Beyond Paternalism or Abandonment in Mental Health Care: An Interview with Neil Gong
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Release Date: 07/17/2024
Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy: A Conversation with Stijn Vanheule
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Stijn Vanheule is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and professor of psychology at Ghent University. Trained in the Lacanian tradition, he has written widely on the structure of psychosis, the limits of psychiatric diagnosis, and the importance of attending to the subjective logic of mental distress. His books include , and most recently, , which offers a reorientation of how clinicians, families, and broader society might understand and engage with psychotic experience. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, case studies, and contemporary cultural examples, Vanheule treats hallucinations...
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A Therapist Navigating Antidepressant Withdrawal: Nelson Lee on the Power of the Present Moment
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
is a therapist and mental skills coach with a master's degree in clinical mental health counseling and an MBA. In 2024, he attempted to get off antidepressants that he'd been on for 15 years. This led to significant long-term medication withdrawal that Nelson is still navigating at the time of this interview. As a therapist, Nelson specializes in helping clients transform their relationships with themselves and others and overcome anxiety and OCD. He loves helping people rise above their challenges and proactively maintain long-term healing and growth. He believes it's never too late or too...
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“Progress Only Occurs when People Make Demands” Paolo del Vecchio Reflects on a Life of Federal Service
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Paulo del Vecchio is a person in long-term recovery from mental health and addictions, who has been a leader in the peer recovery movement for 40 years. He recently completed a 30-year career at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, where he served in multiple roles including the director of the Center for Mental Health Services and the founding director of the Office of Recovery. Paolo is now an independent advocate, working to advance recovery-oriented policies and practices on national and international levels. In this...
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The Poetics and Politics of Our Mental Health Metaphors: An Interview with Laurence Kirmayer
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Laurence Kirmayer is one of the most influential figures in cultural psychiatry today. A psychiatrist, researcher, and theorist, he serves as James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at and Editor-in-Chief of . Across decades of work bridging anthropology, psychiatry, and cognitive science, Kirmayer has advanced a complex view of mental health as inseparable from culture, history, language, and political power. His research ranges from Indigenous youth resilience and narrative medicine to the diagnostic metaphors—such as “chemical...
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Kermit Cole: Dialogical Therapy and Quantum Theory Walk Into a Bar…
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Hello, my name is Bob Whitaker, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Kermit Cole. We'll be speaking about a philosophical enterprise that Kermit is now deeply engaged in. That is, broadly speaking, how humor can help in creating a shared experience that is helpful to the healing process. Kermit, in his experiences of being with people in psychotic states, has seen humor as a moment when a connection can be made. In many ways, this project is bringing Kermit back full circle to his work as a film director, early in his professional career. After dropping out of Oberlin College, he...
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Chemically Imbalanced: Joanna Moncrieff on the Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Welcome to this Mad in America podcast. My name is Robert Whitaker, and I'm happy today to have the pleasure of speaking with Joanna Moncrieff. Dr. Moncrieff is a psychiatrist who works in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. She is a Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at University College, London. In 1990 she co-founded the , which today has about 400 psychiatrist members, about two-thirds of whom are in the United Kingdom. From my perspective, the Critical Psychiatry Network has been at the forefront of making a broad critique of the disease model of care. Without...
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Teralyn Sell and Jenn Schmitz: Breaking Out of the Prison of Prescribing and Finding the Freedom of Therapy
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
On the Mad in America podcast this week, Brooke Siem, author of May Cause Side Effects, talks with Teralyn Sell and Jenn Schmitz about their journey from working in the prison system to challenging conventional psychiatric narratives in their therapy practice and podcast, . is a distinguished expert in Psychology and Brain Health, holding a PhD in Psychology and an MS in Counseling Psychology. She bridges the gap between traditional mental health care and integrative brain health solutions with formal training in holistic nutrition and biology. She is the author of Your Best Brain and...
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Psychology’s Small Stories and the Call of the Other: An Interview with David Goodman
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
David Goodman is the Director of the and the Dean of the , where he also teaches in the . A past president of the APA’s , Goodman is known for his interdisciplinary work at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, theology, and ethics. He is the founder of the series and serves as editor of two book series: Psychology and the Other and Essays in the Psychological Humanities. In this conversation, Goodman draws on the work of philosopher to reimagine therapy not as a space for self-optimization but as an encounter with responsibility—a call to become more available, interruptible, and...
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Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics: End of an Era for Independent Journals? An Interview With Giovanni Fava
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Welcome to . My name is Bob Whitaker, and today my guest is Italian psychiatrist, Giovanni Fava. From 1992 to 2022, Dr. Fava edited the journal . We will be talking about the importance of that journal and what may be lost now that the publisher, Karger, may be taking it in a new direction. Here's why this journal, under Dr. Fava’s leadership, was so important to us all. When psychiatry talks about how its drug treatments are evidence-based, it points to RCTs and meta-analyses of those RCTs as proof that its drugs are more effective than placebo. However, Psychotherapy and...
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Psychology, Personhood, and the Crisis of Neoliberalism: Jeff Sugarman on Theoretical and Critical Psychology
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Jeff Sugarman is a distinguished scholar in theoretical and philosophical psychology, known for his work examining the psychology of selfhood, human agency, and the sociopolitical underpinnings of psychological science. A Professor Emeritus in the Education Department at Simon Fraser University, Dr. Sugarman has spent decades critically interrogating the ways mainstream psychology reflects and reinforces the ideologies of , shaping how we understand identity, mental health, and human development. A past president of the and a former associate editor of and , Dr. Sugarman has played a key...
info_outlineNeil Gong is an assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego, where he researches psychiatric services, homelessness, and how communities seek to maintain social order. Neil's new book, "Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles," published by the University of Chicago Press, offers a detailed look into the starkly different worlds of mental health care in Los Angeles. He contrasts the public safety-net clinics, which strive to keep patients housed and out of jail, with the elite private care centers that cater to the wealthy. He finds that while the public system focuses on survival and containment, often providing only minimal care, the private system aims at rehabilitation and respectability, albeit sometimes at the cost of personal freedom.
Neil’s extensive fieldwork included spending nights in homeless encampments, shadowing social workers, and engaging with patients and families across the socioeconomic spectrum. His work highlights systemic failures and societal indifference but also the humanity of those working and living within these disparate treatment systems. In our conversation, we unpack the critical insights from his book and explore the broader implications of his research. How do these disparate systems reflect our societal values? What can we learn about the intersection of mental health, homelessness, and social policy? And perhaps most importantly, how can we move towards a more equitable and humane approach to mental health care?
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