Jackie Kemp - freelance journalist and writer - Edinburgh, Scotland

MADNESS is a creative way of dealing with pain, " argues Rufus May, a recovered schizophrenic who used to hear voices urging him to kill himself. He and Dutch psychiatrist Dirk Corstens told a conference of mental health workers in Dundee recently that they need to explore more creative ways of dealing with voice-hearing.

Mental health professionals travelled from as far as Italy to hear about the "voice dialoguing" technique, in which, at its most extreme, the mental health professional engages with the voices themselves, in the first of a series of seminars on recovery.

Hearing voices - for instance after a bereavement - is a surprisingly common experience. Corstens says: "My aunt, who had lost her husband, used to sit on the bed and talk to him every evening. She could hear him talking back and that was a very reassuring and happy experience for her."

Children's health is an emotive issue, so the question of how best to improve health services for the nation's children is a knotty problem. It is also one which some of the best brains in the NHS are currently tackling, and is viewed as the key to improving the country's poor showing in international league tables in the years to come.