Peter Bleakley teaches Art and Design, Religious Education, and Philosophy and Politics at a secondary school and believes that they are all a highly interconnected quest for truth and growth rather than incompatible or hostile to each other.  He is an artist, teacher and lay minister who is ecstatic about recent developments in quantum physics and theoretical and experimental science. 

Expect a visual and mental feast, to have your assumptions challenged, and to be enthused about new ways to experience and appreciate Art, Religion and Science in what some have described as our new 21st century Age of Alchemy.

‘Do no harm’ underpins medical practice yet much has been written about medical iatrogenesis. Health psychology explores the links between psychology and physical health. This talk analyses research exploring medication adherence, help seeking, screening and behaviour change to argue that all interventions have the potential for both benefit and harm. Accordingly, health psychology may have inadvertently contributed to psychological harms (eg lead times, anxiety, risk compensation, rebound effects), medical harms (eg. Medication side effects, unnecessary procedures) and social harms (eg. financial costs, increased consultations rates). Such harms may result from medicalization or pharmaceuticalisation. They may also reflect the ways in which we manage probabilities and an optimistic bias that emphasises benefit over cost. Or they may reflect a change in the way we understand mortality and a belief that even death can be controlled, or even avoided, by the individual.

After completing her PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry Jane Ogden lectured first at Middlesex University then Kings College London. She joined the University of Surrey as Professor in Health Psychology in 2005. She teaches psychology, medical, vet, nutrition and dietician students to think more psychological about physical health. Her research focuses on eating behaviour and obesity management, aspects of women’s health and communication. She has published 6 books and over 170 papers. She is also a regular contributor to the media and writes a regular column for The Conversation.