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Ep12 - Psychosis & Art with Conor Gavin
15 Plays9 months ago
Conor Gavin works in mental health. His academic background involves clinical neuroscience, genetics of schizophrenia, chidhood trauma and social cognition. Conor is a founding member of the Psychosis Arts Collective. An organisation that is bringing awareness to mental health through art. The contributors include professional artists, and communicate lived experience through visual art, poetry, short film and more.
Conor and the collective do good work that makes a difference to many people. Please go to the link above to view and support what they do.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:00
Conor Gavin
Hyper puppies bounce inside my head, nine on the bone that makes up my skull. They are feral strays rambling my brain, trying to find a home that isn't there. If they could just settle, then I could sleep. Maybe when grown, I could tame them. But for now, the animals are in control. And when they bark, I answer.
00:00:27
philosophecker
Well, hi, Connor.
00:00:30
Conor Gavin
How are you? How's things?
00:00:32
philosophecker
I'm good. Thank you very much.
00:00:34
Conor Gavin
Thanks for having me on.
00:00:35
philosophecker
ah Thanks for coming on, Connor. I really appreciate it. um Just give a brief introduction.
Connor's Background in Mental Health
00:00:41
philosophecker
Connor ah joins us from Athlone in the center of Ireland, the heartland of Ireland.
00:00:44
Conor Gavin
That's great.
00:00:47
philosophecker
um But he ah got his education here in Galway at NUIG, which is now UG, University of Galway. his education is in biochemistry or around the genetics of schizophrenia and he has a master's in clinical neuroscience around childhood trauma and social cognition and Connor is now working as a recovery education facilitator which is mental health workshops for young people and a peer support worker on MOST most trial which is moderated online social therapy so uh yeah you you seem to have a
00:01:27
philosophecker
You seem to have a particular interest, Connor, just judging judging by everything you're interested in. ah But what we're here to talk about is something else that you've started, which is the Psychosis Arts Collective, which is which is very interesting, I find. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the Psychosis Arts Collective and what it's about, what it's doing.
00:01:52
Conor Gavin
yeah So I'll start with, I suppose, the basics. PAC, or the Psychosis Arts Collective, PAC, is a group or a collective of artists who all have a lived experience of psychosis. So each one of us have a unique experience, but also in a similar way, we have similar experiences and we can share and share insights about what we've been through and all through the medium of creativity. so I suppose one of the aims is to fight stigma and that's that peer connection piece is a huge part of it that we can relate to each other and then true that then we can create art or poetry or videography or playwriting like some of the artists have done and that normalizes the experience and shows that we we have something to offer.
Understanding Psychosis
00:02:41
philosophecker
Okay, so for people out there who don't understand or who are curious about it, what is psychosis?
00:02:49
Conor Gavin
yeah So psychosis in its most simple form is a loss of total reality. So many people that have psychosis will go through delusions, cognitive distortions basically. um They might have hallucinations, visual or auditory hallucinations.
00:03:08
Conor Gavin
um And they also might hear voices as well. well that That will be auditory hallucinations. And they might also, I suppose, have paranoia, so they might think that someone's out to get them, their family, the government. um And then, I suppose, there's two sides to psychosis in a way, for me anyways, at least.
00:03:28
Conor Gavin
There's the psychotic episode, which is the first interaction I suppose you have, which is brings the delusions and the hallucinations and and all that. So I think they're the positive symptoms of psychosis and psychosis-related disorders.
00:03:40
Conor Gavin
Then the negative symptoms would be things like as as well social withdrawal, um cognitive deficits, social cognition deficits, and basically all the things that come with after your episode, after you've recovered from the psychotic symptoms, people also struggle to reintegrate with society and that can be an issue as well.
00:04:01
philosophecker
Just ah just ah to to clarify a bit of your language, they're positive and negative in the terminology as you're using it, does not mean good and bad.
00:04:11
Conor Gavin
No, I suppose they're both bad in a way. they They're both um difficult experiences. I think the positive and negative is more positively, I suppose, psychotic, I suppose, and in that way.
00:04:26
philosophecker
so it like but
00:04:26
Conor Gavin
And negative means that the psychotic features are maybe not so present.
00:04:31
philosophecker
So is positive and negative in those terms, positive is something that's added and negative is something that's taken away.
00:04:37
Conor Gavin
Yeah.
00:04:38
philosophecker
So, okay, okay.
Creativity's Therapeutic Role
00:04:40
philosophecker
And what inspired you to found this Psychosis Arts Collective?
00:04:47
Conor Gavin
Yeah, I suppose some creativity was something that I was always interested in. I think I wrote my first short story when I was like seven years of age, I think. So I've been writing for a long time, expressing my feelings to writing. Even ah sometimes I mightn't have realized I was expressing myself. I thought I was just writing stories or poems for the fun of it. But as I looked back on them, so even maybe from the age of 12, 13, 14, 15, the poems maybe started to get a bit deeper, a bit more introspective.
00:05:16
Conor Gavin
And it was only then, so I had that experience with creativity before my episode. I had my psychotic episode at age 15. And from there, then, as I slowly started to recover and reintegrate back into, I suppose, school and college and everything, my poems started to become a bit more centered around psychology and mental health and my own psyche.
00:05:39
Conor Gavin
um So that was my kind of creative journey. So I had always had that spark for it.
00:05:44
philosophecker
can you Can you tell us a little bit about your psychotic episode, if that's okay?
00:05:51
Conor Gavin
Absolutely, yeah, but I suppose I'll just maybe just finish the the first part of, and then yeah, so I suppose, sorry to interrupt yourself, but I suppose then that led me in, because of my experience with psychosis, that would have led into, so I suppose, realizing that other people might have used creativity to express themselves in that way as well.
00:05:53
philosophecker
Sorry, apologies.
00:06:08
Conor Gavin
So yeah, but yeah, no, absolutely, the Stagedev episode is, itself, is an experience. It's it's it's quite a visceral experience. And what I mean by that is when you're in it, and when you have the delusions that feel so real to you. It feels you're completely immersed, like a video game or a movie. I don't know if you've ever gone to the cinema um and you just completely feel like everything is surrounding you, the surround sound, the screen. It's like you can't think about anything else. that was That's the best way to describe for me anyways, what it felt like. Everything felt so real. There was really no escape in the thoughts that I was having.
00:06:46
philosophecker
And were they were they had just thoughts or did you have a hallucinations, auditory and visual hallucinations?
00:06:55
Conor Gavin
So funny enough, I didn't actually have any hallucinations. I didn't see anything that wasn't there, and I didn't hear anything that wasn't that there. But I did think a lot of thoughts that seemed to me now completely ridiculous. But ah in a way, in a strange way, they made sense at the time. so Something that I struggled with is and struggled with when I was younger is kind of seeking validation or seeking kind of, I wouldn't say attention, but like I do like to get affirmations and and that kind of thing and have since learned to give them to myself in a more healthy way. Well, I suppose at the time I felt like there was something being organized for me, like a parody.
00:07:35
Conor Gavin
when I was 15 or kind of an event to celebrate me and my contribution to science even though I hadn't really made any contributions um at a young age and I felt like I was special and I felt like you know I was being celebrated and in public life and on the radio that people or if they if they said something about a celebrity I would have thought maybe that they were talking about me and so that kind of makes sense because obviously if I was seeking validation then my delusions were also building on that as well so I'm not sure delusions and the psychotic symptoms I suppose the features of psychosis are
00:08:05
philosophecker
Okay.
00:08:11
Conor Gavin
poorly misunderstood in the literature I suppose there there is some literature on delusions but how they form and how they sustain themselves but I think i think there's something in that maybe that what comes before them influences the delusions and even if you think we had classes in psychiatry in the masters and they often told us that wild delusions have to be separate from culture as in to be diagnosed with psychosis it can't be a delusion sometimes based around religion or thinking that God is speaking to you because that's something that happens quite regularly so it wouldn't be class as a delusion really but often in a weird way they are tied to culture in a way because um if you think about psychotic episodes in the 50s and 60s in Ireland
00:09:01
Conor Gavin
a lot of them would have thought that a lot of people that experienced that I suppose psychotic episode would have been thinking about God and Mary that they were really involved in their lives and maybe seeing Mary the Virgin Mary and in whatever statues and that kind of thing.
Psychosis and Cultural Influences
00:09:20
Conor Gavin
Whereas now these days for me and for others I know it's a lot about technology and social media and the news and CIA and that kind of thing you know so but it While it has to be somewhat separate from culture, it's often it's often tied to it in some way.
00:09:36
philosophecker
That's interesting.
00:09:37
Conor Gavin
and
00:09:37
philosophecker
um i I often think about ah people who are into conspiracy theories and other stuff like this, and that there seems to be some some relevance here, not not perfect match, but some relevance here in that I don't think people who believe conspiracy theories are always stupid or less intelligent people.
00:09:58
philosophecker
In fact, I think the opposite. I think there's something about intelligence that makes people ah better at adjusting income and data to suit their narrative that they already have in their head. And I think more intelligent people are often better at doing that. So ah do you think there's something in that um in that kind of, is is is there is there a correlation between intelligence and psychosis?
00:10:27
Conor Gavin
Can I just pause you for two seconds? I'm so sorry. Are you able to edit this out? I just need to plug in my laptop.
00:10:32
philosophecker
and go.
00:10:35
Conor Gavin
So it is it's it's a bit of a it's a it's a good question, actually, because I suppose, as I mentioned in in earlier, that if you take huge samples of people in studies, um these are called genetic genome-wide association studies that they do. So they gen genotype huge amounts of people that have psychosis or schizophrenia or schizoaffective or related disorders and they genotype and test with thousands of people that don't have it. and When they compare them in terms of cognitive tests or IQ, a lot of the time you will see that there is cognitive deficits in people that have psychosis. But in saying that,
00:11:19
Conor Gavin
that That doesn't mean everyone that has psychosis is cognitive deficient. As you can see, like many people like myself will go on to college and they'll do quite well and they get good results. And it's not everyone, but overall, when
Expressing Through Art
00:11:31
Conor Gavin
you take hundreds of thousands of people and look at the data, you'll often see social card deficits and, you know, different issues that people struggle with.
00:11:38
philosophecker
Yeah.
00:11:42
Conor Gavin
Um, but I like the way you phrased it that maybe there's something in the way people analyze their own thoughts and the delusions that form from it. I suppose maybe there is something in that that if if you're very analytic and the delusions that come to you in in this I gotta get episode that you're the way you think about them and the way you extrapolate them into something that can be applied to your own life. For example, I would have known a lot about science. So I was hugely and interested in reading books about genetics, even from a young age.
00:12:18
Conor Gavin
And to be able to take that information in and then apply it to myself, that's very different, I suppose, than someone that would maybe have no interest in in kind of intellectual, I don't know, I suppose, top topics, I suppose. And maybe their delusions would look a bit different, but that that's not, that's, I suppose that's a bit reductive because everyone's experience is personal to them and it's all valid. um So even in the negative symptoms of people,
00:12:46
Conor Gavin
are talking about their feelings or maybe some depressive episodes they're having following a saccadic episode. um If they have, I don't know, if they're seen to have a lower cognitive score than me, whatever, that ah doesn't mean that that that's not bad, that's not real. they Everyone's experience is valid and everyone is different and unique as I said at the very start. And no one's opinion is more important or less important than anyone else.
00:13:13
philosophecker
Yeah, you touched you touched on something there, which I think is important on this topic, that delusions and hallucinations might not be real. But the experience that somebody is living is very real, you know, ah regardless ah of of that. So um how do you kind of get around that?
00:13:38
philosophecker
Not get around it, but how do you how do you fit that into your story? how do How do you go about accepting that? That there's a realness to the experience, where it but the experience itself is based on something that is not real.
00:13:55
Conor Gavin
That's a really interesting point. That's something I've actually struggled with in my recovery since the last 10 years, I suppose, so I'm 26 now. um I've been looking back on true therapy, I suppose, and psychotherapy. that There's merit in looking back into your childhood and everything. It might be the best as was therapeutic technique for everyone. Some people just prefer CBT and more kind of cognitive-based interventions.
00:14:22
Conor Gavin
but You've touched on something really important there, so they're not real. The delusions themselves, the thoughts about the CIA interacting with your life or the government or anything, that obviously can't be real. um But the emotional side of it are maybe the origin of that delusion. Why why do you think that? Why why that your philosophy or why is that your Why does someone think that the CIA is after them? Why does someone think that God is intervening in their life?
00:14:52
Conor Gavin
but What's the difference there? I suppose Jeddx can explain some of the reasons for it, or maybe childhood to trauma can. um But it's really hard to know why someone has one delusion and why someone has the other. Why is it personalized to you? The content of the delusion. So there's actually great work being done on this. I think in Oxford, there is some work being on being done on delusions. And I think Daniel Freeman, Professor Daniel Freeman,
00:15:20
Conor Gavin
could be the name of an academic expert who does a lot on the the kind of psychosis symptoms. Really interesting stuff. I haven't looked into it too much myself in terms of the literature, but I have done a lot of thinking about my own experience and what that might mean for me.
00:15:34
philosophecker
Yeah.
00:15:36
Conor Gavin
And that's that's valid as well, I guess.
00:15:38
philosophecker
is Is there always with the with the experience of psychosis, is there always an element of of delusions of grandeur, shall we say, where you're putting yourself at the center of some story that's happening?
00:15:53
Conor Gavin
Absolutely. Yeah, it happens a lot. um And I suppose for me, that was the experience conclusion of grandeur. I thought I was this very talented scientist with no basis. In fact, because i obviously I was in fifth year in school, I hadn't contributed to the to the cause at all. um But yeah, I know that that is very common. And very often people, maybe even with bipolar disorder can have these as well, like kind of psychotic features where they might slip into a period of mania or a manic episode as it's called, similar to a psychotic episode, but not full, full-blown psychosis. And they often think they might be running a business or they might get a promotion, but that mightn't be the case at all. And I can remember I'd be talking to someone in school and my immediate reaction was that they thought I was brilliant. They thought I was this social butterfly and
00:16:48
Conor Gavin
And that wasn't the case. I was actually quite shy in school, but because of the psychosis, I had this increased elevated sense of confidence and rigor that I could talk to anyone and I could be anything I wanted to be. And I suppose maybe maybe that is true, but the way I was thinking about it was definitely it was definitely a full-blown delusion. And what's funny, so you mentioned, so was them delusions, the grandiose delusions, but some people can have awful experiences of persecutory delusions as well.
00:17:18
Conor Gavin
where maybe that could be related to, suppose, a lower self-esteem, where you think people are looking at you and judging you and so there's something wrong with you internally and people are looking into to seek that out and criticise you what that might be. Also, they're similar to the grandiose side of it.
00:17:37
Conor Gavin
There might be no fact there at all. There might be no basis in fact. And it's interesting.
00:17:41
philosophecker
it the
00:17:42
Conor Gavin
but like as We talked about it a few minutes ago. Why does one person have one or why does one person have the other? And there are theories on that as well. Maybe if someone has higher self-esteem before the episode, maybe they'll have grandiose delusions during.
00:17:57
Conor Gavin
But really, I think, tired to research this stuff, how do you conduct a study ethically and longitudinally to find this stuff out?
00:18:04
philosophecker
Is there...
00:18:06
Conor Gavin
It's very difficult.
00:18:09
philosophecker
Yeah, that that's...
Ethics in Art and Vulnerability
00:18:13
philosophecker
That brings me on to ethical issues kind of around, how do you handle ethical issues around displaying art by people who may be in like a vulnerable mental state or may be susceptible to vulnerable mental states?
00:18:27
Conor Gavin
Yeah, so that that's a good point. And we'd only share art publicly in galleries that that we set up, that people are comfortable with sharing. So the people that are involved, the people that lived experience will share the art that they're comfortable with sharing.
00:18:43
Conor Gavin
And I see what you're getting at. So, so I suppose maybe you're referring to people that are in an episode or something like that, that will be sharing act wouldn't typically be the case that we would engage with someone that's in a full-blown psychotic episode, probably because they might be in the best place. And we, we try to validate everyone's experiences and everyone's experiences are, are, are important and important to them.
00:19:08
Conor Gavin
But typically, if someone is is very unwell that maybe they wouldn't be contributing to the collective, of it's more in recovery that the months that follow or the years that follow. That's what we tend to see in coming in.
00:19:22
Conor Gavin
But what's interesting and you, so you yourself were at the launch of our last exhibition Drive Together just this week and you've seen and a video made and edited by someone who actually took VHS footage during the episode and then edited after.
00:19:28
philosophecker
Yeah.
00:19:42
Conor Gavin
So they edited the video um only this year and the artist was unnamed and they wanted to protect their identity and everything like that. And there that was completely fine. But that showed, for me, what it felt like during an episode. And I could resonate with that as well. It was similar, there's the flashing lights, the banging at the door, the ah kind of intensity of it all, and the visceralness of it all. um And that's important because, as I said on the knife in my speech, I said, there's two sides of the coin. There's the positive recovery stories, and there's the recovery movement, and there's the lived experience movement in psychology and in mental health. but
00:20:21
Conor Gavin
you can shy away from the negative aspects of it. You can't shy away from the hardship that people go through and you can shy away from the difficult experiences that people have. But that's important to them. they They remember that and I remember that and everyone remembers their episode in in some ways. I don't remember all of it. They do know that it was difficult and you have to acknowledge that as well, you know.
00:20:44
philosophecker
um how How long did your own episode, was it was of a single episode? And how long did it go on for?
00:20:52
Conor Gavin
Yeah, so I had one episode, one psychotic episode, and it lasted for, it builds up. So mine built up maybe for a month and a half. And then on Christmas day of all days, it peaked. And I actually was brought into A&E by my family. I voluntarily went as well. And I was, well section in away to and I I'm not sure if that's the right word, but I was voluntarily brought to cams.
00:21:20
Conor Gavin
ah true A and E, and I was there for about a month in recovery and coming out of the psychosis and taking antipsychotics and therapy and everything. But yeah, about a month beforehand, one and a half, and then a month after, slowly coming back to reality.
00:21:35
Conor Gavin
um But not everyone, everyone has a different experience, everyone has different lengths, and everyone has different that delusions, hallucinations, and sometimes it takes longer, sometimes it takes shorter, especially if it's, I suppose, some people might have drug-induced psychosis as well, that could be that could be a more isolated incident, and some people have treatment-resistant schizophrenia, and it could take years and years.
00:21:59
philosophecker
ah You mentioned drug-induced psychosis. There is a fair amount of links, I think, and correlations been made between the use of marijuana and weed smoking and schizophrenia, which and the link between schizophrenia and psychosis. Could you speak a bit to that?
00:22:18
Conor Gavin
Yeah, so I suppose just an important point to clarify that and not everyone that has a psychotic episode or has psychosis will go on to develop full-blown schizophrenia or full-blown schizoaffective disorder like myself.
00:22:31
Conor Gavin
um It could be related to other things or it could be more isolated. and It can be difficult as well to to get a diagnosis because of the criteria and the DSM, the diagnostic manual, you know, first good for psychiatry. Drug-induced stats, I think, are actually quite quite daunting. It is quite a high... and I'm not sure exactly what the stats are for the links between marijuana or cannabis use too to psychotic features.
00:23:00
Conor Gavin
But I think it is quite significant. I think there is, I suppose, a movement to legalize marijuana and cannabis in Ireland and across the world. I'd be cautious on that one. I think it isn't as low as some people like to point out. So a lot of the time the campaigners will say it's a very low percentage. It's actually not. I can't remember the exact figure. I think it does happen quite often.
00:23:27
philosophecker
Yeah, I remember studying about that and I think there is kind of a an epigenetic component to it, whereas if you are kind of a genetically susceptible to schizophrenia, then it can be brought up brought out by other drugs.
Factors Contributing to Psychosis
00:23:43
philosophecker
um Could you speak a bit to the heritability of schizophrenia and psychotic episodes? I mean, I think there's a lot of people who'd be worried if they have a history of schizophrenia in their family, and they'd be worried themselves
00:23:59
philosophecker
about how it might appear in their lives or if. um Can you speak a bit about that?
00:24:04
Conor Gavin
Thank you.
00:24:06
Conor Gavin
Yeah, so well I suppose when we talk about genetic risk and heritability, it can be quite daunting for people that maybe have a parent or have a brother or a sibling. I'm pretty sure that the the heritability rate of schizophrenia is 80% or roughly 80%. Now I'll explain a little bit what that means. It doesn't mean that if you have a parent or whatever sibling that you have a 80% chance of inheriting it.
00:24:36
Conor Gavin
It means that 80% of developing schizophrenia is owed to genetics and roughly 20%, or maybe 25% dependent on the person, is owed to environmental factors. So things like childhood trauma, even even living in a city increases your risk slightly by a small percentage, urbanicity. Things like that. Childhood trauma is a big one. um Yeah, environmental factors.
00:25:03
Conor Gavin
And the other the other bigger half with the bigger proportion is is genetics and genomics. Genomic sequencing has, I suppose, told us that in the whole new way of GWAS, as I mentioned earlier, genomic-wide association studies, which I've done a little bit of work on. And as I kind of alluded to a few minutes ago, I suppose, you take huge populations, huge samples of the population that have experience with psychosis, so schizoaffective disorder, as diagnosed in the DSM, so they have to have diagnosis. And you sequence all their DNA, genotype them, like I've done actually that in the past in the study. I've been a part of one of them studies. And they take hundreds of thousands, as many as you can get of controls.
00:25:50
Conor Gavin
So the UKB or the UK Biobank has this data and you can pull from that and do studies and you can kind of elucidate patterns or I suppose genes or parts of genes that have mutations that are related to the risk of developing the disorder. It's very early days, very early days in terms of understanding the full biological basis of the disorders. There's a lot of work to be done and it's it's it's very slow, difficult work. And um I could explain a bit about why it's difficult and why it takes so long, but I suppose coming back to the heritability, the way they, the more simple I suppose way of kind of discovering that pattern or that stat,
00:26:35
Conor Gavin
is two twin studies actually so because identical twins are very interested in the fact that they have 100% the same DNA um but their environment might be different depending on what lives they live in that so as you can imagine why that's important in separating environment from genetics if one person has a different experience but they have the same DNA then you can kind of see the pattern that way
00:27:02
philosophecker
And if if ah if there is a history of it in your family, um is there a stage in your life where you've grown past the the the risk areas? Where if it hasn't come up, if it hasn't taken form in you and you haven't had a psychotic episode, is there an area where you can, a time in your life where you can say, okay, look, it's it's it's probably not going to happen to me.
00:27:29
Conor Gavin
Yeah, so I'd be cautious um in kind of trying to predict and I suppose i I wouldn't be too worried if if you had a family member. I suppose it's it's quite still rare. I think it's roughly 1% of the population that go on to develop. schitzphrenia now It's not that rare. that That's actually quite large proportion. But I wouldn't be too worried with family members. And as you mentioned, I suppose the age range usually most people that have schizophrenia or schizoaffective would be diagnosed maybe somewhere between the age 15 which is quite young which which is actually I was just on the the lower end of it myself um and then 25 or 30 so somewhere in between then is where we see the most people being diagnosed.
00:28:14
Conor Gavin
That's not to say, there's always outliers, you know, but as I said, I wouldn't be too majorly worried.
00:28:17
philosophecker
Mm.
00:28:22
Conor Gavin
And I suppose the reason for that is there's so many factors that come into play. So if you think of um mutations in the DNA, so one one amino acid change or one letter AGTC of the DNA code. um We can track them over the the studies that I mentioned, the GWAS studies. Currently that there's hundreds of of single nucleotide polymorphisms is what they're called, so single change in the DNA. And there's hundreds of them that are associated. And they all have a very weak effect. So it's a lot of small effects that add up to a big effect.
00:29:03
Conor Gavin
And only, I suppose, with a perfect storm, I suppose, for want of a better phrase, with childhood trauma, urbanicity, these kind of things, marijuana, drug use, um all these kind of things come together to form schizophrenia. So it's it's very different for everyone. The mix of genes you have and the mix of environments you have. And then there are some genetic components maybe that might be different.
00:29:28
Conor Gavin
There's longer stretches of the DNA that will compot the contribute so CNVs or copy number of variants I think is the the acronym. They will have a bigger effect but they're more rare.
00:29:42
philosophecker
Okay, okay. um This might sound like a strange question, but if you see the the cover photo, you might yeah figure what I'm getting at. Do other animals suffer from psychosis?
00:29:57
Conor Gavin
that's That's a really good question, actually. And as fair as I know, I don't think so. I don't think so.
Do Animals Experience Psychosis?
00:30:04
philosophecker
Okay.
00:30:04
Conor Gavin
um I could be wrong on that. and You'd have to fact check me on that one, Dahi.
00:30:07
philosophecker
Yeah.
00:30:09
Conor Gavin
But as far as I know, we don't typically see psychotic features in other animals. And I'm not sure exactly the reason why.
00:30:14
philosophecker
Okay, for for me that means it's language-based.
00:30:19
Conor Gavin
Yeah, it could be a language base. It could be a somewhat language base, yeah. and and different And that's actually an interesting point, because in different cultures, the Sagata features could be different. And that came up in the and our discussion the last night at the launch of our exhibition, the Sagata. But Sagata is an arts collective. We've seen that cultural context of Sagata might look very different in different countries and different languages. And yeah, so I suppose one of the projects that I worked on in college was the use of semantics so semantic the meaning end of words or that kind of thing you know so i kind of hypothesized and it was only a humble study design module so it wasn't actually i didn't actually get to do the research myself but i came up with the project that and then there was a basis for it in the literature that maybe if you look at per
00:30:51
philosophecker
Mm.
00:31:12
Conor Gavin
people with schizophrenia and delusions. So if they have a very high delusion score or whatever on on the and the measures that we use, I won't go into that, but that that they might have lower, I suppose, they might they might be able to associate the meanings of things that aren't related. You get me? So things in delusions, you relate things to other things that don't have a relationship. So I relate Someone on the radio talking about a celebrity, as I said, to me, but they're not related. And is' it there's a response in the brain called the N-400 response. And that's if you say a word like dog, and then you're showing a word that's cat or another animal, that will illustrate a certain response. And then if I say a word like dog, and then I say a word like table,
00:32:10
Conor Gavin
are not related and I kind of hypothesize that maybe someone with schizophrenia, I think there is some research on this that that response might look a bit different in the brain and you can do this with EEG or you know the the CAHPS.
00:32:21
philosophecker
okay okay yeah that's good that's uh yeah that's interesting stuff um and and and it's stuff that i think uh people who might have interests in schizophrenia or psychosis might be able to look more into themselves because it's quite complex studies and um
00:32:25
Conor Gavin
Some people so have done this and got some results but early days I said
00:32:48
philosophecker
When I did go to your launch the last night and when I went into your online gallery, there was a lot of stuff that stirred me emotionally, that kind of hit me hard, even your poem on ah that we opened with there.
00:33:04
philosophecker
it hit it hit me hard and and part of it made me think okay this is hitting me hard did did i have psychotic episodes did i suffer from psychosis sometimes that i haven't recognized um and also then i that makes me think about people who have diagnosed episodes and how this art might impact them and does it kind of does it does it bring back memories?
00:33:30
philosophecker
Would there be a possibility that could bring somebody into another episode? How do you balance that?
00:33:36
Conor Gavin
interesting point yeah yeah it's an interesting point i suppose as you might might be talking about more the kind of triggering aspects of the art and maybe ones that are very kind of vibrant and kind of hit your head as you said um i i'd say the risk is quite low and i've actually talked to a couple of psychiatrists about this and psychologists and they were happy to share the art with outpatients and impatience and i didn't think There was an issue there, but you've mentioned this was bringing back memories and kind of bringing that experience up again and making it more real. I think it's quite unlikely. I know I'm not an expert. So it's kind of funny that I draw on my experiences as an expert by experience is what we call it in in the business, an expert by training. So I'm not really an expert by training.
00:34:31
Conor Gavin
maybe with the masters, maybe you could say that I've gained some sort of knowledge. But in my humble opinion, I would say the risk of triggering ah triggering psychotic features in someone throughout is quite low.
00:34:45
Conor Gavin
Now, unless you're on the threshold already, um but talking to the teams in the hospitals, I think they're happy to to share it with kind of anyone. um if you As long as you preface it with a trigger warning and
00:34:55
philosophecker
Is there...
00:34:59
Conor Gavin
And I suppose teams, occupational therapists, art therapists will always kind of, they have good sense of someone.
00:34:59
philosophecker
Okay.
00:35:06
Conor Gavin
They'll have some sense of a person, a patient, um and they'll be able to kind of judge that on the day. Should I show them this? Should we work on this today? you know And they'll use their kind of expert opinion.
00:35:19
Conor Gavin
That's worth a lot more than mine to to kind of see who's fit for it, I guess.
00:35:24
philosophecker
Yeah, I do wonder if there's an element of being able to to look at it from the outside as an observer of art, comparing to being in it. There's a definite difference there. But how do you think your education in psychology changes how you process looking back at your psychotic episode?
00:35:51
Conor Gavin
Yeah, it's an interesting one. And I suppose my my psychology background is is limited. I didn't do an undergrad in psychology, but I definitely, the masters in neuroscience and the masters, yeah, the clinical neuroscience aspect of it is very interesting to me. Genetic side, I suppose, opened up a different, I suppose, door. I was starting to think about, you know, what as as we said, 20% and the 80% of heritability.
00:36:19
Conor Gavin
what happened in my childhood or what would have happened. And I think on an individual level, it's hard to know if you think about the science of it all. As I said, these studies that look at patterns of childhood trauma and everything like that, there are huge amounts of data from hundreds of thousands of people, as I said. So when you break it down to an individual level, patterns are low. Is that everything has is very common things that all have a small effect that come together to have a perfect storm kind of effect. So I i try tend to not think about it. There's kind of an aspect of kind of single and out experiences in your past and and thinking, maybe that caused my schizophrenia. now And sometimes in extreme cases, that could be the case. But for me, it's I like to think about that stuff on an intellectual level for my studies or for my work. and
00:37:17
Conor Gavin
even in workshops and that kind of stuff. um But the main thing for me is that how I manage it now, how I, with someone with schizoaffective disorder, how do I manage my mood and what can I focus on that I can change and that I can work on for the future and for my recovery um in the now. And I think There is a lot to be said for psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is huge. It has its place as does psychiatry and as does medication and antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. um But I think if you analyze your childhood too much, I think it might be always the best idea on an individual level.
00:37:56
philosophecker
Because you'll find something anyways. None of us were ever completely happy as kids. If we were, our parents weren't doing their jobs right. you know
00:38:04
Conor Gavin
Well, yeah, like no, no, no childhood is perfect. And as I said, it takes, takes a lot of data to see them patterns come out.
00:38:08
philosophecker
No.
Treatment and Therapy for Psychosis
00:38:13
philosophecker
What would you mention pharmaceuticals there? What role do pharmaceuticals play in the in the treatment of psychosis?
00:38:19
Conor Gavin
Big role. Yeah, big role. So I suppose one of the things it's hard to reconcile is that antipsychotics are the first line treatment for our psychotic episode that they work. They do reduce symptoms of psychosis.
00:38:35
Conor Gavin
that That's a hot topic at the moment in the anti-psychiatry movement and everything like that. you know I don't want to comment too much on this. There are people that are against medication, there's people that are for, and there's people that are somewhat in the middle. I am of the opinion that so i called antipsychotics or any kind of medication for any mental disorder should not be given in isolation.
00:38:58
Conor Gavin
I do think that talk therapy, CBT, CFT, DBT, all of the good stuff should be used in conjunction with medication and antipsychotics because going into a doctor, we if we've all heard them story. Someone goes to the GP and they might have depressive symptoms and they're given an antidepressant and they're told to go home and and take it. that That's not really what we're looking for here, especially with the lived experience and the recovery movement and more holistic ways of doing things. that It's more, I suppose, yeah more holistic. But that's not that doesn't negate the importance of of um of medication.
00:39:44
Conor Gavin
And yeah, as I said, reconciling the fact that we don't really understand the biology of the disorder or many mental disorders. that the biological basis of them in the brain and the connections in the brain and the genetics, like we we do know a lot, but we still need to know a lot more. And people often say, you know, how can we give medication for something that we don't know how it works? But we we do know that the medication does work. So I suppose to a certain degree, it does help. And I think we can't totally forget about it. And we can't totally forget about psychological, psychological interventions either. So we need both.
00:40:22
philosophecker
that Does electroshock therapy still have a place?
00:40:27
Conor Gavin
um I think for certain disorders, not 100% sure how often it's used, but I think it's only used in extreme cases. Maybe treatment resistant, certain disorders that are treatment resistant. I'm not 100% sure. And I know in the past it was used a lot more, but as we know, it's quite invasive and I can have side effects as well. So it prefer, preferably not used, I would say.
00:40:54
philosophecker
Yeah, yeah. I think Hemingway had electroshock therapy towards the end, but he had a lot of damage going into it already. So it's it's it's it's I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing.
00:41:04
Conor Gavin
Mm, okay.
00:41:09
philosophecker
or it's It's got this element, you you touched on it there yourself, where and we know that some drugs work and some drugs help people. we that there's been It's been shown that electroshock therapy has helped people in certain ways.
00:41:22
philosophecker
But we don't exactly know the mechanics of how it goes from the biological side of it to the lived experience side of it. And that's kind of, there's a lot of philosophy involved in that. There's a lot of theory of mind involved in that. There's a lot of, ah there's there's still a lot of distance between the biological side and the lived experience side. um Do you feel that?
00:41:50
Conor Gavin
Yeah, there's lots to be said for the person-centered side of interventions. And that's part of sharing the vision, which is the national kind of guidance document for the new wave of mental health treatment and in Ireland. And sharing the vision does outline that person-centered interventions are huge. The medical model is getting there. It's important, but it's not to be ah be all and end all. And the DSM diagnostic manual for Skytree is not perfect. It works.
00:42:20
Conor Gavin
For some cases, in general, it' it's ah it's a decent approach, but it's not perfect. So the person-centered aspect of mental health treatment is huge. So that means that means it's everyone's experience is very important and that treatment plans should really be built or kind of designed in, I suppose, in line with what the person feels is right for them.
00:42:47
Conor Gavin
and what's important to them. And I suppose if you look at certain recovery, I suppose plans or whatever like that, some people might need CBT, some people might need psychotherapy, some people might need employment support. So that functional job, the functional side of things can improve. So maybe someone struggles to find their job and that could be huge for them. And some people might struggle with their thoughts and CBT could be huge for them. So it's different for everyone. and Yeah, its it should be personalized and more more tailored approach, you could say.
00:43:25
philosophecker
Yeah, um moving back to to the art collective. What's been the response or have you had a response from kind of the art community? How does the art community see the art that comes through the psychosis arts collective?
00:43:44
Conor Gavin
Yes, but something we're trying to constantly do is is grow online and grow on social media. The collective mostly operates online, and we have a few in-person events, as you know. um And we we have got some good feedback. like I suppose the quality of the art is brilliant, the quality of the art itself. We have some professional artists on board, so we have, I think think maybe two, three, four professional artists, that that is their full-time job. And they're quite you know, no one in their spaces and their fields that they are very talented. um But I'd love to see more interaction with, I suppose, maybe something like the Galway Arts Festival or different galleries that might show show our work around the country or different exhibition spaces. And for that, yeah, so you're saying people maybe that are really big in the art world, but don't know anything about psychosis or mental health, and how can we bridge that
00:44:44
Conor Gavin
that gap to kind of create a more, I suppose, more reach for our collective and maybe bring it to ah that stage, the next stage is, okay, we're we're good at lived experience, we're good at communicating our experience, but why not make art that can be enjoyed by everyone and really show that we as a collective have something to offer, not just for mental health, not just for people that are interested in psychology, but we want to create something that's really memorable and I suppose that's the aim is creativity and get to share that work.
00:45:17
philosophecker
Yeah, and and would you would you like to see like an art genre of psychosis driven art? Or would you rather see psychosis driven, not psychosis driven art? i I'm probably using the wrong words here. But do you get what I'm saying? Is it going to have its own genre? Is that what you're aiming for? Or would you like it to merge with the rest of it? Because I'll let you answer that question.
00:45:44
Conor Gavin
Yeah, so it depends on the person. I guess every person in the collective approach is a different name. Some people just draw for the sake of creativity. Some people love drawing random paintings or writing in poems about kind of anything. um And that's their way of dealing with with their but their experience.
00:46:06
Conor Gavin
And then some people, like myself, maybe write poetry or tailor their art very specifically to psychosis and for the even the negative symptoms, positive symptoms like that. um It's an interesting point. Does someone might think that to join the collective they have to tailor it towards mental health or they have to tailor it to psychology? That's not really the case. where We accept every every kind of art and every kind of experience. um But yeah, it would be cool. You mentioned genre.
00:46:36
Conor Gavin
The whole thing about that collective is that we're reclaiming the narrative of ah psychosis and stigma and all the things that go along with misconceptions. And to create a genre, that would be, it's a good idea actually.
00:46:49
Conor Gavin
I'm gonna write that down.
00:46:50
philosophecker
heaven and what ah How do you think we're doing at destigmatizing this?
00:46:57
Conor Gavin
um In some ways it's good, in some ways it's not so good. the research shows, and it was actually a research study that I was part of in the University of Norway, we're quite good at, well at least in print media online, in the different news articles that come out, we're we're actually quite good at avoiding very pejorative language or very stigmatising language in the news. But what we're not so good at is including voices of lived experience or including ideas or notions or writing that directly challenge stigma. So
00:47:33
Conor Gavin
For someone to say, psychosis is not um associated with violence and to really spell that out for people, that doesn't happen as often um as you think.
00:47:43
Conor Gavin
So yeah, quite good at avoiding the very, very serious pejorative parts of it or stigmatizing or offensive language, but to directly challenge stigma and fighters is a different thing.
00:47:55
Conor Gavin
And that's what we do. So as Edward reclaimed the narrative and we're trying to improve every day.
00:47:57
philosophecker
and Okay.
00:48:01
Conor Gavin
There is a quite good organisation in Ireland called Headline, um who monitor the media for mental health stigma and that kind of thing. And funny enough, actually, a great journalist from mental health in Ireland goes by the name of Neve Jimenez. And she wrote an article about the art collective last year, and it was actually featured in the Irish Independent. And that article, funny enough, got nominated for an award, the Shine Audience Choice Awards. We all know about Shine. and anti-stigma campaigns and that's now nominated for an award with headlines so really happy to see that that's being taken into account that art has its place and in this stigma fight I guess.
00:48:43
philosophecker
That's great. ah That's great. It's great that it's getting the the attention it deserves, you know, it really is. I think as a society, maybe we've definitely leaned in the past century towards really stigmatizing ah mental health.
00:49:02
philosophecker
um
00:49:05
philosophecker
i I never lived a few hundred years ago, but I always imagined that There was maybe a little bit less stigma throughout history, not always, of course, but you know, there was the people were just accepted for who they were and if they were a bit off or a bit different or a bit had their own way of looking at things that was often seem to be more accepted in history. but There's also plenty of examples of where it wasn't with the witch burning and there the many other things that went that went along with it. But when I mentioned a ah genre for psychosis art, I think we could go down through history and we would already have maybe ah quite a large percentage of art throughout history has been done by people who perhaps suffered from psychosis or some symptoms. ah To name just a few, we had Van Gogh, who of course ended up cutting his hair off, Edvard Munch,
00:50:02
philosophecker
And that fan was painting the scream painting. And that seems to mean a lot to people with mental health. And even looking at it, that if anybody's unfamiliar with it, it's the the mouth open of the figure and seeming to be screaming. um That's impactful. that ah But that seems to say a lot about psychosis. We have Gaia, Francisco Gaia, who's a painter. We have Lewis Wayne, who was a painter. Richard Dadd, a British painter.
00:50:31
philosophecker
ah Antonin Artard, who's a playwright, actor, theorist, philosopher type, Michelangelo, Jackson Pollock, Sylvia Plath, the poet who sadly committed suicide, Frida Kahlo, who painted some self-portraits,
00:50:47
philosophecker
with Sid Barrett of Pink Floyd, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, John Clare, who's also a poet. And there's many artists down through history who seem to have had psychotic episode and had them had them feed their art to a certain extent.
00:51:07
philosophecker
Is there something ah about psychosis, schizophrenia, these type of of mental health phenomena, is there something in that that feeds art in ways that
00:51:22
Conor Gavin
I love that question. I love that question because I've often thought about that myself and I've tried to do research, but it's hard to know. It's hard to know how to measure creativity, if that makes sense.
00:51:35
Conor Gavin
Like you might say someone is a good person who thinks outside the box and you might, you know, a person is very good at art and very talented and everyone's talented in their own way.
00:51:36
philosophecker
Hmm.
00:51:46
Conor Gavin
But how do you measure that on a scientific level or with a psychological measure on your science level? It's hard to do. um And could you say there's a link between mental illness and being a creative person? The answer is I don't know. and I'm not sure does anyone know that. I suppose you could do a large study on it and see, could could you take thousands of people that typical neurotypical and people that have mental illness and see but it's hard to know and I think maybe the teams that are communicated would differ but it's very difficult to see is there is there a causal link or even an association between the two and it's yet to be seen but
00:52:39
Conor Gavin
I suppose there there definitely is a link between art therapy or kind of artistic expression and recovery. So we kind of do know, and I suppose that was spoken about at our at our exhibition launch the last night, that there is merit to use in art and using in creativity for recovery and for mental wellbeing. but Is there a link, the origin of the thing, the actual just being mentally unwell and being creative is their link there um on any kind of level, a genetic level or anything like that. Hard to know. I think it would be interesting to study that actually.
00:53:17
philosophecker
Nietzsche had two concepts around art, um the Apollonian and the Dionysian and the Apollonian would have been the the ordered element of it and the Dionysian then would have been the more chaotic, the more primal element to us. um And when when when both of them met, when you could bring some order to the chaotic, you could make some great art. And I wonder sometimes if there's, if artists, real artists, can spend more time in that Dionysian element, in that primality, in that chaos, and bring some order to it than for us to see. Bring some order to it for the audience.
00:54:04
philosophecker
They can't explain it fully. and even Even poetry doesn't explain fully in words. it's It's almost what poetry doesn't say that hits us. It's what's between the lines, not the actual kind of words themselves. But I do wonder if there's some some link to a primality.
00:54:21
philosophecker
some link to chaos that real artists, that artists can have, that they can bring back to us and and show us normal people, if I can even call myself that that, that can bring it back to us. I watched an interview with Ethan Hawke recently um and he was talking about Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman. He said he was doing a scene with Robin Williams and He said, Robin Williams was being, Robin Williams, his full self, his engaging self, his witty, you know, his ad hoc
Artistic Expression and Emotional Costs
00:54:54
philosophecker
and the latter of it. And he said, it was great. It was fantastic. He said he felt the energy of it. And then they went back to kind of the the canteen where they were all having coffee and he was sitting around with a few of the.
00:55:05
philosophecker
The actor is talking and drinking coffee and he looked over to the corner and he said, Robin Williams is over there fully depleted, drained. And he said, it doesn't come for free.
00:55:18
philosophecker
But the Philip Seymour Hoffman was another guy he said who used to give it everything and it used to really almost must take something from him. um So for for for them kind of artists, it didn't seem to come for free. It almost didn't seem therapeutic. It seemed something else. It seemed like they were given us something that was actually costing them something.
00:55:40
philosophecker
Whereas the arts collective aims for a more fulfilling thing for the artist, a more therapeutic kind of thing for the artist. I wonder, can you speak to that? Is there is there something that people in the and the arts collective are giving us that's costing them something? Or is it all for free?
00:56:05
Conor Gavin
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I suppose it depends kind of maybe to what the reason is you create art. And I might speak my own experience if that's okay, just to kind of highlight the point.
00:56:14
philosophecker
Please.
00:56:17
Conor Gavin
You talked a little bit about the primal side of it, or the the emotional side of it, maybe in the kind of more instinctive traits that we have, or innate traits. For me, and i'm I'm not speaking for everyone.
00:56:29
Conor Gavin
i'm I'm not speaking on behalf of everyone in the collective. It might be different for other people. And I'd love to chat to them about it. and And in my own brain, I think there's something going on and in the old brain. So we have the old brain and the new brain. is Maybe the amygdala is an example of the emotional side of things and the prefrontal cortex is our logical brain. For me, I'll sit down on a blank page on Google Docs or even paper. And I'll just but just vomit words and I'll just talk about my emotions and I'll just, whatever comes out and whatever metaphor I use, it'll just come out. And I tend to write poems quite quickly. It'll be done in maybe half an hour, 20 minutes. But then I'll go back with my this part of my brain and I'll analyze it and I'll work it out and I'll see maybe what words fit best. What can I change a rhyme and scheme or can I change the structure or change a word and a metaphor? And I think that part, that
00:57:30
Conor Gavin
primal part or the emotional part, that will stay pretty much intact. that the The team of the whole will stay intact. But the way I formed it, and you said you talked about putting an order on the disorder or whatever like that, putting order to the more cha chaotic side of it, that's the part that we display to the audience. I suppose that's how we make it palatable. For me anyways, I want to make it so that it makes sense. um But and in a funny way, it actually makes more sense to me as well. So when I was doing a lot of therapy back a couple of years ago, I'd maybe go away and I'd write a poem in the two weeks in between the appointments, and then I'd go back to the appointment and I'd read that poem. And me and the therapist would kind of analyze it together.
00:58:15
Conor Gavin
And a lot of the stuff that comes out is primal, but then when you think about it and you talk about it, it makes a lot of sense. And that's strange because we think we're more aware, we think we're very aware of emotions.
00:58:26
Conor Gavin
Some so people think that they're fine and there's nothing going on beneath the surface and they're stable. And then maybe a couple of years down the line, they realize, oh, well, maybe there was something going on there and that kind of way.
00:58:40
philosophecker
Yeah.
00:58:40
Conor Gavin
And maybe the thoughts that the more logical side of our brains come later and the emotional kind of um aspect of it is is often, you know, the instinctual part. And it can work both ways. But yeah, to come back, I suppose to the collective and as you said, you said, is there a cost to the art? It's a good question. I saw how you do it and
00:59:12
Conor Gavin
the energy that you put into it. And maybe I suppose for some people, if people cater to the audience too much, I think that could be an issue. and I think there is some merit to maybe, I think, is it Rick Rubin, the music, as long as that is his name, but he's a music manager. I think he managed maybe the Chili Peppers and that kind of thing. He kind of believes this idea that you should cater for yourself first or create the art for yourself first. I think if you maybe cater to the audience, you're trying to impress and dazzle.
00:59:41
Conor Gavin
It might be the best way, it might might might lose yourself in that and that process and the art really should kind of come from within and express your own experience.
00:59:53
philosophecker
I think, and it's it's something I struggle with on this podcast, is trying to stay authentic but still kind of um care about what people want to see. Do you know what I mean? And it is it is a struggle and I can't imagine, I imagine that, it's a fine line.
01:00:06
Conor Gavin
It's a fine line.
01:00:09
philosophecker
I imagine that artists struggle with it even more. um But I do, I think there's something to, one I think Nietzsche's onto something with it with the Dionysus. I think there's something to the letting go of the ordered world to be able to put the art down on paper or on video or wherever you're putting it. And that has to come from that, what you call the amygdala, what I'd call the Dionysian element. And then bring an order to it.
01:00:43
philosophecker
Something one of the artists said um at your launch, I forget her name, now it escapes me, but she said there was something in the process part of it. She had been doing prints and there was something about the process of doing prints that she found therapeutic in a sense.
01:01:08
philosophecker
I wonder about the flow experience. I'm sure you're familiar with it. Chick Chick Mile is flow experience. I always pronounce his name wrong. But um there's something about flow experience and process too, I feel that you can kind of allow yourself to get into the flow of a process.
01:01:30
philosophecker
Am I making sense? And is there something therapeutic in that, in finding that flow experience, not just in art, but in life in general? Is there something about the flow experience that it really appeals to me? I the i find the flow experience is actually what I strive to get into every day in whatever I'm doing. If I can find a flow, I feel like that's a day that's lived well.
01:01:56
philosophecker
um So do you find something about the flow experience in art or um as the lady mentioned and and in the and the process element of doing these arts?
01:02:08
Conor Gavin
Yeah, I think as i think you touched on something really, really vital there is that it's kind of like life. It's like a metaphor of for life, creating or that process. So you you have the idea. You have your starting point. you I'm going to make a painting now. I'm going to write a poem. And then you have the poem, the finished product.
01:02:26
Conor Gavin
But it's that piece in between. So I suppose related to something like, and I suppose the person you're talking about is Lisa Callahan was actually a really, really talented artist and she co-founded the collective with myself.
01:02:36
philosophecker
They say. Excellent.
01:02:39
Conor Gavin
And she talked about the process of creating the art. But do you think something like simple, like me starting college and then me graduating, So you see, okay, my first day in college, I went in, I went to the lecture, this is going to be great. And then you have me graduating on the pictures of the family and the hat on and everything like that. But what you didn't see is I actually dropped out for a year and because of my condition. I spent many nights, you know, in turmoil, thinking about the next day or thinking about an exam or
01:03:15
Conor Gavin
i I really, really struggled to start therapy. I changed medication three times, I think. um And that's that's a metaphor for art, I think. And art is a metaphor for that. You might scribble out the poem three times, or you might go back to it a couple of weeks later and finish it or edit it. And it's not always easy. And I suppose there's there's a merit, I think, to the difficult side of things.
01:03:40
Conor Gavin
um processing so maybe when you're creating a poem or a painting or whatever it is that difficult feelings will come up but then you create something beautiful out of that or you get the degree or you get the promotion of the job and I suppose the two so I don't want to be too philosophical for want of a better word or two kind of a pretentious but I think that process that journey that you go on I suppose this is the kind of cliche thing it's not the destination it's the journey there's a lot to be said for that I think
01:04:10
philosophecker
is there Is there parts of this journey that you've been on um that you find more rewarding than other parts of it? is there is there Is there moments where you said that was that was a great moment, that I'm putting that in the bank, you know?
01:04:29
Conor Gavin
Yeah. And like, if we even go back to a week ago, that launch was brilliant. I think it was 40 people at the launch for the collective exhibition. Everyone came up, patted me on the back and everything, but they're, they're not often the best, they're not often the best measures of how we're doing, you know, a great, a great measure for me and a great reward and part of my life could be waking up in the morning and going out for a coffee with a friend.
01:04:57
Conor Gavin
or waking up in morning on a Monday day and thinking, that okay, my my job is fulfilling and I'm going to enjoy my my job for the next week. I'm really interested, interesting actually, a psychologist said to me another work event was similar to the launch. We launched a novel service, which is which is our service, the Discovery College, which is was founded by Chloe Costolo, my supervisor, the first of its kind that did recovery education workshops for young people.
01:05:25
Conor Gavin
But anyways, and the the the psychologist said to me on the day, he said, not all days are going to be like this, you know, there's going to be a grind. And I think if you can find small moments of joy in the grind and in everyday life, because not every day is ah is a picnic, and not every day is a launch or a big event and a collapse on the back. even Even a therapist said to me before, he said, if you can just enjoy doing the dishes,
Finding Joy in Everyday Life
01:05:55
Conor Gavin
You know, it sounds silly, but like, if you look out, like the fact that you have hot water, you can have a hot shower in the morning.
01:05:56
philosophecker
Yeah.
01:06:02
Conor Gavin
I think, as Jimmy Carr said, a lot of people said, be thankful that you can have a hot shower in the morning. You know, they're, they're often the moments that we forget about and we lose ourselves in career and everything like that.
01:06:15
Conor Gavin
But find joy in the simple things can be just as good.
01:06:19
philosophecker
and gratitude. If you look around and just find reasons to be grateful. And I've listened to that Jimmy Kirk moment as well. Yeah, he's very good. He talked about we're the first people in the history to have hot showers. Like 50 years ago, people didn't really have hot showers. Here we are going in there crying in our lovely hot shower.
01:06:43
philosophecker
without What's next for you? What's next for the ads collective? What's the next? Where are we going with this?
Goals for PAC and Inclusivity
01:06:50
Conor Gavin
Yeah, so the next for the art collective at least what's next for me is is ah is a bigger question, but the art collective I said it last year and I'll say it again this year. I want to make the collective a collective I wanted to be for everyone so In mental health, there's a word called co-production or co-creation. It's where everyone has a say. So everyone's on the same level, psychiatrists, doctors, politicians, everyone, psychologists, everyone comes together and people who lived experience are on the same level playing field. And everyone creates a service or creates a research study or creates an art collective together. And that's what I want to see. I want people to come on the Zoom calls.
01:07:31
Conor Gavin
to speak up and make their voice heard that, okay, we should do this or we should do that. And then eventually create art that is co-produced as well. So maybe a publication or the next exhibition that everyone comes together. Cause I find sometimes I ah might be a bit of a ah director or which I am, I suppose the director of the collective, but maybe a bit of a dictator. I suppose I could find myself making all the decisions, but that really shouldn't be the way. It's essential to start something like that. I think,
01:08:01
Conor Gavin
from the start, ideally you can have co-production, co-productions with everyone involved, but to kind of get the jumpstart or kind of get the collective going, people need to make decisions quickly and that that thankfully was me and I made the right decisions and grew it and expanded, but now I think it's time for the collective aspect and make everyone feel that they have something to contribute and make people realize that their their input is important and have, I suppose,
01:08:29
Conor Gavin
on a kind of legal level or a kind of practical level, making a CLG or a company company limited, but guarantee could be an option, and just so we can get funding and and that kind of thing and increase their status legally so that we can make donations or take donations and and get government public funding and expand. But yeah, on a more philosophical level or a more kind of deeper level, I want it to be for everyone and make it collective.
01:08:55
philosophecker
And is it is it countrywide now? Are you involved with other universities, other educational institutions, ah mental health institutions around the country to kind of get everybody involved?
01:09:11
Conor Gavin
That's the plan. Yeah, we have some contacts in different universities. I won't name them all. So obviously the university go, we have strong ties to trying to work with RCSI as well. We have international ties. We have ties to the UK. So we have some people involved in the collective that maybe try to start something going on over there with local institutions. there aren lot There's a lot of interest, but I always find in the kind of PPI work or public patient involvement work. And it meant health in general. You email someone and someone will text you on LinkedIn and say, you know, we should connect and we should do this. And then it takes weeks. It takes months to to see that happen. like You often see, oh, I'll connect with you and we'll do something on this or we'll collaborate. um But it could take time and it's a slow process. But I did i was happy to see that maybe some of the services, maybe some of the mental health services, inpatient, outpatient,
01:10:09
Conor Gavin
Units in Galway might help us integrate into their services and um then obviously next year we're applying for a grant that we have applied for a grant.
01:10:23
Conor Gavin
to communicate and research themes to art. So the University of Galway have kindly, I suppose, agreed to partner with us on the assumption that we get funding to do a series of researcher-artist collaborations and then communicate themes through that way.
01:10:44
philosophecker
OK, that sounds really interesting, actually. I'd be interested to see that. Do you know Cormac Culkin? He has a creative writing magazine in Galway called Rigor.
01:10:55
philosophecker
He's a poet.
01:10:56
Conor Gavin
I think I've heard the name, but maybe you could explain a bit more.
01:10:59
philosophecker
Yeah I'd have to try and get you in touch because ah you could probably have get some of the poetry work into that from the collective and it might be good. um And so what's next for you personally? I see your jobs there are very involved in mental health that seems to be what holds your interest and where your career is headed so how do you hope to grow that?
01:11:21
Conor Gavin
yeah So I suppose the main main goal for now is to stick with the Discovery College West service based out of Wisconsin, and that's funded by the HSE, which is a really, really novel initiative. It's great to see us even yesterday or the day before Friday, going into schools, working with young people, early prevention, early intervention, teaching people and working with people and facilitating conversations. Our own mental health for the people that are a bit younger than ourselves, but
01:11:52
Conor Gavin
definitely not short of experience. I mean, their experience is just as valid as ours and we can learn a lot from them and they can learn a lot from us. It's really powerful that job because the co-production aspect of it, every workshop that we facilitate and deliver to people is co-produced. So you have a LGBT plus workshop coming up and we worked with a couple of people that They have experience of LGBT+, and they you helped us put together the slides and the workshop and the content and the session plans.
01:12:26
Conor Gavin
And that's that's huge. That's a big step for Mental Health in Ireland. I'm so glad to be a part of that. The second part of that job,
01:12:32
philosophecker
So use I use another, it's co-produced by the users, by the service users.
01:12:36
Conor Gavin
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
01:12:37
philosophecker
Oh, great, great.
01:12:39
Conor Gavin
Co-created and everything, yeah, put together. I suppose the second part of that job is I'm leading actually out on a research project which measures efficacy or the impacts of that work.
01:12:50
Conor Gavin
So when we deliver workshops in schools or in the community, in the library, for example, like that. We want to see what effect that has. So how do people improve after a workshop? How do people improve after two or three workshops? And to measure that scientifically, we're actually going to have to come up with our own measurement tool, which for recovery education is a huge step forward. So um to have a tool or some sort of scale that measures recovery education,
01:13:21
Conor Gavin
It doesn't exist. um So I'm happy to be leading out on that project as the principal investigator. And we're just applying for ethics at the moment to get it all above board and really excited to see where that goes. Secondly, obviously you mentioned the collective so grow that out. And then number three, I think for me, I do want to get into things like this podcast and content creation, I suppose, social media, maybe have a bit more of a voice on all things lived experience, all things psychosis and all things mental health. And one thing I'd love to fight for and one thing I'd love to see and I suppose expanded is PPI quality. So it's a thing I really believe in. So PPI stands for public patient involvement, as I mentioned. So this is the co-production piece. This is where patients, service users, participants in studies get to have a say in how things are done. But
01:14:17
Conor Gavin
in across the world, and even I was talking to colleagues in Australia on the MOST trial, um the moderate and online social therapy date, they also see a bit of a gap there, a bit of a disconnect where people are doing great work, both sides of the coin. So researchers are doing amazing work, service providers are doing amazing work in early intervention, that kind of thing.
01:14:40
Conor Gavin
and PPI contributors. So the people, the service users are doing unbelievable work. But there is a bit of a gap in pay, representation, renumeration, all these kinds of things where maybe the lived experience part of it is is maybe underrepresented. So their voices there could be heard more and they could also be compensated a bit more. And me included in that for for the work they do. It's improving. It's better than it was five, 10 years ago.
01:15:07
Conor Gavin
That was a lot of work to be done in that PPI quality piece.
01:15:12
philosophecker
Yeah, that's, that's all very good. And I imagine it's very rewarding on a personal level actually spending your time, your energy, your attention, your life, helping others who were struggling. and I think that's, that's very reward.
01:15:28
philosophecker
um
01:15:31
philosophecker
You mentioned something about being able to measure things scientifically, and then you have the lived experience aspect of it. um I think there's a lot happening in psychology that that's good around trying to make scientific measurements of lived experience through listening to people and getting them to kind of fill out forms and stuff like that, but I wonder,
01:16:01
philosophecker
How accurately are we ever going to be able to call lived experience scientifically measured? Do you get what I'm saying?
01:16:11
Conor Gavin
It's a brilliant question and it's so subjective in some ways. As I said, it's really important in the services and in the research that we acknowledge everyone's experience as being unique and personalised to them. But that creates a challenge in research itself that how do we measure that? How do we put numbers and how do we statistically prove that kind of thing? there're Just to say, I suppose in science and in psychology in general, there's no perfect measure.
01:16:42
Conor Gavin
There's no perfect test. You can unbelievably, but beyond doubt, say that that's that's a true statement. like Even things that, especially that have very good inter-rater reliability. So between subjects or participants that get consistent results. There's there's a lot of self-report measures. There's a lot of retrospective measures. So something I worked on was childhood trauma questionnaire, which is the CTQ. Brilliant measure for childhood trauma, but it's retrospectively. You're talking about stuff.
01:17:11
Conor Gavin
happened a couple of years ago. But yeah, I know to see how far we can go with that. And I think I hate to be bringing up co-production again, but working with the people at that level, that lived experience level is huge. So what we're doing for the research study now that is trying to measure that subjective experience is we're going to straight away, before we even start the study, we're going to bring an advisory panel on. And actually, funny enough,
01:17:38
Conor Gavin
What's important is the first stage of our study is called action research and it's called participate reaction research, which basically means that the people that we're going to be measuring are the people that are involved in the workshops that we want to try capture their experience. Well, there are people that are going to have a say in the very early stages of the research. So they're actually going to help design the measure that we're going to use. I think that's a huge part of it. I think that's so important going forward that That's done from the very start. And I think that will help. As I said, there's no perfect measure in psychology and it's a constant struggle, but we're getting there. I think we'll get as close to the truth as we possibly can.
01:18:22
philosophecker
and I like the way you said that, we'll get as close to the truth as we possibly can, and you're getting there. um But yeah, I still like to accuse psychology of having white coat envy, you know, of thinking thinking it's a pure science at least, but but that's the aim, isn't it? try and Trying to bring some order to the chaos is what... the this part of psychology is trying to do so that it can be communicated to us. um I really love the co-productive element of it because that's taken the dictatorship, are the the the ivory towerness away from um the person who's who's conducting the research and the person who's ah bringing together all these people. And the co-productive part is like, we're we're in this together. This is not me telling you what you're going through.
01:19:11
philosophecker
you know it's it's It's something more. It's let us try and figure out what's happening here. And I love the we i love the we element of it and the us element of it. I think that's very important and it's very important for people to understand who are worried, like I have been myself at times, that that psychology leans into the kind of command position when it comes to people's experiences and and it definitely certainly has in the past um ah kind of told us what is happening rather than helping us understand. But I like the path that you're taking and it seems to be dealing with that rather well.
01:19:56
philosophecker
You mentioned earlier that some people see um words like psychosis, psychotic, schizophrenia and they see it come up in the news and they see it related to violent crimes and such.
Media Bias and Psychosis
01:20:09
philosophecker
um I think there's a bit of a selection bias there going on of course like you know what I mean because you don't hear of all the ones that have zero got to do with anything like that but I've noticed that there is more psychologists coming into court cases in Ireland now. I'm thinking of the guard that was killed of the country by a chap who was suffering from schizophrenia and there's other cases and it's often
01:20:36
philosophecker
But the defense and the prosecution have their own psychologists who come in and have differing views on a um the effect that the that the illness or the sickness or the condition had on the actions of the person. um Can you speak to that? how do you think How do you think our views are changing around schizophrenia and people who commit criminal acts or people who do things wrong? How do you what's your sense about their free will in these moments? um Could you speak a bit to that?
01:21:15
Conor Gavin
Yeah, so I suppose it is possible that something tragic, and that is a tragic case, that that could happen. But as far as we know in the literature, there is no whole link between having schizophrenia and being a violent person.
01:21:27
Conor Gavin
On on ah and a big scale, you know, the individual cases sure can happen, but overall there there seems to be no no association.
01:21:28
philosophecker
Yeah.
01:21:36
Conor Gavin
But what's interesting is, I suppose the way we kind of flip that around is that as a person with schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia or psychosis, we're actually more likely to be victims of violence than we are to be violent ourselves.
01:21:49
Conor Gavin
but That's a really interesting stuff. I don't know the exact citation, but that actually seems to be the case.
01:21:54
philosophecker
ah Could you repeat that please? could you repeat that just Could you repeat that for the listeners?
01:21:57
Conor Gavin
Sorry.
01:21:58
philosophecker
I think that's a super important thing.
01:22:01
Conor Gavin
Yes, as far as the research we know of, that I think we're supposed to be victims of, or we're actually more likely to be victims of violence than and to be violent ourselves, um just because of the nature of the disorder.
01:22:15
Conor Gavin
and maybe the situations that people find themselves in. But I don't know the exact explanation for that. I mean, I haven't read the papers or the literature on that. Maybe I should. But yeah, I know that there doesn't the definitely that violence piece does come from the media, and especially not even print media or news or that kind of mainstream media, but things like movies or books that try to, I suppose they're not directly promoting the violent aspect.
01:22:42
Conor Gavin
But there's that sensationalist kind of thing where if I can create a character who is is has psychotic features and it's very entertaining, like perhaps the Joker or something like that, the recent movie that came out, that that could be entertaining and that could shock people. But is there any truth in that? I don't i don't think so. I don't think there's any link. And that is strange for people to kind of, I suppose, take it into account.
01:23:11
Conor Gavin
It's funny, we did a workshop in school recently in in a school in Roscommon. And there was a quiz question. It was like a mental health literacy question. um What are features of schizophrenia? And one of them was like split personality disorder, common misconception, delusions or violence. And I was so, so inspired by the young generation and they all pretty much 90% of them said delusions. I was like,
01:23:36
Conor Gavin
How do they know this? i So that just shows that the the stigma is improving or that the stigma reduction obviously is working. And even the youngest people in society kind of are starting to realize that so things things are improving.
01:23:50
Conor Gavin
It's not true. But um yeah, that's my answer.
01:23:53
philosophecker
How did...
01:23:53
Conor Gavin
that Yeah, there's there's no association.
01:23:56
philosophecker
grace grace grace Chris, Chris, Chris. I think it's an important, an important thing to get out there because we do live in a media environment of if it bleeds, it leads. And then we try to add on all the trigger words to make it lead even more, you know, and a lot of the trigger words are associated with some of these conditions.
01:24:18
philosophecker
How How impactful is the sense of community? When I was in that room the last night, I imagined a lot of these people um were contributors, which meant a lot of these people might have had um psychotic episodes or been through some of that stuff.
01:24:34
philosophecker
And I looked around the room and now I ah i often get this feeling, but I thought, oh they all seem like a lot saner than me, a lot better than me. So do you know what I mean?
01:24:44
philosophecker
i like Is there something about a sense of community in these people that they know that we've all suffered something similar here, rather than the loneliness that one might get in the episode?
01:24:54
Conor Gavin
Yeah, well,
01:24:58
Conor Gavin
yeah, there's isolation there. There's the initial piece where even as a person who has experienced an episode myself, I had never heard of psychosis when I was 15. When I came out of the experience, I just wanted to forget about it. I didn't know whether people really went through this. I didn't know what the rates were, how how common it was. I didn't really understand that. And that can be very, very isolating for someone, a young person or anyone, anyone that experiences psychosis.
01:25:24
Conor Gavin
And what i what I tried to do as a peer support worker, um interesting that you mentioned the peer and the connection and the community that obviously I have a master's in clinical neuroscience, but I ah tend to not talk about neuroscience on a peer support call. You know, it's not not the most important thing I could, but I don't do it. And we're taught that we're not experts by training in peer support, we're experts by experience. So when i when someone tells me, oh, I i have psychosis. I've had psychosis in the past. The first thing I don't say is, Oh, did you know that genetics plays a big role? I just say, yeah, I know how you feel. I say, I've been through that. I say, how did you find therapy? They might tell me how, or ask me, how did you find therapy? And that's the peer connection. That's peer support. And that's huge.
01:26:13
Conor Gavin
And that's not just for psychosis, there's peer support workers for depression, anxiety, anything really, eating disorders. And if you look at the research coming out now, it's in early days of the most trials, especially in Australia, peer support seems to be really important. And we, as you said, community, um funny enough, there's there's a section on our website, so The most trial is carried out online. It's a digital event trial information, so it's online. There's actually a section called community. So there's a part where it's like a Facebook wall or whatever like that, where it's a private forum for people that have lived experience, and they can chat to each other. And that's that's really important as well.
Engagement and Peer Support
01:27:00
Conor Gavin
How to drive engagement on a platform like that, especially if people maybe have features of social anxiety that they might want to put themselves out there,
01:27:09
Conor Gavin
But when you see that engagement, when someone puts up a post and says, I'm feeling a bit down to today, and you'll see the comments come in, they'll say, same here, I know how you feel. And then we do Zoom calls, which are brilliant. They bring everyone on the platform together. So we can have five, six people that lived experience and mentored, and then one or two facilitators and peer support workers, and to see that connection. And funny enough,
01:27:33
Conor Gavin
Something that I learned from that peer support experience was to facilitate them Zoom calls in the collective as well. So I think I mentioned that earlier that we have a couple of people with quite serious psychosis experience on them calls and the feedback we've gotten directly or indirectly from people. Maybe they won't say it explicitly that jo they don't know. They don't say, oh, the peer connection is really important. But they'll say, geez, it was so nice to talk about that with someone that has the same experience. They might not always have the language to say, you know, lived the lived experience movement or sharing the vision or all these policy documents. They just want to talk to someone. And that's the most basic human kind of emotion, I suppose, is that connection to other people. And
01:28:21
Conor Gavin
It's rewarding for me as a facilitator, but it's also, I learn a lot from it ah as a human and as a person who lived the experience myself, it works both ways.
01:28:29
philosophecker
Yeah, absolutely. and And the other side of that I guess is ah would isolation tend to trigger episodes in some people?
01:28:39
Conor Gavin
and Possibly it's a contributing factor, I would say, yeah, social isolation, social ah functioning or social recovery, I suppose is a huge aspect of it,
01:28:44
philosophecker
Yeah.
01:28:50
Conor Gavin
So there's a bunch of types of, a bunch of aspects of recovery. Some of it is functional. So you have your employment support. You have existential recovery, which is like, you know I suppose, where do you see yourself in the world? Your kind of self-esteem. There's a clinical recovery. So your measures on different scales of of clinical symptoms.
01:29:14
Conor Gavin
And then, yeah, social recovery is a huge part, so reintegrating with society. So if that's important afterwards, then you can imagine how important it is before an episode as well. That definitely could be a factor.
01:29:27
philosophecker
um Do you have any advice for people who may suspect their suffering from psychosis, who may have family members they suspect, who maybe who may be just worried that it's something that's going to come up? um Do you have any advice or or places people can go to find further information or help?
01:29:46
Conor Gavin
Yeah, so I suppose the the gold standard kind of treatments or help-seeking information would be things like the HSE, your GP, can't recommend that enough. The GP is supposed to depend on what age, where you know it could be calms, it could be the EIP, which is the early intervention psychosis services in the country. They're quite good. The waiting lists and that kind of stuff can often be an issue.
01:30:13
Conor Gavin
purely funding issues and resources. I think it's my experience, at least with the HSC and the services, is that once you get in, it's it's good. You tend to you know you get looked after. At least that's my experience. Not everyone's experience that the care is perfect.
01:30:31
Conor Gavin
but I think early intervention for sure is the biggest thing. I think it came up in in the in the discussion at the launch, the last night that the early you intervene in psychosis, so you catch it early, nip it in the bud, that improves your long-term outcomes. So like, okay, you could intervene late and you could still have a great outcome clinically, everything socially, but in general over what we know from the data is that If you intervene early and go to your GP and seek information very quickly, your risk of relapse goes down, you' every outcome basically improves, ah most of them anyways.
01:31:13
Conor Gavin
And a big part of that, and i and I hate to be coming back to stigma and everything like that again, because we've talked about it at length,
Reducing Stigma and Early Interventions
01:31:20
philosophecker
It's important
01:31:21
Conor Gavin
stigma reduction and
01:31:23
Conor Gavin
I suppose, understanding and challenging misconceptions has a big effect on help-seeking and for people to seek help in the early days of it. If they know a bit more about it in terms of the literacy side of it, like how what is psychosis, and if they also have that rejection and self stigma. So there's public stigma and there's self stigma, how you feel about yourself and your own condition. Reducing all these things and increasing information, that they can help the intervention and the area intervention side with an untold amount.
01:31:55
philosophecker
Okay, that's great. um
Emotional Epiphanies
01:32:00
philosophecker
Okay, I have two questions that I've begun to ask all my guests now and then you can read us out with another poem. um Have you had an epiphany that you can tell us about that has made you see the world differently that you can't go back from? That it's like, okay, now I now i know this or I've had this realization, I can never go back.
01:32:24
Conor Gavin
that's That's a brilliant question. I suppose it's slightly putting me on the the spot, I guess. and
01:32:33
philosophecker
That's what it's designed to do. it like
01:32:35
Conor Gavin
yeah so It's a brilliant question. I feel feel slightly under pressure now. but um And if you want to talk about psychosis, I suppose that kind of thing, like that's fine. But it's it's not even that it's it's not even that. I think it's Because when I was younger, I think science and was, I suppose science, studying career was such an important piece to me that when I was in college. I was studying here and I was trying to get my degree. I was trying to go on to pharmaceuticals or genetics or whatever it was, maybe possibly doing a PhD. But true therapy, I think I realized, and this was the epiphany that you have the intellectual side of your brain and you have that
01:33:18
Conor Gavin
prefrontal cortex that analyzes everything. But true therapy, I realized, and I had this very simple realization was that you might understand something and you might understand your feelings.
01:33:32
Conor Gavin
So as a neuroscientist, I know what maybe what sadness is or what happiness is on a chemical level, but you have to feel it as well. So you have to be able to feel it. So I might go throughout my day and I might say, okay, I know what sadness is.
01:33:46
Conor Gavin
I know what pain is, I know what all these emotions are. I think it's important to sometimes experience them firsthand and be aware of your emotions. That's an epiphany in a itself because, okay, everything has its place, medication, CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, understanding your thoughts, your behaviors, your emotions.
01:34:06
Conor Gavin
But I think there is merit in being aware of your emotions. So maybe it's a bit confusing, maybe I'm not explaining it in the right way.
01:34:14
philosophecker
not no not Not to me at all. um the The intellectual knowing there and the knowing as a neuroscientist to me sounds like you know um the biological features that correlate with the experience of sadness. But knowing the experience of sadness or happiness, it's ah it's it's a different thing. No, that that's great. that Thanks for that.
01:34:41
philosophecker
And the second of these questions that I hope to ask everybody who comes on here is, if we were writing a new story about what it is to be human in this world, because as throughout history, this has changed. And we've got so much knowledge now about the world. So if we're writing a blank page, let's, let's start again. Let's write with what we know now, what it is to be human in relation to each other, in relation to the rest of nature, in relation to future generations, past generations.
Challenging Traditional Ways
01:35:12
philosophecker
And you were asked for one sentence to put into this story. What would that sentence be?
01:35:20
Conor Gavin
It's a good question actually. So you I'll just give a bit of a preamble, but human civilization changes a lot. It changes slowly in some ways and changes quickly in others. One thing I would say as ah as a kind of person who hopes to make change and positive impact on society, and that's something one of my values, is maybe, and if you want one sentence I'm guessing,
01:35:45
philosophecker
One sentence.
01:35:46
Conor Gavin
It's kind of a sentence that's been used before, but I'd say just because that's the way things have always been done doesn't mean that's the way it has to be always done or done in the future.
01:35:56
philosophecker
Love it.
01:35:56
Conor Gavin
Does that make sense?
01:35:57
philosophecker
That ah absolutely makes sense to me. It's great. yeah I think it's a great sentence to to throw into the next story. OK, Connor, thanks for coming on here. It's been an absolute pleasure. I think what you're doing is wonderful.
01:36:09
philosophecker
And I think you're a wonderful young man yourself. um watching you speak the last day at the launch. I thought you held the stage so well. I think you're a great champion for for what you've chosen to do.
01:36:23
philosophecker
And thanks very much. And good luck to everybody in the Psychosis Arts Collective. ah So with that, is there anything else you'd like to say?
01:36:34
philosophecker
Any other advice you'd like to give that I'm missing?
01:36:38
Conor Gavin
no no Thanks very much for having me, Dahien.
01:36:39
philosophecker
No?
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:36:41
Conor Gavin
Thanks for your kind words and for your bringing me on in the first place and promoting positive change. No, that's pretty much it. And I suppose as we kind of discussed beforehand, we might end or start and end with a poem. and So I'll choose my next one now and I'll i'll whip it out here.
01:36:57
philosophecker
Okay, okay um okay, thanks folks. um Please like, share and subscribe and that that's for my benefit. But please, if you know anybody that might that might benefit from listening to to Connor's wisdom here, please please don't be afraid to share it. And let's try and take the stigma down of mental health issues. It's important. And with that, we'll give you Connor with his final poem.
01:37:24
Conor Gavin
Thanks very much. So, the next one is called Good Art, so I'll start now. Good art. It should shake you up like a violent storm, open up old memories like stented arteries full of culturally normed plaque you'll see. From the moment of birth you were told to color within the lines, fit everyone's perception and realign. You dreamed of more and never settled.
01:37:50
Conor Gavin
So today you paint and write, you fight, turn against society's tide and find the light. You create something that wouldn't exist, only for you had your demons slain, using nothing but your mind, your brain. It is a sacrifice so noble and true to stroke a brush against the walls of the plausible, to work on the imagined chisel at the impossible. We graft and cater for those in the crowd, for those who choose to talk instead.
01:38:19
Conor Gavin
and critique our works for which we've bled. But we listen, we know, that art is for the brave.
01:38:28
philosophecker
Brilliant.