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

The fracturing and the labelling and the...

ever smaller diagnostic categories don't seem to be helping us get through that.

So I want to challenge that authority too.

I think in some cases it is, but it's complicated like everything.

So these models of how to think about thinking, we need something like that.

And there's a very famous piece by Ian Hacking for the LRB that was written 10, 12 years ago when the DSM-5 came out, where he has this wonderful line where he says, we need something like this for the purposes of research.

So clearly, if you're gonna do research on how to help people ease their suffering, you need a way of categorizing them into seeing, well, this group got that treatment, and this group got that treatment, and this group got that treatment, and these groups are broadly compatible for these reasons.

So that's how science progresses.

But my problem with the DSM, as I'm laying this issue out of this hypothetical patient, is that this utility in research has slid over to this unjustified faith in the categories as biologically discrete realities, which I encounter in a clinic.

And I'm not convinced that that is helpful to help people get through their problems of thinking, feeling and being.

It's too rigid to allow the adaptability, the flexibility and the optimism with which one can start to address

your difficulties.

So if you, to stick with the same example, if you believe I have generalized anxiety disorder, it's to do with the way my brain is wired, it's to do with things that happened to me in my childhood, I can't change them now,

It's very easy then just to say, well, you just clearly need some kind of medication and then go take that medication.

And I would like to, I try and encourage my patients to think about their problems more in terms of their possibilities and build on their strengths rather than their weaknesses and their vulnerabilities.

So instead of thinking of myself with generalized anxiety disorder, it can be more helpful to think of somebody

who is suffering from extreme anxiety at the moment for all these different reasons, many of which may be approachable and amenable to amelioration.

It depends.

Most people love it.

Most people are just really happy to be listened to and heard.

Showing 121–140 of 523 · page 7 of 27