To paraphrase the old saying of the 50s ‘well at least you’ve got your mental health’ seems like something to offer thanks for (and we all know how powerful gratitude is for mental health) but we’ll be trying to take it much deeper that you will normally find in a festival – we have neuroscientist Prof Catherine Loveday and psychologist Claudia Hammond in the field to help.
We'll also be taking a tour around the whole idea of diagnosis. We will have an eagle-eyed view of this from a psychiatric point of view as we welcome off his psychiatrist’s chair bounced straight onto the main stage, eminent psychiatrist Alastair Santhouse. Yes, he will explore the most important part of our health perhaps – our state of mind. We have Lucy Fowlkes who’s bravely tackling this other area of nuance in diagnosis as she considers from the question of difficulty in diagnosis – how can it be improved, how are we talking about mental health, are we even talking about it in the right way?
Pragya Agarwal will help us all to get some perspective on our own heads by presenting her new work (world exclusive, lads) which is to look at how attached we are to gendered representation of emotions.
We have all had a lot thrown at us, so much, too, too much. And did we give ourselves time to process the trauma of life as we know it being turned upside down? I worry we didn’t. I worry we ran full pelt back into what we did before impatient with our minds, our memories and our anxieties that they wouldn’t just snap into shape as we needed them to be in. With these thoughts in mind we have invited to the field trauma expert Jennifer Wild (Go Wild for Prof Wild) via Oxford University to help us understand what just happened.
Looks like breath is BIG for 2022, so we will do as many sessions as we can to see how it helps us to get out of our heads - why not see what your breath could be doing better for you with Juliet Russell. Perhaps it can turbocharge your health, or your resilience or failing that can it help you get into the lake water – we have Caroline Saxon (Champion Ice Queen of the Water) on hand to help. And breathe.
Can you prime yourself for an adventure? Always a fabulous way to get out of your head and if there was a neuroscientist of adventure they would surely say we are suffering from a deficit in our adventuring. So we are so pleased to ensure we can help you think about your relationship with adventure and how to plan one from going to listen to Belinda Kirk (outdoors adventure, supremo, author of Adventure Revolution: The life-changing power of choosing challenge, founder of the Big Night Out) or if you literally want to get all the stuff out of your head then why not write it all down with Cathy Rentzenbrink – the UK’s most superb teacher of memoir writing. She can help you sift through all that is uniquely yours and to transform it into story. One of many ways to use your voice in-festival – which we always encourage – could this be the year choirs come roaring back with a vengeance, and talking of things we hope Juliet R will be involved with – please don’t miss Jeffrey Boakye’s Musical Truths on the history of modern black music in 28 songs with our own Juliet in the chair – a huge piece for us…
