Podcast: Finding and losing schizophrenia

Posted September 25th 2019

Listen to the latest episode of POMpod where we're joined by award-winning author Nathan Filer and our deputy director, Professor James Walters.

Schizophrenia is a contentious diagnosis and source of often heated debate across the various professions and stakeholders associated with mental health. Some argue that it has outlasted its usefulness as a single diagnosis and should instead be viewed as the extreme end of a ‘psychosis spectrum disorder’.

To unpick the issues, we hosted a live discussion at Bigmoose Coffee Co. in Cardiff. Professor James Walters, deputy director at NCMH interviewed Nathan Filer, an author and former mental health nurse, about his book The Heartland: Finding and Losing Schizophrenia.

At its heart, the book focuses on personal stories from individuals and their families living with a schizophrenia diagnosis. Alongside these stories, Nathan writes a series of essays exploring what these experiences can teach us.

The conversation started with Nathan and James discussing the difficulties of language when talking about mental illness, including the term mental illness. James and Nathan go on to discuss ‘so-called schizophrenia’, the problems around diagnosis, mental health services, medication and research.

Listen

Win a copy of Nathan’s book

We’re giving 5 people the chance to win a copy of The Heartland: Finding and Losing Schizophrenia. There are two ways to enter:

• RT this Tweet on Twitter (that’s fun to say)
• Like this post on Facebook

About the competition

The closing date for the competition is Friday 4 October at 5pm. The winners will be selected at random and contacted via the social media channel they enter on by Tuesday 8 October. We will select 3 people from Twitter and 2 people from Facebook.

Winners will have 7 days to claim their prize by sending us their name and address* for us to post the book. If we do not receive a response within this time we will select another winner. We will announce the winners on Twitter and Facebook once the prizes have been claimed.

Please note that this competition is only open to those resident in the UK. If you enter from a Twitter account set to private or from a Facebook account with certain privacy settings activated we may not see your entry. You may only enter once on each channel (so if you RT on Twitter and share on Facebook, you’ve got two chances to win).

* This information will only be used for administering the prize.

This competition is not sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with Facebook or Twitter.