Peter Fonagy on a revolution in mental health care

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2020

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Peter Fonagy arrived in the UK from Hungary aged 15, not speaking a word of English. His family was in Paris. He was bullied at school, failed every exam and thought of ending his life. Therapy saved him, he says. Years later, he trained to be a clinical psychologist and then a psychoanalyst. His research on attachment styles between a mother and her baby (which can be healthy, anxious or avoidant) was ground breaking. He went on to show that the human need to be understood runs very deep indeed. The ability to ‘mentalise’ (to say that we’re feeling angry rather than being angry, for example) enables us to understand our own thoughts and feelings. And, Peter believes, it forms the cornerstone of good mental health. He pioneered a new way of treating people with borderline personality disorder which he called mentalisation based treatment, or MBT. Shocked to discover that such a simple approach was so effective, he set up randomised control trials to prove the effectiveness of this new approach to mental health care. The results were a revelation and it led to a revolution in mental health care for patients with a wide range of mental health problems, from borderline personality disorder to drug dependency, eating disorders and psychosis. Producer: Anna Buckley

Transcript

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0:40.3	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life research has revolutionized the way hundreds of thousands of people with mental health problems have been treated.
0:55.1	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:58.6	How good are you at understanding your mental state? Can you say I'm feeling angry rather than
1:05.2	screaming it or throwing something at someone? How easy do you find it to imagine
1:10.2	what someone else might be thinking and feeling. My guest on the life scientific today
1:14.4	has shown that this ability to mentalize, the ability to see ourselves from the outside
1:20.0	and to see others from the inside forms the cornerstone of our mental health.
1:24.8	It's not rocket science, he says.
1:26.8	But the treatment program that he developed based on this key insight
1:30.8	has helped hundreds of thousands of people, including many who suffer some of the most extreme forms of mental anguish,
1:37.0	people with borderline personality disorder, for example.
1:40.0	Peter Fonagi is one of the world's most respected researchers into mental health.
1:44.4	He's the Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis at University College London
	...

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