Mental Health for All
Andrew Scull, Sonu Shamdasani, Martyn Pickersgill, Norman Lamb

• Saturday 11 June 2016, 5.30PM to 7.30pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
• Tempest Anderson Hall, Yorkshire Museum, Museum Gardens (map)
• Wheelchair accessible

Event details

We all have mental health and the importance of maintaining it is increasingly recognised in public and political spheres. In particular, there are a growing number of campaigns to improve the mental health of young people and a continuing concern that suicide remains the UK’s single biggest cause of death among men under the age of 45.

Join us for a series of talks exploring the nature and scale of the public health challenges across the globe and the best ways of addressing them. How can we build better social and cultural environments that will foster happier and more effective societies? There will be the opportunity to pose your own related questions too.

The talks include:

• The Problem of Chronic Mental Illness
  Andrew Scull discusses the abandonment of the Victorian ‘museums of madness’, and their replacement by what he says is euphemistically called ‘community care’. Are we are no closer than our 19th-century ancestors to solving the problem of how to address the needs of those suffering from serious forms of mental illness?
  
  
• The Place of Psychotherapy in Contemporary Societies
  In many countries psychotherapy is being rolled out and promoted as a prime means of improving mental health and well-being. But what is psychotherapy? Suspended between science, medicine, religion, art and philosophy, the advent of modern psychotherapies represents one of the distinctive features of 20th-century Western societies. Yet their historical study lags behind their societal impact. Sonu Shamdasani explores the ways in which these practices have, and continue to shape, contemporary notions of psychological disorder, well-being and identity itself.
  
  
• Mental Health Services That Don’t Burn Out the Providers
  Psychological therapies - like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) - are increasingly central to the treatment of mental health issues within the NHS. Martyn Pickersgill will argue that the wellbeing of health professionals is key to securing ‘mental health for all’ – yet, it is a surprisingly neglected issue. Join Martyn as he explores how mental health interventions can be funded, planned and delivered in fair and equitable ways.

• Achieving Equality for Mental Health
  Norman Lamb MP will explore how to achieve equality for those suffering mental ill health, with a focus on waiting times, preventative care and improving quality of care.

About the speakers

Andrew Scull was educated at Balliol College Oxford and at Princeton University. He is past president of the Society for the Social History of Medicine and has written extensively on the history of psychiatry. His most recent book, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine, was published by Thames and Hudson in 2015 to great acclaim, and will be issued in paperback later this year.

Professor Sonu Shamdasani is the Vice-Dean (International) of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London (UCL), and the Co-Director of the UCL Health Humanities Centre.

Dr Martyn Pickersgill is Wellcome Trust Reader in Social Studies of Biomedicine in Edinburgh Medical School. He works across the health-related social sciences and medical humanities, and is particularly interested in the sociologies of neuroscience and mental health. Martyn has held grants and fellowships from sponsors such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Leverhulme Trust and Newby Trust. He is the recipient of a Wellcome Trust University Award, and recently received the Henry Duncan Medal from the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Norman Lamb has been the Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk since 2001. He was appointed Minister of State for Care and Support at the Department of Health in September 2012 and served in this position until the end of the Coalition Government in May 2015.  As Health Minister, Norman worked to reform the broken care system and led the drive to integrate health and care, with a greater focus on preventing ill health. He also challenged the NHS to ensure that mental health was treated with the same priority as physical health, with access waiting standards being introduced this year.

Tickets