All Real Living Is Meeting - In Conversation With Brent Robbins - Part 1
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Release Date: 02/12/2025
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...
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“Dad, Something's Not Right. I Need Help”- Richard Fee on the Dangers of Adderall
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Welcome to the Mad in America podcast. My name is Brooke Siem, and I’m the author of . Today, I’m here with Rick Fee, president of the . Rick joins us to talk about his son, Richard Fee and his encounter with psychiatric drugs, most notably Adderall. *** Thank you for being with us to listen to the podcast and read our articles this year. MIA is funded entirely by reader donations. If you value MIA, please help us continue to survive and grow. To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: © Mad in America 2025. Produced by James...
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Psychotherapy and Social Change: Mick Cooper on Counseling, Pluralism, and Progressive Politics
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mick Cooper is a in contemporary counseling psychology, known for his work at the intersection of psychotherapy and social change. A Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Roehampton in the UK, Dr. Cooper is both a researcher and a practicing therapist, exploring how psychotherapeutic principles can contribute to broader political and societal transformation. As a co-developer of the pluralistic approach to therapy, Dr. Cooper has been instrumental in advancing a model that prioritizes shared decision-making, client preferences, and integrative therapeutic practice. He serves...
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All Real Living Is Meeting - In Conversation With Brent Robbins - Part 2
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Brent Dean Robbins is a psychologist, scholar, and all-around thoughtful human whose work has profoundly shaped . He is one of those rare thinkers who makes psychology feel alive—not just a collection of theories and data, but a field full of urgent, deeply human questions. He’s a professor of psychology and the director of the , where he’s helped create one of the most distinctive training programs in the country. He earned his Ph.D. in —home to some of the most beautifully dense phenomenological work you'll ever have to read twice—and is a licensed psychologist in...
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All Real Living Is Meeting - In Conversation With Brent Robbins - Part 1
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Brent Dean Robbins is a psychologist, scholar, and all-around thoughtful human whose work has profoundly shaped . He is one of those rare thinkers who makes psychology feel alive—not just a collection of theories and data, but a field full of urgent, deeply human questions. He’s a professor of psychology and the director of the , where he’s helped create one of the most distinctive training programs in the country. He earned his Ph.D. in —home to some of the most beautifully dense phenomenological work you'll ever have to read twice—and is a licensed psychologist in...
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Kids Are Not The Problem: An Interview With Gretchen LeFever Watson
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
In this interview, Brooke Siem, who is the author of a memoir on antidepressant withdrawal, , interviews Gretchen LeFever Watson, PhD. Gretchen is a developmental and clinical psychologist with postdoctoral training in pediatric psychology. She has served as a professor in multiple disciplines at universities and medical schools in the United States and abroad and as the patient safety director for a large healthcare system. She secured millions in federal funding to study the epidemiology of psychiatric drug use and to develop community-based strategies that reduce reliance on psychiatric...
info_outlineBrent Dean Robbins is a psychologist, scholar, and all-around thoughtful human whose work has profoundly shaped existential and humanistic psychology.
He is one of those rare thinkers who makes psychology feel alive—not just a collection of theories and data, but a field full of urgent, deeply human questions. He’s a professor of psychology and the director of the Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology program at Point Park University, where he’s helped create one of the most distinctive training programs in the country. He earned his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Duquesne University—home to some of the most beautifully dense phenomenological work you'll ever have to read twice—and is a licensed psychologist in Pennsylvania.
In this two-part conversation, we’ll explore Brent’s career—from his early work critiquing the overmedication of children to his scholarship on metabletics and cultural therapeutics. We’ll also discuss how he’s navigating his current health journey and cancer diagnosis as an existential psychologist and his hopes for the future of the field—how we might reimagine mental health care in ways that embrace the messy, wondrous, irreducible nature of being human.
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Thank you for being with us to listen to the podcast and read our articles this year. MIA is funded entirely by reader donations. If you value MIA, please help us continue to survive and grow. https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/
To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850
© Mad in America 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org