Loading...About The Speaker...
I’ve written over twenty books – everything from the psychology of ‘stress’ and depression to theatre, dogs, sports psychology, humour and Sumo. Some of my poetry collections have been illustrated with my own artwork and I’ve written a play and a novel about Edmund Kean. I’ve been an International Fulbright Scholar (arts) and a UEA research fellow (environmental sciences), been up in a hot air balloon, done 130 on the back of a motorbike and held a tarantula. I’ve been on live TV, been in a war zone, been a Met Police stress expert adviser and a life-skills trainer to the long-term unemployed. I currently run a creative writing class that transforms people who think they have no imagination. I write for the Spectator and the Critic on mental health. Yet I grew up in an East London slum surrounded by bombsites and had to survive asthma, panic attacks and years of domestic violence.
About Their Talks...
BRAIN PEAKS – the gateway to your inner genius (Power Point and Online)
Difficult to think of a more exciting subject. Our key leisure activities all involve what you might call ‘brain peaks’. After a build-up of tension and pressure there’s a critical moment, a climax, followed by joy and resolution. In fiction, drama, sport, childhood dares, TV quizzes and contests, classical music, adventure activities, human sexuality and rites of passage, the same pattern emerges. Why? The brain is a complex system, and like all complex systems in nature it is capable of a magic trick known as ‘emergence’. At the very climax of complexity these systems suddenly produce order. This is how geniuses come by their great works. This is why, during life crises, you may experience an epiphany.
BEAT DEPRESSION WITHOUT DRUGS (Online)
How to kick both the melancholy and the medicalising – and toughen up. The dangers of brain-modifying drugs were the subject of one of my front-page articles in the Spectator. But what’s the alternative? It’s called ‘inurement’ – character training. My book Challenging Depression and Despair was based on four years as a life-skills trainer to the long-term unemployed, with by far the best outcomes record in the region. The secret of success was a system of graduated challenges – the opposite of calm-down ‘stress management’. Offers a root-and-branch reappraisal of the current mental health crisis.
STRESSOLOGY: THE GASLIGHTING OF A NATION (Power Point and online)
Our predecessors survived pandemics, persecution, wars and workhouses, yet never used the word ‘stress’. That term was borrowed from engineering in the 1930s by a man who tortured thousands of rats in his Montreal laboratory. Come and find out how ‘the Father of Stress’ was sponsored by the tobacco industry, got his data wrong, yet inspired a lucrative industry with 21,700,000 websites. Today they are busy gaslighting us, making us think we are mentally ill and claiming the human brain can’t possibly cope. It can. (Based on my book THE TRUTH ABOUT STRESS, shortlisted for the MIND Book of the Year Award.)
OWEN PARSNIP’S REVOLUTION (With pictures, prose and verses)
A talk about the author’s Parson Russell Terrier Owen Parsnip, who became an international celebrity on Facebook when he donned a tin hat and ran a dog revolt against ‘two-leg tyranny’, leading a worldwide campaign for dog rights. A Dog Army of over 550 animal soldiers stationed on four continents followed their Field Marshal with unquestioning fervour. Owen’s enormous courage enabled him to overcome a spinal tumour and change the legislation on dogs involved in car accidents, where previously they had always been classed as mere chattels. Thanks to Owen Parsnip dogs are now recognized in law as members of the family. Come and hear about this funny, fierce and inspirational little character, who was much adored.
Fee:
£51-£149, depending on location and whether or not I have to travel.
