Beyond Words: Preface

This is a departure from the usual AI Script to Screen interviews. It isn’t a conventional podcast episode, but the beginning of something new: the audio version of my forthcoming book, Beyond Words: A Manifesto for Animation, AI and the Future of Mental Health Communication, which will be published at the end of October.

In this first instalment, I read the Preface, which introduces the central argument of the book. We have more psychological language than ever before, but knowing the vocabulary of anxiety, trauma, depression, addiction or attachment is not necessarily the same as understanding what those experiences actually feel like or how they work. Information is not understanding.

The Preface explores why animation may offer another language for mental health communication: using image, movement, metaphor, character, sound and story to make invisible psychological processes visible. Drawing on nearly thirty years as a psychotherapist and more than twenty-five years working in film and animation, I begin to ask a simple question: if other industries routinely use animation to explain complexity, why aren’t we making greater use of it in healthcare?

This is where Beyond Words begins.