GAVIN FRANCIS & SARAH MOSS: Making Sense of Mental Health

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Bestselling authors Gavin Francis and Sarah Moss join us for an evening to discuss their encounters and experiences with mental health, along with their latest non-fiction books, The Unfragile Mind and My Good Bright Wolf.

About the books:
The Unfragile Mind by Gavin Francis
Between a quarter and a fifth of young people in the UK now suffer a mental disorder. One in four adults are prescribed psychiatric medication. These numbers represent a huge and recent expansion in mental health labelling, but reveal nothing of the experience of those seeking help.

In The Unfragile Mind, Gavin draws on conversations with patients, colleagues, and his thirty years of practice to explore the chequered history of psychiatry, the nature of mental health and ill-health, and the problems - including mood disorders, trauma, anxiety and addiction - that he addresses daily. The mind, he argues, is dynamic and adaptive - better addressed not with rigid labels and protocols, but with curiosity, kindness, humility and hope.

My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss
In the household of Sarah Moss’s childhood she learnt that the female body and mind were battlegrounds. 1970s austerity and second-wave feminism came together: she must keep herself slim but never be vain, she must be intelligent but never strident or angry, she must be able to cook and sew and make do and mend, but know those skills were frivolous. Clever girlsshould be ambitious butwomen must restrain themselves. Women had to stay small.

Years later, her self-control had become dangerous, and Sarah found herself in A&E, forced to reckon with all that she had denied her hard-working body and furiously turning mind.

My Good Bright Wolf navigates contested memories of girlhood, the chorus of relentless and controlling voices that dogged Sarah’s every thought, and the writing and booksin which she could run free. Beautiful, audacious, moving and funny, this memoir is a remarkable exercise in theway a brain turns on itself, and then finds away out.

About the authors:
Gavin Francis is an Edinburgh GP and the author of eleven books of non-fiction including Adventures in Human Being, Island Dreams, and Recovery. His latest book The Unfragile Mind explores the current landscape of mental health, arguing that the mind is dynamic and adaptive – better addressed not with rigid labels and protocols, but with curiosity, kindness, humility and hope.

Sarah Moss has written several novels including the Sunday Times top ten bestseller Summerwater (adapted for television and currently showing on Channel 4), Ghost Wall, The Fell and, most recently, Ripeness. She has also written a memoir, Names for the Sea, an account of her year living in Iceland. She was born in Glasgow and grew up in the north of England. After moving between Oxford, Canterbury, Reykjavik, west Cornwall and the Midlands, she now lives in Dublin.