All In The Mind

BBC Baghdad correspondent Andrew North was struck down with a debilitating illness after reporting on the US invasion in Iraq, paralysed with acute pain as his immune system attacked his nervous system. After witnessing pain in so many others, he was forced to confront his own. Over two programs, Andrew explores the perplexing experience of pain. In Part 1 - how power, or lack of it, shapes an individual's experience. All in the Mind's podcast this week features The Nature of Consciousness Debate with Paul Davies, Susan Blackmore and David Chalmers.

Cases of filicide and infanticide confront us to our core -- but what leads women to kill their own children? And, from cognitive therapy to chemical castration -- most treatments for sexual offenders target men. Do women offenders require a different approach? Three female forensic specialists join Natasha Mitchell with a rare glimpse into a world riddled with taboo and revulsion.

Intuitively we sense that nature relaxes us -- even small pockets of green in the concrete urban jungle seem to make a difference. But finding good scientific evidence for how and why has been more difficult -- until now. Crime rates, academic performance, aggression and even ADHD. Could a bit of greening make all the difference? And, ecology on the couch -- a self described 'ecotherapist' with novel techniques.

Of course Proust wasn't a neuroscientist. Or was he? Science writer Jonah Lehrer argues 19th century artists from Paul Cezanne to Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein to Walt Whitman anticipated some of the great discoveries about the mind and brain in their ground-breaking art and prose -- realisations that science is only rediscovering now. He's calling for a radical rethink of truth, art and science. Art can make science better, he reckons.

Psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela was on South Africa's historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chairing many of its tortuous public hearings about atrocities committed in the apartheid era. In an unprecedented dialogue she met with one of apartheid's most abhorrent killers, in jail, to explore forgiveness, psychological redemption and the symbolic language of trauma. She joins Natasha Mitchell in a feature interview.

Psychiatrist and neuroscientist, John Mann, has a grisly job. He wants to understand why some deeply depressed souls take their own lives, yet others resist. His team's post-mortem studies suggest a distinct neurobiology of suicide. And, for those left behind, might there be a definite 'biology of sadness' too? Also, a bereft father writes to his dead son, and asks 'why?'

A rare glimpse from the inside. An Australian neuroscientist and an animal welfarist share their experiences of working together on animal experimental and ethics committees. Personal philosophies are challenged, compromises are made, and change happens through dialogue. Good animal welfare equals good science, they argue. But does good science always underpin animal welfare? And, a vet turned animal welfare researcher, now driving the effort to improve methods of pain reduction for lab animals.

Like many young Australians in their early 20s, writer Julie Deakin headed to Europe for her first 'Big Adventure'. But holidaying in Hungary with her sister she found herself diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour and scheduled for immediate surgery, in a land whose language she didn't speak. It was the start of an eight-year saga before her death in 1998, confronting a tumour that wouldn't go away, and the finality of a passionate young life. This week, Julie's story.

From the collective paranoia of Cold War hysteria to the medicated, disordered mind - sociologist and performance artist Jackie Orr has penned a passionate and political history of panic. She delved into the rich archives of the war-time psyche, confronted her own panic attacks, and even enrolled in the clinical trial of a drug for panic disorder, in her quest to excavate our panicky past and present.

'How do I get them to talk?' Hinted-at events, listening to the silence, roundabout stories. Mental health and other professionals inexperienced at working with Indigenous clients struggle with the limits of their cultural awareness, with language barriers and with the historical legacies of mistrust and misunderstanding. Cultural competency is more than sharing a joke. So what is it? And how can psychologists, doctors and others acquire it?