These questions are explored at the Cambridge Festival, one of the largest festivals of its kind in the country. Coordinated by the University of Cambridge, the festival runs from 13-28 March. Over 360 (mostly free) events range from talks, debates, tours and interactive sessions.
In Is the female psychopath more hidden than the male? (16 March), leading corporate psychopath expert and pioneering researcher, Dr Clive Boddy from Anglia Ruskin University, discusses the incidence rates of female psychopathy in the adult population. He argues that there are far more female psychopaths than anyone has previously imagined and examines the implications of this for employees, business and society. Dr Broddy reveals how these behaviours manifest themselves and compares male and female psychopathic behaviour across both criminal and corporate psychopathy. He shows that female psychopaths are destructive but in more subtle and less violent and antisocial ways than male psychopaths are.
Dr Boddy said: “The incidence rates of female psychopathy are debatable – however it looks like the estimations of 10:1, (10 male psychopaths for every female) or even 6:1, or 4:1 are overestimations.” He argues that there are far more female psychopaths than psychologists and psychiatrists ever imagined, “Some of the current psychopathy measures used are based on research among male, criminal psychopaths and so there has been a confounding of both criminality and masculinity with psychopathy. Thus, female psychopaths may not be reliably identified by many existing measures.
“When primary measures of psychopathy are used, for instance in my own research, then the incidence rate is more like 1.14 males to one female, and this implies there are about five times as many female psychopaths as previously assumed.
“Relative to males, female psychopaths use physical aggression less and relational aggression more. The latter is harder to spot, perhaps leading to an underestimation of female psychopathy. They are manipulative and use fraud more than physical theft and can use sexual seduction to gain the ends of resource acquisition, money and prestige that they seek. This relative subtle approach may explain why female psychopathy flies under the radar of many psychopathy measures.”
In The Future of Mental Health- it's not all in the Mind (26 March), Peter Templeton discusses the holy grail of our age – tackling the mental health crisis in children and young people.
Peter, a specialist in university-industry knowledge transfer at the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing (IfM), founded the charity The William Templeton Foundation for Young People’s Mental Health (YPMH) after his 18-year-old son William took his own life.
Building on his experiences in chemical engineering and university knowledge transfer, and the IfM’s innovation management methods, Peter proposes an approach for revolutionising the current mental health landscape, with a clear focus on depression.
By linking up current social, biological and psychological research on depression using ‘root cause analysis’ he provides a joined-up understanding of the risk factors and mechanisms that can lead to depression. Over the past 5 years, YPMH has worked with the IfM, conducting 35 workshops with people from across the mental health ‘ecosystem.’ The workshops helped to identify, evaluate, prioritise and develop evidence-based ideas for prevention, early detection, diagnosis, and personalised management and treatment of depression; they have also helped to identify barriers to innovation and implementation at scale – and ways to overcome them.
Peter said, “The individual, social and economic costs of mental ill-health are huge, and its incidence is continuing to rise. We need more effective, and a better balance of, approaches from prevention to treatment. By applying structured methods to i) systematically identify opportunities to make a difference, ii) manage innovation better, and iii) design implementation across multiple organisations, we can make a real step-change in mental wellbeing. Together, we can help people to live happier lives, improve society and even improve our economy.”
During the Cambridge Festival, YPMH will publish a new booklet, Depression – It’s really not all in the mind, which brings together current insights from social, psychological and biological research in a clear and accessible way. It offers new understanding and approaches for people and organisations seeking to prevent and reduce depression in young people. It is designed to be useful for young adults, parents, and organisations such as educational institutions, employers, custodial institutions, as well as to the health and social care sector.
In Meet the researchers: Clinical MS research in Cambridge (27 March) leading MS researchers describe two approaches for treating MS. First, the study of repurposed drugs for remyelination – a form of ‘brain repair’. Normally the body can regenerate damaged myelin, but in MS this process fails. Second, is using the power of ‘big data’ – through collaboration with other national and international MS research centres. Using this information, researchers can examine multiple aspects of care for people with MS – for example running ‘virtual clinical trials’ to explore the effects of different MS treatments and exploring real-world outcomes for patients. This work is building an evidence base to support future MS treatment that will be more tailored towards specific individuals.
In Ageing, dementia and cure (28 March), Drs Maura Malpetti, Rob Durcan, and Alexander Murley from the University of Cambridge talk about the current understanding of dementia, trials that are running and those that have unfortunately been halted. Although not successful, they have taught us much about the feasibility of trials and have paved the way for future research. Dr Malpetti talks about inflammation markers using both PET imaging and blood biomarkers in diagnosing dementia and stratifying participation in trials. Dr Murley discusses trials in more detail: what does it mean to have a successful trial, what are the measures of success and failure of a trial? What types of drugs/ interventions are currently being developed and what are their chances of success? Is there a point in developing symptomatic treatment over curing the disease? Dr Durcan then brings it back to our current understanding and concrete things we can do as individuals to minimise our risk of developing dementia as prevention is better than cure.
OCD is a common mental health condition and is discussed in the following two events:
Bridging lived experience and scientific inquiry: A personal journey through OCD research (23 & 24 March) shows the human side of science and how personal battles can shape scientific progress. Margherita Zenoni, a PhD candidate from the University of Cambridge, explores her extraordinary journey from battling Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) to transforming OCD research. She explains how her personal fight with OCD steered her toward a PhD and a role at Orchard OCD – where she advocates for more awareness, research funding, and effective treatments.
Tidy that room right now! How to tame our clutter chaos (23 & 24 March), sees Dr Sharon Morein, an expert in hoarding disorder from Anglia Ruskin University, explore the science of clutter and messy bedrooms. This interactive session offers solutions for how we can be more organised and explores some of the reasons why we do not like to throw things away.
Other related events include:
Psychotic experiences: Everyone has them and so do you! (16 March). 1 in 4 people with common mental health problems such as anxiety and depression also have psychotic experiences. TYPPEX is a 7-year research programme that aims to increase recovery rates among people with depression and anxiety who are attending NHS Talking Therapies services. The programme gives therapists specialist training in psychotic experiences and the role they play in mental health problems. In this session, the TYPPEX team talk about their research.
Mind matters: An evening looking into the brain (20 March). Researchers from The MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit host an evening of experiments, demonstrations and tours. They also present a series of talks on current research: third-year PhD student Rebecca Williams discusses apathy, why it is such a problem in dementia and finding new ways to treat it. Research Associate Dr Charlotte Garcia explains how a cochlear implant provides auditory perception to people who cannot hear acoustically. Programme Leader Professor John Duncan talks about our brain networks. Programme Leader and Clinical Psychologist Professor Tim Dalgleish discusses how his research into human emotions is being used to develop and refine psychological treatments for mental health problems.
On the same (brain) wavelength: Neural synchronisation during social interactions (23 & 24 March). When we interact others, our brains seem to synchronise in their activity. Greater levels of synchrony often suggest better social interactions and coordination. How does the brain achieve this? How do we measure this? And can neural synchrony reveal more about our ultra-social species? This talk by Edoardo Chidichimo is hosted by the Centre for Family Research reveals all.
To view the full programme and book tickets visit the Festival website here.
Image: wildpixel, Getty Images Pro via Canva
