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

There's a wonderful cultural psychiatrist here in London who I've never met called Dinesh Bugra.

I've read his textbook of cultural psychiatry.

He's got all these wonderful kind of scenarios where he describes discussing depression, say, with a group of Punjabi women in London.

And he's got an article where he says, all these women I spoke to recognize the feelings of sadness, of lack of motivation, of lack of energy, but none of them characterized it as a mental or emotional problem.

They characterized it as a spiritual problem.

They said they would never go to a doctor with that.

They knew exactly what he was talking about, but they would choose a different, as you say, a spiritual elder in some way to approach with those kinds of problems.

And so our society is quite medicalized.

There's a lot of people don't have access to some kind of clergy that they trust.

And so a lot of these more philosophical existential questions are coming to doctors, which can be good if you've got a doctor with plenty of time.

And I love chewing the fat about the meaning of life with my patients and, you know, casting a line into their life to find out what their motivations are, what gets them up in the morning.

But I recognize that, again, back to the system under pressure, a lot of GPs don't have time for that.

And then we're left with, well, where do they go?

who's left in our society, who's left in our community who can take on these kinds of questions, which are the only important questions.

You know, what is the meaning of life?

How do I feel better about things?

How do I get better at loving and being part of the community of people that support me?

How do I get rid of this monkey on my back of misery or depression?

How do I stop feeling so frightened every time I step over my front door?

You know, these are fundamental questions about the nature of life and motivation.

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