All In The Mind

For some individuals living with psychosis, art-making becomes an act of necessity, a way to bring coherence to experiences that threaten to overwhelm. We meet an artist whose hallucinatory episodes serve as inspiration for paintings and drawings, as we learn about the fascinating history of outsider art.

Is there anything different about the brains of extraordinary creative geniuses like Michelangelo, Coleridge or Mozart? World renowned psychiatrist and doctor of English Renaissance Literature Dr Nancy Andreasen unravels the 'creative brain' and explores how we can foster creativity in ourselves and throughout our society.

Until the 18th century epilepsy was associated with the supernatural or seen as the work of the devil, and it continues to be surrounded by social stigma. There's still a hard core of sufferers who aren't helped by medication - despite the plethora of new drugs being developed. Lynne Malcolm speaks with a brave young girl who turned to brain surgery after years of daily seizures, a woman whose life has been transformed by nerve stimulator implanted in her chest and a geneticist who gives us hope for the future.

Faces are the most important biological stimuli we see and we've evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to the most minute changes in another person's face. But what happens when our brain's ability to recognise the human face breaks down? In All in the Mind this week, some intriguing research on how our brains process faces, and we hear one inspiring woman's story of what it feels like not to even recognise her family and friends, and what strategies she uses to adapt to her condition of 'face blindness'.

Dorothy Rowe has always seen herself as an outsider, yet this psychologist and prolific author is considered one of the 50 wisest people in the UK and her many books continue to sell like hot cakes. Depression, she says, is an intolerable prison we build for ourselves, but we can escape by choosing to change the way we interpret our lives. Hear her controversial yet heartfelt views on the 'prison of depression' in this frank conversation with Lynne Malcolm.

Do you privately shake with nerves or shyly blush when the attention is on you? Most people experience some form of shyness but others are so immobilised by the fear of being judged negatively that they can barely function. Social phobia is the third most common mental illness after depression and substance abuse. We hear about one woman's 20 year struggle with social anxiety and some recent scientific findings about the brain activity associated with this disorder.

The practice of petrol sniffing is devastating some Australian Aboriginal communities, with some kids starting to inhale petrol fumes as young as six years old. But amazingly very little was known about the effect sniffing petrol has on the brain until recently. Lynne Malcolm speaks with a scientist whose research is beginning to cast light on a problem which has been too easy to sweep under the carpet. And we hear from an Aboriginal mental health worker who takes computerised card games out into the community to test the brain function of her people.

The majority of asylum seekers held in Australia's immigration detention centres are men. Detention centres impose severe restrictions and for men long-term incarceration can be devastating. Aamer Sultan is a doctor and refugee and he believes the three years he spent in detention changed the core of his identity. The director of the NSW Institute of Psychiatry, Dr Louise Newman, assists some of those critically disturbed by their incarceration. Together they offer insight into the impact of long-term detention on men.

The prospect of human clones walking amongst us is a while off yet. Some argue that human reproductive cloning is inevitable, others suggest our moral sensibilities will hold us back even when the technology is ripe. But whatever our brave future holds for us, ethicists are already asking what it might be like to grow up a clone? Can we predict what the social and psychological impacts of being born a 'mini-me' will be - an exact genetic copy of just one other? From identical twins and stepchildren to the progeny of famous parents, Psychiatrist Stephen Levick and other guests join Natasha Mitchell, and embark on a remarkable thought experiment to find out.

Cotard's syndrome is the belief that you have died, and for sufferers it is a terrifying state. Delusions can take many forms, from widespread paranoia to a specific and singular delusion - you might think an impostor has replaced your spouse. These misbeliefs are commonly associated with schizophrenia, but they can also occur in people with brain injuries, Huntington's and Parkinson's disease and dementia. The Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science is seeking to explain delusions by developing a model of how we all come to accept or reject beliefs. We see how this research is progressing.