender reassignment treatment, because that's the way the health care system works in their country.

And so those sort of discussions kind of melt away in those other countries.

And I wrote a book which did touch on my experience caring for patients, trans patients, a few years ago now.

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