YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. Gwen Adshead

lines on the record: 37
first: 2021-06-25
most recent: 2021-06-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There is good work that's happening there. I don't want to suggest there isn't good work. There really is good work done by some fantastic colleagues in the prison service, both psychologists but also prison mental health service in the NHS. But we need so much more, so much more. And it's in all our interest that those men and women get that help.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd like people who don't need to be in prison to be diverted away from prison. So, for example, we need many more psychiatric beds. We've closed a lot of psychiatric beds and we find ourselves in a situation where men and women with mental health problems who've committed probably fairly minor offences are put into prisons for their own safety. And that is inhumane in a wealthy country like Britain, the twenty first century we know better, so we should be diverting more people into psychiatric beds and providing more psychiatric beds for people who need it. But we also need to be improving the amount of psychological therapies in our prisons, particularly around substance misuse, but also offending. We need to be doing more work with people who committed offences and helping giving people space and time to think about their violence and their cruelty and how they want to live different lives in the future.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's true, and although perhaps many other people are not wishing that they're back in Broadmoor at that point. But I think the most important thing is that I have found is to remember that if I'm feeling irritated with someone, the chances are that there's something going on in that person that's irritating to them. There's something that's getting under their skin, and it may well be painful, and it may well be that if they're getting snippy, it's because you're approaching something that's painful or difficult. And so the important thing is not to take it personally, but to just take a step back and think about what might be going on here. Why is this conversation difficult? Is there something about what we're talking about that is painful or difficult for you? It sounds as though perhaps there's something about what's happening here between us that's annoying you. And something about being a”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The important thing is not to take them not for that not to become the focus of the work. If the work was to become all about my emotions, then we would have lost sight of what I was doing there. But what I know is that it's very important that I need a place where I go and process my experience. And not only do I do that still with other colleagues, but I also provide those kind of reflector spaces for colleagues who do this work. So we have somewhere to process what we feel about the stories we hear.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a very important part of the training to anticipate them. I think the first step is to acknowledge that they're there. I mean, it what would be fatal is to somehow pretend that they're not there, or even to assume that one shouldn't have painful or difficult feelings when dealing with matters that are painful and difficult. I mean, it's entirely reasonable to feel rather disturbed by hearing people talk about having done horrible things or talk about people who are frightening or whatever it happens to be. So I think the first thing is to normalize those emotions. And then in the training, what we do is we spend a lot of time reflecting on those emotions. And just to my mind, what I tell myself is that this is to do with the work. I'm having these emotions because I'm doing this work, so there's nothing strange about that. And in trying to do good work, I try to do good work on my own emotions.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's really what again what Eileen and I have tried to do in the book is to try and present in a kind of almost like short films on a page with images and words to convey the kind of people that I meet and how they are very far from the kind of grim monsters that are often put out there on show the stories that people tell the way that people talk about people who've killed repeatedly or the people who've killed when mentally ill. Sometimes the way we talk about them is very cruel and pretty heartless. And what I was really hoping is that people would come with me and come and meet some of these people and see that we have perhaps more in common than you might think. And although that's a scary idea, actually that's also a potentially hopeful idea that actually perhaps we could look and find the more pro-social, the more hopeful parts of this person.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just to remember that this is a person who they may look or different to you, they may sound different to you, but they may well have very similar interests, the things that move them and are important to them, may be very similar to the ones that are important to you.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's one I think that the story of Gabriel is one that I and I spent a lot of time on because it's about a young man who comes to this country as a refugee from a war torn country in Africa and has undergone all sorts of traumas as a child and as a migrating refugee gets to this country and struggles struggles with life here and unfortunately becomes mentally unwell and in the context of a mental illness a very serious mental illness attacks somebody and thankfully doesn't hurt them doesn't kill them but causes enormous alarm and distress and what comes out of Gabriel's story I think for me is partly that we need to look behind labels of mental illness to look at sometimes the trauma behind mental illness but also sometimes it's important just to keep going”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and I think the point about it is whether that dash of narcissism, which can be associated with a kind of charisma and a kind of willingness to take up leadership and a kind of sort of hopefulness and about a kind of energy, if that's balanced with compassion, with self-reflection, intelligence, an idea of social relationships in the importance of social relationships, then that narcissism could be turned to good purpose. I think what we're worried about is when you've got a personality structure where there's only narcissism and there's not much else. And there's a kind of emptiness behind the very brittle, grandiose facade. And a lot of workers in this field, researchers in this field argue that behind a brittle grandiose, I'm the greatest in you all are losers, facade is a kind of emptiness, a kind of vulnerability, a kind of a kind of gap where a person should be.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“become less narcissistic and more aware of other people's minds, and there are some kinds of therapies out there which we think may be hopeful in helping people become a bit more aware of seeing other people as people.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think narcissism and narcissistic personality disorders become a growth interest in the last ten years or so, and I think that's, there's lots of reasons for that, but at least one is because a lot of this is about self-presentation and the stories we tell of ourselves. And arguably, narcissism is when we get so preoccupied with our sense of self that we lose sight of the reality of other people's selfhoods. And a lot of so I think there is a kind of ordinary normal developmental narcissistic stage that people do grow out of as they grow a more of a social self. But I think the pathological version of this is people who really don't see other people as real, where other people are just have walk-on parts in their particular personal drama. And one of the, again, the 64,000 dollar questions is whether you can help such people.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“in a that you can't always help everybody. There are probably some people for whom it may not be possible to help and get them to change their minds for the better.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Downloading of child pornography, I was keen to touch on because it is a massive, massive problem. We have millions and millions of people looking at pornography, and of those millions and millions of people quite a significant number are looking at child pornography, and some of them are downloading it, and a few, only a sub fraction of them are getting caught. And the courts are very busy dealing with people who are downloading pornography, child pornography, and we need to have a think about what to do with them. But the other thing to just go back to your point is that I wanted also to make it clear that although it's my experience that if we offer people help, they often will take it. Not everybody will take it. Not everybody will take the chance. Some people say, no, I'm not interested. I don't have a problem. It's your problem, not my problem. And there's not much I can do about that. And I and my colleagues can do about that. So I wanted to be true to the fact that...”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wanted to, obviously Eileen and I wanted to include a full range of different kinds of offences and offenders, as I said earlier on, homicide is actually very rare event in every average year we only have about 600 homicides and very few of them will necessarily come to secure psychiatric care and only a small percentage will have mental health problems. So we wanted to include other kinds of offense that people like me tend to get involved in. So stalking is one. And I particularly wanted to include a female stalker because I've been struck with the work that I've done in female prisons by the numbers of women who are serving sentences for stalking behavior which seems to be a bit difficult to treat. And stalking behaviors are quite difficult to treat, I think, and there's quite a lot of debate about how best to encourage somebody who's stalking to give up that behaviour.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'd like people to take away from the story of Tony is that people can't always be defined just by their actions, that if they”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first sign that somebody is in pain, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're violent or cruel, it's just that anger is sometimes the first sign that somebody is in deep, deep pain. And being thoughtful about that is a really important part of the task of training as a therapist.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and here is a man who became mentally unwell in prison and then was transferred to a secure psychiatric hospital for treatment. And I think what I learned is how careful you have to be when exploring painful and difficult issues. And that may sound desperately obvious, but actually it's easy to go in too quickly and too deep. What I've learned as a psychotherapist is we have to pace the work and not push too much on people's defences, not expose people too quickly. When I was junior trainee, I would ask people about what they'd done without really thinking about how disturbing that might be for them. And I think what I've learned since is that it's important to go carefully and also to be mindful that if you cause somebody pain, they may react with anger. Anger is often a first.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“various kinds of paranoid mental illness, but it may be that women are more resilient. It may be that something about feminine gender roles that helps protect women against using violence as a solution to emotional conflict.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is a Nobel Prize winning question, Linda, and if I were able to answer that, no, I'd be very excited. But I think, and it really is a puzzle because, of course, the vast majority of people with a Y chromosome will never kill anyone. Homicide is a very low base rate event. The fact that it doesn't seem that way is because every single one is reported, and that's rightly so because it's a disaster for the individuals, everybody involved, tragedy and dreadful. But actually, it's a very rare event and a very unusual way for people to break the criminal law, and most people with a Y chromosome will not do it. So quite why eighty five percent or ninety five percent of those who do kill have a Y chromosome is an interesting question. And at least one number of answers have been is there something about men that's a bit more vulnerable? Perhaps they're more vulnerable to substance misuse, more vulnerable.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which might then push you over into violence. So what we're arguing in the book is we need to do much more for parental mental health, and we also need to do much more for children who are traumatized.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well there are lots of risk factors for violence as we've already said, but I do think that one of the things that comes across very strongly to me in the work that I've done is unresolved childhood trauma and distress. And I think it's worth labouring this a little bit because nobody's suggesting for a moment that this excuses people who've done horrible things and it is also the case that not everybody who's exposed to childhood trauma and abuse will go on to become violent, far from it. Nevertheless it does look as though for some people perhaps some vulnerable people exposure to a lot of kind of childhood adversity so that might be having a parent with a mental illness, having a parent in prison, physical abuse, neglect, emotional neglect, these kind of risk factors seem to be risk factors for the kind of later states of mind.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things together might build a much more positive pro social kind of relationship with other people, and that's the kind of state of mind that we think is very important to reducing violence risk in the future, that sense of being pro socially connected.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, well, and I think the reason is, you can imagine it was a memorable quote because, and it came up in a context where he and I were discussing what the purpose of the treatment was. And because clearly there's no kind of treatment that can change the past. But what most psychotherapists who work with violent offenders would argue is that we're not really thinking about changing the past, we're thinking about changing the future. And what we're doing when we're working with violent offenders is we're hoping, yes, to improve their mental health, but because that's good for them, but it's good for them because we'll also hopefully go to reduce their risk, that actually if you improve people's mental health, if you prove their sense of well-being, that may be a powerful contributor to, for example, to not misusing substances, to perhaps being less angry or being less frightened.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They can come out, and they can be very powerful drivers for violence. But the vast majority of people who commit acts of violence wouldn't be described as either deceitful or callous or an emotional. And interestingly, there have been quite a number of review studies which have not found a relationship between violence and lack of empathy. So a bit unexpected.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, I would say that deceitfulness and lack of empathy in a kind of particularly cruel state of mind these are the kind of features that we associate with the concept of psychopathy, which is a kind of very severe personality disorder. Now, we don't know, because we don't know all that much about sericilla is because they're quite unusual, we don't know if they're all would meet criteria for psychopathy. It's possible. But we do know that not all violent offenders are psychopaths by any means. In fact, the best data we have suggests that probably no more than between a quarter and a third of people who are repeatedly violent would meet criteria for psychopathy. So and that's and that really fits because a lot of violence is, as we were mentioning earlier, is to do with relationships between people and strong, painful emotions like anger and fear.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interestingly, quite a number of serial killers in the last ten, fifteen years have been healthcare professionals. And that's probably because of access. It's because you, when you've got access to vulnerable people.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly across time, it's possible that we may be more able to detect them than we used to be. So it may well be that the internet, the development of and the development of digital footprints and the use internet and satellite tracking and mobile phones and things have made it much harder for people just to disappear whereas in big, big countries like the states, like Russia, like China, possibly in India too, it was easier, you might be able to kill and then vanish and disappear in another state a long way away and nobody would know and then you could kill again depending a little bit on what the reason for the killing was. But as far as anybody knows, and the data is really woolly, so I don't want to hold, I don't want to be held to this too closely, but as far as anybody knows, serial killing is less frequent than it used to be. But we still do get people turning up very occasionally, killing lots of people.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it is very interesting, a very interesting topic because I didn't know before Eileen and I started writing this book that there actually is a kind of definition which is about number and the number is three, the magic number is three, which is, you know, you want to imagine the committee that sat around deciding that. One is not, two is not three. The magic number for serial killing, very strange. But three is the number that is internationally recognized, and that's a number that people who do research on serial killers use. So on that basis, there's quite a number of people who kill three or more people. This doesn't, of course, include spree killing where people include multiple people simultaneously. That's a completely different other kind of homicide. And it's quite difficult to get good quality data about serial killing because it's possible that”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“by young poor men. So the first two risk factors for violence, the commonest risk factors are being young and male. But of course that doesn't take you very quick in terms of trying to assess violence risk because that's a lot of people and of course a lot of young men who will never be violent in their lives. So being young male is a kind of statistical risk factor but doesn't really tell you anything very much. Now we know that substance misuse, alcohol and illicit drugs particularly cocaine anything makes you paranoid basically amphetamines another drug that makes you paranoid these drugs particularly the perpetrator is armed.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reasons that people are interested in evil is that they know deep down that probably each one of us has the potential to do something terrible if all the risk factors lined up right, and that if you understand that, then you can approach these people with a different kind of eye. Yeah, I found that bicycle lock metaphor to be absolutely just very insightful, and I was struck by a couple of the stories where the trigger to open the lock was perhaps something like saying so long instead of goodbye. So I think, you know, kind of it'd be useful just to hear a bit more about the common risk factors for violence and you write in the book putting it bluntly, most violence in the world is committed by young poor men. Yes, that's correct. There are very few societies across the world where the majority of violence is not carried out.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also because I wanted to try and get to the sort of pithyness of the interest that I know that everybody has. One of the reasons that I wanted to write this book is that I know that I work in a world, that everybody is interested and everybody has an opinion on. So I had come to understand evil as a state of mind that anybody might get into in the right circumstances and if the right risk factors are in place. So we talk in the book about a kind of bicycle lock metaphor, which is actually an idea developed by a wonderful colleague of mine called Peter Aylward. But we developed it in the book as a way of trying to understand how risk factors for violence can come together and unleash something terrible which can sometimes take both the perpetrator and the victim a bit by surprise. But I think really the main reason for wanting to write this book was because I think one of the”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was actually used in reality every character is a composite of many people like similar to the person described. And it was very important in terms of privileging both the perpetrator but also the families of victims who've been affected by the perpetrator's actions. I would say it was very effective because even though I knew they were composites, I still felt it was a story arc in every chapter. So I want to get to some of those. But first, I want to just sort of help our listeners understand this area a bit more. So you describe that people can be both fascinated and repulsed by evil. So tell me about the title of your book. Oh yes, well I wanted to call this book, or the rather when I was first working on it many years ago, when I first had the idea for a book like this, I wanted to call it a short book about evil, partly because I didn't want to write a long book.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“do more to help someone who they think really needs help, but there really aren't the resources to do the work. So you've told us why you wrote the book. It's quite an unusual structure. I enjoyed it immensely, but just do say a word about why you wrote it with Eileen Horne, who is a writer and dramatist. Yes, well, I wanted to write a book about the work that I do as a forensic psychotherapist for a general audience. But the way that I try to write it, I'd written quite a lot of academic stuff before, but I couldn't really get the voice right. But Eileen, of course, is a dramatist and a professional storyteller, was someone who was able to see how we might be able to do this, and she was also very important in helping me construct composites of the literally hundreds of people that I've seen over the years so that confidentiality was preserved, so no single individual”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Convicted after someone's been sent to prison, after a judge has sent somebody to a secure hospital, and I just really wanted to invite people to come and hear the kind of work we do with people who've done horrible things when they be mentally unwell. How much of a toll does this work take on you? Well, I think it would be foolish to think it doesn't take a toll at all, and it's a very important part of the training that we do as psychiatrists, forensic psychiatrist, and psychotherapist that we think about the emotional demands on us of working in this world. But the emotions that we have to deal with are complicated and they're often to do with feeling sad, and they're often to do with feeling a sense of sometimes a sense of despair or a sense of frustration that we can't do more. So for example, I've just come from some work with some colleagues where people were describing a sense of frustration that they couldn't”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You why did you decide to work with violent offenders? Thank you, Linda. Well, that's a good question. Well, I think that the truthful answer is that I was interested in the law, and I was also interested in moral philosophy and ethical decision-making in medicine. So I was drawn to a branch of psychiatry where there would be a lot of ethical dilemmas. So at justice you said how should we as a society treat people who've broken the criminal law, done something very scary and frightening when their mental health was disturbed? So I was drawn to work in that field of work, and I also became interested just in really wanting to hear from the people themselves how they felt about things, how they saw it from their point of view. So the book is really about an invitation to readers to come with me and see the world that I see after someone's being”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Welcome to this intelligent squared podcast. I'm Linda Yu, an economist and broadcaster. My guest today is doctor Gwynne Adstead, who's here to discuss her new book The Devil You Know Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion. Gwen is unusually both a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and she has worked in the NHS for nearly three decades with violent offenders. And a forensic psychiatrist is someone who addresses how a society responds to and treats those people who break the criminal law. So warm welcome to you, Gwen. Who wants to see a serial killer? There were no takers except for”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Summer heats up in FX's The Shards. Said an 80s Los Angeles. The shards falls a group of beautiful privileged prep school students who are preyed on by the trawler, a serial killer targeting teenagers across the city. This fever dream of youth, beauty, sex, and mystery is a must-see. FX is the Shards, streaming August 5th on Hulu on Disney Plus. Sign up now at Disneyplus.com. Hello podcast listeners, I'm Connor and welcome to this week's episode of Intelligence Squared. Today we're joined by Dr. Gwen Adshead, one of Britain's leading forensic psychiatrists who spent over thirty years providing therapy inside secure hospitals and prisons. And she spoke to Linda Yu about her new book The Devil You Know which seeks to challenge our common understandings of evil and change our minds about how we view violent criminals and offenders. It's a really fascinating conversation and if you do enjoy it you can find a link for the book in the podcast description. But now let's go to the episode.”
2021-06-25 · Intelligence Squared · The Devil You Know, with Dr Gwen Adshead and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source