Between the Lines

Joining us on this episode is Professor Sir John Strang a leading clinical academic who has conducted extensive addiction research studies and has worked with governments to improve responses to problems of addiction and related complications. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is an autobiographical account written by Thomas De Quincey, about his laudanum addiction and its effect on his life. The Confessions was "the first major work De Quincey published and the one that won him fame almost overnight".

Joining us on this episode is academic and consultant psychiatrist Dr Lade Smith CBE.  Lade is  the Clinical Director for the Forensic Service at SLaM and won Psychiatrist of the Year in 2019. Together we discuss Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Catch-22 is satirical novel by American writer Joseph Heller, published in 1961. The work centres on Captain John Yossarian, an American bombardier stationed on a Mediterranean island during World War II, and chronicles his desperate attempts to stay alive.

Joining us on this episode of Between the Lines is Dr Dan Harwood to discuss Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. Dan is a consultant in old age psychiatry at Croydon Memory Service. What begins as the record of W. G. Sebald’s own journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, from Lowestoft to Bungay, becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present. From Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, to fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms, the result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.

Joining us on Between the Lines this episode is Dr Alistair Santhouse to discuss Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Dr Alastair Santhouse is a Consultant Psychiatrist in neuropsychiatry and liaison psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital and Guy’s Hospital. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir, Man's Search For Meaning, has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. 

Joining us on this Between the Lines episode is Dr Jacqueline Phillips Owen. We discuss The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante. This book is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.

Joining us on Between the Lines this episode is Professor Sir Simon Wessely. We discuss Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning (1992). Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions.  Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.

Joining us on Between the Lines this week is consultant psychiatrist Dr Lisa Conlan. We discuss A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor by John Berger (published 1967).