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

So they're maps of how to start to approach problems of thinking and feeling.

And they evolve ceaselessly, of course, because our culture evolves and the way we think and the edges of what we don't understand evolves.

The DSM, the American one, famously started as a manual for asylum keepers.

So the physicians who were superintendents of asylums began this classification system, famously had only 22 possible diagnoses.

And then it evolved slowly over the 20th century into the DSM-5 we're on now, which has got about 400.

So more and more and more different ways of thinking, which you would expect if you were getting more subtle, more careful, more textured analysis of the problems of thinking and feeling.

So why did you interrupt me when I asked about DSM?

Because you raised it.

So I was saying that, it was fascinating to me that I was having more and more conversations with patients who were

worried that they had one of these problems that's in the DSM and they would approach and they would say that to me, I have generalized anxiety disorder, for example, but then they also were questioning the authority upon which that diagnostic category was based.

And so I was having a lot of conversations trying to wind back and say, well, that's okay to question that authority on which it's based because the DSM and the ICD are culturally specific models of how to think about thinking.

You know, they're not universal.

Absolutely not.

Of course they're not universal.

They're created by a particular community, an intellectual and clinical community, to help solve a set of problems, which is how to help people feel better.

So I feel like we have to approach these things with such care and gentleness and keep reminding ourselves that we all want exactly the same thing, which is to ease mental suffering.

So whether we come from a side of the divide, the increasingly polarized divide, which wants more and more categorization, or if we come from a side of the societal debate who wants less and less, we all want to diminish mental and emotional suffering.

And these are tools to think about those problems.

And my contention in this book is that they're not working very well.

And they're working... I'm seeing more and more people who are more and more distressed for all kinds of reasons.

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