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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

So if you scale that up across the country, it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of conversations happening up and down the country in GP clinics.

And so when I put the subtitle of this book, and I'll come on to your question, Making Sense of Mental Health, it's as much about how I have made sense of mental health

issues over the last 30 years in medicine, 20 years as a GP, because for whatever reason, good or bad, society seems to have decided that GPs are the people that we are to go to in the first instance.

for these kinds of issues.

And other societies and other cultures do things differently, but our society seems to want GPs to deal with these things, first of all.

And we can talk about the advantages and disadvantages of that later.

But the reason I wrote this book now is because all my books are written because there's a book out there that has not yet been written that I want to read.

So all my books are written for me because I want to read that book, which nobody's yet done.

And so the intended audience is always myself.

And I was being struck more and more and more by a really fascinating paradox, which is that I was encountering more and more people

with the unfounded conviction that the categories we apply to states of mind have a fixed biological reality in the sense that they are facts of nature or facts of neurobiology rather than dimensions of being or aspects of culture.

That's a really big point to get across, so I'll elaborate it or... Maybe give a hard example of the kind of

So for example, a hard example might be, I might meet somebody who would come to me and they would say, I need you to help me with my generalized anxiety disorder.

Whereas 20 years ago, somebody would have come to me and said, I feel really anxious.

And that is the difference across that 20 years of my career.

So there's some wonderful advantages to the rise in this kind of diagnostic language.

You know, it's destigmatizing, it removes the sort of burden of shame that so many people seem to feel attached to their feelings when they can medicalize it in a way.

It seems to offer access perhaps to accommodations in work or in education, which are helpful.

It offers access to a community of others, a fellowship of people who have gone through similar problems in the past.

And so it offers all these positives.

Showing 61–80 of 523 · page 4 of 27