"You're Crazy Professor...But It Might Just Work!"

Taking a look at the cases of suicide where pilots kill themselves from the flight-deck, with a special interest in the mass-killings undertaken by pilots who kill themselves and their passengers when flying commercial passenger airliners.

There have been numerous reports of people deliberately licking products and surfaces in supermarkets and filimg it. These “licking videos” are then often posted on social media sites like TikTok, Snapchat or YouTube for all to see. Deliberately licking and coughing on things in this way, during a pandemic, spreads fear and disgust, along with the health risks. This is what’s known as “consumer terrorism” where dangerous substances are introduced to food or other consumer products, that put people’s health at risk. Some people are now weaponising their own bodies in frustration.

Experts say the mental health of the frontline healthcare workers may be at risk, because of what they witnessed during their work. Looking out for frontline workers' levels of depression or anxiety will only be part of what is needed. The distress of such work may also trigger the development of many physical health problems that may not be understood and might not be taken seriously by medicine. We have seen this problem before . . .

Stalking is a specific form of criminal offence and a recognised social problem. According to the Crime Survey for England & Wales, approximately 20% of females and 10% of males receive unwanted stalking behaviours over their lifetime, and this figure continues to increase annually. The role of the workplace in stalking cases is crucial - many stalkers find their victims through workplaces and are able to elicit information about their victims from the very place that has a duty of care to protect their privacy and safety. The routine and predictability of workplaces unwittingly assists stalkers in accessing their victims. Many stalkers also show up at their victims workplaces, often with fatal consequences, and knowing how to deal with stalkers is a safety issue.

On June 2nd, 2010, 52-year-old Derrick Bird, an ordinary and down to earth self-employed taxi driver from Rowrah in Cumbria, in the North of England, had started a shooting spree earlier that day. He went on to kill 12 people, and injure 11 others in the space of two hours, before killing himself. This tragedy could not have been prevented, but Bird was not the quiet and pleasant man that many neighbours and friends thought he was. Bird had a history of suffering at the hands of others and never getting the justice he truly deserved.

The size of the work-related stress epidemic has shown no signs of slowing down over the last decade. It continues to grow and has never yet showed any sign of reversing since the mid 1990s when it seemed to begin. I think there is a very obvious source of workplace stress that has been overlooked and under-researched.Email.That everyday simple tool we rely on to do our jobs. It's not a coincidence that the workplace stress epidemic started to take hold in the mid 1990s - just when everyone started to get to grips with the internet and emails. It's such an obvious smoking gun. How has it been overlooked all this time?I'll explain what the problems are for some people with emails, and ask you to undertake a self-assessment of your own relationship with email. I'll then give you some simple tips on how to make your work with email a little more harmonious - and put you back in control.

I’ve recently come off the back of delivering a 12 week module about mass shooting to undergraduate students. Writing this module and delivering it on a weekly basis for 3 straight months has ben a challenge - not least in it forcing me to develop what I thought my understanding was in the area. Put briefly, my main theoretical take on mass shooters was typically that mostly they were operating under the influence of extreme narcissistic personality, combined with neuroticism and instability, and an inability to cope when things went wrong in their lives (so called triggering events). However, understanding Mass Shooting, why it is done, what the contributing social factors are, and how it can possibly be reduced, requires an understanding that goes beyond just that of “narcissists with firearms” or the more crass “nutters with guns” as I used to jokingly say. It’s a deep dish that involves a whistle stop tour of the American schooling system; weaponry & ballistics; gun laws and state regulations, mental health provision, workplace psychology, law enforcement, and the American psyche, so strap yourselves in…..

Some questions I have been asked about relationship break ups. Also, if you cannot get over a break up, does it mean you're a 'Crazy Ex Girlfriend'? Is there a “normal” length of time to get over a break-up? Why do some people find it harder than others to get over a relationship ending? Does your general mental health have anything to do with it? How much does the circumstances in which a relationship ends contribute towards the recovery of a break-up? I'll tell you what I know about heartbreak . . .

End of series bonus track

After his arrest in February 2005, Dennis Rader immediately confessed to being the BTK serial murderer who had killed 10 people in the Wichita area of Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. This is the third look at the BTK case for this podcast.Rader’s ready admission to being behind those murders, and to also being a prolific prowler, stalker and house-breaker, led to many observers of the case hastily labelling him a psychopath. This convenient label tied in with the popular layperson view at the time that all serial murders were simply psychopaths. However, such a label of psychopath only served to actually mask a much more interesting and unique set of pathologies behind Rader’s prolific offending behaviours over three decades, even going back to before he began murdering. Some useful insights into his obsessions and distorted view of the world have come to light that suggest the label of psychopath is too sweeping and inaccurate to be of use. Rader lived within a very complex world with rules and order and some preoccupations and obsessions that would often come to the fore, especially when they helped to reassure Rader about his crimes and behaviours.

There seems to have been a recent development in online animal cruelty, where various influencers and a broader cohort of ordinary social media users, seem to be willing to engage in animal cruelty and then post up footage of their animals and pets receiving what could most charitably be described by some as tough love, or deliberate mistreatment by others. Such cruelty is still viewed by psychologists as severe warning signs of psychological problems - especially if repeated more than once. People who abuse their partners or torture their children often begin by taking their frustrations out on family pets first.

In this podcast I want to ask if there is any scope for using clinical hypnosis in the modern working world as a way to help us all improve our lives, overcome any difficulties we may have, and to generally change our behaviours towards the more healthy and happy. If it works, why are we not using it more? In this age of mindfulness and mental heath first aid, there has never been a netter time to explore this form of psychological self-help.

On the evening of Friday 22nd July 2016, there was a multiple casualty and fatality shooting at the Olympia Shopping Mall in Munich. Eighteen year-old David Ali Sonboly, German born from parents of Iranian descent, opened fire on teenagers in a McDonald's restaurant before shooting at bystanders in the street outside and then in the mall itself. Nine people were killed and a further thirty-six others were injured. The role of extreme narcissism in spree shooters is captured in a fascinating conversation between the killer and a very brave bystander caught on camera . . .

Ive been thinking about teeth this week . . .

This episode and the next will look at the crimes of the BTK and establish the timeline of the offences as well as what was happening in the rest of the life of the BTK at the time of these known killings. I have studied the BTK case for almost a decade and have co-authored articles about BTK and taken part in documentaries about these crimes. The approach taken here is to look closely at the known offences of the BTK with a view to help understanding the particular psychopathology and his ability to offend prolifically over such a long period of time. Using what we now know about his crimes, and his ability to maintain both a domestic life and meaningful employment and even a successful career throughout his killing period, we will look at how this was possible. Some of the material within focuses on BTK’s crime scene behaviours and while the descriptions given here try as much as possible not to be explicit and prurient, it should be noted that the contents are not suitable for minors. More detailed descriptions of crime scenes and the offences of BTK are available elsewhere.

Here are my top ten pointers for what to do if you’ve just had a career setback. Perhaps you went for a promotion and didn’t get the job; perhaps somebody else was appointed over you; perhaps you’ve even been demoted to a lower position. Perhaps the failure was something of your own doing - you underperformed - you messed up - or you failed to do the job people expected of you. Perhaps you got caught with your fingers in the till, so to speak. Rather than getting drunk and blaming it all on those “sons of bitches in the office”, a more helpful and adaptive way of coping could be what you need.

This episode looks at a very important part of the BTK serial murder story - asking why FBI criminal profilers were unable to identify and stop the BTK murders, given how much they knew about his crime scene behaviours and subsequent communications with him. To understand this aspect, we need to take a deeper look at criminal profiling and the apparent flaws within.

Our victorian ancestors had a simple premise about working and the new industrialisation they faced. They saw the value of eight of hours work; eight hours of leisure; and eight hours of rest in a day. Working is good for people, but should not take up the majority of the day. Victorians saw this when going through the industrial revolution, but we seem to have missed this point with the digital revolution.

The cleaning industry is facing a problem. Those who do the cleaning work in society are marginalised. Because of negative perceptions of the cleaning profession among young people, the cleaning industry has a recruitment shortage. The way organisations and companies treat their cleaners results in a retention problem for the industry also. If we do not make cleaning a better job to have, and acknowledge the importance of cleaners, there will be major public health consequences.

The Golden Gate Bridge is the largest single site of suicidal deaths in the world (outside of the Aokighara Forest in Japan). Over one thousand people have ended their lives at this bridge, and this is currently at a rate of one death every thirteen days. Will a 'suicide deterrant-net' underneath the bridge help reduce suicides at this location? I don't think it will.

The idea of getting prisoners to work more and to pay restitution to their victims comes and goes. Getting prisoners to work as part of vocational rehabilitation is good, but the risk of health effects and the hazards from the dirty jobs they may be given could be a huge problem.

Over 600 days since the Mandalay Bay Mass Shooting, which was the most deadly mass shooting in US history, the reason and motive behind the killer's actions are still not understood. Looking deeper into the case and the background of the killer, there is another possible theory that may explain what happened...

Work is vital to our health. However, not all work is good and healthy. We can make workplaces healthier for workers. There are moral and legal imperatives behind this. A fiduciary imperative is also that good worker health is good for business.

We have a problem with Social Media - it's no longer kind. Many people on Reality TV shows are vulnerable in different ways, and trolling them online is a new low. Can't we do a bit better than this?

Take a new and closer look at Dirty Harry (1971), a movie that was overlooked and has been criticised for being a conservative gun-toting dumb action movie. This is a movie that is much smarter and more subtle than critics give it credit for.