Nathan Filer: Storytelling that honours Psychosis

Award-winning author, broadcaster and former mental health nurse Nathan Filer asks what happens to a person’s story when their experience is translated into a psychiatric diagnosis. Drawing on literature, psychiatry, politics and his own experience in mental health care, Filer explores psychosis without reducing it to illness or metaphor. Diagnosis can name something important, but what does it leave out? Moving from psychiatric wards to literary history — with appearances from Holden Caulfield and Winnie-the-Pooh — this funny, personal and searching talk asks who gets to tell the story of mental illness, and what literature can reveal that medicine alone cannot. At its heart is a case for exquisite attention: resisting the temptation to turn a difficult human life into a label, and remaining curious about everything that does not fit.

Nathan Filer