Welcome to Lewes Skeptics in the Pub

Mark Stevenson has been to the future a few years ahead of the rest of us – and came back believing we still have everything to play for. His voyage of discovery took him to Boston to visit a robot with mood swings, to an underwater cabinet meeting in the Indian Ocean, and Australia to question the Outback’s smartest farmer, had his genome profiled, and glimpsed the next stage of human evolution … then he tried to make sense of what’s in store.

The result was An Optimist’s Tour of the Future, which is finding fans from schoolchildren through to Nobel Peace Prize winners. Mark will talk of the future of humanity and how technology will help remedy some of these problems.

Mark combines two careers – one as a successful writer and comedian and as co-founder and director of the cultural learning agency Flow Associates and the science communication agency ReAgency, Roving Learner at The Age of Smart, a fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and Nibmaster General for the Ministry of Stories.

http://anoptimiststourofthefuture.com/

Joanna Moncrieff challenges the view that drugs like ‘antidepressants’ and ‘antipsychotics’ remedy mental disorders in the same way that medical drugs treat asthma or diabetes. She argues that psychiatric drugs cause rather than cure chemical imbalances, and change the way we normally think and feel. Some of these drugs may be useful for suppressing emotional turmoil and disturbed behaviour, but at a cost of dampening down normal emotional and intellectual functions and causing physical complications. Her presentation aims to provide information that is not usually revealed about the physical and mental alterations produced by the different sorts of drugs prescribed for mental disorders, so people can judge for themselves whether particular drugs might be useful, and whether they might do more good than harm.

Joanna Moncrieff is a psychiatrist and Senior Clinical Lecturer at the Mental Health Sciences Unit at University College London. She is an internationally recognised leader in the field of research into psychiatric drug treatment. Her research interests include evidence for the effectiveness of such drugs, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry and the political aspects of drug treatment. She has published a number of articles and appeared widely in the media. She has published two books: A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs and The Myth of the Chemical Cure.