 The thing is it's not a band. Well, what is it then? To be honest with you, it's probably more a deal with the fact that it's rehabilitation for me. And I'm using music as some type of therapy. We're talking life and death issues here. We're not talking about some Nambi, Pambi, who can't get out of bed because he doesn't want to go out of bed or whatever it might be. It's a little bit more serious than that. Yes, absolutely. A good day, you know, can be as simple as getting through the day. And a bad day might be thinking, well, should I go on the internet to find out how to tie a hangman's noose? This is a medication taken at night time. These are metformins, antipsychotics, which are quitire pin. These are opacone, which are my sleeping tappas. Metazepine, which I might say are my 17 tappas today. No Gallagher. This is drug taking. I've been working really hard over the weekend on this idea that I had not motivated to do something after Amy Whitehouse's death, which I've found to be really tragic. Mortality, thinking of loss, but trying to incorporate that in the music, but still have some hope. This is the interview I've always been looking forward to. This is the one on what they get into. What this guy does for a living in raids is he has to get paid. Yeah, a type thing. Let's get into schizophrenia. Why is schizophrenia so misunderstood? People can understand almost conceptually what anxiety is, because everyone at some point experiences anxiety. People can conceptually relate to mood disorders because everyone experiences mood. Schizophrenia is in some way quite enigmatic and straight. People, I think, find it difficult to relate very easily to what's going on in schizophrenia. It's pretty difficult to put yourself in the shoes of someone with schizophrenia. As a consequence, it is very misunderstood. It's probably the most stigmatised against disorder. In some sense, because it's about cognition, it's about perception, it's about belief, it's almost one of the most human disorders that exists. It's kind of at the core of being a human being. The first thing that bipolar tends to do is once they start feeling better, they stop taking the meds. And that's a really bad situation, which I've seen it happen to so many other people where they stop taking the meds and they go ill. So I'm very, very strict on making sure I take my meds every day. Now, these ones are the ones that really knock you out. These are the one that's called the quitaipin. These are sleeping tablets called zopaclone. I can't sleep without these. And that's dependent on what happens with the quitaipin, is you take them and you get uncontrollable hunger, this craving for food. You just eat neat and neat. And that's my medication regime for this evening, see in the morning. So what is the definition of schizophrenia? When you're saying that someone's got schizophrenia, what they have at its core is they have very unusual beliefs, which we call delusions. Your tan looks good with a white shirt, because even your body, you can see your body colour through you. You're obviously getting a good tan. It's not just like believing my football team is going to win the league this year, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It has to be something a bit more bizarre. Someone is stealing my electricity in order to charge up a spaceship in their garden, or something quite bizarre. I had an idea for a lick, for a banjo lick, and I recorded that, which is this. And then I thought, well, OK, let's put a beat behind it. Banjo roll on it, which is like a rhythmic thing, a sick-painting rhythm. Hallucinations are typical as well, so most characteristically they're auditory hallucinations, and that means that you hear things, as if they're occurring in the outside space around you. You hear them, but there's no stimulus, so there's nothing actually there. Try and just relax a bit. You're very serious. At its most classic, it is a voice, or voice says, that are not recognised as self, and that occur in external space. I mean, when you're thinking aloud, so to speak, you're pretty clear that it is going on inside your head. Where it's someone with an absolutely characteristic hallucination will be locating it as maybe the corner of the room, or outside the house, or under the bed, or in the wardrobe, or on the radio. It is heard the same way you hear me speaking. When you are thinking to yourself, you're unlikely to be hearing two, three, four different voices arguing about you, or criticising you, or commenting on what you're actually happening to be doing. No back shots. No, no, that's fine, that's fine. If you want, no problems. That's good. That's fine, Mick. Thank you. In the morning, I have to take my meds, and this is venipraxin, and this one's been particularly helpful. Raised my mood a little bit from being constantly bad to a little bit better. When you're taking 17 tablets a day, it gets a bit challenging to remember which one's which and which one does what. Money allowed me tablets on a weekly basis, because all my overdoses prior have always been tablet overdoses. How do you treat schizophrenia? At its most simple medical level, you use medicine called anti-psychotic drugs, but that will not abolish many of the problems. So people with schizophrenia, the vast majority of them cannot find employment, have problems with housing, have problems with relationships. So they also need a lot of social support. Are the similarities between bipolar and schizophrenia? They do overlap. People with schizophrenia also have mood changes, odd behaviour, people with bipolar disorder, not infrequently when they are very ill, have hallucinations, delusions, odd behaviour. So the symptoms overlap, and it can be quite difficult to distinguish between the two, assuming such a distinction is entirely valid. I guess because I've got a goal, which is the 28th of March, 2012, I know I need to do certain things. I know I need to get good on the banjo for that date. I know that the ban is going to be good for that date. We have to work on our visual image and losing weight is all part of this visual image that I want to present. So that's my sort of goal, whether I achieve it or not, I don't know, but I'm going to give it a good shot. What sort of research has been done here in Cardiff? Speaking for myself, probably the main thrust at the moment is genetics. The purpose of the genetics is to find some biological clues as to the origins of the disease. What we want to do is take the genetics and not just try and link the genes to disease, but also genes to how maybe different ways the brain is activated. So you try and link genes with brain imaging findings. Why is it important to continue research and get more funding? We have very little grasp on how it develops. We have no real clear understanding about how risk factors, of which there are many, can possibly lead to this clinical picture. And that all adds up to schizophrenia being one of the most important causes of human suffering, family suffering, economic suffering. And somehow we have to break that. And one proven way of breaking this sort of thing is through biomedical research so that we can identify positions in that chain between risk and disease that we can interfere with, interrupt, or, if we're really lucky, prevent altogether. Techniques were becoming available where we could look into people's brains and that just fascinated me to be able to get a glimpse with neuroimaging of people's working brains. Where's creativity in the brain? There's no answer to that. The process of actually lying on a slab made me feel a bit like I was being laid out in a morgue. To be honest with you, I was terrified.