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Siblings with Mental Health Problems - Grief - Predicting the Future

Where can siblings of people with mental health problems go for information and support? Are stages of grief a myth? Plus, why expert forecasters are often spectacularly wrong.

Siblings with mental health problems - while parents often care for young people with mental health problems it can also raise issues for their siblings. They might have fears for their own mental health or worry about the change in their relationship to their brother or sister. How easy is it to share worries about your own mental health if you feel it's minor in comparison to your brother or sister? And what of the future and the responsibilities you may one day inherit from your parents. The mental health charity, Rethink has launched a new website where siblings can not only get information, but can also share experiences with one another. Lorraine and Olivia share their experiences with Claudia.

Is there a way we all grieve? The five stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance were proposed more than forty years ago by the psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and are now taught across the world, But with little evidence that these stages are what people really experience when they are bereaved - how did they become so popular and what research has been done into the process of grief.

Predicting the future - why expert forecasters aren't very good at it but we believe them anyway. Why did so many economists not foresee the financial crisis in 2008? But are experts in their field actually better at predicting future events? Psychologists have found experts are often as accurate as chance yet we consistently ask them to predict the future. Claudia is joined by author Dan Gardner and by psychologist Dylan Evans to discuss the reasons why expert predictions fail but why we are still attracted to those who predict confidently even if they end up being spectacularly wrong. Could it all be down to a human aversion to uncertainty?

Available now

30 minutes

Last on

Wed 15 Jun 2011 16:30

Broadcasts

  • Tue 14 Jun 2011 21:00
  • Wed 15 Jun 2011 16:30

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