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CONWAY HALL DETAILS
Doors: 6.30pm
Talks start: 7.00pm
Close: 9.00pm
Venue: Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, London WC1R 4RL.
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ONLINE DETAILS
Tune in from 7-9pm. We will send you a link to access before the event.
Is mental health awareness making us feel worse? with Dr Lucy Foulkes
Conversations about mental health are now happening everywhere: in the media, at schools and universities, in workplaces and at home. Yet the more we talk about it, the more there are reports of a mental health crisis. Is it possible that campaigns intended to improve our mental health might be making us feel worse? In this talk, Dr Lucy Foulkes unpacks this delicate question, and considers what might be a more helpful way to understand – and talk about – this often-controversial subject.
Dr Lucy Foulkes is an academic psychologist specialising in adolescent mental health. She is a research fellow at the University of Oxford and an honorary lecturer at UCL. She is author of the book What Mental Illness Is Really Is... And What It Isn’t (Penguin Random House, 2021), which explores how we talk about mental health and illness, particularly in adolescence.
What the body can tell us about mental health? with Dr Camilla Nord
How are you feeling right now? To answer this question, we tap into our sense of the internal state of our bodies. This sense is called “interoception”: a channel of sensation that goes from the heart, lungs, stomach (and many other places), to the brain, and back again. At every moment in time, our brain is receiving information from inside the body. And it doesn’t just passively listen: it interprets, suppresses, and strengthens signals, building your own personal model of your inside world. Traditionally, your mental health was considered separable from your physical health. But interoception underpins both mental and physical health, helping us figure out what we’re feeling, and whether we need to urgently change that—whether that feeling is pain, hunger, fear, or fatigue. Many different types of mental health conditions are accompanied by changes to interoception: differences in sensation and interpretation of bodily signals. These changes to interoception cut across traditional diagnostic categories, including divisions between mental and physical health, and suggest new ways of treating mental health problems via the body.
Dr Camilla Nord is a neuroscientist who leads the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Her lab investigates how brain changes can cause mental health problems, with the aim of translating techniques and models from neuroscience to new, improved treatments. She is also Fellow and Director of Studies at Christ’s College Cambridge. Camilla studied Physiology and Psychology at Magdalen College, Oxford as an undergraduate before completing her doctorate at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and honours, including the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Young Investigator Award, and named as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science. Her first book, The Balanced Brain, will be published with Penguin Press later this year.
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