Past Programs
Drug Use and Abuse - 2007
2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2003 | 2002
Burma: 'I resist in my mind only'
06/10/2007
Medical anthropologist Monique Skidmore has conducted field work in Burma for over a decade, carefully probing the ways the state manipulates the emotional life of the Burmese, and the psychological strategies they adopt to survive under a military regime. Fear threads through every conversation and gesture. Also, updates from a health worker in the longstanding refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border. The mental health challenges are immense.
Addiction: Dis-ease over diseased brains
18/08/2007
Your brain hijacked -- possessed by a chronic, relapsing brain disease. Scientists now view addiction as a disease, not a behavioural problem. Brain circuits involved in reward and pleasure, planning and control are dramatically changed. The priority is medical treatment, not shame and blame. But others challenge what they dub the 'disease rhetoric', arguing it's fatalistic and reductionist. Do we treat the brain, or the person? And, should we surrender control to the addicted brain?
