The Wellcome Collection Podcast - Hello Happiness: Joy

Hello Happiness: Joy

11/24/21 • 46 min

Bidisha explores joy, from the psychology of our earliest laughs to collective and solitary pleasures like comedy, food and performance.

Hear historian of emotions Thomas Dixon describe and define joy, before listening to comedian Daliso Chaponda and developmental psychologist Caspar Addyman talk with Bidisha. They remind us to let our inner jester and inner laughing baby come out and play.

Musician Sola shares her track ‘All Mine’ and talks about the pleasures of making music. Whilst enjoying ice cream, performance artist Travis Alabanza speaks with Bidisha about identity and defiance and the sheer delight they experience when they can be themselves on and off stage.

How can joy be a collective experience? Bidisha finds out through speaking with Kemi Akinola, the founder of Be Enriched, a community kitchen in South London bringing people together over food and creating a place of comfort and joy for 4000 diners a year.

Presented by Bidisha Produced by Debbie Kilbride Sound design by Micky Curling Music by Sola Executive producer Emily Wiles

Bidisha explores joy, from the psychology of our earliest laughs to collective and solitary pleasures like comedy, food and performance.

Presented by Bidisha Produced by Debbie Kilbride Sound design by Micky Curling Music by Sola Executive producer Emily Wiles

Previous Episode

Hello Happiness: Tranquillity

When was the last time you felt utterly tranquil?

Moya Lothian-McLean searches for an oasis of calm, taking Wellcome Collection’s ‘Tranquillity’ exhibition as a point of inspiration.

She visits St Bartholomew’s Hospital to experience the installation ‘Regarding Forests’ by Chrystel Lebas. Hear tips from staff and visitors as they share how they find a moment of peace in the middle of a bustling hospital.

Moya speaks with three young people from RawMinds, Fawaz Sajid, Malika Sandover and Tahmina Sayfi and they talk about whether phones can ever help us to find calm in our busy, modern lives.

Brain injury survivor and gardener Keith Emmanuel and environmental psychologist Dr Eleanor Ratcliffe talk with Moya about the importance of being in nature for our health and wellbeing. They meet in the garden at Homerton Hospital Mothers and Babies Ward where Keith volunteers.

Even if you can’t escape to a green oasis, you have the right to rest wherever you are. Artist Rhiannon Armstrong has created a meditation to help you do just that. The meditation is part of a larger work called Public Selfcare System, shaped by Rhiannon’s lived experience as a disabled artist with chronic debilitating conditions that mean she has become an expert at resting in public.

Presented by Moya Lothian-McLean

Produced by Debbie Kilbride

Sound design by Micky Curling

Music by Sola

Executive producer Emily Wiles

Meditation by Rhiannon Armstrong

@mlothianmclean @HeadwayELondon @el_ratcliffe @armstrongtactic

Next Episode

Hello Happiness: Ecstasy

In the final episode of our podcast, Bidisha takes us on a journey through the highest of highs, from nightclubbing and the ecstasies of religion and drugs, to mania.

Artist Harold Offeh shares his personal take on the connections between movement, music and bodies.

Annie Macmanus (‘DJ Annie Mac’) speaks about the power of nightclubbing, how ecstasy and dance music go hand in hand and how she has managed to maintain her sense of euphoria and delight over the last couple of years.

From taking MDMA in the 80s to the work of a religious professional, the vicar, musician and radio presenter Richard Coles reflects on his adventures with both chemical and religious ecstasy.

Philosopher Jules Evans and drug science expert David Nutt talk about how people have sought to lose control throughout history, and how psychedelics are being trialled to relieve hard-to-treat cases of depression.

Finally, Bidisha asks, can you have too much of a good thing? Psychologist and writer Kay Redfield Jamison talks about her patients’—and her own—experiences of mania as part of bipolar disorder.

Presented by Bidisha Produced by Debbie Kilbride Sound design by Micky Curling Music by Sola Researched by Priya Jay Executive producer Emily Wiles