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Darian Leader

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst and author. His books include Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing; Why Do People Get Ill?; The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression; and What Is Madness?

March 2019

  • time to wake up

    Why the sleep industry is keeping us awake at night

    We’re told that getting eight unbroken hours of sleep will protect us from cancer and dementia, and make us happier. But are we being sold an impossible dream?

November 2016

  • Gavin Turk (right) with psychoanalyst Darian Leader

    Gavin Turk: the analyst will unmask you now

    He has impersonated tramps, punks, Pollock and Che. But who is the real Gavin Turk? As a major retrospective opens, we challenged psychoanalyst Darian Leader to find the man behind his many masks

May 2016

  • Detail from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam

    Darian Leader: how technology is changing our hands

    Doctors predict that our increasing use of computers and mobile phones will permanently alter our hands. What will this mean for the way we touch, feel and communicate?

July 2013

  • Crying business woman

    Heed the new age of anxiety rather than bemoaning it

    Darian Leader
    Darian Leader: A study calculating the cost of widespread stress and exhaustion ignores the signs pointing to what really lies behind it

April 2013

  • spike milligan

    Bipolar memoirs: What have I done?

    We live in bipolar times. Yet memoirs of manic depression by Stephen Fry and others suggest the new diagnosis, treated with drugs, risks ignoring the crucial details of each patient's condition. By Darian Leader

November 2012

  • Nail biting

    Nail biting doesn't belong in psychiatry's list of OCD symptoms

    Darian Leader
    Darian Leader: The DSM handbook's approach to mental health is flawed – it encourages a rigid, normative vision of human behaviour

June 2012

  • Display of pharmacy shelving in UK pharmacy

    The bipolar explosion

    Darian Leader

    Darian Leader: Psychiatry is at last asking the right questions about a remarkable shift in mental health diagnosis

July 2011

  • Anders Behring Breivik Oslo, Norway

    You told us
    Anders Behring Breivik and the logic of madness

    Darian Leader

    Darian Leader: The case of Anders Breivik in Norway reminds us that the relationship between madness and responsibility is complex

June 2011

  • Bedlam 1860

    How psychiatry became a damage limitation exercise

    Darian Leader

    Darian Leader: Wards are now just crisis centres and there's no time to listen to patients – it is time to rethink our mental health services

December 2010

  • Therapy shows us life is not neat or safe. So why judge it by those criteria?

    Darian Leader
    Darian Leader: A proposed regulation of talking therapies would impose market values on a practice that aims to free us from such judgments

July 2010

  • Being mad is one thing, going mad quite another

    Darian Leader
    Darian Leader: Many are worried that the latest edition of the psychiatrist's 'bible' labels everyone as ill – but this has an upside

May 2010

  • Actus Tragicus

    Loneliness study: Help! I need somebody

    As a report warns that loneliness is rife and advises us to 'invest in' friends and family, a psychoanalyst argues that the experts have got it wrong. Below, one woman describes her agonising years of solitude

April 2009

  • Talking therapy

    Darian Leader

    Darian Leader: It's a mistake to try to make counselling fit the marketplace of goods and services under the Health Professions Council

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