The Blindboy Podcast - Dr.Sharon Lambert

Episode Date: January 1, 2020

I chat with Forensic Psychologist Dr.Sharon Lambert and we have fierce craic Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to 2020, you futuristic dorks. Blade Runner is now a film about the past. It's history, same with Back to the Future. Not Star Wars yet, but hello, you futuristic bollocks. And welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. Earlier on I was actually listening to a podcast not my own podcast someone else's one and i don't know just an an advert came up and the advert in it it was for male genital grooming products, right

and firstly alright, here's the weird thing number one, what I'm kind of trying to get at is that we seem to have lost a sense of irony in culture, right so number one, the podcast that I was

listening to was like a history of the mafia podcast that was kind of recorded in a cheesy gangster 1920s style. Right. So I'm listening away about Al Capone going, wow, that sounds class. This sounds very moody and 1920s ish. And then all of a sudden they start, you know know the advert comes into the middle of the podcast and it was an advert for male genital grooming products but the

person reading it didn't really drop character they kind of stayed within the mood talking about these male genital grooming products as if they were talking about Al Capone and I didn't really know I didn't notice that it was an advert so I'm listening to the life of Al Capone with the moody jazz music in the background

and the fucking you know the feeling of it being a 1920s gangster film and then this man is talking about male genital grooming products but again what got me was he he couldn't call him male genital grooming products because like i guess men don't like to groom their bollocks i've no problem with it i don't want

big hairy bollocks i'll wash and shave my bollocks not a bother but i'm guessing for most lads, it seems kind of effeminate. So they had to call, the razor for shaving the balls was known as the lawnmower. And the deodorant for your balls was called the crap duster. And it made me realise that because of incredibly fragile senses of masculinity and what masculinity is, there's lads who won't tend to their testicles unless an advertiser describes them as a field. And they kept it referring to the razor and the deodorant as tools as well, that these were very manly tools. and what you have as well is not only

a fragile masculinity but a terrible fear of being gay so you have to over manly eyes grooming products so you don't appear either effeminate or gay and the whole irony of it was is that the whole ad was being delivered to me seamlessly in a fucking podcast about Al Capone with that gangster jazzy music and you know

you're listening to the podcast and it feels like it's in black and white do you know but Warehouse is bursting open and fellas with Tommy guns it brings back all this feeling but then this advert is there trying not to be

effeminate or gay but ending up being incredibly camp and homoerotic it's just me down a dark black and white 1930s alleyway with a fella in a long trench coat and the light coming

down and his hat blackening out his face and he's talking from underneath his hat and his long trench coat and the light coming down and his hat blackening out his face and he's talking from underneath his hat and his long trench coat smoking a cigarette down an alleyway asking me if I want to fucking lawnmower my testicles and then afterwards if he can spray the crop

duster on him and it was so camp and sincere and homoerotic and nobody spotted it the the man with the fucking mafia podcast delivered it without irony and i won't even say the man with the mafia podcast because that's not fair it was one of these podcasts where it's made by money it's it's like a full production team and they spent a few quid on it and it's made by a company so it's not like my podcast where it's just me in a fucking studio on my own without backing no it was a lot of people had to get together and agree upon the appropriateness of an advert about crap dust or

bollock deodorants and doing it in in the tone of of film noir and nobody nobody popped up and said this is ridiculous this is really really absurd and yeah just it gave me a real i was really struck with fuck irony is gone isn't it sincerity there's so much sincerity now in our culture as opposed to irony that no one can spot when something is utterly fucking

absurd and dichotomous and I want to revisit that on a a later podcast but it's a hot take that I'm brewing about

I'm not gonna say it because someone else someone else will develop the idea but it's around irony em so this week I have VE I'm going to be chatting to someone I'm chatting to someone

who is an expert in an expert in psychology let's and I recorded this in the Cork Opera House a couple of months back I'm going to be back in the Cork Opera House in 2020 doing another gig

and in Belfast and in doing a UK tour and an Australian tour and I'm in Chiang Mai in Thailand and I'm in Galway, see how I did that look those up, blind boy 2020 in one of those areas if you live there i have to plug the gigs lads i apologize but yes this is a conversation i had

with a psychologist by the name of dr sharon lambert who specializes in addiction trauma psychology and again like I didn't even feel like she's an expert in her field and I didn't even feel like I was chatting with an academic

because of her ability and capacity to take really really complex ideas in psychology and for it to just sound like you're having a chat in a pub and I know

I remember the live podcast I put out with David Adardi a couple of weeks back I was saying you know how much I laughed throughout it this is one of those it's just a really fun enjoyable chat about

important things important things in psychology and homelessness and addiction all of this but we speak about it from a place of humour and humour and irony lads and my thing

it's okay to speak about important topics using humour because you can still deeply care about them and be serious about them while still using humour this idea of not using humour

when speaking about important topics that's not being serious about it that's just being solemn and the state of solemnity is utterly useless and pointless you know so before I go into this I'll give you a really quick ocarina pause

so I don't have to interrupt the conversation also when I'm recording this right now it's a half rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play.

Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil it's all for you no don't the first o-men i believe girl is to be the mother mother of what

is the most terrifying six six six it's the mark of the devil hey movie of the year it's not real it's not real it's not real who said that the first omen only in theaters April 5th an hour away to new year's when the clock strikes 12 whatever you call it the new year 2020 so I want to I want to open up a can

alright here's the ocarina pause you're going to be played an advert probably that ACAST put in hopefully for crop dust and your bollocks. That was the OcarinaPause. So before we go into the chat, this podcast is supported by you, the listener.

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And generosity. And. Look. It's paying my bills, lads. What more do I need? All right, so here is the conversation I had with Dr. Sharon Lambert. I hope you enjoy it. I thoroughly did. How are you finding Cork?

I love Cork. And I think Cork is brilliant, and I can say that because I'm not from Cork originally. You're from Clare. I'm from County Clare. I have a Cork accent. I've been here for 20-something years. Cork is the only accent that you'll infectiously pick up. Like, when I was in art college,

like, I was hanging around with two Cork lads, and within two weeks, it sounded like I was singing everything, you know? But no other accent. Like, you'll never pick up a Dublin accent because it's horrible. You just won't, like... I know people living in Dublin for years you will not pick that accent up but Cork maybe a little bit of Kerry limerick isn't very contagious no it's too monotonous it's just a continual monotone where is up

here you beautiful or down here I suppose you're down aren't you you singing people you lilty people. And it is the only accent in Ireland whereby they describe it as a lilt. You'd think you'd be a tenora, wouldn't it? Usually what I do when I have a guest, Sharon, right, is I ask the internet for the questions because that's the best way to democratize it. And the questions were fucking class.

They were very, very... I don't understand a half of them, so I'm hoping... First off, like, what do you do? Like, you're a lecturer in applied psychology, so I know what applied maths is that's when you get maths but you make the maths work in the real world is that what applied psychology is that's exactly what applied psychology is could you could you put the mic a little bit sorry yeah so yeah it's it's about taking psychological theories and concepts

and applying them to real-world problems. So a lot of the work that we do in applied psychology in UCC is based in communities. So we do a lot of research with organisations, working with people who are experiencing homelessness, people who use drugs, mental health. So it's about... There was a very famous psychologist in the 60s, I think I could get this wrong now,

my boss, who's always talking about him, it'd be really cross, George Miller, and he said it's really important to give psychology away, and that's one of the things that we do in applied... So, actually, I don't know if any of the other departments in Ireland are called applied psychology or if they're just schools of psychology.

We're applied psychology, because one of the things we want to do is give psychology away so a lot of the work that we do is with groups of people who often need psychology but find it very hard to access it and you work with a lot of like what it said on your biography is marginalized people so what is the definition of someone who'd be marginalized what does that mean so for me what i talk about is people who find it very hard to access services that you and i can access well i don't know what it's like when you rock up to a and e like that but um for you're probably marginalized actually are you marginalized i suppose if i mean i should have brought my dictaphone and we could this could have been actually a research I could have gotten a paper out of this if I

walk up to any with promotion with the bag on they're gonna like oh shit it's blind by and I'm like yeah but my fucking my leg is sore and then can I have a selfie no can you cure my leg so in that sense yeah I suppose I could go around calling myself marginalized now thanks for that now I'll be I'll be doing that I'm playing by a marginalized marginalized because I'm well known all right so shut the fuck up and stop oppressing me yeah so be so there are so there's groups people in our community who need our services and you find them very difficult to use them because they're stigmatized and so because those people are sticking so and is that stigma does that include

like someone with no money as well yes poverty yeah it's marginalization even your accent do you know senator lynn ruan lynn ruan yeah she's super cool yeah she tweeted something a few weeks ago about a book that she was writing and she spelt a word wrong in her tweet did you see that and this class a gobshite tweeted back and said um corrected her spelling yeah so then she told him to fuck off and i saw that yeah what was the response she got the response oh did you not he got up in his fucking high horse didn't he he certainly did i did not expect this type of language yes and you see that's that's yeah and he actually tweeted i won't name the place where didn't he yeah he was in an educational institution

and he tried to rat her out he did so he said i really hope that the students that you teach in x institution uh aren't exposed to this kind of language or or I'm paraphrasing. Yeah, let's hope the grown adults don't hear the word fuck. And her response was excellent, which was, you know, when I teach young people who are marginalised, I tell them that their accents don't matter and their language don't matter. So if you've got loads of money and you've nice education, it's very easy to access services. I went... I've used it.

One of my children was sick and she had to go to Crumlin. And I made sure when I emailed that I put on my signature, Dr Sharon Lambert, because I knew that that would open a door for me. OK, so you essentially use the privilege of having Dr. knowing we're going to essentially put her ahead of the queue almost. Yeah, because there are people who have no voices in our communities

and that's our responsibility then as academics who are, we're incredibly privileged, incredibly privileged to have had an access to an education and to be working in UCC, which is a beautiful place to work in. It's a beautiful building. We have a responsibility to share that. So that's that concept that George Miller said about giving psychology away

so that you can empower people for their voices to be heard so that they can access services and get the things that they need. So essentially what I call that is, because I speak a little bit about psychology on my podcast. You do. Now, I studied psychology a tiny bit for two or three years. I'm not qualified or nothing, but I know more than if I didn't go to college. And what I call it is...

You have the job, sir. You have the job, sir. I know a little bit, you know, but for me, that little bit that I learned, using it for myself and to understand... Like, I'm attracted to psychology because it allows me to...

When I was at the throes of my anxiety, right, the most frightening part of it was not having a language at all to understand why I felt this way how I felt this way even even you know anyone who's ever gotten an anxiety attack even someone saying to you oh that that's called a panic attack that's immediately finding that out that's 50 percent of the fear gone because it's such a terrifying thing to happen and you don't have a name for it i call it um democratizing psychology i like that can i steal that work away we could have i i have this i have it we will set up a new module we propose

a new module called democratic psychology and put it to academic board what do you think yeah fuck it why not why not um what's your own what's your own journey how did you end up because you didn't start off as uh an applied psychologist um so when i was small i i wanted to be a guard i really wanted to be a guard and i was really short be a guard. And I was really short. That's a real Claire thing. I know. Yeah. So you're either a hurler or a guard, like Claire.

But I wanted to be a guard, and I'm five foot three-ish. Was this when guards had to be a certain height? They had to be. I think it was five. It was ridiculous. It's because there was no guns be, I think it was five. It was ridiculous. It's because there was no guns. I always thought that was gas. It's like, you can't have guns, you have to be six foot.

It was five seven for a woman and five nine for a man or something like that. And it was something ridiculous. Like, we're all fairly short. And my grandfather, lovely man, he was born in 1906. Wow. And he used to tell me to go home and at night time to hold on to top of the bed and try and make my toes so every night i used to stretch in the bed but what are you doing training to be a guard yeah and that's why all the guards look like bats

and my poor mother should be looking at me she'd go i don't think it's going to happen love you're five foot three so i kept trying anyway so then, I don't think it's going to happen, love, you're five foot three. So I kept trying anyway. So then anyway, it wasn't working. So I went to England in the 90s to join the police. Because the British police are a bit shorter. Are you fucking serious? Yeah, I'm serious. Why are you going to England?

Because the police are shorter and they let me in. Because I was going to join the police in England. What is, what's the, I think that's a perfect reason. That's fucking nuts. Will you stop? Says the man with a bag. I suppose I have a bag in my head, yeah. It's all relative.

It's like a nursery rhyme. Going to England to meet the Queen because they accept shorter people more. Why were the British... Why did the British not discriminate against short people but the Irish did? I don't know.

Do you know what I think it is? What? This valorisation of what's known as the big fucker. He's a big fucker. Those lads out in Clare are the big fuckers out there. He plays goals. That's it. Whereas they obviously don't have that in Britain, because they're better at horses.

Yes. So they used to, like, Oliver Cromwell was tiny, going around on a horse, chopping everyone and drawing his head off. So they're like, it doesn't matter about height. Yeah. And they're all inbred as well, the posh ones, so they're... Go on. So I...

So I went over to England, I moved to London in 19... Can you move the mic? I'll just move it yeah like this yeah perfect there you go see you've got loads of experience um yeah so I moved is that too loud though no that's grand yeah so I moved to London they need a bit of a fucking Claire Lilt up here that's they need to hear I need to yeah so I went to London in 1995 and unfortunately I moved there the day before the Canary Wharf bombing. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. So I went down to the police recruitment centre the next day and said, hi!

And, like, this is the 90s now, and I'm from East Clare, so I was wearing a cardigan as well and jeans, like an iron one. Yeah. And I was like, hi! And, like, I really wanted to be a policewoman. So he said, fuck off, home paddy. Are you fucking serious? Like, word word for word that's what he said the policeman said to you fuck off home Paddy

he said not only are you Irish you're a fucking woman as well fuck off home yeah Jesus we've moved on we've moved on um so I I stayed in London for what did that feel like well I was only 19 so you know like you don't have like it's different now I'm in London for about... What did that feel like? Well, I was only 19, so you know, like you don't have... It's different now, I'm in my 40s, I don't really care about anything. So I just went, okay, thanks very much. And then Irish people are very polite. So I said, sorry for taking up your

time. Thanks very much. Bye. And I left, and I got a job in the London Borough of Barnet processing... Barnet, a place named after a haircut Barnet processing, I was never good at maths I'm shit at maths

I'm very bad so I got this job processing invoices for the town I didn't even understand you have no idea and on the first day I was there they asked me to photocopy something, I'm from a small village in East Clare I'd never seen a photocopier so I went into the photocopier room I was down there looking like going how the hell does that work so the cleaner

came in I was like have you ever used a photocopier and she was like yeah and I said can you help me out so anyway I had to process these invoices and send them off to town hall for payment I probably shouldn't have said I was shit at maths. Why? Because I'm working in UCC, and sometimes they might ask me to teach statistics. I really... I forgot I was a lecturer in college there

and shouldn't have said I was shit at maths. I got an A for stats. No, do you know what you say? You say that you're shit at maths, and as a result of that, you're very good at lateral thinking. That's... So there you go. So then all the invoices came back from town hall because i hadn't processed the vat i hadn't worked out the vat right so the line manager came over and she said all the

invoices came back they're wrong you didn't calculate the vat and i was like yeah i'm sure i know how to do it so i she's she bought i had a calculator on the desk and she said will you do it there so i was like just randomly typing in numbers. And she said like, no, that's not how you do it. Well, that's how we do it in Ireland. So for about a year and a half, I lived in London and I really liked London and I made an awful lot of good friends there who are still very good friends to this day. But there were times that were really tough because you'd be on the tube and there'd be a bomb somewhere yeah and uh you you know you'd

have to come up along and the police are outside and you just keep your head down and don't speak because you could get arrested for um under the you know and going through the airport when you'd come home and there was racial profiling you'd be pulled out and all that kind of stuff. So the answer to the question is you're not in a position to say anything because the country that you're from is doing these things in that country. And that's why I feel really sorry for people who are Muslim who are living in anywhere now because um you know i know what it's like to have to walk down the street and keep your mouth shut because i went to them like

at least with us we were lucky enough it's just our accent that gives us away yeah but we never dressed a certain way absolutely yeah i remember one time i went to um notting hill carnival is that what it's called and myself and my buddy were walking. We saw Jamiroquai dancing on top of a car and it was all very cool. He was just randomly standing in front of a car. As he does. That's total before Instagram, carry on. Yeah, and there was a little radio.

Do you know the little ones that you put the battery in with the aerial? And it was just left like in the middle of nowhere. So my buddy said, oh my God, we robbed that because we had no money. Let's rob Jamiroquai's radio no i don't think it was jamiroquai okay grand then it was there was like nobody around only jamiroquai on this radio so she she took the she i didn't take it i did not take she did okay So then we got on the tube, right? And we were chatting,

and then we went, oh my God, we just picked up an unattended electronic device off the street at a carnival, and now we've got it on the tube. So then we had to start talking to each other at Irish about where were we going to dub this radio. Ask Wales. Yeah, and what if we blew up the tube by accident?

Oh shit, you thought it might have been a bomb? Yeah. Oh my god. So do not steal unattended electronic devices. Well not in 1995, but you can get away with it now maybe. So the original question was how did you get

into psychology? We've gotten as fair as you robbing So the original question was, how did you get into psychology? We've gotten as far as you robbing Jamiroquai's radio and it turning into a bomb. Oh yeah, so because they wouldn't have me, I started reading about forensic psychology. Okay. That's what we're talking about, psychology. And I thought, oh... Did you just find it in a magazine? Did you have any inclination that you wanted to do this?

And what is forensic psychology? Forensic psychology is the application of psychology to the criminal justice system. Is it as simple as... I don't know, a lot of these new podcasts about serial killers. Does that not teeter in and out of forensic psychology? Understanding patterns and the behaviour and the mind of a serial killer and stuff?

Yeah, so forensic psychology is basically taking social psychology, understanding patterns and the behaviour and the mind of a serial killer and stuff. Yeah, so forensic psychology is basically taking social psychology, which is, social psychology is all about understanding how people behave in social contexts. So forensic psychology is a new enough discipline, you know, it only kind of emerged in the 90s, that's why I came across it in the 90s.

And it takes bits from lots of different psychology and applies it, so you have a bit of cognitive psychology, a bit of social psychology, environmental psychology and patterns of behaviour. And just applying it to criminal behaviour. So I thought, that's really cool. I'll go to college and I'll become a forensic psychologist and then I'll go and I'll work for the police that way

because they mightn't care that I'm short then. Yeah. Or that I'm Irish or a woman. And how did that work out for you? So I did. I did do that. And what did you do? Just went to a university? Yeah, when I was 23 I went to UCC and did a psychology. So they had forensic psychology in UCC? Yeah, they did. And it was a real emerging field at that point? Yeah um and and what about i i'm kind of on topic i heard that serial killers always piss the bed and set fire to things and harm animals and that's how you know someone's a serial killer is that true well is that forensic psychology i not. My six-year-old went to bed last night. No.

There are... So with some... Yeah, some people who do bad things have had very difficult childhoods and sometimes they do bad things in childhoods and then grow up.

It's much more complicated than that. It's like a six-hour lecture. Of course, yeah. I didn't think it was those three things all of a sudden. Usually there's a deficit in empathy yeah yeah um so then that means that you can do whatever you want and you don't feel bad about it which is pretty cool I guess

like look at us working really hard for a living you know You could just kill people and get lots of money. What about... See, I'm coming at this from a real pop... My thing that I know about would be... I'm okay with cognitive psychology, existential psychology, things like that. When it comes to forensic psychology, it's like what I've read off the back of a Cornflakes box type of stuff, you know? But is it true that like serial killers they're born psychopaths but

it's also if they have a traumatic childhood too and then there's other psychopaths that don't have traumatic childhood but they those people end up in business yeah is that again like i'm just throwing there's there's a really if you're interested in psychopaths, there's a really good book called Snakes in Suits When Psychopaths Go to Work. Yeah. It's written by Bob Hare. So he's, he was a psychopathic expert basically in the States. And when he did a lot of research on psychopaths and about three percent of the population are psychopaths some psychopaths might have experienced some kind of brain trauma when they're born but most it's as a result of their life experiences um so does that mean psychopathy it's it's not a genetic thing it's more an environmental thing or do we know or can you even say that you see can you i mean

they've spent can you west he's not a fucking come on chill out there's millions there's there's been millions and millions and millions and millions of of of dollars and euros and pounds spent on trying to find an addiction gene and they haven't found it so um i just think that people human beings are incredibly complicated and there's no one solution to anything. It's a biopsychosocial response. So it's part biological, part psychological and part social. That's a nice... Yeah. And there's no...

Everyone is a different bit, like a spectrum. Yeah, we're all different bits. We're all biopsychosocial beings. And so when you were doing forensic psychology, you ended up working with the English police. No, I didn't. That sounded like an accusation. I didn't. I did not. I totally refute that accusation.

No, I worked in on Guard of Shea Corner for a few years. My first job actually was working with young people in Cork who were at risk of or involved in crime. When you're working with the guards, essentially, is that moving towards criminalising people then?

Yes. Yeah. Because they do, that's their job. That's the guards' job, yeah. Yeah. So I suppose when I was younger, what I thought was I wanted to catch bad people. Yeah.

And then I suppose the more that I worked with people in the real world, the more I realised that there weren't, there are, as I said, about 3% of the population are psychopaths. So about 3% of people are bad. And that's not even a nice thing to say. They're only in the situation that they are because, but for the grace of God, they're Gawaii. Yeah. But in terms of people who are involved in criminal activity, it's mostly people who are very sad or people who are very mad.

And, I mean, if you go into any prison in Ireland, most of the people who are in prison, you know, they should be in hospital. Yeah. Getting help with all of the different issues that they have, their mental health issues and their substance dependence issues. Most people who commit crime are not bad people they just have different have walked different steps so you are now somebody who you tend not to criminalize in your view then no no no and is that a problem you

think we have with the system we have like there are laws the laws exist yeah and and on guard shakana has to um enforce those laws there will be members of engard shakana who won't agree with all the laws that we have but yeah when you sign up for the job you have to do that yeah um so i hope as a society that we're getting more progressive and that we're going to start looking at things in a different way. So, you know, earlier... That's a guard who left. A very sad, upset guard. It's not really... They probably just wanted to piss.

She works in a call centre, we just heard, so she has to take a call. That's what you do in call centres, isn't it? Call people up all the time. How are you getting on? So my experience of working in Garda Síochána is everybody who joined wanted to make the world that they lived in a safer place.

That's not my experience with all the Gardas that know that's fair enough we can talk about that um that was so there's 13 000 I think there's 13 000 members of Angarda Siocana in every single organization you're going to have people who are not fit for the job um but most of the people I met with were very hard-working people who really wanted everybody to be happier I think that on Garda Síocháin I've had a difficult time yeah you know well the past 10 years like the numbers have been crunched they've been shutting down stations everywhere so I would say guards today are I don't think they're very happy um friends of mine who are guards what they will

complain about a lot is what they say is that they've lost their powers of discretion that's so they can't yeah so that means you constantly have to constantly reinforce so if you meet a young fella down the road and he's done something stupid in the past they'd say actually look God loves us so you know you know and we give him a chance you build a relationship yeah and you build a relationship. It's very difficult to do that now because if you let him off and then it ends up on the front of the Irish Daily Mail on Sunday, Garda, Sharon, Lambert

gave ten young fellas ten chances. I mean, it happened recently in relation to juvenile judges. There was all these young people who hadn't been prosecuted and most of the young people that they were talking about, do you know where they are? Where?

They're dead. They're dead. If you look at the statistics of the people that they are talking about who weren't prosecuted, they're dead. So prosecuting them was not what they needed anyway. What was the point of it? But on Garda Síochána have to go out and they have to enforce those laws and then they no longer can use

discretion because of mistakes that other members made so very good people in on Garda Síochána have to pay for the mistakes that other members made and we try to be a little bit less controversial

okay I'll express an opinion that's controversial and then you can disagree with it or agree with it Can we try to be a little bit less controversial? Okay, I'll express an opinion that's controversial and then you can disagree with it or agree with it. Some people would say as well, would say that a guard's loss of discretion, especially on things like, like what my buddies say is that they can't community police anymore. They can't build relationships with the community. They can't community police anymore no they can't build relationships with

the community they can't have friendships they can't turn a blind eye in the interest of a greater good because they're continually forced to no i must criminalize yeah here's the controversial opinion it's a way to especially on the road to earn more tax revenue? That a guard no longer can go, ah, look, I know you were speeding, but sure, look, we'll be grand, instead of straight up with the ticket now. I don't think so. Great. I think it's because they're worried that if they don't

and somebody somewhere complains about that, that their career will be on the line. Okay. And they might want to give you a chance and then they're afraid that... So I get caught and you go in and you say, well, Charlene Lambert got caught last week and you let her off. Yeah.

And somebody else then says, well, that's not good enough. And then that guard has to account for the fact that he let me off. So I don't think that individual members of Engard at your corner are interested in generating revenue. I think that they're very worried about not being seen to do everything, dot every I and cross every T, because it would be a consequence for them. And you also work with the guards.

Do you still work with the guards? You're not a guard anymore, are you? I was never a guard. I was always a civilian. Wait, how did that work out? So they you're not a guard anymore yeah i was never a guard i was always a civilian i was wait how did that work out so they hired me as a civilian what as so i was a psychologist and i went to temper more okay yeah well you were training the guards in temple more yeah all right so you're not a guard no okay what was that i was still too so they brought down the heights and by the time they brought down the height, I was too... You're not going to believe this.

This is the most fucking Irish conversation in the world. So when they brought down the height of the thing to be in the guards, and I said, yay, I was too old. Oh my God. They just didn't... They clearly didn't want me. I just had to accept, they clearly didn't want me.

I just had to accept it that they didn't want me. So yeah, I trained as a psychologist and then I went off down to Templemore and I worked there. So like,

in the most basic way, as a forensic psychologist, what would you teach a guard? Like some 19-year-old lad in from Tip who's fond of the hurling and now he's got a baton in his hand.

What do you, like are you teaching young guards who are on the beat or is it... It was all levels. All levels. So, like, what would be the most... I know there's some here because I saw some outside in the lobby earlier. Ah, they're grand. They're grand.

They were high. Just, like, what would... What would an Irish guard learn on day one about forensic psychology, just to understand what it is? So I suppose the kind of things I was working on were investigative interview and incognitive psychology, so how you apply psychology to interview, so understanding human memory. Teaching people how to spot when people are lying?

No, because you cannot do that. Really? No, isn't that a huge disappointment? What about those lie detector tests? They're not always accurate and we don't have that legislation in our country anyway. But it's things like, so just supposing you were involved in a traumatic incident

and you'd had a lot of alcohol and you're trying to remember the details of it and you can't remember it all. There's different strategies that you can use to try and get people to recall information so it's called the enhanced cognitive interview um so like your brain is really cool it's got all these little folders and it's if you imagine your brain is like a computer and it's got all these little folders so it's got a folder for sound smell taste so do you know like when you're walking in the woods

and it could be a summer day and it's you know christmas and you kill someone no and you smell like a christmas tree smell yeah so that opens your brain that's dealing with yeah because i find smells can bring me back to memories more than any other sense yeah well different people have different senses that are stronger so you you could be walking around you get a smell and boom that that oh and then the part of your brain that deals with that smell says that's connected to other things and other experiences so so it opens it's like as if you've got four folders open on your desktop then so it connects it to all of the other experiences so if somebody

was really drunk in a fishmonger's and killed someone, would you walk into the interrogation room with a mackerel? Is that kind of on the gist? You actually could, yeah. Well, I couldn't because I'm not a member of the Guard of Shepparton. Are you saying one of the guards, I don't know, might walk in smoking Marlborough Red? Because they, like, would... If the person wanted to confess yeah otherwise then that

would be but are you saying the guards would actually use smells as a way to they could if they wanted to yeah how would they do that how well no a big petrol engine into the fucking you know what you could do so if somebody was having so it's usually for witnesses and victims so um you might say if somebody was having a difficulty remembering something you might say oh can you remember what you could hear okay so oh, can you remember what you could hear? So can you remember what you could hear at the time? Can you remember if you could taste anything? Can you remember if you could smell anything? So the guard's line of questioning is going to be about senses and smells. So it's a really lateral form of questioning someone. So hoping that you're going to open one of those

sensory boxes that will then allow you to open... See, they're on their way now. I know, they're fucking... Can you hear that? Lord Mayor of Cork's in the audience going, she's giving away too much information. Can... Are you trying to go out and get pints

or are you going for pisses? You can't get pints in the middle of the show. Can you hear Sharon all right? Yeah? Okay. Yeah, so that was it. And then I just decided... I'd like to hear more about that type of stuff.

I need to know about the guards getting people to smell things. And so that's lesson one that you'd give a junior guard. What would be, like, lesson two? What other stuff? We talk about mental health as well. Most people who so most people who are involved in in committing criminal offenses have very difficult and challenging experiences it's not you know csi miami and serial killers it's it's it's people who haven't had the opportunities that they deserved so we we talk a bit about that and kind of the impact on brain and behavior.

Is the goal there for each and every guard to essentially have empathy, to understand if they're dealing with a person that they might have this particular baggage? We'll say, you know, most people who don't have a member of their family with them we'd say a psychosis or something yeah like what if a guard came across somebody who was suffering from schizophrenia or something do you train that guard essentially to go this is what this is it was very they got they have a huge so in ireland our legislation is huge there's a huge amount of legislation and that's the most important thing when you're training to be a guard because there's no if you go out and arrest somebody and you've done one of the basics

wrong it's going to be thrown out of court what are the basics now name the date of birth all right okay basically and knowing how to read people their rights properly and guard they have the guard has to wear their hat all the time. There's lots of different things. That's what they used to say in Limerick. Seriously, the boys would be like, was he wearing his hat? Was he wearing his hat? If he wasn't wearing his hat, you can go back up.

Alright, we won't talk about the guards anymore because I can tell it's making you nervous. It's not, no. I'm not nervous. I just, I do, I have a huge amount of empathy for members of Engard at Shecona because they sign up to do this job, you know, and it doesn't work out.

It can be very, very difficult. And they get an awful lot of training in relation to the legislation, which they have to do. And I don't i i think that sometimes as you said they might not be always prepared for yeah and i mean being in a classroom is not going to prepare you for no for the real world and if if you were from east clare and you were stationed and your first station is store street in dublin it's it's a big shock to the system yeah so i think it would be really nice if um if they had more training on the impact of poverty and deprivation

marginalization addiction that kind of stuff um so that they'd understand that when sometimes people behave in very challenging or difficult ways if they were you know to be able to understand for me i remember my other myself my other half of at home one night we were watching crime watch or crime call or whatever that's called and you know the cctv bit yeah and this man just randomly like headbutted a fella outside of bookies i think it was a limerick actually that's yeah it was either limerick or dublin it wasn't cork anyway and uh uh we were watching it and we all said jesus that's desperate i said yeah he's very dysregulated isn't he very emotionally dysregulated god love him i wonder what happened so like when i see somebody who's acting in a in a kind of an aggressive or threatening manner as a psychologist i am am interested in what has...

What's happened? Yeah. What has happened that's made you feel... And I don't think that a lot of people are angry. I actually think they're frightened. And I think that when you work in a job where you have to deal with really high energy and sometimes aggressive situations,

that it's much easier for you to be able to manage it if you understand where it's coming from. And I'm very lucky. I'm a psychologist. I understand where it's much easier for you to be able to manage it if you understand where it's coming from yeah and i'm very lucky i'm a psychologist i understand where it's coming from yeah um so would you say too that like you mentioned before right guards have to uphold the law and laws exist yeah but let's just say that someone who headbutts someone yeah and they get caught and then they get done for assault and then they get two months in prison. Yeah.

Like, would you... And I'd say, what's the point? Like, what's the point of sending them into prison? Yeah, what's the point? Is that person... Like, if you're saying there that, you know, you view anger as an expression of fear, is that person then allowed to...

Given any tools or any resources to understand or process the fear that motivated a headbutt outside of bookies. You said that earlier when you understood what an anxiety attack was how empowered it was and for me as well we all have stuff, we all have

days where we're anxious or worried or frightened or whatever and I'll have days where I'm just totally losing my shit and then I'll take a deep breath and I'll go oh god what's just totally losing my shit now you know and then I'll take a deep breath and I'll go oh god what's going on cognitively for you today Sharon and uh I can I can understand I go okay so you're not actually cross you're actually worried yeah do you see the way the cork accent comes out yeah and when I get excited I get real I get pure cork um but um like if I would love if people were

had the opportunity to learn more about themselves and what's going on in their own bodies and their own brains so that they could have control over it I don't know if always as psychologists and psychiatrists we give it away actually do we kind of hold on to it a little bit because it makes us

all knowing and all powerful the academic problem that goes with a lot of issues is that there's barriers of language whereby... Well, I've had a few people say to me, people who are actually themselves in psychology and academia, saying that they're doing this professionally and ways that I've said things, talking about CBT and stuff, has made them understand it better.

Now, my thing is always, I'm about communication. So I think effective communication happens in the language of the receiver. Absolutely. So whoever's receiving it, that's how you put it. Oh, we went off topic. We were talking about Lin Ruann and the fuck thing. Yes.

Go on. So this is back to that which is that people judge people based on accents and language and blah blah blah right so if a young person rocks into your service and they're mad like they're really mad

because things they've just had a crap time do you mean mad now as in angry or kind of just a bit wired yeah yeah and you know they come in there fuck this fuck you fuck off all that kind of thing and then if a professional says you know i don't appreciate your language yeah i don't like that because what it's saying is you don't match my middle class value system and i am here i am with my fabulous education and what i'm going to do is i'm going to look down on you now yeah and that little bit of self-esteem that you have I'm going to totally strip it away from you and I'm going to make you jump through hoops you're never going to jump through because

I'm going to talk to you in a way that you don't understand and I don't think that we I don't and that's what I mean about marginalized groups accessing services there's not enough diversity in in services in terms of the people who deliver them either yeah um you know and and it's okay to curse and i'm more interested in the intention of the communication absolutely rather than the actual words that are used i remember my very first job i worked with young people who were at risk or involved in crime and i went in and i was i'm all delighted with myself Dr. Sharon Lavert I'm a psychologist I'm delighted and I went over to meet this young fella who was in a lot of

trouble and I went in I said hi how are you my name is Sharon he was like you're still a cunt I actually promised my mother I wouldn't say the c word I actually promised my mother I wouldn't say the C word. And I remember standing there going, oh, my God, like, you know. And I couldn't believe it. And I was like, I'm here to help him, and he's being abusive to me. I mean, Jesus Christ, I just spent seven years at university, so come out and help you, and now you're calling me names. And like that, you know, when i went home and i thought about it and i thought

you know sometimes i wonder if we go to do these jobs are you all right i'm checking there was supposed to be a clock there so when i can see what time we have where's the clock is it pointing towards you oh it's here look oh my foot's in front of it yeah okay um yeah you have to stop me. I go on. So what it made me think about was... What were we talking about? You were talking about... Some young lad called you a cunt. Oh, yeah. And then I went home.

And I was... Like, it hurt my ego. Okay, yeah. It hurt my ego. Yeah. So then I went home and I thought about it and I thought sometimes when we go to work are we doing it because we want people to like us yeah or because we want to serve people yeah and if you want people to like you then there's certain jobs you shouldn't do if you

want people to like you make wedding cakes people are always really grateful with their wedding cake or be a funeral person yeah and no time for being being a bastard you know if it's a funeral dentists don't get thank you cards you know it's like like yeah no one's gonna thank their dentist really and thanks thanks for essentially beating me up but i was was in a chair. Yeah. So, and sometimes with, I suppose, the jobs that I've done, I have worked with people where you have to spend a long time building a relationship because there's lots of reasons why they're not interested in building a relationship

and you have to go slowly. So for those jobs, you have to say that, don't go into that if you're there because you want somebody to like you because you know that's what I have kids for they're you know they're young and they still like me because they don't you know they're not at that age yet but when I go to work like they still believe everything I say but when I go to if you go to work and somebody does say you know fuck off yeah and that's it's not about me it's about wonder

what it is it makes it really difficult for this person um and maybe it is because they don't like me and then if that's the case then they should be given to somebody else yeah because it's not about my ego it's about them being served does that make sense yeah a lot of it sounds quite similar to to psychotherapy yes like inotherapy, like, that would be called resistance. Or, you know, you'd refer someone to a different therapist. But, like, how long did it take you to develop the skill of... Like, would you be treated in, like, we'll say, a verbally abusive fashion regularly as part of your job?

Or people who are... Well, no, I'm in UCC now. Okay. For the first six months I was there, I was like, abuse of fashion regularly as part of your job or people who are no i'm in ucc now okay for the first six months i was there i was like oh my god this is really weird nobody has cursed at me and on my first week there i used to work in a service where there was a lot of young people who were in a lot of trouble and there was a lot of drugs and drug debt and fighting and all that kind of stuff and uh uh there'd be scuffles and you know stuff like that but i was sitting in the in my my new office with me fancy chair in ucc and i was there about

10 days and i heard all these raised voices in the corridor and i thought oh shit there's a row and i thought oh my god i'm gonna have to go out and deal with it so i went out and there's all these lovely young u UC students you know but it was funny actually it took me a while to come being working in a job where you have to be really mindful of what you do and what you say

because you don't want to trigger somebody off and then to go into UCC where everybody's nice to you it took a while to yeah to adjust to that actually and that that's one of the things I'm interested in is the impact on people of working in environments where you're working with people who've just had a really really tough time I don't like people saying challenging behavior yeah I don't think people

have challenging behavior I think they're just trying to tell you something and when you mean challenge someone like what we would call antisocial or someone as in the person is not trying to challenge you this is their current language at this time to try and understand something i think that's an adaptive response the challenging the challenging behavior is an adaptive response one of the examples i give sometimes so if i if i've lived in an environment or a community or a home where there's a lot so if i lived in a community where there was a lot of community violence every time you leave the door uh you have to be on guard so it means your your brain is it goes into fight and flight and so you might have to adopt behaviors to keep yourself safe so that might be to walk behaviours to keep yourself safe,

so that might be to walk a particular way or to talk a particular way, and at that time, that behaviour is really important to keep you safe, and the thing is that you just develop those patterns of behaviour, and then you become an adult, and then you go into different settings, but you keep using the same behaviours, and they worked really well at a time when you needed them when you needed them to keep you alive but now they're not working so you know you might have you know experienced a lot of adversity in your home you might have had lived with a domestic violence and that's made you you know appear very aggressive or challenging and then you go to a doctor's waiting room and you're

sitting there and you become aggressive and challenging. And it's because you have this pattern of behavior that worked really well in one setting, but it doesn't work in this. And it's just about understanding where that person is coming from and giving them the skills and the tools to understand what's happening in their brain

and how it's impacting on their behavior. I brought my six month old to a and e um when anybody you know when you have your first baby and they get a rash and a temperature what's the first thing you think about meningitis okay so um my first baby and she was six months old and i brought her to south dock and black pool and he looked very worried and he gave me a letter and he brought her so by the time we got to the hospital I was convinced that that child had meningitis. So what happens when you go into fight and flight?

Your heart rate increases, you're pumped, ready to either fight or flight. You won't let in any rational information that says the child doesn't have meningitis. So your prefrontal cortex, which is your thinking brain, which is here. In order to survive a dangerous situation, this is the part of your brain that does all of your thinking brain, which is here. Yeah. In order to survive a dangerous

situation, this is the part of your brain that does all of your thinking and analysing and planning ahead and understanding consequences. And you can feel, like if you get angry as well, you can feel getting hot here. Do you? I do anyway, yeah. Do you want to tell me a bit more about that? Is that not my prefrontal?

It is, yeah, but I don't know if it gets hot. Anyway. It does in me anyway. It does. I it does i must why do you think i wear a fucking bag so what happens so in an emergency situation so if you're driving down the road and a child runs out in front of you your body that your brain the middle part of your brain perceives the threat it says danger danger sharon and because we don't trust your brain in an emergency situation we're going to turn off the front part of your brain which deals with thinking we're going to activate your fight and flight response no thinking will happen we will perceive the threat we will react to the threat and you won't think about it because if you stop to think about it Sharon you'll overanalyze

it and you'll be dead so the brain is incredibly incredible at keeping you safe so I rock up to A&E with the little baby and the man behind the desk is there and I'm a new mother and I'm terrified so I've left my prefrontal cortex yeah so I hand him the letter and he's talking to somebody about a match or something obviously not perceiving you know the urgency of my particular case and then he I say to him sorry can you get a doctor like it's kind of you know serious and he said yeah I'll be with you in a minute and then I said no like can you get a doctor and he put up his hand and he said I told you I'll be with you in a minute and I said can

you get me a fucking doctor now so then he points to the sign that says abuse towards staff will not be tolerated so what do I need to be able to read that sign my prefrontal cortex so then my other half is there and he's apologizing on behalf and I'm like don't you say anyway the child was fine but what's interesting to me is if you think about it I'm somebody who has good internal resources because I'm you know I'm a psychologist I'm lucky I live in a nice house and I have a lovely family and I you know I can pay the mortgage at the end of the month I've also had to you know do a lot of personal therapy and stuff like that so if I can behave like that in that with all these tools with all these tools then why do we judge people when they totally lose their cool when they've got so much stress

going on it is absolutely appropriate to for your prefrontal cortex to switch off when your fight and flight system is highly activated so back to the god this takes so long to get to the point it doesn't i'm enthralled um everybody else is asleep like they're not so so that's the thing is that's why i don't agree with the term challenging behavior because it assumes that the person is 100 responsible and i don't buy that I think that they're trying their very best in a very difficult situation and rather than excluding somebody from your service what I'm interested in is how we can apply psychology and our understanding of stress and trauma on the brain to say well if my service so just supposing you you know kick off or whatever in the waiting room so rather than say

blind boy is not welcoming our service because he's a total bollocks yeah why not say what is it about our service that makes it so hard for a blind boy to be able to access it okay and what could i do differently so that he can get the service that he needs so that's what i do that's my research which was one of the first questions that you asked. Hooray, we got there! The bar is open now for an intermission for 20 minutes, alright?

Alright. 25 minutes for pints, you greedy bastards. Eating into your own show time. So, let's talk about hash. Because you are a big fan of decriminalisation of cannabis. The research is a big fan of decriminalisation. Yeah, no, it's actually quite a serious thing. You know, just for example,

supposing if you got caught with a bag of weed tomorrow because of who you are, you're unlikely to end up in court. I would literally put the bag on and say, guard, I'm blind, boy, and they'd leave me off. Yeah. Even, but you'd have the financial resources to get yourself a really good solicitor and all that kind of stuff. Well, I've, like, listen,

2010, when all of my buddies were emigrating, the ones that couldn't were the ones who were caught with an ounce or more yeah of their own possession and then they didn't have the opportunity then to emigrate and to do what the rest of the lads were doing yeah and i suppose why i'm a why i'm a fan of decriminalization is two reasons first in relation to young people that lovely brief prefrontal cortex that we were talking about earlier yeah that's not fully formed until you're 23 yeah so when you turn 18 you you go into adult services even though your brain isn't fully mature yeah so it's not like when you're at home when you

wake up at 18 you go oh now i'm going to start planning for my mortgage um so your brain can it keeps growing and developing and the last part to develop is the prefrontal cortex. And that's the bit that does planning ahead, impulse control, understanding consequences and risk. So that's the reason why young men are more likely to be involved in high-speed car crashes. They understand the risk, but they're prepared to take it because the part of the brain that deals with impulse control isn't working properly. And that was really useful once upon a time. So the society that we live in has changed an awful lot. But us as human beings haven't, and our brain hasn't.

So, you know, a thousand years ago, and we were living in caves, like I'm in my mid-forties, you didn't send people in their mid-forties out at night time to catch a boar, because I'd be worried about me hip or, you know, the arthritis. Yeah yeah and a broken leg yeah a thousand years ago is that's a death sentence yeah yeah so what you did is you sent young men between the age of 16 and 25 out at night time to catch and hunt your food because they were prepared to take risks and act on impulses this is the evolutionary reason why we are like this now yeah we haven't really evolved since then and unfortunately our society has so we think do you think do you think uh societies would take advantage of this by

like the average soldier is going to be 18 19 so it's they know this will send like world war one yeah world war one is 17 18 year old lads marching towards machine guns i remember when i was working in an addiction service and there had been a couple of deaths in relation to young people and I was driving home from work and I was listening to Matt Cooper on Today FM or whatever it is

and he said coming up after the break we're going to have a psychologist on from the States who's going to talk to us about how you can stop young people from taking drugs and I thought oh my god this is amazing my job is going to be so much easier pulled in at the side of the road be late like the kids it'll be grand and he said Matt Cooper said how do you stop young people from taking drugs and he said you can't and then I thought oh Jesus and you know and even though I was a psychologist and I knew all that, sometimes when you're working in the job, it's all chaotic and stuff

and you just get swept up in it. And that's the thing is, and he said that, he said, the reason why we send young men to war is because they know that there's a risk of death, but they're prepared to take that risk and they're also not fully aware of the consequence. Yeah. And that's not a bad thing, you see. Because there was once upon a time that as human beings,

we needed those young men to survive. Yeah. But our society hasn't created a space for those young men anymore. Yeah. What are they supposed to do now with their risk taken and their impulse control? The other thing in relation... Are you saying that might be a contributing factor

towards abuse of drugs? No. No, that's a different thing. We'll come back to that. Doing a big load of coke and ketamine is a risk. We're on topic. We're talking about decriminalisation. So what it is, is if you have a young person, let's say under the age of 25,

understands that if you smoke weed, it's not it is if it would be better for you to drink lots of water and have a plant-based diet and get lots of exercise every day that is the ideal scenario yeah but sometimes people like to have a drink or they like to use drugs yeah and the more of it you use the the worse it is for you yeah okay but if you're a young person it is it is you know kind of normalish for for young people to experiment with recreational drug use um and if you say to a young person you know a 17 year old well you know you don't buy weed now because if you're caught with a bag weed you'll

never be able to go to america you're talking about long-year-old, well, you know, you don't buy weed because if you're caught with a bag of weed, you'll never be able to go to America. You're talking about long-term thinking there and the brain isn't programmed for that. So they'll take the risk, then the consequence is huge. So if you have a 19-year-old who ends up with a criminal conviction for a 50-year-old bag of weed,

the consequences of that for the rest of their lives is just horrific. And I don't think that's fair because you and I are sitting here drinking alcohol, one of the most dangerous drugs in our country. Yeah. And that's legal. And we're not going to pay a consequence for that. But a young person who does something that's developmentally appropriate to be experimenting and taking risks and then gets criminalised. I'm not talking about legalisation.

I don't know where I am with that. I do know where I am with decriminalisation. We know what happened in Portugal. Do you know how many people die every day in Ireland as a result of drug and alcohol-related death? No. Two per day. Wow.

I think the latest number for 2015 so I know the stats for 2015 because I wrote a paper on it, in 2015 697 people died in Ireland as a result of a drug and alcohol related death do you know how many people died in road accidents that year? 197 died of what? Road accidents

27 people died from the flu so if you criminalise Road accidents. Road accidents, yeah. 27 people died from the flu. So if you criminalise young people, you limit their options. And there are students all over Ireland who will want to do placements and they'll want to travel abroad and then want to do all of those things. And they're blocked from progressing because they've done things that were not the end of the world things but they have to pay for them for the rest of their life and decriminalization does not help people are criminalizing people who've made you know who've been caught doing

things like that does not open doors for them and does not give them an opportunity to have a most fulfilled life it actually does the opposite um oh yeah the drug-related death thing to go back to topic uh if you look at portugal yeah do you know how many people died in portugal in so in 2015 in ireland 697 people died as a result of a drug and alcohol related death how many people died in portugal that year i don't know two what and they have a bigger population? Two people died as a result of drug and alcohol-related deaths in Portugal that year. So can you... Because they have decriminalised drugs. But they're still doing drugs.

They're still doing drugs. So what's the change? So instead of wasting all of the money that's involved in the criminal justice system of, you know, arrest, detention, paperwork, courts, incarceration. system of you know arrest detention paperwork courts incarceration so instead you divert that money away from the criminal justice system and you divert it into into other services drug and alcohol services education and employment services um but on the ground like does that mean somebody will say because they had access to clean needles we'll say yeah like safe injecting rooms yeah what does it look like what does that look like that world

that portugal has we'll say that's saving people's lives as opposed to here where they're dying i suppose they're treating drug uses as a health issue as opposed to a criminal issue and also as a human rights issue actually yeah um and that's what i'm interested in so i'm interested in the fact that everything is decriminalized like even heroin is decriminalized for personal possession okay so if you're caught like wait you know a million euros worth of heroin in portugal you're going down okay um but uh if if you're caught with with personal use because people who who use uh who use drugs and you know if they have that quantity on them so if you take heroin for an example if you're using heroin you have to use it otherwise you would get really sick yeah so if you're caught with a small amount of of heroin on you you have it because you need it because you're sick and i remember somebody saying

you wouldn't take insulin off a diabetic no um so you know if somebody's using heroin then there's the whole judgment well it's his own fault for starting it in the first place well then you didn't understand what i said just before the break which is about the way the brain works and if somebody's in fight and flight if you've experienced a lot of stress and your mental health is really bad and in the absence of any intervention what is a good thing like you know if you were really stressed in a blind way yeah and you're sitting at home on your couch oh you want to wind down what do you do i'd have a small bit of hash yeah i thought you were going to say a beer all Alright. No, I... You don't have to over-disclose.

So that's what you do, right? So what you're saying is that that's what you're doing for your mental... Now you could choose to do other things. Well, to be honest, I... No, I'm only taking the piss there. No, but I do smoke hash, lads.

My whole thing with substances is I evaluate my relationship with it. So I will never... I try not to use an external thing to mediate an internal problem. So if I'm feeling stressed and I notice, fuck it, I'd love a can.

Fuck it, I'd love a joint. I know that's not good how about I meditate or I be mindful or maybe I write how I'm feeling down work through the emotions and once I've done that I tend not to want a can or a joint like you were nearly self-actualized in Maslow's hierarchy I don't know about that. Bono thinks he's self-actualized. Well, you're up there. But if you think about

people who are living in difficult circumstances and don't have the access to the kind of knowledge that you have. Now, when I was fucking 19 and I was getting panic attacks, I would think, right, what if I have six cans? Because it would work for a small amount of time and that is toxic as fuck so what that's telling me is that you're self-medicating a mental essentially

and is that is that what dual diagnosis is oh yeah a lot of people don't like the term dual diagnosis okay it's stigmatizing but yeah dual diagnosis is where you use substances and you have a mental health issue yeah and we don't really have dual diagnosis services in Ireland because I had on this podcast uh Grace Dyess is her name and she does uh she writes plays around addiction and Grace basically said that any person that she's met either in her life or through her work especially with heroin she doesn't know any of them who don't also suffer from severe mental health issues and also abuse or trauma. So therefore, the heroin isn't recreational, it's actually a form of self-medication because there are no services that exist to assist that person. What would you think of that? Well, interestingly enough, I did a research

project on that. So we did a research project in Cork Simon actually one of my collaborators is in the audience the GP from just for the American people because they're going to go who's Cork Simon and why are you allowed inside of him so Cork Simon is in our Cork Simon communities and you know they work with people

which there's loads of stuff we've talked about that doesn't translate I know the poor old yanks is it going to be like do you remember when they did the snapper and they had to do the subtitles at the bottom there's loads of stuff we've talked about that doesn't translate. I know, the poor old Yanks. Is it going to be like, do you remember when they did the snapper and they had to do the subtitles at the bottom? I can't subtitle a podcast. I can... Oh, yeah.

I can... Jesus. I'm in my 40s. I'm trying to keep up with the technology stuff. You could have, like, a person in the background. Could you do, like, little pauses? Yeah, in one ear, I could have me talking, and then in the other ear, I have an American translating it,

and you just listen like this. A guard is a police officer. Yeah. And they are often big fuckers from Clare. What were we talking about? Oh, dual diagnosis. Dual diagnosis, yeah. First off, why is dual diagnosis kind of a term that...

No, we were talking about Cork Simon. So Cork Simon obviously works with... You're worse than me. Who's going to keep us on track? I don't know. The mayor of Cork. The Simon community in Cork. Yeah, so we did a research project where 50 people were using the services, so people who were experiencing homelessness. And what is Simon Community? That's a homeless service.

It's a homeless service that people experience in homelessness. And what we did was so people who work in homelessness will say to you that the people that they work with have experienced a lot of adversity in their lifetimes. So there might be childhood trauma, there might be adult traumas, and being homeless in itself is a trauma.

So you can have, you know, being homeless in itself is a trauma. So you can have, you know, and everybody in homelessness is very different and has a different story. What is trauma? Psychological trauma is a subjective experience of experiencing your internal and your external world is frightening. Wow, okay, so it's the both of them together. Yeah, so the panic attacks are a really good example. So you might have difficulty in waiting. So waiting might be difficult for you because...

So to give... Oh, this is gonna get really serious now. You're grand. So we'll say if you live in a home where there was a loss of domestic violence. And if you were lying in bed at night time and you're a smallie and you're waiting for the noise downstairs because your brain is so clever it says to you in your procedural memory part of your brain which is right back here it says you know Sharon when you're waiting you're in danger we don't really know why but we know you're in danger so every time you're in danger

what we're going to do is we're going to activate when when you're waiting we're going to activate your fight and flight response so suppose when you're in a and e and it's a six hour waiting time you're sitting there and your brain goes back and it says the waiting is dangerous can't remember why but it's really important now that we trigger the fight or flight so i'll either kick off and that's what's called a trigger yeah but then we'll see if I have anxiety as well so my heart starts to increase. Yeah. I'm going to perceive my insides as being a risk to me and you'll know if you've had a panic attack that sometimes you think that you're going to die. That yeah yeah straight up that was my panic attack is like I am going to die in a half an hour I don't know why but I'm pretty sure I'll be dead um you know uh I remember when I think kind of anxiety is

normal I think when I was 19 I had a lot of anxiety and I remember going to bed one night and I had I I think I don't know anyone really to be to be honest who has ever said no I've never had an anxiety attack liars aren't they if they say that they say that. But I had a panic attack, I think, when I was 19, and I was lying down, and you know when you get a panic attack, and you're not getting enough oxygen, so you get pins and needles in your hands and your feet and your lips and all that. So because I had all of that experience, I thought, oh my god, I've got leukemia. Oh yeah, classic anxiety thought. He's actually serious, That's true. It's true though. And that's the fight or flight part of the brain.

You won't let any rational information in. I used to think that my shadow was a different person. And I was like really entertaining that idea like better not look at my shadow. So I went to the doctor the next day and went in and said I've got leukemia

I need to get a blood test. So I came back and I was fine. But I'm guessing when you were getting that anxiety attack, you didn't know what it was. No, I had leukemia. There you go. Yeah. It's like, I've got leukemia and this is why I feel this way.

And then when the blood test came back and I said I was fine, I was like, that's great. But then I had another panic attack and I was lying in bed and I thought, this is really sad. I'm dying and nobody knows. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're laughing like it's terrible. I was lying in bed and I thought this is really sad I'm dying and nobody knows yeah yeah yeah they're laughing like it's terrible I was dying I was 19 and nobody knew um but the kind of the serious part of that is that um like you and I are lucky we've we've had the opportunity to go to therapy I was lucky to be in college and because I was in college it meant

that I had access to counseling because you go to student services. If I didn't have that, I wouldn't have anyone to say it to me. The first thing the counsellor said to me was, that was a panic attack. That's like a fire alarm going off in a building, but there's no fire. When I heard that, 50% of the... The panic attacks didn't go away,

but the fear of me being broken or me going to die or... I got agoraphobia. I was staying away from anywhere where it happened. 50% of that went away because now I had a language. And then I went and read about what a panic attack was. And then it was like, all right, sweaty palms, all of these symptoms. And just seeing them went,

it's not nice, but at least I'm normal. Yeah. That was massive to find out that I am normal so we go backwards again so trauma is the internal and external world is dangerous but you don't know that it is because the part of your brain that deals with thinking is not he's gone offline so it's expressed there as just a feeling. You don't even sometimes have a feeling. You might just have a physiological... Yeah, you might be angry or you might be withdrawn.

So when we looked at a group of people who were experiencing homelessness, they had very significant levels of very unpleasant experiences. And how do you assess the trauma? Is it through talk therapy? Is it through then disclosing, we'll say, what happened to them in their life or things like that? Well, as in psychologists who work out in the community now, yeah, because I don't. So yeah, there's, you have to be really careful. And how much of the trauma as well is completely unconscious?

How much of the memories that triggered the trauma are just outside of that person's awareness because they were so painful the other thing is how much of it is yours and how much is somebody else's i watched a youtube video that you did with russell brand yeah well obviously you didn't do a youtube video i just saw it on youtube yeah um and you would talk he asked you about why you were anxious yeah and you said it was because your great grandfather was anxious because he was fucking starving in the famine the famine i do believe that i believe that i i and i don't believe i genetically inherited it i just behaviors no but i'm i know it sounds nuts but like no i'm going to tell you my story now in a minute i have an intergenerational trauma story you've an interesting go for it 73 go on so this is like, just to give you an example.

So my grandmother died in 1975. I was born in 1976, so I never met her. But she went to Rocha's stores. Oh, no, hang on, I'll go backwards. I was in a shopping, in a mall. I was in a mall. Go on. For the English listeners, it's a shopping center. So I was in a shopping center in English listeners it's a shopping centre so I was in a shopping centre in Cork

it's called Mahan Point with my daughter and we were coming up to the escalator and my mother was with me and the big one was the H1 and she said don't think just jump mom and I said that's right and when we get off the top whatever so my mother said what's that about and I said oh Sarah's frightened of escalators

but it's my fault because I'm frightened of escalators and my mother said that's very interesting because I'm frightened of escalators but I know why so my grandmother who died in 1975 which was a year before I was born went to roach stores in Limerick in 1973 and saw a small child fall on an escalator and her hair got all pulled out at the top and you're all at risk of vicarious trauma now if you just imagine that um so uh she went home to east clare and told her 14 children so yeah so then they went on i don't know how many i think like i've got 43 first cousins on that side so uh all frightened of escalators and then uh but so then like in twins is that why all your cousins live in bungalows i actually live in a bungalow that is so i was talking to somebody about this yesterday i can't have the stairs in the house

it's really weird but um maybe it's that thank you thank you thank you blind boy um but it was really interesting to me then was that a little girl in 2018 was frightened of something because it's something that happened to a woman that neither her or i had ever met and but for the fact that my mother was there that day we probably wouldn't have even made the connection and once we made the connection and i realized it wasn't my fear it was somebody else's I became less the escalators became less frightened but do you think because there's what's called epigenetic trauma yeah the research is a bit I'd say that's like is that dodgy enough trauma in the genes like like I blame my trauma. Like, when I say I can trace my panic attacks back to the famine. Yeah.

I... Look, I got panic attacks. My dad got panic attacks. He learned panic attacks off his ma, and then his ma was in the famine. So I do see... And I'd imagine the famine's going to trigger an odd panic attack, wouldn't it? Everyone's eating grass.

Can't be great. That's quite frightening. So I don't think it's irrational for me to think that... No, because... Because they're just learned behaviours. I think they're learned behaviours. There is a lot of research being done on the epigenetics and we'll see what comes out of that.

That'll be very interesting. How do you test that? How do you test blood? I don't know. I'm a psychologist. Oh, so you don't... No, I you don't think no what's that called what's it called when when because there are other areas of of is that psychiatry like i i was recommended a guest tonight and someone who studies the relationship between the gut and the brain you have to that's john crying he's that's he's an amazing speaker and super interested in research So what's that called?

Because that's physical body He's a microbiologist and a neuroscientist and what else? He's a microbiologist is it? Who shouted it out? He's not a fucking chemist A biochemist A biochemist

Their work is... So they have a book called The Probiotic Revolution. Yeah. Very, very interesting. You have to read that. Put that on your list now. But what were we talking about again? So we were talking about...

Oh, epigenetics. Yeah. No, I think it's behaviours. I think it's behaviours. Yeah. But at the moment, that's what the evidence is. And it makes sense. But I'm open to more evidence.

We learn good things off our parents, and we learn bad things off our parents. Do you know? And for me... Which I shouted at the kids yesterday. If it was raining, you'd want to be outside. Like, where did I hear that from? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know? And where did she hear that from? Yeah. So we keep carrying on the same patterns and have you have you read the this is another little plug now but um the atlas of an irish revolution one board gosh book of the year i can't remember if it was the last year of the year before but that was a book that came out of ucc it's it's a really excellent book on the history you will love this book on the history of of ire of the Irish Revolution now you want to

reinforce coffee table because I bought one and like it's ginormous but I was sitting at home and I opened all excited you know I'm going to learn a bit about history and I'm going to be all you know cool and I read the first couple of pages and it was about the famine and I got a little pain here and I was like that's my gut now. That's my famine gut. And, you know, whatever one of my ancestors had to eat back off a tree. Have you ever read Under the Hawthorn Tree? No. Oh my God.

It's a children's book. I don't know how they thought that this was a good idea as a children's book. It's about a little girl in the famine. It is one of the most traumatic things I've ever... I think I read it when I was 12. I still dream about it. And, like, people eating dead dogs and blades of grass and all that kind of stuff. So that stuff has to be stuck to us in our behaviour. So if you think about my grandmother's experience of the escalators,

that there's a girl in 2018, an eight year old girl in 2018, who's frightened because of something that never happened to her. What else have we got? What other stuff am I frightened of? That's just one tiny little isolated incident. One of the questions I got asked tonight one of the questions I got asked tonight

for you was what about, we'll say the the Irish are seen as a nation of alcoholics. Yeah, good. But, like, to look at, was that an empathic sneeze? But, like, to look at, we'll say, addiction in Ireland, and then to go, can that be, is that post-colonial? Like, we've had so much of this murder and bloodshed and trauma

in 800 years of this fucking country. Recently, up in fucking Bloody Sunday was only 40 years ago, 50 years ago. I remember exactly where I was standing on the day of the Omar bombing. In 96? Yeah, it was one of the most horrific things. I suppose in the past as well, you didn't have things on screen maybe. So you didn't have to see things as much as you can now. But I remember exactly where I was standing on the day

of the Olma bombing when it came on the television, on the news. So that's a public thing. So that's something that a lot of people experience. Is this... Can... It's fair to say that in this country, our drink culture is probably toxic we consider binge drinking

to be completely normal, right? I was just in Spain I was in a city the size of Cork and I was the only drunk person there genuinely, and for me that's healthy drinking, I was like sitting down going I'm going to have six pints what do you think when I say six pints?

are you going, oh you mad bastard that's normal, six pints is normal do you think when I say six pints? Are you going, oh, you mad bastard. That's normal. Six pints is normal. That's a Friday night. In Spain. That's a three-day hangover for me. I could not cope. Really? In Spain, the idea of six pints in Spain is once a year and something to be really shameful about. They are able to have a beer that's that size and they'll sip on it for two hours. That's not present in their culture. But we'll say something like how we drink in this society and how we've normalised utterly binging

as almost a form of, I do believe it as well as a form of medication in a sense too because if I look back at, you know, how did I learn that it's okay to get utterly pissed I don't know how to have one pint now I wouldn't consider myself to have a drink problem I'll drink once a week but I don't have one pint

I'm like I'm having six for me that started when I had to get to the point in my life where I had to talk to girls so teenage discos you go to the teenage disco when you're 12, 13 everyone's on both sides of the rooms right, you've got girls here, you've got boys there one brave person

is going to dance with a girl and everyone will giggle two years later when you're 14, what's happening? everyone's doing naggins of vodka and everyone's shifting the alcohol intervened as the way for whatever shyness we have for people to get together and go it's okay now, we can shift's grand i was pissed but that's a cultural thing right there and alcohol

was directly put in there what what do you think is it too hot a take out of me or the person who was asking the question to say that something like the irish attitude towards drink could actually be as a result of a generational trauma or a response to it? I mean, it's not a wildly loose connection. I think that... I don't want to be the crack police here either. Not crack as in serious. Well, I'm aware as well that you're an academic, so you have to be very careful with big sweeping statements.

But I can say what I want. No! I have no accountability. I think that everybody should be allowed... There are people who don't drink at all there are people, you know, there are people who drink a little bit there are people, I think everybody should be allowed to do whatever they want in moderation as long as they're not

hurting themselves or other people so I don't want to be the crack police by saying oh we drink too much and it's terrible but we do. We do like but you know what's considered actual binge drinking? Four pints. Do you know what I mean? So four pints is like a really relaxing Sunday lunch yeah but that's binge drinking and the Spanish seem to get it the Germans get it the Germans do their big Oktoberfest but they literally have one giant pint and then they kind of relax. We don't have that. Elements

of what I do view it as healthy. I think one of the most healthy expressions of Irish culture is the Irish wake. I love a good funeral. But seriously, we do celebrate death and we celebrate people's lives and we're not allowed to do it anymore

but back in the days, and this is before, what did they call it, an embalming, they used to get the corpse and dance around the house with it and shove whiskey down its throat. That was normal. I'm not saying bring it back.

But like... Would you like to put that into your will? I want to be burnt into a crisp and all my friends have to smoke me in a joint. But that's one of the good things, I think, about Irish culture is British people, when they come to Ireland and they see the fact that we even have an open coffin, the Brits can't handle it. They very much sanitise their debt.

Do you know what I love? because I'm from a rural area is what I what I find very difficult is you know when you go to a funeral and they don't so where I'm from originally they don't have a dead body it's a fake funeral you know where I'm from originally we don't have professional undertakers so we have undertakers who are farmers or whatever yeah so how does that work in rural communities you have the funeral home but because the community is so small it's not like you know there's three funerals a day like like when i moved to cork i uh somebody i knew their father died and i went to the removal which was in a large funeral home in the city and we'll say where I'm from it would be

the only funeral in the day so you'd kind of rock up at whatever time you want yeah so I rocked up anyway went around and shook hands and came out and it's like I didn't know anyone there I was an hour early because in cities it's like in and out whatever yeah where's where I'm from it's rude so you have somebody who you know works during the day and then somebody dies and they go and they start it out. But you don't have grave diggers. So family members and members of the community go and dig the grave. And you send up a bottle of whiskey

and some sandwiches and stuff like that. Is this still going on? Yeah, absolutely. Wow. This happens in rural communities in Ireland all of the time. And then when you put the coffin in and they're finished saying the prayers, and then the local people shovel in the clay. And the sound, for me, the person has gone.

There's almost an acceptance that they're gone when you hear the sound of the clay hitting the coffin. Yeah. And I've been to funerals where they don't do that. You know, they put this fake grass over the top. Yeah, fuck that. And I'm like... So it's kind of like standing around going,

what happens next? It's almost like it hasn't finished. And I find that really weird i think that we're really good at i agree with you i think we're really good at death i think yeah um and i think the wake is a part of it as well as well too if you look at it from terms of um like so what's this got to do with psychology it's it is i'm gonna bring it right back to psychology right now because i'll tell you when i was, when I was learning and training in psychology, right, they were talking about one very important thing

that I learned was when an adult in front of you begins to cry, our natural instinct is to hand that person a tissue. But what I learned was that I'm not actually doing it to assist them. It's that their explosion of emotion frightens me and what I'm trying to do is to go please take this and stop crying because I can't handle this I'm not trying to help them that grass that plastic grass is the tissue it does the same

thing it's when you put plastic grass over the coffin and you don't allow the clay and the earth and the worms that are going to eat the body you deny the actual reality of finality and death there is no coming back when that clay hits that timber and it's honest

they're going to be worms and it's grand because it happens to everyone do you know who are the best at it though? The fucking Tibetans, man. They get dead bodies, fuck them up onto a mountain and they cut up the body and a lot of vultures eat it and fly off and drop the bones all over the valley

because they've no soil and then the young Buddhist monks have to go into all the rotten flesh and the bones and they have to meditate there for seven hours so that they can confront death. And they do it in loud as well bones and they have to meditate there for seven hours so that they can confront death no and they do it in loud as well i'll have the plastic grass no i'm not right that used to be a tradition as well in in there was a church in france and they were catholic nuns and they this is they had these big concrete, they looked like toilets. So it's this big concrete throne with a hole in the center,

and the dead nuns were placed on this to decompose. The hole was for the bodily fluids to actually just decompose down. And the young nuns had to sit there all day and just do holy rosaries with tons of these rotting nuns around them but which it's a bit extreme it is very extreme but what it essentially is it's the same as the buddhist thing it's part of the experience of being alive sometimes is consistently distracting ourselves from the fact that our lives are going to end at one point and we don't like thinking about it and we don't like thinking about everything you love and hold dear is going to die.

That is reality. We can die tomorrow. We don't like... Why would you want to think about that? I'd rather listen to Slipknot. But there is a thing within spirituality, within Buddhism, and within early Christianity

where if you want to achieve communion with God, we'll say, you must go, I am a finite human being, I'm going to die, I accept it and I know it, and only by achieving that can I be a spiritual being to help other people. So that's what they were doing. They had a lot of free time on their hands. If Instagram was around, that wouldn't happen.

So tell me this. What do you think about people who are atheists, then? Do you think that they find it easier or more difficult to deal with death? It depends on the type of... Like, I would consider myself an atheist. I'd be more... What's the one that isn't an atheist? Agnostic.

Agnostic, yeah. I consider the position of atheism to be a little bit arrogant, you know? Oh, I'm an atheist. Oh, are you? Straight up, there's definitely nothing. I can't go for the absolute definitely nothing, because it's too mad. I just go, whatever it is, I don't know what it is. So I don't want to take a full position. No, there's definitely nothing. I get my meaning from the present moment.

That's what I try and do. I say, first off, there's no such thing as heaven or hell. What I say is that if I can choose to live in hell, I choose to live in hell by allowing anxiety to conquer my life, by allowing myself to get so anxious over a long period of time that I let my depression creep in. around my behavior that will allow me to live in hell by fighting that and making other choices like cbt choices i now get to live in heaven because i'm happy all the time because i keep an eye on my mental health so there's my heaven and hell i can only live in heaven if i try to do everything as much as possible in the here and now so i don't live in the past worrying too much you know sullying my present moment by worrying about something I said to someone last week. And I don't sully my present moment by worrying about what might happen next week because I've no control over it. So I just try and go, what's going on right now? So would you recommend mindfulness then for mental health interventions?

I would definitely recommend mindfulness. But one thing, now you'd probably know more about this than I would, but I did a guided meditation on the podcast a couple of weeks ago and I meditate a lot I fucking love it it's very helpful for me but I heard that meditation can be risky for people who have body trauma if someone has I don't know a car crash and they hurt their leg and they forgot about the anxiety of it and then all of a sudden they meditate and check into their body and they start feeling that pain and it brings up the emotions yeah you have to be very careful with it but yeah do you know anything about that because that's just something i heard what's the deal with that there are some people so like there are some people who just cannot do mindfulness because it's just too it's too

traumatic for them so you have to with every single intervention that you do you have to cbt doesn't work for everybody. No. You know, so mindfulness is very good if you can master it. It's cheap. You can do it yourself. There's no big complicated language. I do it a lot. And I hated the idea of mindfulness.

And I had to do it. I was forced to do a training course on mindfulness. That doesn't sound very mindful. We're going to force you to do mindfulness. Because forced to do a training course on mindfulness one and I was like that doesn't sound very mindful it was I know we're gonna force you to do mindfulness because it was recommended as best practice for a particular thing that I was doing and I didn't want to do it and I was like I know am I actually going to pay somebody to tell me to breathe in my nose and out my mouth and that's what I actually did when I was born automatically for free and I just couldn't get my head around it so the first day that I was there I brought my diary and I was doing my Tesco shopping list so when your man was saying you know do the breathing and all that I was

walking through the aisles of Tesco in Wilton so you were Tesco is a grocery store and I was walking through you were doing mindful Tesco I oh well genie mac that's yeah you were yeah because I try and be mindful when I'm washing the dishes I try and be mindful when I'm eating my food when I'm smoking my vape no I wasn't no I wasn't mine because I was not being present in the moment which was in the mindfulness class okay yeah in the mindfulness class I was imagining myself walking through the aisles in Tesco oh shit okay yeah no I was in the mindfulness so you were certainly not present in no I was like so when you go down yeah in mind so yeah so there's the bread aisle first oh those nice sun-blessed pancakes the ones with the you know there's sometimes it's eight with two free they're

lovely with butter I'll definitely get some of them and so I went the whole way around the thing and then we had to do homework mindfulness homework and I was allergic as they say in Cork and do you know what it worked okay and then I started reading the neuroscience behind it and there's a huge amount of neuroscientific research now behind mindfulness and i know myself that when i do mindfulness it is a huge impact on my you know when i notice when you do you mean mindfulness now as in like why do you make i do body scans and all that kind of stuff so but do you mean meditation or simply like i will a huge thing for me with mindfulness is like i said said, when I used to have anxiety, somewhere like Dunn's stores, or not just Dunn's, maybe Tesco,

these would have been massively triggering places for me. I used to have an intense irrational fear of, I would do something in this place that would draw a lot of attention to me. I was afraid that I would get sick or go mad or start screaming or putting things off. I'd go, fuck it, what if I went up to the uh the washing powder island just started taking things off the uh and everyone would stare at me and I used to kind of go fuck it how do I know whether I have control over that oh shit I think I want to do it and now I'd have this mad panic attack so I would just stay away from supermarkets altogether and it developed into agoraphobia so now because of that because

that's a former trigger when I'm in done stores now I take out my headphones and I completely and utterly mindfully I will walk down the bread aisle I will touch bread I will smell it I'll go down into the aisle with the the washing powder and I'll smell the different washing powders and I'll be incredibly aware of literally everything the touches how many times you've been arrested for smelling I don't mean I'm straight up to the fucking daz with my face in there like I just mean I'm I'm noticing I'm really really in the aisle with the white powder intensely noticing what's going on but then what I try and do as well is when I behave like that in in in in dun, when I go up to the cash register then,

I'm so nice and sound to the person who's packing my stuff and I'm not even aware that I'm doing it. It's because had I gone in there anxious, I won't even recognize that person's presence and they will end up feeling like shit because here's just another prick that comes in

and thinks I'm invisible but instead what I've done is I've smiled at them I've been sound, I wasn't intruding and going what are you doing, I just said have a lovely day and walked out, so my mindfulness then has allowed me to improve my community as such I notice where I use it a lot is actually in parenting

because you know if you work full time and you're tired and you come home in the evening and you're just like oh my god I can't wait for them to go to bed I don't because I've no children I can do what I want you can have mine anytime you want try it out and so you come home and you're exhausted and you think I just want them to go to bed because I'm so exhausted and then they love you and they want to spend a bit of time with you and they might want to do ba ba black sheep and you're like I just can't like i just can't do it i can't do baba actually because i have to peel the spuds and put on a load of washing and i didn't send those three emails and i have 17 missed calls and the poor old crazy says they're hanging off both legs and they're whinging and all they want

is for you just to be present yeah and the minute you do a bit of mindfulness and you just go the washing will have to wait the emails will have to to wait the return phone if you can just be present for 15 minutes they stop whinging and they go away and they i was expecting you have this big compassionate realization about what's important oh you like wait when you do parenting you know oh my god they go away and they play are you for real yeah they go away so does that mean that they're? yeah they go away and they play nicely with each other is it possible too that when you come in worried and you're given off a home of anxiety that their way of coping with it

mom is demented let's mirror mom's behavior of course but dogs do the same thing yes a dog will start yapping if you're yeah so if you become mindful honestly 15- 20 minutes and then they go away but they're essentially but love you darling bye bye but do you think that

go outside and play when you come in demented and stressed that their coping mechanism is is baba black sheep or just attention or love or something no baba black sheep is because they want to you know they want to hear the song yeah okay and they want you to do it and then if you're really stressed you go I'll do it in a minute love I'll do it in a minute I just have to peel the potatoes I was going to say spuds potatoes um you see you've just drawn so much attention to that now um so yeah and they just they just really want your attention and and it's very hard in the world that we live in to to give your attention because there's so many distractions um and and and by being and say take a deep breath and ground yourself and notice your feet in the floor and you know all that kind of stuff and then you say i'm okay everything is okay

in this moment and i can do baba black sheep and enjoy it and how often in your day do you ground yourself like that just do like a little body scan more than i I should. Not as much as I should. I do it a lot at night time. I listen to a body scan that's eight minutes long. Yeah. And in bed. I have never been awake for the end of that. Yeah. I wake up at eight o'clock in the morning with the earphones wrapped around my head.

And the phone is over there. And there's a child here and one down there. Dogs and all sorts. And I will fall. From the minute I put my head on the pillow, Dogs and all sorts. And I will fall. From the minute I put my head in the pillow, I will be asleep before the eight minutes is up from that body scan. I think it's amazing.

Yeah. Did you hear the little body scan mindfulness thing I did, yeah? And it didn't bother you that was in a limerick accent, no? I'm going to use that in one of my classes. Do for the crack. I will for the crack. I'm going to use that in one of my classes do for the crack I'm going to ask some of the fucking questions

I was actually asked, I haven't asked fucking one of them you're very distractible my question is what do politicians and policy makers need to do to prevent childhood trauma from happening in the first place and to better support unrecovered adult survivors so that they can feel safe and heal okay a you're not always going to

be able to prevent all adversity and a little bit we all experience adversity in our lives life is not always great and it's that's builds resilience bad things happen and you can't protect children we i think we're over in protecting children from bad things now as well, and that's not good for resilience. Have you heard of the concept of helicopter parenting? There was something that happened in the 90s, wasn't there? Something to do with Bill Clinton, I don't know.

Is it a theory that... I've heard it rolled out as one reason why there's a lot of anxiety today that it was a generation of kids who grew up with just the news freaking out about others pedophiles everywhere mind your children the whole time and now everyone didn't get as well as that parents so we have smaller families and things like that as well. But I think older parents are more cautious too. Yeah, so I'm in my 40s, I'm totally risk-averse. And I've only got two children,

so I can actually watch them all the time. If I had 14 of them, sure, I wouldn't even know their names. Okay, yeah, yeah. And that's not always a bad thing. So there's this concept of an element of health neglect so I'm trying to do this with my children and but they don't I'm actually totally served I'm totally monitoring them but they don't know so they think they're going to the shop on their own and that kind of stuff but

they're not I'm like you were drawn behind them I mean the bushes and and they're like they think they're great and they're all super cool. But when we were that age, like you left the house in the morning and you didn't come back until six o'clock. Oh yeah, yeah. I used to get lost. I used to hang around with a dog and get lost. Did you ever hitchhike?

What? Me, myself and my sister used to hitchhike into Limerick. I didn't go that far now. I used to jump on the back of vans and end up at different parts of town. Like imagine if you were 14. No, do you know what? Actually, I used to jump on the back of vans and end up at different parts of town. Like imagine if you were 14. No, do you know what? Actually, I used to put my hand out and hitch

but no one wanted to collect me, so probably because you were girls. Yeah. So we used to hitchhike to Limerick from East Clare. No one does that anymore. People used to have their thumbs out on the road. And you were kids, were you? I was teenagers. And no one told you that that's that's

wrong for two yeah but you did it anyway okay yeah but there was no mobile phones or anything like that and so nobody knew where you were so they'd say oh where we'd be inside in pennies in limerick and uh my mother would say where were you we were down in the Protestant graveyard looking at the headstones because we were interested in, you know, the family names. Mother. We weren't, we were in pennies. Limerick.

But you're like, no, but you're sure how... That would nearly make the news today. Oh, yeah. If kids ended up successfully hitching into L sure how... That would nearly make the news today. Oh, yeah. If kids ended up successfully hitching into Limerick, it would get on the news. Do you know two young fellas from Dublin went to America? Oh, didn't someone make a story out of that? How did they manage that?

So they got on a flight and they went to America. Didn't they? Am I wrong? Right? Was it America? Yeah. Did they get two flights? Even? Were they, like, proper children? Ten. I think they were ten and eleven yeah. I know a dog ended up in Dublin there three weeks ago from Maynooth. No I remember yeah the dog from Kildare ended up in fucking Dublin he was all

over the TV. I, so we used to hitchhike when we were that age I remember when my nephew was I don't know in TY transition year whatever year I don't know 15 or 16 and there was a thing on in UCC and he wanted to come down and my sister was going to Christen or something and she couldn't drive and I said Cherie could get the bus well the panic

and now my nephew he's a big man now and at the time he was still a big, tall fellow. And he had a beard and everything, even when he was 16. And I said to him about getting on the bus. And he said, but there could be weirdos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, you are the weirdo on the bus.

And then I can't remember if it was my mother or my sister said to me, what about pedophiles? And I was like, I've got news here. He's like, wait, he's like gone beyond. He's not in the age range, you know. But I was looking, I was going like, we were hitching. We were like, we were hitchhiking when we were that age. And we don't allow our children to get the bus.

We don't allow them to go to the shop on their own. We constantly know where they are all the time. The thing is with that right is and here's where i would look at it is that genuinely for the safety of the child or so that the parent doesn't have to feel anxiety it's it's it's our anxiety yeah because we we respond now to one percent and two percent risk um you, the risk of a child being abducted by a stranger in Ireland is extremely small in comparison to other countries.

It's horrendous, absolutely horrendous when it happens. But what we're doing is we're parenting based on a probably less than 1% risk. And what that does is it tells the children, you tell children by your behavior that the world that they live in is dangerous and it's not um you know and and we totally diskill them so in order to build resilience you make you have to make decisions and you have to take risks and sometimes you have to make mistakes and what do we do now when our

children come home from school and they say, I was in school today and blind by call me four eyes. What do we do now? We ring the school. What did we do then? Go in and hit him a slap. Yeah. Because you had to problem solve. Or like if your parents weren't like that, it was sticks and stones. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but boards will never hurt you. Yeah. So we have to let children problems... There's a really good article in the Huffington Post called Simplifying Childhood. And it talks about that, about children not having opportunities to be bored as well.

Being bored is very, very good for you. Boredom, literally, I remember being bored when I was younger, but the second the internet was invented, the feeling of boredom left my body. I've forgotten what boredom feels like. How the fuck are you supposed to be bored? Like, I remember being seven, eight years of age and I literally had nothing to do for half an hour.

It's boring. But you just, you take out your phone and you're talking to someone on Instagram. You can't be bored. It doesn't exist. Yeah. And a bit of boredom is nice in our house our poor children are totally deprived so they've no access to ipads they have no access to any they're not allowed to use any electronic devices the television is not switched on on weekdays it's only switched on on a saturday night and are you doing that based on research that you've seen yeah okay yeah so the kids come in and they go i'm bored i'm delighted because there's a load And are you doing that based on research that you've seen? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

So the kids come in and they go, I'm bored. I'm delighted because there's a load of washing in there that needs to be hung out. The dishwasher hasn't been emptied. And there's a hoover down there with your name on it, love. They're gone. Out the back, climbing a tree. Oh, okay, okay. They're no longer bored when there's housework.

When you're bored, what you have to do is you have to be creative. Yeah. And if you're there and you're bored, you'll say, Oh, Jesus, what do I do now? Sure, look, will I clean the skirting boards or I'll paint that wall? Wouldn't that wall be nice blue? I used to draw. My whole artistic thing. Cut up bits of paper and pretend it's money.

Yeah. And then fight. Myself and my sister, who's here, we used to box the head off each other. Are kids allowed to box the head off each other anymore? No, not anymore. No. The guards will be called.

I heard an interesting... She's here. Will I tell you what? She spat at me once when I... When she was about... When she was about seven. Isn't that terrible? Who does that? The news used to just be a thing that happened in, like the Angelus, you know, morning and lunch in the evening. But as soon as cable television in America had 24-hour news, it also led to these huge, massive panic stories about someone's missing, a kid is missing. Well, fucking hell, we have to do 24 hours of news, let's give it six hours.

And from this fed the fear of the world is an incredibly dangerous place. We're living in the least violent time in human history. The least violent time in human history. Statistically, yeah. Statistically, we're probably the most frightened. I remember when I had my second child and she was only a few weeks old and I was sitting on the couch

and, ooh, lovely little baby, big fat chubby cheeks. And I turned on the television and do you know what came on uh the murder of the British soldier on the street fuck yeah and I was lying there with this beautiful little child and I started crying yeah what have I done I've brought you into a really terrible world and I was so upset all day about the fact that I brought this perfect beautiful little creature into a world that was so horrific and the reality was was what happened was horrific yeah but it didn't

happen to me yeah it wasn't happening to her but I was being impacted emotionally impacted by something that's the vicarious I was being emotionally impacted by something that I could do nothing about yeah about so that's why there's none of that TV Wi-Fi stuff going on in our house TV Wi-Fi stuff? I'm going moving in with Conor because Conor's got an iPad

okay love I'll miss you darling I love you loads I'm going to open the floor up to some questions for the end of it can we bring up the house lights but in a very gentle fashion please I don't want to alarm anyone for fuck's sake bet you didn't know there was that many

I did not do I have to look who would like to ask a question I'm going to do this in such a way that I'm sound to the person who has the microphone. Is it correct that the microphone is over here? Hiya. Is there also...

Oh, shit, up here. Yeah, look. Oh, boys, I was forgetting about Ali. There's somebody waving up there with a microphone. So sorry, lads. And are they the more expensive seats? You have to look after them. Okay, this lady here.

Hiya. How are you? Shannon, I actually have a question for you there you were talking about like transgenerational

and blabber you were saying this as well is that a Scottish accent no I'm from Canada and I'm kind of have a

quark accent now oh my god wow I'm all over the place you sound like a fucking Viking go on but I was just wondering in your in your professional opinion and blind by for you as well

uh do you see that like kind of you know relationships you know toxic relationships that could be happening you know not happening to you but to your parents or your grandparents could that be affecting your present day relationships as well oh didn't you do something on uh systemic family therapy yeah yeah yeah oh you should answer this one um well i mean look it's very simple if you grow up in a house and you would say your two parents should really be divorced but they're still together so therefore their way of expressing companionship is through passive aggression or not talking or even worse if there's you know a toxicity and a violence involved that from a very young age is you learning how you should relate to another person so if you didn't experience love from your parents you as an adult then trying to find love in another person, you might

not know what it looks like. Or if you believe that your parents fighting all the time is how it should be done, when someone actually does come towards you with genuine love, you don't know what it looks like. And you go, that's weird. No, thanks. And then you're like, why am I always doing that? That person was sound. I think I'll have this prick instead. Do you know? But that sounds like a very pessimistic thing. The beauty, and I always say it, the beauty of psychology and the beauty of being an adult, once you discover these things about yourself and you become an adult, you can go, fucking class, I can rewrite my script and I can change that. I can identify it and I can become a new fucking person. Do you get me? So it's not as deterministic and as doom and gloom as that.

How does that sound? Because you're the professional psychologist. I would give that an A+. Thank you very much. I am conscious that it is 11 o'clock. I'll write one more, you poor bastard. I met you outside and I smoked a fag, didn't I? I smoked a fag with him earlier. Here, send this gent down, the man in the orange jumper.

Sounds like a novel. Hold on, the mic's behind you, cousin. Kind of a two-parter, right? I love this already bear with me right so that's a man with mic technique yeah I'd like you to know your personal opinion first of all on marijuana I suppose I'm gonna say and then as a psychologist point of view from mental health because I suffer from my own mental health issues myself but I always find that smoking weed helps me be a better me if that makes sense yeah so I just like to know your own personal perspective and then as a psychologist just because i've known if you've done both psychology so um just from the both sides you know all right from me personally uh

any substance it has to do with your own personal relationship with it so for me personally i'll have the odd bit of baldy i have a good relationship with baldy I'll smoke at the odd time when I feel like it. I will not use it to medicate myself. I won't use it to try and feel better. I use it as a reward. If I do a bunch of hard work, I'll go, small bit of Boldy there on Friday, and I'll rediscover the early albums of Nirvana. So that's my relationship with it. Nirvana's great when you're stunned. Yeah, it's fantastic.

But then, here's the thing. Now, I don't know, I could be wrong with this shit, right? But they did some studies into, we'll say, the way that weed can affect the brain, right? Weed that has excessively high levels of THC. There's two chemicals, CBD and THC. That's another question I wanted to ask you as well, actually, man. Go on, yeah. Sorry, sorry, guys. I know you va you as well, actually, man. Go on, yeah. Sorry, sorry, guys.

I know you vape as well, and I started vaping myself, right? Yeah. But I still smoke fags, but I'm vaping the CBD. Yes. And that was another thing I wanted to ask you as well. But you're not getting a buzz off it, though? Nah, THC is all for me, but I started vaping. There you go. There you go.

So THC is the fun one. But here's the thing, though, lads, right? We, if you're in California, we'll say, well, it's perfectly legal, okay? You can walk into a shop, like it's a fucking cheese counter below on the English market, and you can choose, today I want to have 50% THC, 50% CBD. The shit that we are smoking on the streets, that you're buying off the dealer, you don't know what it is, you don't have choice. The dealer is going oh I've got blue cheese. It could be fucking anything. These things have incredibly high THC and they have done studies that excessive use of this can

be triggering to people who already have a potential towards psychosis, right? Think of it this way, if drink was illegal it this way if drink was illegal lads if alcohol was illegal what would we be drinking poaching that's made in people's bathrooms and we wouldn't know what's in it and people to be going blind and people be dropping dead instead at least we can go to a shop and buy a can of beer that's 5% and know what you're getting so the law has created a situation where we are smoking things that are potentially unsafe as opposed to having the choice to go today I want

to have a mix of CBD and THC because I know this might protect me. The other thing with hash being illegal and I mentioned this before in a podcast, the main hash growing gangs in Ireland are triad gangs they're fueling human trafficking they're bringing in Vietnamese people Filipino people who just want to get to the west they're paying nothing bringing them over in containers they're ending up in limerick

and they're in grow houses as slaves growing fucking weed the guards come in, they arrest them they're sent to jail for 10 years and all they are is a migrant who wanted to get to another country who thought they were going to work in a kitchen that exists when we buy cannabis on the streets so now cannabis this essentially healthy drug is unethical you're supporting slavery so those are other reasons I think but

regarding look it's all about your relationship with the fucking drug if you smoke weed and it makes you really your relationship with the fucking drug if you smoke weed and it makes you really paranoid all the time and it makes you unhappy and you worry about how much you smoke it and you feel you can't enjoy yourself if you don't then you have an unhealthy relationship with that substance and you need to step away from it and look at the issues but if you can recreationally enjoy it and be grand and you're fine, then you don't have an issue with that substance. How would you feel about that? Yeah, I couldn't disagree with it. I think in the 1970s

in terms of European countries including Ireland, about 10% of the weed that you could buy would be the kind of high strength. Whereas now it's something like 95%. I used to smoke smelly sock hash it was called in Limerick.

Brown stuff and it would barely get you high. Squidgey black. Squidgey fucking, yeah, but squidgey black is the good stuff. But I didn't, there was, everyone was smoking weed when I was a teenager, but you weren't getting people developing weed psychosis because they were all smoking this really shit hash.

So yeah, so you're right. So there's THC and there's CBD, and THC is what gets you high, and CBD then wraps itself around your myelin sheets, which is a thing in your brain, and it protects you from getting too high, and then it protects you from getting drug-induced psychosis. But the problem with the stuff that you are buying

is it has... The levels of THC are too high, and the levels of CBD are too low. So you are putting is it has the levels of THC are too high and the levels of CBD are too low so you are putting yourself at risk. There are people who are more vulnerable. If you have chronic mental health issues and you have stuff going on in your life and you're using drugs to manage that it might not give you what you need um but you can say that like there are people who exercise too much i like why didn't i get that one the exercising one you know i sit at home and drink a beer and eat chocolate but um so you can have unhealthy relationships with lots of different things video games yeah jesus i've got friends whose lives are

fucking ruined from video games. They can't enjoy it. They don't want to go outside. They just want to, all they care about is the video game. Social media. I got a blister on my thumb when I was in college from playing Crash Bandicoot one night. There we go. Until four o'clock in the morning.

But that by itself, like that's very low level, but that is... Crash Bandicoot is low level. Oh no, four o'clock? But it's troubling behaviour. Are you testing Crash Bandicoot? You're giving yourself an injury because you're doing this thing and you can't stop. That's very low level, but that is... Crash Bandicoot is low level. Oh, no, 4 o'clock? But it's troubling behaviour. You're tasting Crash Bandicoot. You're giving yourself an injury because you're doing this thing and you can't stop. That's a problem.

That's not great. That's not... So if you've injured yourself, you've injured somebody else, if you haven't got enough money because you're spending it too much. Yeah. So, like, if on a Friday night...

Like, I love cheese, and one of my treats is the English market is to go and buy cheese so you eat loads of cheese and box the head off someone so I eat loads of cheese so that would might be I might reward myself to cheese from the English market on a Friday and if you want to

treat yourself to having a spliff or whatever on a Friday and somebody else wants to have a beer and somebody wants to go for a jog if you attend to all of your responsibilities and you go to bed at night feeling okay with yourself then I'm cool with that Can I go serious?

Someone didn't take the microphone away from me, can I ask one more question? Go on, you can, yeah Fuck it, right? How come just from what you're saying there, right? Like, and... Just...

Right, I felt like I'm home from work and having, like... Right? Me dad. Fuck it, he's not here. Right? So, if my dad comes home from work, right? And has 20 cans of Budweiser sitting down watching YouTube with me, right? Yeah.

But if I come home from work and have two spliffs and then I'm too fucked to even watch telly so I go out to bed. Yeah. Like, how is that so fucking different? It's not different. It's the relationship, though. Like, put it this way.

I will go and have, I'll have eight cans on a Friday. What I mean, sorry, what I mean sorry is like how is the alcohol so bad and then how can a fella have 12 cans rather than a fella have like a spliff and a half and go to bed and go to sleep because he's too fucked like do you know what I mean first of all drinking 20 cans in one night

is going to fuck your liver up that's not great but again it's not just if you drink cans and then after you drink cans you feel like starting a fight with someone or you're depressed or depressed or you text a lot of shit to your ex-girlfriend and you regret it in the morning those are all things too that you go fuck it maybe this isn't for me i mean for me if i have a spliff and a few cans all i want to do is listen to music and have a good time. So therefore I have a good relationship.

But yeah, but I know, I have friends, we go out with them, they get five or six pints and all of a sudden they're starting a fight and now I'm involved in it because my friend has started a fight. So we have to talk to him and say, you need to have a look at your relationship with fucking alcohol because I'm too old to be getting into fucking fights because of you.

But seriously, you know what I mean? That that's an alcohol issue there you know we'll have to wrap it up here lads right because it's nearly 11 o'clock oh it's fucking after 11 Jesus all right Dr Sharon Lambert thank you so much thank you to Cork I've been blind by best of luck. The art. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre

in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at TorontoRock.com.