Piece of Mind: Mental Health & Psychiatry · Piece of Mind: Mental Health & Psychiatry

Episode 18: How mental illness impacts our memory and concentration

·36 min·2 clips

Tony says his cognition worsens during mania and depressive episodes, turning into a “loss of rational control.”

Bex Parker opens the conversation by asking how mental illness affects cognition. The episode sits inside the National Centre for Mental Health, a research centre made up of Cardiff, Bangor, and Swansea universities. Amy Linham explains that the team has been studying memory, concentration, and problem-solving in relation to mental ill health. She also introduces CONCUR, the Cardiff Online Cognitive Assessment Tool. CONCUR is presented as an online assessment for cognitive difficulties often associated with diagnoses such as psychosis and depression. The point is to make that kind of support easier for more people to reach. Tony Cope then shifts the conversation into lived experience. He says cognition is the doing of thinking, something easy to miss until it starts to slip. For him, cognition changes during mania and depressive episodes. He describes that change as a loss of rational control. The effects he names include uncontrollable spending, a desire for isolation, and unusual behaviour. He also speaks about feeling as though he is a third person in his own life during those periods. The episode does not smooth that over. Instead, it leaves the discomfort next to the explanation. Tony also talks about the support that has made a difference. He mentions therapy, medication, and the long process of finding the right combination, and he frames acceptance as a major step rather than a neat ending. He describes a daily mental routine he uses to check in with himself, including the simple questions of who he is, what he is, and where he is. The episode closes by returning to the PAR group, which invites people with lived experience or caring experience to help shape research and points listeners to [email protected] or ncmh.info if they want to get involved.

As heard by us

A plainspoken look at cognition, lived experience, and access to support.

This episode makes a complex clinical topic easy to follow without sanding off the human part. It looks at how mental illness can affect memory, concentration, and problem-solving, and it keeps returning to the practical question of how an online tool such as CONCUR might help…

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Why you'd press play

For the days when thinking feels slower than usual and you want that named plainly, without a lecture.

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