Glynn Harrison

This year, Christmas carol services are expected to draw their largest congregations since the pandemic. As numbers attending carol services swell, one central London church has appealed to its regular congregation to donate 12,000 mince pies to give away. Even in the wake of shocking revelations of religious abuse in recent years, those who rarely engage with faith may still find themselves stepping into cathedrals and parish churches this Christmas season. But why will we go? What are we looking for? Can all this sentimentalised longing really be good for us? The sights and sounds of Christmas stir emotions of altruism and goodwill, of warmth and cosiness, of well-being and belonging.

If you want to make your name in psychiatry, find a problem, identify a plausible one-factor solution, and then offer a big fix at low cost. And provided you can make at least some of the sums add up, even editors of academic journals will find it hard to resist. I was first offered this tongue-in-cheek advice on the threshold of a lifetime in academic psychiatry over four decades ago. But the idea of the one-factor solution has never been particularly attractive to me. After all, over the first half of the last century, the lure of a surgical solution to mental health ailments scarred the lives of tens of thousands of patients who were subject to brain lobotomies.