FiveBooks

The psychologist, trustee of Alzheimer’s charity SPECAL and bestselling author chooses FiveBooks on the mad world we live in and says British and American women today are five times more likely to be mentally ill than women in the 1950s. Thatcherism and Reaganomics smashed the family to pieces.

Cardiologist Tato Grasso is a fellow of the International Association for Cannabis as Medicine and he advocates the use of medicinal cannabis as a treatment for the nausea following chemotherapy as well as producing increased appetite in patients with HIV and for some types of chronic pain. He says Sativex, a drug derived from cannabis, should be available in Europe in 2010.

Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, and an expert in autism, Uta Frith says the study of brain and mind will be the big science of the 21st century and help human beings to understand themselves. The mind is not just one hopelessly entangled mass, but can be divided into surprisingly neat compartments, as if we were looking at a house with many rooms. Many people shrink in horror at this idea. ‘They are the lumpers, while I am more of a splitter,’ she says.

Social psychologist Shazia Omar is the author of Like a Diamond in the Sky, a novel about Bangladeshi addicts. Omar is a founding member of Writers Block, an organisation that aims to promote the works of Bangladeshis writing in English. Drug addiction, she says, is a growing problem here. Many people are taking a drug called yabba, which comes from Thailand and is similar to speed. ‘It’s an expensive drug so it’s the well-off young people who are doing it. A lot of those I met while researching the book didn’t realise they were going to get hooked. None of them knew how harmful it is,’ she says. Having spent a month doing research in a rehab centre in Mumbai, she concludes that love, and not a punitive approach, is the answer to overcoming addiction.