Medical Organizations Turn Blind Eye to Harms of Maternal Antidepressant Use: A Conversation With Adam Urato and Joanna Moncrieff
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Release Date: 10/08/2025
Examining Psychiatric Medication Tapering and Withdrawal: The Evolving Role of Pharmacists — A Conversation with Agnes Higgins and Cathal Cadogan
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, my name is James. Today, we are discussing the experiences of people who have attempted to stop taking psychiatric drugs. These experiences are captured in a survey undertaken by the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Joining me to talk about this work are Cathal Cadogan and Agnes Higgins, both from Trinity College. Cathal is an Associate Professor in Practice of Pharmacy at Trinity College. His research focuses on developing supports to help people make informed decisions about starting and stopping...
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Spiritual Emergency and the Collective Work of Staying Alive: An Interview with Nisha Gupta
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Nisha Gupta is an existential phenomenologist, a depth psychotherapist, a creativity scholar, and an artist. She's an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia and earned her PhD in clinical psychology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. She's also, if she doesn't mind me saying, a bit of a rising star as an early career psychologist, having won early career awards from the APA divisions for both humanistic and qualitative psychology. Dr. Gupta's work centers on lived experience and the problems of form and method in the field. She is an advocate of the...
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The Political Systems Driving Abuse in Psychiatry: An Interview with Human Rights Lawyer Alicia Ely Yamin
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Alicia Ely Yamin is the Director of the Global Health and Rights Project and a lecturer at Harvard Law School. She's also an adjunct senior lecturer on health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Senior Advisor on Human Rights and Health Policy at Partners in Health. Alicia is known globally for her work on the right to health, economic and social rights, and reproductive justice. She has spent much of her professional life in Latin America and East Africa, including co-founding a health and human rights program with the Asociación Pro Derechos...
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History, Eugenics, and an Inquiry into Mad Consciousness: A Conversation With Susanne Paola Antonetta
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Susanne Paola Antonetta is an accomplished writer and poet, the author of numerous books, and in 2001 her book Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, won a prestigious American Book Award. Her latest book is . *** 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 2026. Produced by James Moore
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How Our Blindness to Context Harms Patients and Breaks Practitioners: A Conversation With Kamaldeep Bhui
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Kamaldeep Bhui is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford and Honorary Professor at Queen Mary University of London. He is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking work on cultural psychiatry, ethnic inequalities in mental health, and the social determinants of distress. In recognition of his contributions to mental health research and policy, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). He has written extensively on the grim reality of minorities facing higher rates of psychiatric detention and coercion. In an era of algorithmic checklists and...
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UberTherapy and the Enshittification of our Relational Lives: Part 2 of our Interview with Elizabeth Cotton
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Elizabeth Cotton is Associate Professor of Responsible Business at the University of Leicester and the founder of , which carries out socially engaged research on mental health and work. She has worked with health teams and trade unions, practiced as a psychotherapist in the NHS, and now runs the Digital Therapy Project, a group of UK and US researchers studying the future of therapy from both sides of the relationship. In her new book, , she explores the effects of reorganizing mental health care around the logic of the app store. Therapy is now something you can scroll through on your phone,...
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UberTherapy and the Enshittification of our Relational Lives: Part 1 of our Interview with Elizabeth Cotton
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Elizabeth Cotton is Associate Professor of Responsible Business at the University of Leicester and the founder of , which carries out socially engaged research on mental health and work. She has worked with health teams and trade unions, practiced as a psychotherapist in the NHS, and now runs the Digital Therapy Project, a group of UK and US researchers studying the future of therapy from both sides of the relationship. In her new book, , she explores the effects of reorganizing mental health care around the logic of the app store. Therapy is now something you can scroll through on your phone,...
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Food First, Pharma Last - Part Two of our Interview with Chris Masterjohn
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
This week, we are joined by Chris Masterjohn, PhD. Chris is a nutritional scientist, a former professor, and the founder of . With a PhD in nutritional science and years of research in mitochondrial biology, Chris’s work focuses on translating peer-reviewed science into practical tools for human health. At Mitome, Dr. Masterjohn pioneered the first analysis designed to measure mitochondrial respiratory chain function directly, identifying individual energy bottlenecks and guiding personalized science-backed protocols to optimize the system responsible for over 90% of cellular energy...
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Mitochondria and Energetic Failures - A New Understanding of Antidepressant Withdrawal? An Interview with Chris Masterjohn
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
This week, we are joined by Chris Masterjohn, PhD. Chris is a nutritional scientist, a former professor, and the founder of . With a PhD in nutritional science and years of research in mitochondrial biology, Chris’s work focuses on translating peer-reviewed science into practical tools for human health. At Mitome, Dr. Masterjohn pioneered the first analysis designed to measure mitochondrial respiratory chain function directly, identifying individual energy bottlenecks and guiding personalized science-backed protocols to optimize the system responsible for over 90% of cellular energy...
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Why Critical Mental Health Knowledge Is Essential for Ethical Practice: An Interview with Jan DeFehr
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Jan N. DeFehr is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Winnipeg and an associate of and a member of the . She is also a member of the . Before entering academia, she spent many years as a clinical social worker, working alongside people who were trying to make sense of their distress within, and often in spite of, the mental health system. Her teaching, research, and course development focus on building public access to critical analyses of that system, drawing on the work of clients and survivors of psychiatry, practitioners, and scholars. Her new book,...
info_outlineOn July 21st 2025, the FDA convened a hearing on maternal use of antidepressants during pregnancy and the impact this use has on fetal development. Around 400,000 children in the United States are born each year whose mothers took antidepressants while pregnant, and so it's easy to see the societal importance of this topic. What are the risks to the fetus, the newborn, and the long-term development of that child? Adam Urato and Joanna Moncrieff were members of that FDA panel, and so too were several others well-known to MIA readers, including David Healy and Joseph Witt-Doerring.
The purpose of the panel was to assess whether the FDA needed to put a warning on antidepressants related to their use in pregnancy, and most on the panel spoke of research that told of the need to do so. However, after the panel concluded, the American Psychiatric Association and other medical associations, most notably the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, responded with what can only be described as howls of outrage, issuing press releases and telling the public that the panel was biased and that the real risk during pregnancy was untreated mental illness.
These medical organizations asserted that the increased risk of adverse outcomes for children born to depressed mothers is due to the illness and not the drug, and that there was plenty of evidence that antidepressants were a helpful and even life-saving treatment for maternal depression.
Here is where we are today. That FDA hearing put two narratives on public display, and most media reports embraced the narrative put forth by the medical organizations. What we will do today is review the evidence that exists on this topic and the response by the medical guilds to a public airing of that evidence.
Dr. Adam Urato is Chief of Maternal and Fetal Medicine at the Metro West Medical Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, and he has been speaking and writing about the risk of medications used during pregnancy for years. Dr. Joanna Moncrieff is a UK psychiatrist and researcher who was a co-founder of the Critical Psychiatry Network and is well known for her research on the safety and efficacy of psychiatric drugs.
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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