The Blindboy Podcast - Speaking to an expert about Trauma

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

Dr Sharon Lambert is a researcher in applied psychology. We speak about trauma on an indivual level and a societal level  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hola, I'm over in Spain and I'm recording this bit in Spain and attaching it very crudely to the beginning of this week's podcast which I recorded last week in Limerick with the intention of uploading it this week. The reason I'm stitching this bit in at the start is two important things have happened since I recorded the podcast last week. The English Queen is dead and I have a gig in the Cork Opera House that I forgot to promote. Alright, I'm in the Cork Opera House on the 12th of October doing a live podcast. Please come along to that gig, the Cork Opera House, the 12th of October.

Now we will go back to our regularly scheduled podcast episode. There's German tourists staring at me, man. I'm up on the balcony recording into this thing with a big furry microphone. Not a German tourist staring up at me. Caress the Hessian pheasant, you convalescent emmets. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. There is greasy September rain in Limerick right now. Bitter rain that has chimney smoke in it. It paints the sky a very specific shade of grey, the colour of a cheeseless omelette and it

bounces off tarmac and gets your toes wet. But you know what? At least I can trust it. I know it's going to disappoint me. It's not going to let me down like the sunshine. Wonderful rain for reading a book and drinking hot tea. I mentioned last week, I've been nominated for podcast awards at the Irish Podcast Awards for the best comedy podcast. And no, I haven't been nominated for that. What have I been nominated for?

Best arts and Culture Podcast, Best Entertainment Podcast, Best Health and Wellbeing Podcast, and the Spotlight Award. And also there's a Listener's Choice Awards that you can vote for me if you like in the Listener's Choice Awards. Just go to the irishpodcastawards.ie,

Listener's Choice, if you'd like to Irish podcast awards.ie. Listener's Choice. If you'd like to do that. I have a magnificent guest this week. And we sat down for a chat. She's a returning guest. Because I had her on about two years ago. And she was so knowledgeable. And so much crack.

That I asked her to come back on the podcast. Her name is Dr. Sharon Lambert. And she's a psychologist. Whose research focuses on the area of trauma. She's incredibly knowledgeable. She's sound. She has unending levels of compassion. And she's an expert on trauma.

Even though we speak about trauma. I don't think I have to give any content warnings. About this episode. Because we don't go into anything particularly detailed or heavy also this is quite a long chat because it needed to be usually I like to keep an interview to about 60 minutes but this interview is just over 90 minutes because it needed to be the shit that Sharon was talking about is just too important and too interesting and too fascinating. So you might listen to

this in one go or you might want to do it as a two-parter. That's the beauty of podcasts. How you listen to this is 100% up to yourself. So without further ado here is the chat that I had recently with Dr. Sharon Lambert. Sharon. Sharon Lambert. what's the craic?

Well, Blang Boy, how are you? I'm fantastic. So I wanted to chat to you today mainly about trauma because trauma is something I get asked so much to speak about trauma on my podcast and it's one of the things that I refuse to speak about because I'd rather have someone who works in that area who knows about it because I just think trauma is something it would be unsafe for me to be speaking about trauma as a lay person. The first query that I

have for you really is my mental health was most definitely very badly affected not very badly my mental health was affected significantly by the pandemic okay and it's left me struggling with like I said feelings of hypervigilance but I don't want to call that trauma like is is it like where do you decide what's trauma and what's not so I wanted to I wanted to touch on two things that you said. I actually want to go back to something that you opened with, which is you said you don't like to talk about trauma because you feel like, you know, it's not your space or your area. Yeah. But actually. And the fear of triggering people, to be honest, saying something that's unsafe to someone who is vulnerable to being triggered. someone who is vulnerable to being triggered okay well it was one of the things i want to say about that is that peer and peer discussions are very important part of mental health and often

people who are professionals don't recognize the power of peers and here is lay person to lay person just exactly personal experience yeah yeah so there is a value in that look i understand there's also a danger that you'll say something that will upset somebody else but yeah the thing with trauma is and to get back to what trauma is is it's a subjective experience so blind boy you and i could could both witness the same event yeah and i might experience it as a trauma and you might not. And what determines that, Sharon? Like what determines two people being in the same situation

and one person being shattered by it and the other person just living their lives? What determines that? A lot of it is to do with, you know, our capacity to take it on. So we all have risk and protective factors. to take it on so we all have risk and protective factors so if you and I were in a place and something bad happened and we both witnessed something negative we have we both have risk factors so you know you've said that you know you already have a mental health issue I've certainly had it in the past so there's our risk factors factors. So then you'll say, right, OK, what are our protective factors? So you could say, well, you know, Sharon's got VHI.

She's going to get herself a really great psychologist and she has her own home. So she's not worrying about the landlord kicking her out at the end of the month and she lives in a safe place. So have I got enough protective factors around me to be able to buffer the impact of that stress? And unfortunately, and you hear it a lot with trauma, you'll say, oh, you know, I experienced that and, you know, nothing negative happened to me. Well, I'm delighted for you, buddy, that, you know, you were able to pick yourself up and keep going, but it's not the same for everybody. So it is a subjective experience.

The other thing as well is allostatic load. So we all have the ability to deal with a certain amount of stress. So there's things like tolerable stress and tolerable stress is like, it's shit things happen, but you can't avoid them. Yeah, suffering is part of existence. Exactly. So bereavement is a very good example um so we're all going to experience bereavement but hopefully it will be a tolerable stress hopefully it'll be a good death and yeah and not a complicated bereavement and that you have sufficient supports around you but you could also experience bereavement and it could be what

we call in the literature a bad death so some kind of a death that has stigma attached to it okay and then you don't have the appropriate supports around you and you reach allostatic loads your body just says i can't cope with any more stress so you can get physically ill or you can become mentally ill and and that is just a different experience for every single human being so you've mentioned an example of like allostatic load there but on a kind of neurological level what's happening in the body when there's an allostatic overload so your fight or flight your stress response system is activated and when that happens you

know there's a whole load of stuff going on your heart rate is faster and your blood pressure is up and there's a whole load of chemicals flowing around your body and your body can cope with a certain amount of that but if you're if you're experiencing just too much of that all of the time with no break the body and the brain can reach a point where it says right you know i'm actually taking over here because I can't, I just can't do another day of this amount of stress. So, you know, people can get, you know, very sick. And a lot of people who work, you know, in stressful jobs would say, you know, I'm terrible for ignoring the impact of the job on me. And then I keep going and I keep going and I know that I'm not in a great place. And then I, you know, wake up some morning

with a terrible chest infection and I'm just not able to get out of the bed. And I know it's my body saying it didn't listen. So now I'm going to keep you in bed for four days. You know, Bessel van der Kolk, I'm sure you've probably heard. Yeah, that's The Body Keeps the Score. Is that the book? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it talks about that. It talks about the impact on the body of, you know, the wear and tear of stress. And that's interesting, Sharon, because, like, so what you're speaking about there is how mental strain can actually present itself as physical illness,

which, as an opinion, was generally kind of rubbished that was seen as kind of holistic and aren't we moving towards a place now where we're looking at that as as no that's factual that's actually what happens mental stress can result in physical illness 100% and I think we're you know even to give you an example, this notion you might have come across as social prescribing. So doctors now are doing this thing called social prescribing. So, you know, if I go in and I have, you know, a lot of maybe aches and pains and I'm just I'm really lonely and really isolated and I'm stressed and I might have had difficulties in the past and I have general aches and pains that aren't attributed to any particular physical issue.

And it's just the wear and tear of stress. So more and more doctors now are doing the social prescribing where it's not just addressing the physical symptoms that are in front of you, but the social context that might be contributing to these symptoms who is this person where do they live are they live are they homeless do they have a support network these type of questions yeah so i mean you know i know you've talked about talked about things in the past like cbt cognitive behavior therapy there's loads of

different therapies that we can use but like how effective is cbt for somebody who's lonely exactly i you know here's a couple of tools to help you deal with the fact that you're lonely um you can do them but it's going to make absolutely no difference to the fact that you're you're lonely so let's look at your social situation what can we do to to reduce that loneliness and to you know boost social connections and a lot of the stuff you're speaking about there as well it takes into consideration um class we'll say the the impact that how much money someone earns where they're living what that is having on people's mental toll and their physical health. Where are we as a society when it comes to addressing that,

to looking at that, to not just looking at a mental illness in isolation, but as you said, looking at it within the system that the person is living. Where are we as a society with that? Oh, my God. You've asked me the question that actually makes my heart rate increase because i get so mad about this yeah so in fact in the uk i think they they at one point and possibly i think maybe lynn ruan has discussed this in an irish context about you know in the equal status act you're not allowed to discriminate against people based on gender, sexuality, race, etc. So there's talks about moving social class into that, because

actually, we know that if you're a working class person, and you don't have much money, that you are much more likely to have poorer physical health and poorer mental health. And that is not sometimes people say, oh, sure, that's because poor people drink too much. Actually, they don't. Middle class people, people with money actually use more drugs and alcohol, but they suffer less consequences because of their use. And that's because if I, you know, I work in university. So if I decide, you know, I want to drink or I want to use drugs, why am I doing it? Am I doing it for recreational reasons because I want to have fun? Or am I doing it because everything is just so miserable and I need something to make me feel better? And I'm somebody who has benefited from social mobility. I'm from a working class background.

I'm from a council estate and my mother was a single parent. So I know what it is like to be poor. I also know what it's like to now work in a job where I get a nice, you know, regular income that creates a safety around me. So one of the things

about the class issue is that people don't really understand what it's like to be poor so when you are poor and i did a thread about this on twitter last week or before when you are poor everything is more expensive so when you are poor you don't have direct debits for your electricity bill because you cannot take the risk of a bill coming out of your bank account where it's not a fixed amount so if your electricity bill is normally 50 euros and then one comes in for 80 euros that 30 euros difference is something that people don't have so what they do is they have the pay as you go cards as well.

So you pay more for your electricity that way. So the people who can least afford to pay for their electricity or their gas. It's more expensive for them. They pay more. Then if you, God forbid, did have a direct debit and they tried to take the money out of your account and it bounces, they will charge you that so not only do you now owe the bill you now owe money on top of that for the fact that your bill bounced so will the bank so you're being punished by two different people now for being poor and it's low it's everything it's transport it's education it's leisure it's health it's everything. It's transport. It's education. It's leisure. It's health. It's everything. Everything is more expensive when you're poor. And people who haven't walked that walk don't

understand that. And they make a lot of judgments about it. And they say, oh, they haven't, you know, they're not thinking about the future and they're not planning. You can't plan when you have no money, because all you can think about is where am I going to get money for tomorrow there are people all around us all of the time and their child might be invited to a birthday party tomorrow and they will pretend that they are away for the day because they will not have 10 euros to put in a birthday card. And there's too many people who are in positions of decision making. Privileged blindness. They don't understand that somebody would not have 10 euros on a Wednesday.

And on a Friday morning when they get up and there's a tiny bit of milk left and they're asking everybody to be careful with how much milk they're using in their cereal. They know exactly how much two litres of milk costs. They can tell you how much it costs in three or four different shops. And they will route around to find the coins to buy that milk. And then somebody will come on. Buy that milk and then somebody will come on. I know Boris Johnson came on today and said, you know, buy a better kettle so that you're not boiling your kettle for too long. It might cost you 20 euros.

Like that's the level of understanding that some people have of what it's like to actually be poor. There was some work done in the States actually around decision making in the poor. I can't remember who did the research, but it was really interesting. And what they found was actually that doing long term thinking when you're poor is just not something you can do because you're living in the here and now. And when you're poor as well, you're stressed. You're really stressed all of the time. So you're doing that thing, which is triggering your, you know, your stress response system so i would argue that poverty is the trauma because if a trauma if if psychological trauma is the act is the constant activation of your your nervous system to a point of which that it's causing an impact on your physical well-being

and your and your mental well-being well then poverty is there poverty is a trauma and then how does that because with a community then that lives in poverty where you have several people in a community living in poverty how does that trauma then manifest on a community level? When you have loads of people around and you're all in the same boat and everything is pretty miserable, where is the hope, you know? And the other thing as well is social capital. So if you live in a council estate, for example, and everybody around you is working class, I think people don't realize as well that most people who live live in social housing work they just don't earn a lot of money but they do jobs that are very important and that we need and we couldn't function without them but if i'm living in a council house and i say to my parent i'd like to be a vet when i grow up

I'd like to be a vet when I grow up. I won't have a vet as a neighbor. So if I'm in TY and I want to get a work experience because I'm in school and I have a week to get work experience, I won't get work experience with a vet because I don't know one. So what we do is we put people all living together in one place. So not only do we affect their financial capital we affect their social capital as well and then you look around and and you think and people like us or people people like me this this is what we do this is this is what we can achieve and it actually becomes a sense of identity then. You know, because if you can't see it, you can't be it.

And I know that that's said a lot, but it's actually true. And you believe it. So I got some questions also about, like people were asking, can you speak about the overlap and misdiagnosis between borderline personality disorder and complex PTSD is that a thing? There are certainly groups of psychologists and psychiatrists that are concerned about the way in which some diagnosis are done so there has been a criticism of borderline

personality disorder for example saying that it's a collection of traits and that actually there's a lot of crossover with other other disorders now i want to be really careful here because there are people who have struggled their whole life with their mental health and then they get a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. And when they get that, they feel really relieved. They feel like it's an explanation for how they felt. And I want to respect that. There are also a group of people who get a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and they're not happy about that um because personality disorder is saying that

this is who you are yeah it's a really tough one for a lot of people and especially borderline as well it as a personality disorder it it's it's like a doctor tells you oh it says here that you're manipulative and you lie a lot and people don't like reading that and as well it says that this is something that you have to manage and maintain there's not much talk about recovery and i suppose that's not something that i'm comfortable with because I believe that every human being has the potential for recovery so what I'm interested in is when we give somebody a diagnosis does it benefit them or does it exclude them further and for for some people the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder actually creates more social exclusion because of some of the stigma that's attached to it. There are plenty of people within psychology and psychiatry that would say

that actually what we've done is we've medicalized human distress. So for example, we know that borderline personality disorder, there's a higher proportion of that diagnosis in care leavers, so young people in the care system. Many of them have experienced a lot of traumas. So if they're manipulative, if they are lying, that behavior served a very important function and it probably kept them safe. that they use to adapt and survive. We're now saying, oh, this is this awful negative thing, rather than saying, look, you developed all of these great strategies that allowed you to be able to survive a very difficult situation. Now you're in a different place. And what we need to do is look at strategies that you can use now to keep you emotionally safe that won't alienate or isolate you from other people so that's my question i'm not giving you an answer i'm giving you a question is does a diet is the diagnosis helping somebody is it pointing them on a road to recovery or is it creating further exclusion the other thing that i was

asked about as well was intergenerational trauma is that something that you're interested in like irish people intergenerational trauma with irish people i think it's really interesting and i know the last time we spoke we we briefly touched on the epigenetic stuff, which is still, you know, ongoing. And that's not my area. I'm not a geneticist and I'm not a biologist. And I'm watching it, you know, so the research on the transmission of trauma through generations, I suppose, is really taken off in the last 10 years. So it's still emerging and and there are certainly some very interesting things coming out and then there's of course people saying look it's too early it's too soon we don't really know um but I think when I was on the last time I talked

about the escalator story didn't I about my child who was frightened of escalators because of something that happened to a woman yeah in shit, yeah. Yeah, in 1973. That's learned behaviour as a result of a trauma. Yeah, so my grandmother witnessed something negative where she saw a small child fall on an escalator in 1973, but she died in 1975, which was a year before I was born. But I have, my eldest child is frightened of escalators, but I didn't know about my grandmother's story. And when my mother noticed that my eldest

was frightened of escalators and she passed a comment on it, I said, sure, you know, that's my fault because I'm frightened of escalators. And then it was, I heard the story. So there's this kind of like, wow, you know, there's this child who's, you know, a couple of generations away from from a woman that we never met. Neither of us ever met her. And here we are, both of us playing out this this behavior. So then you say to yourself, like, what other stuff am I carrying around that, you know, is in my behavior? And I'm not even connected to it because I don't know the story. And since the last time I was talking to you, actually, I was at home one day

and I was looking out the back and I saw this fireball in the sky. And people are going to think I'm very strange, but I don't like talking about outer space. I don't want to know about it. I find it very distressing. Like just the concept of the universe and planets and the size about it. I find it very distressing. Like just the concept of the universe and planets and the size of it. I just, I

don't want to talk about it. I get you. And when my husband and my children, you know, if they want to watch something on the television about planets and all that, I just go, I leave the room, I get upset about it. I don't want to talk about it. But I was out the back and this

fireball went through the sky and I was actually so paralysed I didn't even take a picture of it. I don't want to talk about it. But I was out the back and this fireball went through the sky and I was actually so paralyzed I didn't even take a picture of it. And I just totally froze and stood on the spot and I thought, this is it. Oh, my God, I'm going to die. There's something falling from the sky. And, you know, when I put myself together, I ran in home and I said, oh, my God, you know, there's this big fireball in the sky. And I went on social media then to see, you know, had I imagined it? Was there something in my drinking water that I needed to be looking at?

And there was, in fact, a fireball went through the sky and it was some bit of something. Like a meteor? Yes, yeah. Or a bit of, oh wow. And my husband was dying laughing and he said, that's so funny because

he knew how you know anxious i would be about that whereas if he'd been outside he would be oh my god this is so cool and he would have probably taken a really nice video of it and i rang my mother and i said oh my god i'm so stressed i just saw a fireball in the sky and she said to me i don't want to talk about that and i said i said but i'm reading you because i'm upset about that and she said no i doubt outer stuff no i don't want to talk about that and I said I said but I'm reading you because I'm upset about that and she said no I don't want to talk about stuff in the sky and I said um I said that's really weird and I said why and she said I she said you know the book she said chicken licking and I said oh I don't I said I don't want to talk about chicken licking and I said somebody gave one of the kids that book and I can't read it to them and I actually gave it to the charity shop because I thought that something when it would be falling

from the sky is horrendous so that she told me that when I was really little she couldn't read me the book chicken licking because she found the idea of something falling from the sky really stressful so we had a great laugh so I said yeah so so you know it's been an interesting journey so you learned so your ma had a fear of things falling from the sky and this was transmitted to you freaking licking because she couldn't read chicken licking so you at that tiny age just was like the adult is frightened about this i don't know why but i better internalize it this is valuable for me yes and now now my children have never heard the story of chicken licking um because i can't i can't go there so and all of this to me makes perfect sense from

an evolutionary point of view like this to me seems this is how humans like no one taught me to be wary around spiders no one i live in ireland but yet spiders freak me out and a lot of other people and we can kind of agree upon the fact that our ancestors at some point were like stay the fuck away from those spiders some of them will kill you and now i'm here in ireland and i have no reason to be scared of spiders but yet i am it's a useful phobia that helps me to survive and like do you reckon that's why we have this shit i think i think until the research on the epigenetics becomes you know where they can say look we've addressed all all the critics here's

all of the evidence you know that would be great and i i think it'll still always be a combination where we have to think about behavior and how we pass behaviors on you know as well we pass behaviors on and and sometimes i mean religion is an example of that you know religion comes with both fears and delights and we pass the fears of religion down to our children through culture actually we talked a lot about death the last time i was on and i was i was thinking about that the other day because um oh actually yeah as you know i'm an atheist and uh i think you said that that was arrogant the last time we met i didn't my fuck i wouldn't have said it was arrogant you did actually you started talking about atheism and you and you said you think there's kind of an

arrogance about it because it's like a really definite position but that was before i told you i was an atheist and then all right okay i would have said that do you think there's kind of an arrogance about it? Because it's like a really definite position. But that was before I told you I was an atheist. Oh, right. OK, I would have said that. Then you climbed back down. Yeah, that sounds about right. I wouldn't have straight up said, if you said you're an atheist, I wouldn't have called you arrogant. But I definitely would have climbed back if I'm like, oh, shit, I accidentally called Sharon arrogant. Yeah.

No, my thing is, I just I don't like I just can't stick with the certainty of it. I'm just like, I'm happy with not knowing. But what's interesting then is obviously I don't participate in religion, but we had a couple of bereavements in the household at the weekend. So Buddy the fish, who was six, passed away. And Rusty the hen, unfortunately, also died on Sunday night poor old Rusty, why did the hen get called

Rusty? she just kind of she's a Rusty, she was, I'm still talking about her in present tense, she was a Rusty caller and there was something kind of she was.

This is a weird thing about gender, actually, like we have laying hens, so they're obviously all female. There was something about Rusty that when people would see Rusty coming towards them, they always referred to Rusty as a he, which was odd. Wow. he which was odd wow there was something about rusty's character that for some reason made her look or seem different than than the other hens and she was bold as well she was always the last one to bed so so she was just a funny little hen but but she also died at the weekend. And the kids had two funerals in a very short space of time. But what was interesting was the rituals that we have for funerals in Ireland were very much part of what they did. So they wrote out a service, you know, so there will be a song. I think the first one was Fields of Aitham Rye because it's sad.

And then there was a reading from one of them. Then there was another song. I think the first one was Fields of Attenry because it's sad. And then there was a reading from one of them. Then there was another song. Then there was another reading. But they had it all planned out and they came. And the kids were heartbroken, I'm guessing. Heartbroken. Yeah. So they spent the whole day planning the funeral and flowers and all that kind of stuff. But all of the things

that they did were all of the things that we do in terms of our culture and that we've probably always done here. How many of those things are associated with it? Were they present with the body of the hen? Like that's a very Irish thing where we're okay with the body, whereas other cultures, Spain and England, they're just like, get the body away from me, lock it away. No, the hen was laid out in a box on the kitchen table overnight

because it was it was awake a proper wake for a hen a wake and then there was some letters written and put into the box with some flowers

and then the hen was brought in a wheelbarrow in her coffin thing which was a box that had been decorated

and she was brought in a wheelbarrow and we walked in single file to a weeping willow and she's buried under a weeping willow because that's an

appropriate place to go and weep. And it was all really nice. But I was watching it, I suppose, you know, I mean,

you're watching it as a parent and you're saying it's terrible, my children are asking. And you didn't guide this, the kids guided this process. Yeah, I mean, as a parent, you're watching it as a parent and you're saying it's terrible. And you didn't guide this. The kids guided this process. Yeah.

I mean, as a parent, you're watching and saying this is really terrible. My children are really upset about the hen. And then as a psychologist, you're going, wow, isn't this really interesting? How, despite the fact that I don't participate in religion, that there's this level of cultural stuff going on rituals rituals and and it was really lovely and it was really nice and they were all behaviors that we have learned from people who came before us as well you know and is was there a part of you too, like what I love hearing about that story is, like I lost my dad when I was 20, right, but I never lost a pet. I didn't have any pets to lose.

I had a goldfish, but I didn't give that much of a fuck about him. And I kind of wished that I had gone through the pain of losing a dog or a cat at a young age so that it would have been a rehearsal for my father's death if you get me i do because i didn't have i didn't have pets either blind boy when i was a child um so my first loss would have been a human and it's a great shock it is and i didn't i did i just went in there like i dived into a cold lake and i love hearing that story about your kids with the hen because I'm looking at it going one day they will lose a human that's close to them and they'll have done a little bit of practice yeah and and and they said we sat around you know it was very traditional you know we dug the the grave ourselves and we put Rusty in and they said a few words and they played a few songs

on the phone and then we chatted about how funny she was and how much we liked her more than one of the other hens which was a bit mean because the other hen was nearby and could possibly have heard but it was all very Irish really I suppose because it was you know, how great she was and all of her positives. We never said anything about, you know, the fact that sometimes she used to get out and dig up things she shouldn't be digging up. It was, you know, the typical. She was amazing. She was the best hen. There will never be another hen like her. And it was great. And they they were really sad and they cried. And and it was interesting from a parent point of view but from a psychologist point of view to say

you know this is really important and I think especially because of COVID there's a lot of people who lost people and they didn't get to do those rituals and participate That's one of the things as well that I think about that breaks my heart with COVID people who didn't get to grieve in that way in that communal way

like we were speaking earlier there about with COVID. People who didn't get to grieve in that way, in that communal way. Like, we were speaking earlier there about, you know, suffering. Suffering is inevitable. That's just part of being alive.

We're going to be disappointed. We're going to be rejected. We're going to lose people that we love and awful, tragic things will befall upon us. But for me,

I, how I cope with the inevitable suffering of life depends on how much meaning i can take from that suffering i'm still sad i'm still upset but if i can derive any sense of meaning from it then i come out of it okay when something happens and i can't get that meaning from it that's when i end up in trouble when i can't extract meaning from it. That's when I end up in trouble. When I can't extract meaning from it. And the pandemic is something that I struggle extracting meaning from the pandemic. Parts of me, it's like I have a feeling of unfairness.

Do you get me? I do. Like this was a terribly unfair thing. And I focus on, if only that didn't happen, I could have done this, I could have done that. I have a sense of unfairness about the fact that I can't make sense of the past two years in terms of the actual time that passed. My sense of time passing is fucked up because it was just four walls all the time. So I couldn't extract a hell of a lot of meaning from that pandemic. And I think that's one of the reasons that I'm still, I have a hangover from it.

I think as well, when the pandemic came, we were sold some positives. Oh yeah, there was that as well. Yeah. So, and that's okay because actually some of them were nice, you know, less commuting, it's better for the environment yada yada yeah um but what's been disappointing for me is that the positives we were sold are now not available anymore yeah so those things that allowed us to make some kind of meaning or take some kind of positivity then we once it's oh okay business as usual now yeah and and actually it's not for a lot of people because we talked about it's actually a bit ableist because there are there are lots of people who who have health conditions and if they get covid they will be really sick so we haven't really balanced yeah we have to remember that

yeah and we haven't balanced the needs of everybody coming out of the pandemic and also as well on the subject of ableism like i was speaking to someone who's who's wheelchair bound they're fucking devastated because they were like when the pandemic was there i was able to go to book readings i was able to go to everything because i was doing it all from at home everything that I was interested in that I previously wouldn't have been able to access I could do it because doing it online was a given now it's all gone back into real life and I can't enjoy the things that I enjoyed during the pandemic you know but even even for you know if you're if you're if you're an academic and you have a small baby and there's a big conference that's really important in your area. During the pandemic, there were no barriers to attending.

And it was sold as a positive. But an awful lot of people now have said, no, we want, there's no online participation at this conference. I've been invited to speak at a couple of conferences where I've said, I actually don't, I don't want to get up at three o'clock in the morning and fly somewhere to speak for an hour to come home. Knowing that I can do the exact same job just as good from my fucking bedroom. Yeah, and you know, I can see my children when they get up in the morning

and I can say goodnight to them when they're going to bed tonight and I don't have to spend all that time away for one hour. Now there's benefits obviously to go into those things in terms of networking etc but there are lots of people who for lots of different reasons cannot go and the suffering some of the suffering that people would have had maybe you would be able to maybe accept some of that loneliness and isolation if you thought that some of the changes that were made were meaningful changes that made life better for some people. And that you still continue to provide that for people, even though you've been able to return to normal. It's time now for a little ocarina pause.

And we return to the chat with Sharon. for a little ocarina pause and we return to the chat with Sharon I don't have my ocarina with me but I do have my Puerto Rican guiro because I'm inside my office so I'm going to play my Puerto Rican guiro and then you're going to hear some digitally inserted algorithmically generated adverts

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The content stops being about passion and creativity and it becomes about servicing the needs of the advertiser in order to continue making the product which is a shit model it's a terrible model and it's the reason i'm in independent podcasting rather than mindlessly chasing jobs on tv or radio so support any independent podcast that you enjoy by independent i mean a small team of people making something they're legitimately passionate about. Support those podcasts either monetarily by sharing them, by speaking about them, recommending them, leaving reviews, all of these things. Because the podcast space since the pandemic has become highly saturated. Highly saturated with poor quality corporate podcasts and a lot of stuff is being put out where the people making it aren't passionate about the material and what this

is doing is it's pushing passionate independent creators to the bottom and there's just a lot of noise. So find the independent podcast that you love and support it if you're enjoying that work to keep it that way i'm not going to be on twitch till probably october all right because i'm busy on my thursday night so i can't do it so i won't be returning to twitch stream until october or the last week of september maybe i'll keep you updated just a couple of gigs to plug i'm in Ballycatton at the Ballycatton Comedy Festival at the end of this month on the 29th of September I'm really looking forward to that gig

come get your tickets online look it up on Google and also I am in Vicar Street in Dublin on the 1st of November which is a Tuesday night

and I deliberately picked a Tuesday night because midweek is a it's a good time for fucking live podcasts even though it's a nightmare to sell tickets on a Tuesday night Tuesday night show for my live podcast is better than a Saturday night show because you can come to the gig you don't have to drink if you don't want to or you can have one or two pints it's up to you but it's not like a party atmosphere it's like going to the theater or going to the cinema so you can come along to the live podcast in vicar street tuesday 1st of november and be home in bed

by 12 and up the next day fresh as a daisy for work or college or whatever. So I love doing Tuesday night gigs. But come along for that if you're up in Dublin. 1st of November. Blind Boy Live podcast. Vicar Street. Find it on Google. Back to the interview. With the fantastic Sharon Lambert.

Like the office is asking people to come back into work. When it's not necessary. Like that's just. That just needs to stop. And I don't understand why some places are still doing it asking workers to come in when there's no actual decent reason because that then makes it the journey meaningless well i suppose does it justify the rent that they're paying on the building if they get the people in there so it's whose needs

are being met by the decisions that are being made well some people say a shit ton of middle management would just get fired because their job is physically being in the office and managing people and supervising and making yeah supervising now what do you supervise when there's a zoom call but it's something like me and you right now we're chatting over the internet we wouldn't have been doing this in 2018. No. I wouldn't have thought of it. And the technology didn't really exist. But now, like, you have a USB microphone as a given because you had to do a bunch of talks.

And now it's perfectly normal for you to be down in Cork, me to be in Limerick. And we're going to get a podcast that sounds like we're in the same room. So I'm not going to give that shit up. I love being able to do that. And me too. I'm fine with it. I do speak to other people who say they didn't enjoy teaching online. There are people who didn't enjoy learning online.

And that's fine. So why can't we facilitate everybody? Facilitate everybody. That's it. I do know teachers teachers i have a buddy who's a teacher he's a he teaches psychotherapy and he hated using zoom because a huge part of his teaching method when he's training psychotherapists is self-disclosure he in a room full of people will speak about events from his own life things that are personal and he feels safe saying this in the environment of a classroom but does not feel safe teaching people that way over

zoom and as a result this has impeded his own personal way of teaching is that something over the pandemic where like your way of teaching or your way of speaking to a classroom is different now that you feel you're being watched on the camera. So if I was giving an example of a psychological theory or a psychological concept, I am somebody who's experienced poor mental health in the past. So I might say, you know, what this looks like in reality is this one time when I went to this particular type of therapy and this is what I was like or whatever. But when you're when you're doing it in a room, you have the non-verbal stuff as well. And also because I teach psychology, you know, and you talked about this,

about the danger of triggering somebody is, is I don't know how people are really responding to what I'm saying, because sometimes they have their cameras off or if their screen freezes for a second, I don't know. And the safety of the room, Sharon. I trained as a psychotherapist for three years.

I didn't finish it. But one thing that was hugely important was the sense of safety that we can establish in the room. In fact, we'd actually ground ourselves before most classes. We'd all together sit and breathe because we know we're going to be speaking about heavy shit here. So safety in the room is a communal thing. You feel it with other people.

How do you then have that safety when your student is back in their apartment? What's that environment like? Is that safe? And I mean, that was definitely, you know, I suppose one of the things that came up during the pandemic was a focus on domestic violence. You know, I suppose one of the things that came up during the pandemic was a focus on domestic violence. So, you know, you could be delivering something to 60 people online. And as you said, you don't know where they're living, what conditions they're living in, who are they living with? Are they are they physically safe? Are they emotionally safe? emotionally safe um when class is finished you and everybody leaves the room and you're walking down on the corridor and you see somebody and you think they looked a little bit uncomfortable in

class you can you can walk along by them and say oh hi you know how are you getting on and are you settling in and you know you can do that kind of almost checking in and debrief afterwards so I think there are certain subjects and topics that online isn't great for but then certainly there are ways that you can do it as well and that we should try to do it because of all of those reasons I've said before in terms of people and their access um there are going to be lots of students who will not be able to afford to live in in counties where there are universities. That's the other thing as well like I mean each new academic year we're seeing more and more uh students unable to take their places because there simply isn't any accommodation available for them so for those students you could imagine yes I'd quite like to

do a lot of it in zoom and stay at home and still be able to attend the course that i want to attend like if you live in tipperary or ross common and if you live in a county that doesn't have a university if you're living in west clare your nearest university is going to be Galway and Limerick you know so you're talking about a big commute and the students then who can't afford to move and find it's actually gone beyond even being able to afford it so even if you can afford it you're not going to find it anyway access now it's access now but it was affordability before but the people then who who do get it and who can afford it the people who can't afford it the people who can't afford it the time that they spend commuting is time that they're not spending studying so

there's a disadvantage they're getting tired before they get into a fucking classroom when everyone else is fresh faced so there's a disadvantage there already because um you know they're they're not getting to spend the time that other people might be able to spend and they may not get the grades that they're absolutely capable of achieving. And so I don't know how it's going to be addressed or how it's going to be fixed. But but like I suppose it's it's that, you know, thing that didn't matter during as much during the pandemic. suppose it's it's that you know thing that didn't matter during the as much during the pandemic you know so so how do we take some kind of meaning and I remember thinking during the pandemic as well there were times when when I really was happy to be at home actually a lot um and then there were times when I wasn't but I suppose mostly because I have children and I was thinking about the impact on

them I mean two years I'm 46 blind boys so two years in my life isn't as big of a deal as a nine year old two years when you were eight years of age and two years two years at eight years of age felt like a lifetime it's a quarter

a quarter of your life has been disrupted whereas it didn't really you know I'm 46 I'm going to be in my It's a quarter. Yeah. A quarter of your life has been disrupted. Whereas it didn't really... I'm going to be in my pyjamas at 6 o'clock in the evening. Anyway, it makes no difference. Because I was even feeling sorry for people who entered at 18 and left at 20, you know, and missed those two years of potential crack. Like going to night...

When you're in your early 20s or your late teens going to nightclubs and being silly and not having those responsibilities that's a hugely important part of where you are at that point and there's people who didn't have it being 18 and not getting to see a nightclub until you're 20 or 21 yeah i felt there's so many so, you know, it brings us back to what we started off with, which was, you know, what is the impact of the pandemic? It's just so different on lots of different people for lots of different reasons. One question I'd like to ask you about is. someone who has trauma, is suffering from trauma, during therapy, we have this opinion that they must relive the traumatic memory and if they do so, then they're cured from it.

Like, one thing I found very interesting recently is there's a documentary on Netflix, I think it's called How to Change Your Mind, and it's a fantastic documentary, but it's about how MDMA, psilocybin and ayahuasca are being used therapeutically in clinical settings. And the MDMA episode in particular was fascinating. They were getting people who had lived through some quite extreme things like witnessing a parent being murdered or veterans of war. And they were giving him ecstasy and then while they were on MDMA they were safely revisiting the the terrible memory from a place of empathy and love do people suffer from trauma do they have to relive the memories in in therapy in order to overcome them? There are some people who will go to therapy

and they will not go into the experience that they had, you know, so they might do kind of more cognitive behavioral techniques because they just want to be able to survive on a day-to-day. There will be people then who feel like this thing is there all the time and i just feel like i need to free myself from it and they go for you know quite intense therapy and then obviously in the last few years you have this this increased interest in in the use of of substances so actually

we had a very interesting speaker come to our our department here um dr josh woolley he's a physician and a neuroscientist in the department of psychiatry in the university of california san francisco and he was doing some psychedelic research and he presented some of his initial findings so he looked at a group of um of men who had lived through the hiv epidemic and they would have been diagnosed with HIV. And at the time that was a fatal illness. If you got it, you were going to die. And then down on top of that, there was the social stigma.

Yeah, Jesus. You know, so it was a huge issue. And then they would have experienced a lot of death and a lot of loss. And then for the ones that came out of it and got through it and there was you know these improvements in medications and now like i mean it's absolutely you know unreal you know how far the treatment of hiv it's unbelievable people who have access to the medication yeah like it's they're not detectable they're like like people with diabetes or asthma even it's even better actually the outcomes

wow yeah because like if you're if you're on the medication and you do a blood test you you they won't say that you're cured but actually it comes up as non-detectable they can't find it so they haven't reached a point where they're saying it's cured but it's non-detectable um you know so it's incredible what has happened. But he did the work with this group of men and they used psychedelics and they would have had, you know, flashbacks to a lot of pain. And they described the experiences as painful and really sad in that moment. But then once it was finished,

it was like as if they had left it behind and parked it somewhere. So this, and Professor David Nott, I think is in the UK, is looking at this as well. And I know you've had speakers on before I've listened to some. Paul Ignitsky from the University of Melbourne,

I think it is. Yeah, very interesting. It's fascinating interesting it's fascinating because it's like they're reliving the memory one thing that I found

fascinating with what Paul Licknightsky was speaking about is he's using psilocybin to help people deal with traumas that happened

when they were at a pre-verbal stage so which is mad like talk therapy will never work from this for this person because the trauma happened before they had developed the capacity for language but psilocybin is working um what about can we just can we just jump and we're terrible but you just said something there that made me think about class again.

When you're talking as well about class. So if you were living in poverty, you have different experiences of and different access to education. And we know, for example, that children who are living in poverty have a different range of vocabulary by the time they're four than other children do and then that can carry on a bit as they go older because sometimes some not all but some schools may not have high expectations for particular groups of children some maybe don't push it but but one of the things that how do you communicate your experiences if you don't have the language for it so like i did work with young people and you'd often say to them how are you feeling and they'd say fucked up now that could be a whole it could be disappointed upset frightened it could be a whole lot of thing but but sometimes they didn't have another word beyond fucked up for that feeling whereas you know i could be at home and i can feel you know i'll

start my heart rate starts to increase or something i'll know straight i'll go oh there's something going on i'm emotionally dysregulated what is it and i you know i will stand there and i'll have that conversation with myself about what's going on in your body you know something's happening and what is the feeling and then i'm the exact same sharon when i used to get panic attacks at 19 i had no vocabulary for it and now if i experience that same anxiety i have a huge glossary of words and terms that i use to talk myself through everything that's happening with me right because now now you understand the mechanics of it yes the mechanics of anxiety so it's a fire alarm but there's no fire yeah so i used to just think it was a fire fire run jesus christ blind boy run yeah whereas now you can say is there a fire

and i'm going to scan the environment i don't see any smoke i'm going to test my you know i'm going to look for the evidence i don't have any evidence to suggest there's a fire so what else is going on oh my heart is increased i'm I'm anxious and it's my heart and it's my anxiety and I don't need to be afraid of it because I'm I can control it now because it's mine and I own it and I know the mechanics of it and everybody should have that that shouldn't be a privilege no absolutely not that's I mean that's what I try to do with my podcast like I have a lot of tools that I've learned and I want to try and give these tools to as many people as possible for free and that's where I get my sense of meaning from

otherwise I'm just a fellow with a bag in his head who says funny things I want to allow people to have access to tools that I've spent years learning because we didn't get these in school and and I suppose I'm going to talk, so this would be a good opportunity to talk about podcasts then because when I appeared... Yeah, you're doing a study at the moment, aren't you? I am, but, you know, even before the study,

when I went on your podcast the first time, I got a lot of contact from people, strangers afterwards, from all over the world. And they said, I heard the podcast. And when you said X, it reminded me of something. And I realized that I've been kind of holding on to this particular thing, but I know that it's impacted on me. And I was quite overwhelmed by the amount of contact that I got from people saying, you know, I think that maybe I would flourish, not just function better, but actually flourish if if I was able to figure this bit out. What kind of a psychologist do I need to see or what kind of service do I need?

So there was a lot of that and it went on for a while. And then I did the two Norris podcast. And I know you've had James and Timmy on with you as well I've listened to the office they're they're amazing and again you know straight away after doing that a lot of contact from people or from from family members of people who were struggling saying god look I think that you know and so so a lot of signposting going on so that got me thinking about psychology and and what we do so so when you go to see a psychologist you can make an impact at an individual level one-to-one um but actually people are quite bad by the time it it gets there so and then there were groups of people we know that have very poor mental health literacy.

Men, people from working class areas, people in poverty, particular groups of people have poor mental health literacy and they're much more likely to have mental health issues as well. So I started thinking about that and I went to to look at the literature and there wasn't any about the role. About the impact of podcasts on mental health. Yeah. Democratising mental health. Yeah. So I have a fabulous master's student,

Níoshe Oshkulta and Níoshe Cuilte. So for our non-Irish listeners, that's Níoshe Woods, it translates to his name. So Nisha's a fabulous, he's just finished his Masters in

Mental Health here and we put together a survey and circulated it and I think there was over 722 responses but we're going to release the findings of that at the end of September. And what was the thesis question what was like the main question what are people's experiences of mental health

related podcasts you know why are they doing it because i remember reading something one time where somebody said oh you know there's there's all these particularly i suppose during covid a lot of people did turn to to podcasting because they were isolated and they were lonely and I suppose I did read something once somewhere where they were saying oh well you know what if this is bad and I thought well you know we don't know whether it's bad or good because there isn't any literature um and certainly I had that shitty article written about me as well Sharon um that's the one I was referring to yeah just saying like I'm not qualified so I should not be speaking about mental health yeah and I suppose I reflected

a lot on that article because it wasn't my experience of being on the podcast you know my experience was the opposite my experience was people were contacting me and it was their first time reaching out and contacting us like you know, somebody who worked in that space and I heard this and I'd like to go and see somebody. So then I'd say, well, these are the kinds of people that you need to go and see. And this is how you check if they're qualified and if they're insured and, you know, all of those other things. So I thought that's really odd. as well, is that there is a lot of literature that shows that people benefit a lot from from peer learning in the space. So Nisha, you know, did this for his master's dissertation, and we have submitted a paper to a journal, I won't name it, so that article has gone out for

peer review. So we will hopefully be able to release those those findings at the end of september but but but it is overwhelmingly positive i can tell you um and and all of those things and and it is people want to hear a mix of professionals and peers they don't want just one or the other they want a mix of both and because they learn from they they learn from professions and what they actually particularly like is when it is a peer who's interviewing a professional because they yeah it's it's somebody's translating this stuff because sometimes you know psychologists or psychiatrists or wherever we take for granted the information that we have or the language that we use. So when you have a peer asking a question and say, well, what does

that actually mean? And, you know, so we'll say if you have somebody on and you have me on and you say, well, what's that? And I say something and you say, well, Jesus, Sharon, that's a whole lot of big words. Like, what are you actually fucking talking about? There are people who will go to see a psychologist and psychiatrist and we might talk to them like that. And they mightn't in that moment have the confidence to say, I don't understand what you just said. Do what they'll do. They nod and they say, OK, so thanks very much.

And they go. Exactly. And the other thing too, Sharon, is why I find that effective, we'll say just from the position of my own job. When I'm speaking to an expert and if this expert is is quite clearly like I have a lot of academics on and I've spoken to a lot of academics now this isn't an issue that I have with with you because you naturally you naturally tend to speak in the language you speak in the language of the receiver you're not trying

to speak to other academics when you're on a podcast. But sometimes I have academics and it's as if they're speaking to other academics. And then that isolates the audience. So I then step in and bring humor into it. And what you have there is when you have an expert and a layperson speaking, it's the perfect mechanics of comedy. One person is kind of straight and serious and the other person is silly and when those two things interact perfectly that's a comedic sketch and through that then you get wonderful storytelling we relate to the conflict of that and also you're the one who gets to make a fool out of yourself. Exactly. So if somebody says something and you don't understand it, you have the confidence to say, what are you actually talking about?

Whereas if it was another academic, they'd be like, I can't say I don't understand this. I look like I'm not good at my job. Yeah. I mean, often what I'll say to to someone especially if i'm doing a live podcast if this if it's an academic i'll always say to him if we're going to speak outside of your remit if we're speaking outside of what you should be talking about as an academic i'm going to make sure i let the audience know and also i say to him remember i'm up there with a fucking bag on my head. I'm utterly ridiculous. I'm a clown.

So nothing can go wrong. There's no way for you to look silly. You're talking to someone who's already looking unbelievably silly. So do what you want to do. You can relax. You can't look like a fool. I have a bag on my head. And there's a lot of pressure.

There's a lot of pressure to be right. There's a lot of pressure to, you know, it can be difficult to say, I don't know. You know, there's all of that kind of stuff. But I think, you know, in terms of the podcast and what's powerful is their accessibility. They're free. People can relate to them. It's language that they can understand. It's bringing information to them that they

wouldn't ordinarily get and they're hearing it in a different way like you know i have a kind of an idea of the amount of people individual people who listened to the episode i did with you in the past and also to the one with the two norris I will never ever write enough enough academic papers to reach the kind of numbers that I have reached between those two podcasts so I think it's really one of the things that has been great about you know what you're doing is is that it's bringing that information you know so there's this thing now in academia, non-traditional dissemination. So dissemination is, you know. How you get the stuff out there.

How you get the stuff out there, yeah. So the traditional dissemination is academic papers. And, you know, there is much more of a push now for non-traditional dissemination. And podcasts, you can reach a large amount of people and they don't have to pay and they can do it when they're going for a walk or they can do it when they're going to bed if they're just finished a night shift but also what's essential sharon is the democratization of language yeah 100 because i had someone in the so in the uk they do have podcasts that i think are made by the nhs specifically for mental health and to disseminate mental health and for it to be

democratic but a therapist in the uk who listens to my podcast said that none of the official podcasts about mental health in the UK are working as effectively for him or his clients because I'm the only one who's democratizing language well I can tell you that there were in the study that we did there were we asked people what they were listening to and we had there were participants from 20 different countries in our study as well there was a good few from the UK. Not one person in the UK. I didn't know that about the NHS podcast.

Not one person has mentioned an NHS podcast, I can tell you. Yeah, it wouldn't be getting a lot of... It never came up. People could list, people were asked to list three podcasts that they listened to for mental health information. they listen to for mental health information. Nowhere is, you know, NHS podcasts mentioned. Nowhere. Yeah.

And one of the things that I'm wary about then as well. So I do my podcast about mental health, but I genuinely come from a good faith place. I just, I use it as a diary I'm as honest about my I'm emotionally congruent with myself and my own emotions and I try to be as honest as possible

to let people see that I'm okay being vulnerable with what is perceived as weakness and if I can do that people can relate to it but there are a lot of I'd cite Jordanerson as an example

jordan peterson is someone who's a he's a qualified psychologist and a lot of what he says is solid psychology and it's relatable but it's not regulated and he's not coming from a position of good faith he's coming from a position of misogyny, essentially. So it's like I'd hate for the podcast space to be regulated, but at the same time as well, how does a lay person tell the difference between this podcaster is speaking about mental health from a position of good faith and this one isn't? Because a lot of young men are

listening to very toxic experts who are speaking solid mental health to a certain extent and then you pull behind it and what it is is misogyny and anger and toxicity and it can how the fuck do you tell the difference if you don't know like i know the difference in two seconds yeah but if you don't understand that language and a lot of young men in particular have fallen to that it's like you i oh you're depressed okay i get it i get you're sad i understand speaking through cbt all this stuff and then at the end it's like it's because we don't have a traditional patriarchal society that you you as a man are lost. And actually what we need to do is get women back in the kitchen and then you'll be happy. I'm glad that we're not recording this on stage in front of people

because I rolled so hard when you said his name that I would have fallen off the chair on stage. There is that concern. Again, I don't want to ask you about the study but i'm assuming his name came up it did not as much as i thought it would actually um which was such a huge relief to me but one of the the things that is that there's a lot of professional people listening to podcasts and they are recommending podcasts to their clients. So we're not recommending a textbook here, we're recommending something, the stories in this maybe have benefit to you. Yeah, and I do it all

the time. So somebody will contact me and they'll say, I'm very worried about X, Y and Z. And I'll say, well, you know, you need a clinical psychologist or a counseling psychologist or an educational psychologist, or you need a psychotherapist or an addiction counselor or an equine therapist or whatever it is and and in the meantime here are some episodes of different podcasts that you might find useful for your situation you might listen to them and say no it's different than mine and i'm not getting anything from it or you may listen and say i tried that and that didn't work for me but i haven't tried that or or even just hearing you know somebody else's experience and the fact that that might give you hope while you're waiting i would like to see some kind of a health health check or an endorsement of particular things endorsement yeah rather than regulation scares the shit out of me

because then you're you have out of me because then you're you have a body well yeah but then you're gonna have people saying oh it's cancel culture which is Jesus not even that it's like the reason

like okay in television and radio right the regulator is called the BAI it would be very difficult for me to do I couldn't do my podcast on RT radio with BAI.

Impossible because it's so heavily regulated. I wouldn't be able to say anything without an expert stepping in and saying whether what I'm saying is OK or not. Then as soon as that needs to happen, the budget doesn't exist for us. So regulation scares the shit out of me. The reason we are seeing podcasts doing brilliantly is because it's unregulated but it's also the reason that we're seeing people being led astray by people positioning themselves as experts but actually their message is toxic so it's a very tough one but recommending there as you said that's a like a little a healthy little middle ground yeah it's

not full-on regulation but it's like a team of people who know their shit kind of deciding together this this is okay this isn't and even when i visited a psychologist for the first time ever when i first got panic attacks they recommended a book to me. The book was called The Calm Technique. All it was was a very simple pocketbook about how to meditate. That's all it was. It wasn't a textbook. It wasn't clinical.

But this clinical person who was a qualified psychologist said, this book that you can buy in Essence, I think that's going to help you. And it did. And in the podcast study, where I'm trying desperately, you know what I'm like? I find it so hard to tell you and it did and and in the the podcast study i'm not where i'm trying desperately you know what i'm like i find it so hard to tell you know you have a lot of shit you can't say until it comes out yeah but one of the things is there's lots of people listening to podcasts and

lots of different socioeconomic status and qualifications and etc but but there was a proportion of the respondents uh people who participated in the survey who are mental health professionals. So they're listening to the podcast for different reasons and an awful lot of them are recommending specific episodes of specific types of podcasts to their clients. I have tons of listeners because their doctor told them to listen to my podcast. Like loads. doctor told him to listen to my podcast yeah like loads um you know so so you know it would be very easy for to come up with some kind of a system where some kind of an organization says we recognize this as a legitimate tool and we endorse the following endorses the word yeah we've nothing to do with it we don't regulate it but we think this is good

it's like we're not going to talk about the ones that we don't exactly and i don't talk about the ones because i just don't want to give them any airtime either um you know but when people do there are one or two where they'll say oh have you come across come across X, Y or Z? And I will just say, yes, I have. And I think that what they're doing is unethical and concerning. And I don't recommend it. And I think that there are better resources out there for you. And that's all I have to say about those ones. I have one last question for you, Sharon, because I was asked this quite a bit. People, it's two parts right people want to know about aces um i don't even know what aces is from what i could tell it's it's a way to assess a person's trauma okay what are

aces and what are your opinions on them so i i i know i understand what the question is and so an ace is an adverse childhood experience so any adversity that occurs during childhood that can impact on a child's social emotional or um cognitive development right so they're they're traumas aces are traumas so but what that person is so there are ace scales so is it like a dMR type tick list? It is, yeah. So there are about 15 or 16 different ones. And the World Health Organization has its own one as well. So the one that's most famous, I guess, is one that came out of the Center for Disease Control.

And it's by Felice Adal. So it's a 10 item scale and it asks 10 questions. Have you ever experienced any of the following things when you were under the age of 18? And then we'll say if you tick six of those, so you now have an A score of six. So there's been a huge amount of public health research using those tools. I have used them as well and they are very helpful from a research point of view because if you have a huge amount of you know thousands and thousands of people filling these in you can start to see patterns but what happens sometimes is they are also used in organizations who are delivering frontline services, right?

Now, are they doing that because they want to, are they doing it for a research reason because that's what they were set up for? Those checklists. Or are they deciding who gets services and who doesn't? Yeah. So those checklists are not clinical tools. They are for research purposes. And there's nothing wrong with using it in your state.

So if you have a service and you say, you know, I think that. So we'll say Cork Simon, for example, we did a study with them where we used an ACE tool. It was a research study. So people who work in homelessness would have said, you know, we know that we've a lot of people who've experienced adversity but we can't quantify it we can't put a number on it so how do we know if we're meeting people's needs if we don't know the full extent of the types of traumas that they might have experienced so you can go in and you can say, well, look, lads, you're right. Eighty five percent of the people who come here have at least five. And these are the most common ones. So that's useful information in order to help design and deliver a service.

Now, what has kind of happened in a couple of places is they would have been putting ACE screening into it. But the purpose would have been for research. But perhaps some people in the organizations are misinterpreting that and they're using it as a clinical tool. And they're saying, oh, you five all of the adversity within the family home. So it's all about abuse, neglect and household dysfunction. And actually, there's nothing about the adversity of poverty and social exclusion. And, you know, if you're a member of the travelling community and you've no access to education and employment. Or race, I'm guessing.

Race, ethnicity, you know, all of those different things. Bullying, you know, none of those things. They're all considered adversities during childhood, but they're not on that 10 item scale. So the problem with doing that is you're placing all of the difficulties within a family home without acknowledging the social structures that caused the parent to have a drinking problem or caused the parent to have a mental health issue. Now all of the blame is in the family home. There's a huge amount of people when they hear about aces first particularly

people who've experienced them they go this makes sense to me this explains why i struggle with things you know whether it's a relationship or you know i can't not have confidence to educate whatever it is so it's not that aces are a problem or that the aces tools are a problem it's the way in which people are using them and the variety that exists across services you should never use an ace tool for clinical screening it should only ever be used if it's being used for research or if it's being used as a psychoeducation tool. So you're using it to teach someone, to give them some information and some knowledge. So I know we'll say when we, we've collected loads and loads of ACE questionnaires here, myself and one of my colleagues, Reagan Murphy, and some colleagues from the HSE as well, and Marie Nocton and others.

And we've collected a lot, and Graham Gilliams, and we've collected a lot of ACEs from professionals. So we actually looked one time at, you know, ACEs in professionals. So what we found was that there were particular occupations where people have higher levels of ACEs. So the helping professions, psychology, psychiatry, counselling, addiction, social work, et cetera. So the people who filled in our questionnaire who were working in those jobs had higher levels of ACEs

than people who were emergency doctors, example um okay yeah so we could see that there was differences between um it was also it impacted on the length of time that people stayed in their job as well as people who had higher aces tended to move from one job to another that means that means that we have people with lived experience coming into our services and we're not looking after them properly as employees okay because we need them and they should be there are we giving them appropriate access to employee assistance and time off etc so how you but but one of the things we asked was so you fill out this you know on a scale of one to ten how difficult was it for you to complete this questionnaire?

So what's really, really interesting is on average, it's about three out of 10. People with higher levels of adversity have a lower, take a lower level of distress. So they're around two or three more aces you have, the less distressed you are about the questionnaire. The fewer the aces you have, the more distressed you are about the questionnaire the fewer the aces you have the more distressed you are about the questionnaire so this is a very complicated thing to talk about so there are a group of people now who you could almost describe as anti-aces so they say we can't talk about aces you can't talk about aces because it upsets people but actually have you asked people with high levels of adversity whether you should talk about it or not who's making that decision and when I hear

those conversations, what I describe as anti-ace conversations, there are nearly almost always in academic contexts where academics are sitting around with each other arguing about whether you should talk about adversity and whether you should ask people about their own experiences of adversity. And then the people who've actually experienced it are telling us in our data, I'm not upset by those questions. And what they're also telling us when we go even further is, I remember this one quote when we did the Cork Simon study, and there was one service user who'd experienced a lot of adversity in his childhood and had experienced chronic kind of long-term homelessness. And he filled out the survey and he was given information then about adversity

and what it can mean for your physical health and your mental health later in life. And he wrote down, this is the first time that I have realized that I'm not actually a scumbag. Wow. Because he had lived this life of chaos with addiction and crime and homelessness. And his sense of identity was, I'm a scumbag and that's why I live like this. And when he saw the adversity that he'd experienced, it was his first time realizing, actually, the way I am is a consequence to my experiences. My identity is not as a scumbag. These are consequences to my experiences anyway.

And I want to know more about that and less about what academics think about what poor people feel like. I want to hear what poor people have to say about that. But that ACEs tool has become very controversial, mostly because it's being used in a way that it was not designed for. It has the potential to be great if you use it properly. That was a very long answer and I hope I made sense of it. No, it did because it's it's similar to with um like you know I love CBT and CBT is what works for me yes but CBT sometimes gets thrown at everything

and like people in services get recommended CBT and it's like that might not be what that person needs so just because something works for one, you can't throw it out for everybody. A hundred percent. Same with mindfulness. Mindfulness is actually quite. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Some people like if you would say.

Like I heard about mindfulness and trauma, especially body trauma. That grounding exercises can be quite dangerous for people with body trauma. but with body trauma like if i was in a very bad accident and i had you know i was still living with chronic pain or in a part of my body or whatever and if i went into and it happens a lot where you go to a you know some kind of a workshop and then all of a sudden they say right we're going to start with you know a grounding exercise and we're going to do mindfulness close your eyes and you're going to do body scan and and actually you know there's people in the room who can't do that and you if you say i want you to now focus on your knee pay attention to your knee what if the person's knee is is not there because they've had their leg amputated um you know it's that kind

of stuff so so mindful i find mindfulness good it works for me not all of the time there's times when I can't do it but I know that it doesn't work for everybody and it shouldn't be given to everybody CBT I I like CBT if I'm if I'm really busy and something bad happens and I need to be able to function yeah I like CBT because it means I can get tools to function without having to go deep. Yes. It's like a plaster. It's like something you bandage your wound with. If you have a child who's experiencing a difficult time, now is not the time for you to be dipping into your emotions about that because you've got to help and support them.

But at some point, you're going to have to, you know, look at, well, what was that like for me and has it impacted on my well-being? So so if I was going through a crisis like that, I might say, right, I need some CBT tools because I need to keep my ship together for the next three months. And then after that, I might say, right, I've still got some stuff hanging on there. You know, it's not going away the CBT is you know it's grand and it's but I actually need to go and visit that um have I got the time to do that have I got the space to do that have I got the feckin money to do that you know so different things are going to work for different people and also at different times yeah absolutely um and one last question sharon what are your thoughts on emdr and brain spotting

so emdr and there's loads of research out there that shows that it works quite well it's become very popular and there was what is it like i've only seen that's one of the ones i didn't get into it's like you people touch their fingers and stuff during therapy or something or tap their fingers it's not my and i'm not going to be able to i i would only be able to give you an academic answer so okay um it's a form of psychotherapy and um and i could give a very simplified version of it like you have there but it would do it justice and maybe it would be really interesting for you to have an emd or personal because it is becoming becoming quite popular i mean i have looked at the research in

relation to it and um what's the gist of it do you know even the gist yeah so so the the suggestion is that it helps to access traumatic memory networks um you know by by shift movement it's eye movement yes i'm moving why does it fucking stand for two seconds now emdr eye movement desensitization and reprocessing yeah um and it's associated so there's literature out there and reprocessing. Yeah. And it's associated. So there's literature out there and some of it is positive and some of it is negative. Some of the literature has suggested that it works better on trauma that was experienced in

adulthood and not so much on childhood. But because it's pretty new, you know, it's only around since the mid-80s really you're only talking about, you know know a couple of decades of of research and research actually people don't realize it takes a long time so if i do a piece of research you know by the time you've it all done and you submit it for publication

and goes through peer review you could be talking 18 18 months to two years before you see something published so so it's it's one to watch do you know what my this is what i'm going to tell you what i feel about everything whether it's psychedelics or whether it's emdr or whether it's because you know there's this whole thing brain spotting with the other one yeah and like you know there's this whole thing now about the sRIs because the study that came out about depression not being a chemical imbalance and you know you have all of these people arguing on social media, psychologists and psychiatrists arguing

with each other on social media in front of members of the public who expect these people to... That's not great, yeah. It's like it's shit like... There's a time and place. That's not great yeah. It's like it's shit like. There's a time and place and that's not it. It's not it. Do not. What's the appropriate way there

like you said something I disagree with so I'm going to write a paper that disagrees with you rather than just say it on Twitter. Yes 100%. Okay. But like you know if I go on. Because it makes us then not trust science because if I see someone with a blue tick and a phd yeah twitter getting overly emotional then i will lose faith in science yes

so like you know there's this big thing oh yay we were right ssri's don't work so that's you know antidepressants and then you have this other group of people going why i've been prescribing antidepressants for years and they were then you have people who are people who've experienced depression and they've they've taken antidepressants and they're saying actually I was really harmed by antidepressants and then you have another group of people who say Jesus I don't think I could have survived without them so what actually matters I don't mind whether you do emdr or ssris or cbt or mindfulness what actually matters is what works for you yeah and there can be an awful lot of snobbery um about things you know when mindfulness came out first there was a lot of snobby because it couldn't possibly be that simple

you know that somebody could even any holistic therapy like i had the pat bracken who's a psychiatrist but he's he's very critical of psychiatry i had him on this podcast and pat bracken's thing was he was looking at uh child soldiers in the congo i believe and he was there to try and help him with Western psychology. Their own rituals that were unique to the community that they grew up in, that was much more effective to them than any Western psychology. Look, if you said to me, Blind Boy, that licking a toad's arse on a full moon made you feel like you were fully restored and functioning and if you haven't harmed that toad i'm okay with that what works for you um i'm i've just started a book i i haven't i've only

gotten through the first few pages it's i think it's how how capitalism has created the mental health crisis or something um and it looks to be like it is going to be about that about you know kind of losing that sense of connection with with other means of of dealing with distress like those cultural rituals and things like that and that's gabber matthew's argument gabber matthew is like we live in it our society is traumatized so while we have a traumatized society we will have mental health issues within society i i i just agree with everything there's there's so much inequality and unfairness and greed that drives that and as long as that will continue to exist like that's one of the annoying things about allowing people to and it is a choice of course because if you allow people to stay in

poverty by not having policies to help them out so the examples i gave earlier you know about the electricity costs more stop doing that regulate it don. Exactly. Don't allow them to do that. Similarly with the housing crisis. Like the harm that's being caused to people. Why is it illegal for me to smoke a joint, but it's legal for people to be utterly exploited with rent? Yeah. In terms of looking at actual harm that's being caused,

like make it illegal. This is harming people it's illegal no you can't make that much money off a house you can't this is illegal you're hurting people and and all of those things that we're not doing that we're not because we're choosing not to respond to these because we say asher that's happening to those people over there and they're poor and i don't care about them anyway. Those from a purely economic point of view, those people that you don't care about over there who have the shit housing and all that, they're costing you money because children who do not live in secure, safe housing are at increased

risk for physical health issues, are at increased risk for mental health issues. It's going to cost you money. It's going to cost the taxpayer more money down the line. So all of these things that we choose to do nothing about, it would take minutes, I would imagine, to sort out the fact that people are paying more for electricity if they're using a top up card. If I want to tax my car and I pay for 12 months, this is a state. This is state. So this isn't another company. I don't have to go to another private company and say, hey, lads, would you be really nice

and do us a favor here? This is car tax. It's the state. They do it too. If I buy my car tax for 12 months, it is cheaper than buying it every three months. If I have, you know,

that's the state doing that so so there are things that's the state targeting poor people it is so we can and when the pandemic hit first and you could only buy non-essential items and little and andy have their middle aisle where you can get you know your baby grows and your your hatchet and a wheelbarrow we our country overnight practically was able to legislate to close down the middle island aldi and little for commercial reasons because it was upsetting the lads who had the shops that were closed why aren't we as upset about the children who are who who are moving on a week to week basis from one hotel to another yeah like a child if you have a six-year-old child and you're in in homelessness and you're in a hotel that child is not having play dates that child is not

having a birthday party because it is extremely expensive to have a birthday party in one of those centres. And when you're poor, you have your birthday parties at home. They don't have a home. And Christmas, they don't know where they will be

on Christmas morning. So when they're writing their letter in the first week of December, will Santa know what hotel they're going to be in on Christmas Eve because you're moving every week. Little children, over 3,000 children in our country

are living like that every day. And there's a disproportionate amount of children with disabilities and homelessness. You have a lot of autistic children in homelessness. Routine is so important. I spoke to a woman

whose child is uh whose child is autistic and they're moved week to week and and her child would be so upset that they would bang their head off the wall for 24 hours and she would have to get that child to come into the room backwards so they're slowly being introduced to this new space every week if you have a baby and you're in homelessness and your baby gets a cough and you go to the doctor and they give you that antibiotic the yellow one or the pink one the liquid one that tastes like sugar and you're supposed to store that in a fridge you may be sleeping in a hotel room that doesn't have a fridge so you tie a string around the antibiotic bottle and you hang

it out the window to keep it cold you also do that with your infant formula fucking hell like people don't like you can think about child homelessness and you can say that's really sad i would love if people could walk it for one day just walk it for one day because it's the little things that you you you mightn't have occurred to you and and i've heard people saying sure isn't it really nice to get to stay in a hotel it's not yeah i have children i've stayed in a i stayed in a i hate it don't touch that stop bouncing on that stop making noise there's people in the room next door try not like it's my job like i might have to do a gig and stay in a hotel for seven days and every time i do it i if i find myself complaining i because

it's horrible i say to myself holy fuck there's people in ireland and this is their lives yeah because it's it's not sustainable yeah staying in a hotel you don't have what you need no matter the fucking hotel and there are people who could be doing that for 12 months 18 months the the family hubs that were set up a few years ago that were supposed to be temporary are now not temporary. Direct provision that was set up that was supposed to be temporary is also not temporary. You know, and I, God, I sound so negative, but it's just that there are things that we can do straight away

that will make life easier and better, not just for the people who are experiencing the crisis that they're in, but actually for all of us. Because if you live in a society where everybody's healthy and happy and flourishing, then life is better for you, too. Yeah, I mean, that's I hate having to make that argument i hate that that's when you look to the people in power that you have to make that long-term business argument but it's true like i'd prefer if it's like just do it for a compassionate point of view why do you want people suffering when this suffering can be stopped when it's not necessary. And I suppose when I started off, I thought when you bring the research, people go, oh, wow, OK, we didn't know. And we're going, oh, God, I was so naive.

So thank you for showing me. Thank you for showing me that we've been doing it wrong. Yeah, we're going to fix it immediately. But so what happens is they do. You get invited and you say, oh, my goodness, did you know this? And they say, oh, my God, that's so interesting. And it's really important that we take this on board. And you leave there going, oh, my God, this is great.

I have meaning in my life. And nothing happens. Nothing happens. And then they change and the new lot come in and then you go in and you do the same thing with them. And and then they say the same thing. thing with them and and then they say the same thing and then after a while you start to realize oh my god i think they don't care and that was i think they may be calling me in just for the sake of it to show that they listen yeah so then what happened then was i started saying i think you don't care and then do what happens when you say that? They get mortified. No, they don't invite you back.

Okay. Yeah. So it leaves you in a really difficult situation when you're in my role, which is as a researcher, because I've reached the point where research in relation to child homelessness is not going to tell me anything new. So it's not appropriate for me to keep asking a marginalized group the same questions. It's not going to tell me anything new. So what do we do then as researchers or academics? At what point do we say, lads, listen, it's like with the climate crisis, like at what point do you say i'm not doing this anymore just change and what do we need to do to mobilize to get people to change and it's really hard because a lot of people are

feeling by people you're speaking about people in positions of power yeah yeah people who have the agency to politicians people who can make decisions yeah so i mean you can you can arrive at a stage like me where you just go i can't i can't do that i can't uh i remember i can't remember who said it it could have been joanne ivorice from trinity um but i can't remember who said it so so you get invited to the table right and you go in and you go to the table but what you realize after a while is you've been invited to the table but they haven't actually given you a plate to eat from okay and i suppose i was conscious that that was going on for a while and people kept saying to me it's really important that you're at the table it's really important that you're at the table and then after a while i just thought but i'm leaving the table really hungry

all the time and at some point am i going to make a decision and say now that's i i don't want it i don't want to come to your table i want you to do something i want you to give me a place and i said but when you start doing that then you you you become on the outside and you're you become difficult you're difficult yeah you're difficult just go away sharon do research come back present it put it in a nice powerpoint we'll tell you that you're fabulous and you can come back in two years time and do it again and i guess i work in communities with communities people are dying i did a study a few years ago on drug-related death and i and that was launched by the minister for social protection at the time who said that it was fabulous and it was amazing and this is terrible we have to do something nothing has changed that was 2015 i think or 2016 i can't remember nothing has changed in fact we've gotten worse and i i have met some

of the parents who participated in that study some of the parents who participated in that study. Some of the parents who participated in the study have lost all their children since I met them. They have had all their children die as a result of a drug related death. I can't in good conscience sit at the table without a plate. I have to be ethical in my research. So if somebody has taken the time when ordinary members of the public, particularly people from marginalized groups, when they participate in research, they're not interested in peer academic reviews. They are doing it because they believe

that if they do this, this will make a change. I know that when they're talking to me because they tell me, I hope that my story will mean that no other mother has to go through what I went through. Or I hope that when I tell my story, that my son's life and his death will will have done something to make a change i can't continue to hear that and to know that the research has not been embedded into policy so at some point you have to say lads i'm not i don't want to come to your table it is bare go away and that's where you are and then you become difficult and challenging and i'm not difficult and I'm not challenging. I am. And when you become difficult, Sharon, is there a risk then of research not getting funded?

Oh, no. Well, no, because you can apply for research funding anonymously, actually. Okay. It can affect you, actually. If you are difficult and challenging and ireland is a very small place and so is the united kingdom actually so if there's if somebody who's in a position of power for example decides that they want to hold an event on homelessness they want to hold a think tank we'll say on homelessness or something and if you've criticized an aspect of their policy in the past unfortunately you're not going to get asked yeah because there's an ego response there you know

rather than saying actually and i remember one time having to deal with somebody who was difficult and challenging and they disagreed with everything i said all the time and i i had to work with them a lot and i went to, I was going for supervision, that's what psychologists call it when we go to talk to another psychologist. And I said, look, I have to work with this person and when I come,

when I say something, they say, but always. And I remember he said a really important thing to me. He said, that person is going to keep you safe because they keep challenging you. So it means you need to be really she you're going to have to

really justify the decisions that you're making and that's good for you why are you seeing it as a negative and it totally changed the way i view people who argue with me and i think that when you're in positions of power when you're doing policy you need to have people who don't agree with you because even so even if i if i'm challenging or i'm difficult if i'm wrong you're going to be able to prove it when we're sitting around the table because i'll make my point and then you will make your counterpoint and you will present evidence and it will be a professional robust discussion but if you bring in incompetence and ego into that scenario if you've somebody who's in charge of a brief and they don't really

understand it they don't want to hear my counter argument because they don't have the information to challenge it back and then it becomes an ego thing thank you very much Sharon Lambert for that magnificent chat that we had there that was a long bye that was a long interview maybe you listened to it in two parts maybe you just went the whole hog I thoroughly enjoyed that I can't wait to hear the results of Sharon Lambert's study into podcasting and mental health, I believe those results we'll hear about them in October I think, I think I'm not sure, but I'll definitely give you

an update when I do find out, in the meantime I'll be back next week I don't know what with Rub a dog enjoy the honesty of early autumn embrace the here and now of early autumn

that's always important your brain is telling you it's cold, it's rotten find the beauty in the death of autumn okay dog bless Okay. God bless. 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.

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