YouSaid · the spoken record

Edward Bullmore

lines on the record: 44
first: 2025-11-24
most recent: 2025-11-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And the other strategy I was mentioning earlier would be called primary prevention. So that's trying to deal with children or adolescents who hadn't experienced any psychotic symptoms. But look, to be at risk of doing so in future. So I think there are a couple of points in time where we could think about being preventive and predictive and trying to, rather than just damping down symptoms and locking people up when they become most disturbed, try and intervene more you know, proactively and predictively to kind of prevent those problems becoming so severe in the first place.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“20 year old phase, they might have. Some experience of psychotic symptoms, some people will Develop schizophrenia. Many people will fully recover. If we could find out what makes the difference, you know, what is it that puts some patients in that longer-term path to, you know, long standing schizophrenia and prevent that from occurring so that in the jargon that would be called secondary prevention because the patients have already appeared seeking treatment for psychotic symptoms and what you're trying to do is prevent that becoming a long-term disabling disorder”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than we did, rather, I think we could look afresher prevention and we could think more positively about how do we do that and when do we intervene? You know, we could try and intervene very early in the course of development. We could try and pick up the kids that had the combination of inherited risk genes and toxic exposures and were most likely to develop schizophrenia long into the future. And we could do what we you know, there are things that we could do there, particularly around modifying exposure to environmental risks. You can't change somebody's DNA very easily, as you know, that you can change to some extent the environment that they're exposed to. So that's one strategy for prevention. I think the other area, the other point in time where prevention could really make a difference is, as again, we were talking about earlier, people in their 1819...”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In recent decades, partly because there is some uncertainty about exactly where schizophrenia is coming from and how can you prevent something if you don't understand its origins, but also I think because of this history that we talked about. Because if you go back to the 1930s in Germany, they would have argued we want to prevent dementia precox, as they called it. And that's why we're going to sterilize all the patients with that diagnosis so they can't reproduce. So we will prevent those risk genes getting into the gene pool and that will prevent schizophrenia in the long term. So there is a history of psychiatry taking a brutal and ethically unacceptable approach to prevention. And I think that's in a sense kind of tarnished the brand of prevention, first psychiatry. But now that we know more than we do,”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think for psychiatry and psychothera and so on, that's particularly important. And it goes back to what we were saying earlier. If somebody becomes schizophrenic or has that diagnosis from, let's say, the age of 22 and they go in and out of hospital and they get various fairly heavy duty drugs that interfere with their normal capacity to kind of make relationships, build a career, et cetera. It's very, very difficult to kind of recover beyond a certain point. Whereas if we could prevent that from happening, obviously it would be infinitely preferable. And I think prevention is where we ought to be focusing our intention strategically. I think that perhaps we have sort of veered away from the concept of prevention”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We shift much more to prevention. Terms of how we're trying to deal with this issue overall. And instantly that is, you know, it's interesting to me the recent NHS plan, one of the priorities that has been highlighted politically is the shift from intervention to prevention.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. No, definitely. I mean, we can talk about it philosophically, but even though I'm an academic, I don't really want to spend a lot of time just talking about philosophy for the sake of talking about philosophy. I think... I think it's useful to kind of take a sort of philosophical look at it just because it helps us see things in context a little bit. It helps see that long historical process. But we've also got to be aware that these kind of quote unquote philosophical issues have really, I think, quite detrimental real-life impacts.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you know, in terms of the health service, if you look around the health service in the NHS, in the UK, most hospitals are either mental hospitals or physical hospitals. Acute medical hospitals they're called. There are very, very few places in the NHS that actually provide an opportunity for patients to have both their mental health and their physical health expertly treated under the same roof.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that is going to be an increasingly powerful driver to rethink how we diagnose mental illness as a whole. That is going to help us in future. So that's one really important thing. I also think we need to change the training process for doctors, at least in this country. You know, you come at a medical school as a doctor and you're basically faced with a binary choice. If you're interested in anything to do with the brain mind, you either become a psychiatrist or you become a neurologist. You either become a mind specialist or a brain specialist. So we've got that split actually hardwired in to the...”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are both heritable, and they both have genes that increase the risk. But many of the genes that increase the risk for schizophrenia also increase the risk for bipolar disorder. In other words, there isn't a clean separation between those diagnoses when you get down to the biological level.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are categorically different. You can't have both those diagnoses at the same time. It's one or the other. And that is basically built on the... That those disorders are a little bit like infectious diseases. You know, you can have cholera or you can have tuberculosis. Choleran tuberculosis have different causes, as you know. I mean, they're different bacteria, mycobacterium, tuberculosis, causes tuboosis. Something else causes cholera. In psychiatry, if schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were really as distinct from each other as tuberculosis and cholera, they should have distinct causes.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“pure and simple, okay? It is a document that has evolved over multiple editions and the first edition came out in the first few years after the war. And as we've already discussed, the war was a massively traumatic event, obviously for many, many millions of people, but it was a massively traumatic event for psychiatry. And DSM, which originated in the States as part of the sort of post-war recovery of psychiatry. So it's a historically conditioned document. It's not science pure and simple. I think that's one thing that we need to just be clear about. There are good reasons why it evolved historically the way that it did. But now, I believe the science is telling us that we really need to think about it quite differently. I'll just give you one example. In DSM, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Existing indication if you come as a drug company to a regulator and say we've got a great new drug and it makes people feel better, but it doesn't really line up with the diagnostic system, that is a much tougher cell from an industry point of view. So DSM, it sounds kind of like abstract and academic and what cares really what the diagnostic system in psychiatry is, but it does have very significant real life impacts in terms of what can get paid, you know, what kind of treatment can be offered, what kind of treatments can be developed. So one change I would like to see is reform of DSM. And one reason I've dwelt on the history so much in the book is because I think we need to be very, very clear with ourselves that DSM is a historical product. It's not science.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have it, it's much easier, it's not easy, but it's easier than the alternative to go for a DSM diagnosis because the regulators read DSM. They take it as a given that there is a diagnosis of schizophrenia and they're happy enough for drug companies and others to come forward and say we want to develop a new drug for this.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that is the convention. But just to add to what you've just said, if it's IndSM, it's regarded as a sort of official diagnosis. That means in practical terms, you can get paid for treating somebody with a DSM diagnosis. If you're working in the States, let's say, where it's a mostly private healthcare system, remuneration is constrained by DSM. It's more difficult to be remunerated for treating somebody with a diagnosis that doesn't exist in DSM than one that does. Also very relevant to drug development. So if you're thinking, how can we create a new drug for schizophrenia or a new drug for mental health?”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there are a few things. I mean, we have a diagnostic system in psychiatry. Called DSM or DSM the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is the sort of the Bible, if you will, of psychiatric diagnosis.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way forward for schizophrenia and CM mental illness, which kind of dodges this old dualistic divide and kind of finds a way of thinking about things more joined up between brain, body and mind rather than always trying to sort of force the argument either one way or the other.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here, I mean, we have to get over the history. And we have to be able to look at what the science is telling us now and try and recognize the reality of schizophrenia as it is rather than what we've been historically conditioned to think it might be. And again, that's another reason to write a book because I spend most of my professional careers, I'm sure you do in your professional career, writing peer-reviewed scientific articles which have to be three or four thousand words long, and they don't really allow philosophy in there. They don't allow history. It's got to be very focused on the current experiment. But I think we need to step back and take a slightly wider look at this and say, okay, here's what we know about schizophrenia now. Here's how the history has brought us to this point. And how can we now use the science that we have that we didn't have previously to escape our history and think of”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The biological psychiatrist became partners in the eugenic policies of the Nazi state. So that really was a disaster. It was obviously a disaster to fool the patients that got caught up in it, but it was a disaster also for the coherence of psychiatry and the coherence of our concept of schizophrenia because it really pulled those two tribes a long way apart and made our thinking about schizophrenia very fractured for decades following the Second World War.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Post mortem examination of the brain, trying to find the lesions in the brain that explained the mental illness. And Freud, who had trained as a neuroscientist, Flipped and became the first psychoanalyst, as we all know, and around him clustered a completely different tribe of practitioners who thought of psychosis as all in the mind rather than all in the brain. So this split that actually you can see going back such a long way in terms of the Western philosophical and scientific tradition, when it came to psychiatry at the beginning of the 20th century, got very sharply polarized between the followers of Freud on the one hand and the followers of Emil Krapelin on the other hand, who was the leader of the German Orthodox tradition. And then that dynamic became embroiled in the emergence of the Nazi state and the Second World War, the psychoanalysts who are mostly Jewish were either killed or exiled.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That then evolved through the 19th century and as we all know the sort of physical side of medicine became ever more successful and people began to understand infectious disease and began to treat infectious disease for example as a body problem and then psychiatry began to emerge towards the back end of the 19th century mainly in Germany and the German tradition was firstly focused on the concept that Mental illness must have its roots in the brain. In other words, they wanted to treat it as a physical problem. And they got quite a long way, at least conceptually, in doing that. But as I tell the story in a book, What happened from about, you know. Say 1900 to 1930 was a split within psychiatry. And the dominant sort of orthodox tradition became very, very biological, very focused on the genetics, very focused on...”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any kind of religious sensitivities around the soul. So, you know, you've got to think back in the 17th century, religion was really the dominant ideology in Europe. And science had the kind of emerge kind of alongside it. But that was always quite a turbulent relationship. Galileo, for example, the kind of pioneering astronomer was persecuted by the Catholic Church because some of his claims about the solar system conflicted with the theological doctrines of the times. So the scientists of the 17th century and subsequently, they had to be quite careful in terms of their relationship to religion. And Cartesian Jewish was a way that allowed them license to think scientifically about the body without getting into trouble with the people that had authority in terms of... Spiritual matters.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tradition. And then during the sort of Renaissance Descartes, in particular picked up that idea and reframed it in terms of the God in the machine. So you've got a sort of soul, you've got a spirit or a mind, which is completely separate from the body. And the body is like a machine. In other words, we can analyze it mathematically. We can experiment with it. We can work on it scientifically, the body. But the mind is something different. And that is called Cartesian dualism, the split between body and mind, as Descartes formulated it. And that was important for science because it basically said to scientists in the 17th century and subsequently that Bodily disease was something that science could tackle. And it could tackle it without sort of infringing.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's quite a deep question. I think the point that I made in the book is that this split, let's just talk about the split between body and mind, you know, goes back a long, long way. I mean, you can find echoes of it in the Hebrew Bible, in Genesis. You know, the idea that man is made of flesh and spirit is a very early representation of that basic idea. still with us and it went through you know it went through that long ancient”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And people are puzzled over that for a long time. And I remember with my colleagues joking, you know, it must be something to do with astrology. Maybe there are style signs that put you at higher risk of schizophrenia. But what it almost certainly is indicating is that children born in the winter months have a higher risk of exposure to viral infections either in pregnancy or immediately after birth. And it's that exposure to early infection coupled with an inherited genetic risk that is accounting for the increased incidence of schizophrenia in children many years after they were born during the winter. So that's an example of that kind of interaction.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In early life, that is a risk factor for schatrinia. It's been known for like decades that children who were born in the winter months, you know, let's say between November and March in the Northern Hemisphere have a higher risk of schizophrenia when they're 20 or 30 years old. In other words, decades later.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Situation through the lens of recent genetic research in particular is we've got to think about both. We've got to recognize that there is a heritable element to it. You can inherit risk genes that put you at higher than normal risk of developing schizophrenia. But what is probably happening is that people who have inherited those genes and are then exposed to an environmental trigger or an environmental stimulus, particularly in early life. It's that combination that is probably most risky. And the kind of environmental factors that might be relevant include things that you're probably familiar with from other sort of reproductive biology side of things. So, you know, if you're exposed to an infection in pregnancy,”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, well, I'd say right at the start, you know, it's not a question of nature or nurture. It's not a question of genes or environment. In fact, one of the sort of big themes of the book is that we've tended to kind of split our thinking about schizophrenia historically. People got very entrenched in the idea that it's all in the mind or it's all in the brain or it's all genetic or it's all environmental. I think where we now see”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know over decades to culminate in the point of somebody actually appearing in front of the psychiatrist with the symptoms of psychosis. It doesn't come out of the blue. It's something that grows and builds over time. And I think males, we can see from a number of other disorders tend to be more vulnerable to extreme variation, let's say, in those developmental trajectories.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Various other kinds of quite subtle cognitive difficulties. Dyspraxia, clumsiness, dyslexia. Many of these issues are more common in males than females. And I think what that probably suggests is that there is a greater biological vulnerability of males compared to females in terms of brain development generally and that that is why we see a greater instance of schizophrenia because as we've already touched on a couple of times it is a rip we have to think about it as a neurodevelopmental disorder I think you know it's a process that evolves”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, the sex difference, which To males, being more vulnerable to schizophrenia than females is quite well reproduced. It's quite replicable, has been for across many different geographies and over time. I think that probably counts against it being entirely environmental. Points more towards a biological explanation. It's also true that male children tend to be more vulnerable to a number of other brain developmental problems, for example ADHD.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Others going through that critical transition from, let's say, 18 to 30, all of those things that people do in that period can be disrupted by schizophrenia. So by the time you're a 30-year-old with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, you may find that you haven't got many friends, you've lost contact with your family, you haven't got secure employment, that makes it even more difficult to recover fully.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“May lose cognitive function. There may be changes in the brain that are ongoing that make it progressively more disabling. But also I think we have to acknowledge that the drugs that we use to treat people with schizophrenia are not without significant side effects that may contribute to things actually getting worse in some ways rather than better. And also, you know, if you've been, you know, imagine you're a young adult who Funds themselves embroiled in this psychotic experience, it is completely disabling in or can be completely disabling in terms of making friendships, getting to university, acquiring cognitive capital, some people call it, degrees, life experience, finding a secure career, finding a partner, all of those things that you and I”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's not curable, and it's only going to get worse. And that mindset was part of the sort of background justification, if you will, for the way that German psychiatry or German-speaking psychiatry in particular progressed over the course of the 1920s and 30s to the point that under the Nazi regime, people with schizophrenia were systematically persecuted. They were sterilized against their will or ultimately they were killed. It was all consistent with this very, very negative concept of an incurable progressive disabling disorder. Now we look at it now. Is there any evidence of progression, of degeneration? And there is some evidence in a small group of people with schizophrenia that they will get worse over time.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But for an interesting reason, which is that when schizophrenia first kind of emerged in medical thinking, which was kind of around the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, it wasn't actually called schizophrenia. It was called dementia precogs. Which is a kind of made up Latin word, the phrase that means precocious dementia. In other words, the idea at the time was that these young 20 somethings with chronic delusions, hallucinations, We were actually at the start of a precocious dementia and that their cognitive function, their mental functions were just inevitably deteriorate over time. And that's why they called dementia precox. And that was a very, that's a very, very negative conception of the disorder, obviously. You know, you're saying that this is something that happens to young people. We don't know why.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what we used to do in this service that I was talking about the first episode service in Cambridge, we'd follow people up for a year. And many of the patients that we saw who had psychotic symptoms initially, they just faded away. And they more or less returned to normal, but a minority, it becomes a long-standing chronic problem. And that's the group that we're talking about, the schizophrenia.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spectrum which gradually shifts to these kind of more bizarre beliefs that are less amenable to reason, as I've already said. Psychotic symptoms are quite common in young people, briefly. Psychotic symptoms aren't that sharply demarcated from normal experiences that we've all had and will continue to have ideas of people paying more attention to us than they really are or occasionally hearing our voices internally quite clearly. So there's that level of ambiguity to bear in mind about psychosis. But then of those 15% that have some brief experience of a proper psychotic symptom, only a small percentage will end up with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Because as your question implies, to get a diagnosis of schizophrenia, you have to have had those symptoms, delusions, hallucinations, and some other psychotic symptoms for at least a year.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when they come through to see their doctor, their GP, or they come through to psychiatric services, actually transient experience of hallucinations or delusions is quite common. And also, when you get into the detail of it, it can be quite difficult to draw the line between a hallucination and a more normal experience of hearing one's thoughts or talking to oneself. Likewise on the delusional side, you know, there's a grey zone between somebody thinking with total certainty and despite any evidence that they're being persecuted by the CIA, that sort of grades away to people thinking, as a lot of people do in adolescence quite self-consciously, you know, the world is looking at me, the world is commenting on me. These are quite normal experiences, but there is a kind of”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think That we might want to draw out or I want to draw out a little bit is that we really need to think of schizophrenia as a kind of a process that evolves over time. And it usually kicks off in late adolescence. And the bit in the book you're referring to describes the experience I had when I started as a consultant psychiatrist in Cambridge. And we set up a service specifically designed to focus on young people who are experiencing their first psychotic symptoms. So those delusions and hallucinations that we were talking about earlier. And what we found and others have found is that if you ask people the questions about delusions and hallucinations, something like 15% of young people that are seeking treatment from mental health services are not necessarily 15% of the sort of young people out there in the general population.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Length about their delusions of persecution, and typically you won't be able to shift their core belief that they are subject to surveillance by the CEIA or whatever it might be. So those two characteristics, delusions, hallucinations, the disrupted sense of reality, those are very characteristic of psychotic disorders, schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder that comes along typically in early adult life, and for some people it can last the whole of their lives.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In practice, it's a psychotic disorder. So that means it's a disorder associated with some kind of disruption in terms of people's sense of reality. They hear things that aren't really there. They see things that aren't really there. So they're hallucinating. They will often also have beliefs about how the world is working. They might think the world is out to get them. They might feel very paranoid and persecuted. These beliefs are not sort of evidence based, if I can put it that way, and they're not really amenable to reason. You know, you can talk to somebody.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, I mean, you know, there has been tremendous sort of increase in conversation about mental health, well-being. That is mostly focused on what we would call sort of mild to moderate or common mental health problems, anxiety and depression, for example, account for a lot of conversation publicly about mental health. There is also a group of people that suffer from severe mental illness and schizophrenia is one of those severe mental illnesses, bipolar disorder is another one. Severe major depression and other ones. So there are people living with really disabling. Long term conditions that are not in the same category. Sort of lifestyle level. Problems that we hear about in terms of depression and anxiety. So it can be a severe problem. What is it?”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I wanted just to make sure that people are fully aware of how that science has changed and why it now looks to me like a very different sort of scenario compared to what I was taught about schizophrenia when I first started back in 1990.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I think there are some messages that work better for a book than for a journal article or some other kind of way of communicating. And I wanted to write this book partly because I think there's still a lot of stigma and a lot of silence around severe mental illness. And I wanted to kind of try and break that silence and perhaps do something to help with stigma. And that, I think, means reaching a bigger audience. That was one motivation. I also think you sometimes hear people say, well, we don't really know much about schizophrenia. We don't know anything more than we did. There's a slightly sort of nihilistic attitude to where the research has gone in the field. And of course, I have a conflict of interest in the sense. I've been a professional scientist in this space for 20 years. But as far as I can see, there's been enormous progress in terms of our understanding of schizophrenia.”
2025-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT