Alek Wek

I've always loved to paint - I was studying to do an art degree when I was approached to become a model - and I've being doing some design work as well. I also love just having a quiet time, sitting in my little library at home in Brooklyn and reading or watching documentaries or listening to music.

I think that there's something extremely beautiful about the Olympic ideal and its motto - 'Swifter, higher, stronger' - it's such a beautiful motto, and it celebrates everything which is the antithesis of death and dissolution and entropy.

The current approach that psychiatry takes almost ignores social worlds in which mental health problems arise and tries to become highly biomedical like other branches of medicine such as cardiology or oncology. But psychiatry has to be far more embedded in people's personal and social worlds.