All In The Mind

Acclaimed doctor and broadcaster Lord Robert Winston investigates the mind, music and dementia of composer Maurice Ravel. For copyright reasons, this week's podcast is another feature Love is a Battlefield: When Heidi and Rick Solomon adopted a son raised in the profoundly deprived conditions of a Romanian orphanage, his confronting behaviours sapped every ounce of their unconditional love.

Acclaimed doctor and broadcaster Lord Robert Winston excavates the music and mind of composer Robert Schumann, to see if there was a relationship between the two. Schumann died at just 46 in a mental asylum, with speculation today that he had bipolar disorder. For copyright reasons, this week's podcast is an alternative from our archives, The Moral Mind.

Parents of a severely autistic child can be pushed to breaking point. Do we have unrealistic expectations of what they should be capable of? David and Karen Royko came to make an impossible decision about their son Ben, and share their story with candour and openness.

Neuroscientist by day, novelist by night - David Eagleman has just written an extraordinary little novel about the afterlife. He's also a leading researcher in synesthesia, studying people who taste sounds, hear colours, and live in a remarkable world of sensory cross-talk. He joins Natasha Mitchell in conversation about life, death and the in-between.

Shame, guilt, loss, and grief - giving up a baby at birth can leave a powerful and permanent psychological imprint on a young mother. Countless Australian women without a wedding band were forced to relinquish their babies for adoption. Don't miss these rare and frank reflections from three women, whose lives were deeply affected by the experience.

In Sierra Leone, child soldiers committed acts that words can barely describe. At the war's end, ravaged communities responded to them with terror and stigma. A minority of former child soldiers, many orphaned, have access to reintegration programs. Dance and movement therapist David Alan Harris describes an extraordinary project to respond to the traumatised psyche through engaging the body.

Born into the bloody horror of war, Sudanese rap artist Emmanuel Jal was 9 when he was recruited into the Sudanese Peoples' Liberation Army as a child soldier. Incredibly he survived, and his music reaches a generation of Lost Boys. And next week, a remarkable dance and movement therapist helping former child soldiers in Sierra Leone express and heal the traumas of their psyches through their bodies.

When Professor Irving Kirsch and colleagues got hold of the unpublished data from drug company trials of antidepressants, it hit the headlines. But their analysis – that antidepressants and placebo pills have about the same clinical impact – was widely misreported. Hear it from the horse's mouth, from the stage of the 2009 Happiness and Its Causes Conference.

News of the largest studies on the genetics of autism to date is out, paving the way for genetic risk testing in the future. And, Australian research suggests autistic behaviours can be detected as early as eight months. So should we be screening newborns for neurological disorders like autism? The ethical debate unfolds on All in the Mind.

Impulsive behaviour, anger, mood swings, poor concentration, memory loss. A knock to the head that qualifies as a brain injury can transform your behaviour in unexpected ways. Confronting research suggests acquired or traumatic brain injuries - past and recent - are rife in prison populations, with little to no screening or targeted interventions in place.