Rab Houston was born in Hamilton, Scotland, lived in India and Ghana and was educated at the Edinburgh Academy and St Andrews University before spending six years at Cambridge University as a research student (Peterhouse) and research fellow (Clare College). He has worked at the University of St Andrews since 1983 and is Professor of Modern History, specialising in British social history. He is a fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland’s natio ...
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In this podcast, Professor Houston talks about the psychological impact on those affected by the Aberfan disaster of 1966. The podcast expands on an interview Prof Houston gave to BBC Wales as part of a series of podcasts recently produced about the disaster. It is strongly advised that you listen to podcast 7 of the BBC series prior to listening t…
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Devolved psychiatries - Professor Rab Houston
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Devolved psychiatries - Professor Rab Houston by Professor Rab HoustonAv Professor Rab Houston
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Professor John Crichton
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Prof John Crichton - Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist and Chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Scotland.What is a forensic psychiatrist? Far from the media stereotypes forensic psychiatrists are not so different to other doctors but working at the most extremes of human experience. Any one of us may have a mental health problem. Very rare…
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Prisoners or Patients? Criminal Insanity in Victorian Scotland
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This is a 50 minute audio file of a talk I delivered at the National Records of Scotland on 7 August 2019, in connection with my hugely successful exhibition that they kindly hosted: ‘Prisoners or Patients? Criminal Insanity in Victorian Scotland’. It explains the records I used and the development of the criminal justice system’s attempts to deal …
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Professor Rory O'Connor
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Professor Rory O’Connor, Suicidal Behaviour Research Laboratory, University of GlasgowSuicide and self-harm are major public health concerns with complex aetiologies which encompass a multifaceted array of risk and protective factors. There is growing recognition that we need to move beyond psychiatric categories to further our understanding of the…
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Chris Williams
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In this podcast Professor Chris Williams, a researcher and teacher in the area of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) introduces CBT as a self-help form of therapy. It gives people the tools help themselves. Although correctly described as a form of psychotherapy, another way of conceptualising CBT is as a form of adult learning. That perspective c…
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Michael Brown
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Chief Inspector Michael Brown: ‘Police, policing, and mental health in the UK’.Police services all over the world are essential as a de facto mental health service, especially around crisis care. All have struggled with untoward incidents involving the use of force, or deaths following police contact, which have framed – perhaps distorted - discuss…
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Dr Fionnuala Williams
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People with learning disability were understood and treated very differently in the past from the present. While attempts were always made to help them, this was against a background of pessimism about their prospects. Much progress has been made in the past half century in positive attitudes towards this group, with closures of the large instituti…
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Dr Ruth Allen
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Social workers and care in the communitySocial workers have a crucial part to play in improving mental health services and mental health outcomes for citizens. They bring a distinctive social and rights-based perspective to their work. Their advanced relationship-based skills, and their focus on personalisation and recovery, can support people to m…
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Prof. Chris Frith
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In the podcast I talk about my research on the biological basis of schizophrenia using brain imaging and my attempts to understand symptoms such as hallucinations in terms of brain based cognitive processes. I describe what schizophrenia is like from the point of view of clinicians and from the point of view of patients. I suggest that the experien…
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Prof. Uta Frith
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Autism is a neuro-developmental disorder with a prevalence of about one in 100 births. Although we assume that this disorder has always been with us, and Rab Houston and I identified a case from the 18th century, it was not given a label until the 1940s. Hans Asperger, a Viennese pediatrician, and Leo Kanner, an American child psychiatrist, both us…
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Prof Douglas Blackwood
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Symptoms of schizophrenia develop in more than 1:200 people, in all cultures, while 2- 4% of the population may experience major depression at some time in their life. Mild and moderate depression are, of course, much more common. Sometimes illnesses run in families and show higher concordance among identical compared to non-identical twins suggest…
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Prof Nancy A. Pachana
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People in both the developed and the developing world are living longer, and in better health, than in any prior point in history. However, mental health professionals, especially psychologists, need to prepare for this upcoming increase in older persons – whom they will encounter in all areas of practice. There is an urgent need for practitioners …
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Dr Calum Munro
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Eating Disorders are understandable as a way of coping with uncomfortable feelings. A temporary sense of reward or emotional detachment can occur due to maladaptive eating. The disorders are driven by fears about being unacceptable. Beliefs about people with eating disorders being selfish or overly concerned about beauty, still seem to arise. In re…
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Prof. Danny Smith
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Bipolar disorder is a complex psychiatric disorder of mood and behaviour that has been recognised for thousands of years. It probably affects about 1 in 50 individuals worldwide and is characterised by episodes of depression alternating with episodes of mania. In this podcast we discuss the presentation, diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder.…
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Prof. Alex Baldacchino
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In this podcast, Professor Rab Houston speaks to Alexander Baldacchino, Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Addictions, University of St Andrews and Clinical Lead and Consultant in Addiction Psychiatry with NHS Fife. This podcast will hopefully provide the right incentive for listeners to understand better the finer details pertinent to the topic…
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Mental Health Nursing, Gerry Hastie
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Gerry Hastie trained between 1993-96, when nurse training programmes were changing from being delivered by the Local Health Authority to Higher Education. He has always been a mental health nurse and has worked in care home settings, long term in-patient care settings, acute admissions, addictions and the community.In this podcast he illustrates hi…
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Understanding Mental Health: conditions, caring, and contexts - Dr Miles Mack RCGP
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In the first podcast of our new series, Professor Rab Houston is in conversation with Dr Miles Mack, Past chair of RCGP Scotland and a GP partner in Dingwall, Scotland. General Practice is the backbone of the British NHS and GPs provide a vital role in providing medical health care to patients registered to their practices. They provide continuity …
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Colonial Psychiatry 4 - How and why? Practising psychiatry in colonial Africa
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I argued in the last podcast that medical theories in colonial Africa had a strong racial element to them, which buttressed colonialism. In this final podcast of my mini-series I’m going to explore how these ideas related to the actual practice of psychiatry in colonial Africa. I broaden my perspective to include not only Malawi, but also Natal and…
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Colonial Psychiatry 3 - How and why?: Ethno-psychiatry and racism
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If you have listened to my series of podcasts on the history of psychiatry in Britain and Ireland you will know that psychiatric relationships are at least partly about power and about the assumptions medical practitioners made concerning those they treated. In the old world, class and sex were important differentiators. In a colonial setting there…
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Colonial Psychiatry 2 - Colonial psychiatry over time and space
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At the end of the last podcast I explained what was special about colonial psychiatry from the 1880s to the 1960s, compared with mental medicine in the United Kingdom. 1) Continuing medical pluralism2) Limited institutionalization of patients and professionalization of services3) Persistently low resources4) Attempts to introduce European-style pra…
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Colonial Psychiatry 1 - What and where?: colonial psychiatry’s origins and characteristics
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I have been asked by the Scotland Malawi Mental Health Project to prepare a short series of podcasts to act as a component of the training programme for psychiatrists at the College of Medicine in Malawi. Like much of the less developed world, Malawi has limited resources for specialist psychiatric care: the ratio of psychiatrists per head of popul…
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We are now acutely aware of the effect which viewing or participating in traumatic events can have on people. This last ‘document’ (actually a set of film clips) is about such outcomes. It has no words by the mentally troubled, but it does have the other components that lay and professional alike use to identify mental state: body language, appeara…
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Extract 21.1 - Living With Madness 2: An Insane Murderer
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This extract accompanies Podcast 21 - Living With Madness 2: An Insane MurdererIMAGE: Wellcome Library, London, L0040923. John Totterdale throwing his wife down stairs. Copperplate, 18th Century. From: The new and complete Newgate calendar; or, villany displayed in all its branches ... Containing ... narratives ... of the various executions and oth…
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21 - Living With Madness 2: An Insane Murderer
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We encountered a coroner’s inquest a few weeks back, presiding over the tragic suicide of an anonymous man. An inquest could deliver a verdict on the cause of death and, if they named a third party, their verdict could serve as an indictment at an assize court. The Old Bailey was the assize for the City of London. This document illustrates how insa…
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Extract 20.1 - Living with madness 1: an apprentice in danger, 1738
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This extract accompanies Podcast 20 - Living with madness 1: an apprentice in danger, 1738IMAGE: ‘Fashion Before Ease, or A Good Constitution Sacrificed for a Fantastic Form', pub. by Hannah Humphrey, 1793. Credit: George Moutard Woodward / Bridgeman Art Library / Universal Images Group, Rights Managed / For Education Use OnlyNOTE: The young man in…
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20. Living with madness 1: an apprentice in danger, 1738
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Most people with mental disorders are more of a liability to themselves than to others. The same cannot be said of this podcast and the next one, where the threat or reality of physical harm at the hands of a mad person seems to have been very real. Early modern apprentices were different from modern ones because they lived as well as worked with t…
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Extract 19.1 - Fighting back. A ballad about William Frederick Windham, 1862
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This extract accompanies Podcast 19 - Fighting back. A ballad about William Frederick Windham, 1862.IMAGE: Broadsheet Ballad: ‘Poor Windham’. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Harding B 11(3115). SOURCE: Bodleian Library, Oxford. Harding B 11(3115). Voice Credit: Oli SavageAv Professor Rab Houston
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19. Fighting back. A ballad about William Frederick Windham, 1862
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This series is entitled ‘the voice of the mad’, but sometimes mentally disordered people needed advocates to speak up for them. Normally that would mean a family member or someone in authority such as a local clergyman or Justice of the Peace. You might remember the young Derbyshire woman, Alice Hill, from an earlier podcast. But sometimes those al…
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This extract accompanies Podcast 18 - Being an asylum patient 4: Christian Watt at Aberdeen Royal Mental Asylum, 1877SOURCE: The Christian Watt papers. Edited with an introduction by David Fraser (Edinburgh, 1983), 106-8. A newer, corrected edition is published by Birlinn.http://www.birlinn.co.uk/The-Christian-Watt-Papers-9781780270722.html Voice C…
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18. Being an asylum patient 4: Christian Watt at Aberdeen Royal Mental Asylum, 1877
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As I showed last week, Herman Charles Merivale’s time at Ticehurst was a bit like being in a nice hotel, though he did not like the other ‘guests’. Someone who seems to have settled rather better into an institutional environment was a working class Aberdeenshire woman, who also wrote a retrospective account of her time in a public asylum. She wrot…
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Extract 17.1 - Herman Charles Merivale
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This extract accompanies Podcast 17 - Being an asylum patient 3b: Herman Charles Merivale at Ticehurst, 1875IMAGE: Wellcome Library, London. Ticehurst Case Records, 1875-9, pp. 15-16. Credit: Wellcome Library, London, Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial licenseVoice Credit: Jem TatarAv Professor Rab Houston
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17. Being an asylum patient 3b: Herman Charles Merivale at Ticehurst, 1875
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Last week’s extract and podcast allowed us to see what others thought of the lawyer Herman Charles Merivale, when he was committed to a private asylum. The document from which it came exists in abundance for 19th century asylums. Insight into how patients saw the experience of incarceration are much rarer, though I shall give examples this week and…
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This extract accompanies Podcast 16 - Being an asylum patient 3a: Herman Charles Merivale admitted to Ticehurst, 1875 IMAGE: Wellcome Library, London. Ticehurst Case Records, 1875-9, pp. 15-16. Credit: Wellcome Library, London, Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial licenseSPOKEN VERSION: Jem Tatar…
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16. Being an asylum patient 3a: Herman Charles Merivale admitted to Ticehurst, 1875
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The most abundant sources for understanding the history of psychiatry are medical case notes, kept by asylum staff. In addition, petitions for admission gave accounts of behaviour that precipitated the committal of a person to an institution. In this case he was a well-off London lawyer and the asylum was an up-market private one in the Home Counti…
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Extract 15.1 - Being An Asylum Patient 2: Letters from the Royal Edinburgh Hospital
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This extract accompanies Podcast 15 Being an asylum patient 2: Letters from the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, late 19th century.IMAGE: Lothian Health Board Archive, University of Edinburgh, LHB7/51/54, p. 314. James P. to Dr Thomas Clouston 28 April, 1891. Credit: Courtesy of Lothian Health Services Archive, Edinburgh University Library.…
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15. Being an Asylum Patient 2: Letters from the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, late 19th century
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Last week I looked at some regulations from Cardiff District Asylum at the start of the twentieth century. One of their main functions was to restrict communication between patients and the outside world, but it is often difficult to see how patients experienced their lives within institutions. The most abundant records are of what doctors and thei…
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Extract 14.1 - Being An Asylum Patient Cardiff Asylum Regulations
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This extract accompanies Podcast 14 Being an asylum patient 1: Cardiff Asylum regulations, 1919Voice credit: Rosie BeechIMAGE: Psychiatric patient, 19th century. Credit: KING'S COLLEGE LONDON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / UIG, Rights Managed / For Educational Use OnlyAv Professor Rab Houston
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14. Being an Asylum Patient 1: Cardiff Asylum regulations, 1919
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In this podcast and the next four, I’m going to look at what patients made of entering and being in what we call mental hospitals and what were known until 1930 as lunatic asylums. The podcasts are about life in the institutions which dominated care of the insane and mentally impaired from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century. The first…
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13. Suicide, Part 2 - A London coroner’s inquest verdict, 1791
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Eighteenth and nineteenth century English coroners’ inquests investigated roughly one death in every twenty. Their main task was to discover if someone else might have been involved or if a crime might have been committed. Suicide was one of those cases because it was a crime until 1961. The truly poignant part of this verdict is that nobody knew t…
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Extract 13.1 Suicide 2 - London Coroner's Verdict
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This extract accompanies Podcast 13 - Suicide 2. A London coroner's inquest verdict.Voice Credit: Rosie BeechAv Professor Rab Houston
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This voice extract accompanies Podcast 12 - Suicide 1. Letters, diaries, and notes in the National Archives of ScotlandRead by: Sebastian Bridges, Caroline McWilliams, Hannah Raymond CoxAv Professor Rab Houston
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This voice extract accompanies Podcast 12 - Suicide 1. Letters, diaries, and notes in the National Archives of ScotlandRead by: Sebastian Bridges, Caroline McWilliams, Hannah Raymond CoxAv Professor Rab Houston
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This voice extract accompanies Podcast 12 - Suicide 1. Letters, diaries, and notes in the National Archives of ScotlandRead by: Sebastian Bridges, Caroline McWilliams, Hannah Raymond CoxAv Professor Rab Houston
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This voice extract accompanies Podcast 12 - Suicide 1. Letters, diaries, and notes in the National Archives of ScotlandRead by: Sebastian Bridges, Caroline McWilliams, Hannah Raymond CoxAv Professor Rab Houston
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This voice extract accompanies Podcast 12 - Suicide 1. Letters, diaries, and notes in the National Archives of ScotlandRead by: Sebastian Bridges, Caroline McWilliams, Hannah Raymond CoxAv Professor Rab Houston
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This voice extract accompanies Podcast 12 - Suicide 1. Letters, diaries, and notes in the National Archives of ScotlandRead by: Sebastian Bridges, Caroline McWilliams, Hannah Raymond CoxAv Professor Rab Houston
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This voice extract accompanies Podcast 12 - Suicide 1. Letters, diaries, and notes in the National Archives of ScotlandRead by: Sebastian Bridges, Caroline McWilliams, Hannah Raymond CoxAv Professor Rab Houston
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This voice extract accompanies Podcast 12 - Suicide 1. Letters, diaries, and notes in the National Archives of ScotlandRead by: Sebastian Bridges, Caroline McWilliams, Hannah Raymond CoxAv Professor Rab Houston
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This voice extract accompanies Podcast 12 - Suicide 1. Letters, diaries, and notes in the National Archives of ScotlandRead by: Sebastian Bridges, Caroline McWilliams, Hannah Raymond CoxAv Professor Rab Houston
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