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

But there are also negatives in the sense that

diagnostic categories are not facts of nature.

And we can discuss the history of psychiatry shows that, that they are interpretations of culture or emanations of culture.

And the dangerous thing about labeling and some diagnostic categories is that they can become self-fulfilling in the sense that if somebody comes to me and says, I feel really anxious, I've got something to start working with.

If somebody comes to me and say, I've got generalized anxiety disorder,

I'm like, right, how do I start?

So before I even approach your anxiety, I've got to deconstruct this conviction that you've already got in some way a broken brain.

So people have got into this assumption that I would argue is unfounded by any neurobiology that our states of mind are categories that can become fixed.

And I wanted to push back to say that it's much more fluid than that.

Our minds are much more fluid and adaptable than that.

And these categories are not as trustworthy as that.

Yes.

So what was really interesting to me, you asked me about an interesting patient that would be an example, and I use this general anxiety disorder as one example.

So what's fascinating to me too is that I'm encountering more and more people

who have the sense that they are suffering from a fixed category, but they also are starting to distrust the labels and the authority in which they're based.

So they're quite angry about

the DSM, say, the fact that committees of Western psychiatrists.

So these are books that are created by authorities within the world of psychiatry.

One is more American-based, one is more ostensibly international, but it's very European-based, ICD.

And they are maps of how to think about thinking.

Showing 81–100 of 523 · page 5 of 27