Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

The Mad in America podcast examines mental health with a critical eye by speaking with psychologists, psychiatrists and people with lived experience. When you hear such conversations, you realise that much of what is believed to be settled in mental health is actually up for debate. Is mental health a matter of faulty biology or is there more to it? Are the treatments used in psychiatry helpful or harmful in the long term? Are psychiatric diagnoses reliable? With the help of our guests, we examine these questions and so much more. This podcast is part of Mad in America’s mission to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care and mental health. We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change. On the podcast over the coming weeks, we will have interviews with experts and those with lived experience of the psychiatric system. Thank you for joining us as we discuss the many issues around rethinking mental health around the world. For more information visit madinamerica.com To contact us email podcasts@madinamerica.com

Examining Psychiatric Medication Tapering and Withdrawal: The Evolving Role of Pharmacists — A Conversation with Agnes Higgins and Cathal Cadogan 04/01/2026

Examining Psychiatric Medication Tapering and Withdrawal: The Evolving Role of Pharmacists — A Conversation with Agnes Higgins and Cathal Cadogan 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 psychiatric medication. He was recently involved in a priority setting partnership to identify priorities for future research on reducing and discontinuing psychiatric medicines. Agnes is a nurse, researcher and academic who has recently retired as a professor in mental health at the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Trinity College. She is a former Chairperson of the Board of Mental Health Reform, Ireland's leading service user organization, campaigning for improvements in mental health services. She is also currently a board member of , an innovative initiative combining the benefits of nature, meaningful participation, community and therapy to support mental health recovery. Their work is part of a wider examination of priorities for future research on reducing and stopping psychiatric medication, and we'll talk about this as well as the findings of their survey. We'll also talk about the role that pharmacists could potentially play when people are considering stopping their psychiatric drugs. *** 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 /episode/index/show/jfmoore/id/40642685

Spiritual Emergency and the Collective Work of Staying Alive: An Interview with Nisha Gupta 03/25/2026

Spiritual Emergency and the Collective Work of Staying Alive: An Interview with Nisha Gupta 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 psychological humanities, disseminating psychology to the public as art, including paintings, film, poetry, and literary memoir, for community healing and social change. Her artwork seeks to raise critical consciousness and empowerment regarding marginalized lived experiences, such as sexual and gender oppression, creative madness, and spiritual emergencies. In psychotherapy practice, she integrates depth and liberation psychotherapy perspectives. In this conversation, we talk about phenomenological filmmaking and what film can capture about distress, identity, time, and relationships that often elude other approaches to psychological research. We also talk about spiritual emergency and the phrase “dark night of the soul,” including the difference between those frameworks and the more familiar language of symptoms and disorders. Dr. Gupta also shares as a clinical psychologist. We discuss what helped, what did not, what clinicians tend to miss in these situations, and what it would mean to build a better set of responses around people going through them. Finally, we discuss liberation psychology and collective resilience, including the question of how to think about suffering when its sources are social and political, and how to avoid reducing resilience to individual “grit.” *** 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 /episode/index/show/jfmoore/id/40527125

The Political Systems Driving Abuse in Psychiatry: An Interview with Human Rights Lawyer Alicia Ely Yamin 03/18/2026

History, Eugenics, and an Inquiry into Mad Consciousness: A Conversation With Susanne Paola Antonetta 03/11/2026

How Our Blindness to Context Harms Patients and Breaks Practitioners: A Conversation With Kamaldeep Bhui 03/04/2026

UberTherapy and the Enshittification of our Relational Lives: Part 2 of our Interview with Elizabeth Cotton 02/18/2026

UberTherapy and the Enshittification of our Relational Lives: Part 1 of our Interview with Elizabeth Cotton 02/11/2026

Food First, Pharma Last - Part Two of our Interview with Chris Masterjohn 01/28/2026

Mitochondria and Energetic Failures - A New Understanding of Antidepressant Withdrawal? An Interview with Chris Masterjohn 01/21/2026

Why Critical Mental Health Knowledge Is Essential for Ethical Practice: An Interview with Jan DeFehr 01/14/2026

Why Critical Mental Health Knowledge Is Essential for Ethical Practice: An Interview with Jan DeFehr 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, (Canadian Scholars, 2025), offers a clear and accessible map of critical mental health scholarship. The book examines scientific critiques of diagnosis, the potential harms of psychiatric labels, the lack of transparency and procedural justice in services, anti-colonial critiques of mental health premises and practices, and the evidence on psychiatric drugs and the DSM. It also gathers non-pathologizing ways of helping that center relational, dialogical, anti-oppressive, and anti-colonial approaches, along with concrete tools for informed choice and everyday support outside of the dominant medical model. In our conversation, we talk about how Jan came to adopt critical perspectives, why she sees access to critical mental health knowledge as a prerequisite for ethical practice, and what it looks like when organizations take informed choice seriously. We move through the key chapters of the book, explore its implications for social workers, educators, and health professionals, and look at how communities can build forms of care that do not depend on diagnosis or coercion. *** 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 /episode/index/show/jfmoore/id/39715810

ADHD Diagnoses, Examining the Psyche, Withdrawal and PSSD Risks, ECT Harms and More: Robert Whitaker Answers Reader Questions 01/07/2026

Learning to Soar: A Conversation With Artist Kev G Mor 12/17/2025

Antidepressant Withdrawal: Finding an Astronomical Perspective - A Conversation with Safa Askeri 11/19/2025

Psychiatric Drugs: The Real World is Where the Harms Live 10/29/2025

Medical Organizations Turn Blind Eye to Harms of Maternal Antidepressant Use: A Conversation With Adam Urato and Joanna Moncrieff 10/08/2025

Medical Organizations Turn Blind Eye to Harms of Maternal Antidepressant Use: A Conversation With Adam Urato and Joanna Moncrieff On July 21st 2025, the FDA convened a 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. *** 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 Moore /episode/index/show/jfmoore/id/38496305

Psychotherapy, Spirituality, and Democratic Socialism: A Conversation with Frank Gruba-McCallister 09/24/2025

Psychotherapy, Spirituality, and Democratic Socialism: A Conversation with Frank Gruba-McCallister Frank Gruba-McCallister is a clinical psychologist, educator, and scholar whose career spans more than three decades of teaching and academic leadership. He served as Vice President of Academic Affairs at , where he helped to reorient the institution’s mission toward training socially responsible practitioners. His leadership and curricular reforms contributed to Adler’s doctoral program receiving the American Psychological Association’s Board of Educational Affairs Award for Innovative Practices in Graduate Education in 2007. He has also taught at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology and The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, and worked as a clinician in both medical settings and private practice. Throughout his career, Dr. Gruba-McCallister has been a steady voice at the intersection of critical psychology, humanistic and existential thought, and spiritual inquiry. He is the author of , a book that examines how internalized oppression and ideological mystification compound human suffering and how healing demands a deep and sometimes painful confrontation with illusions. His newest book, , published by University Professors Press, draws from liberation theology, critical theory, existential psychology, and transpersonal thought to explore the structural and spiritual roots of suffering. At its core is a call to restore moral responsibility, to reclaim compassion and justice as central to any meaningful model of care, and to invite those who seek to heal others to do so with humility, courage, and radical honesty. In our conversation, we discuss the origins of this work, the crises that shape our current moment, and what it might mean to envision psychotherapy as both a spiritual and political act. *** 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 Moore /episode/index/show/jfmoore/id/38265745

Science Under Pressure, Humanity at Stake: An Interview with John Ioannidis 09/10/2025

Therapy in the Age of Abandonment: A Conversation with Psychological Anthropologist Talia Weiner 09/03/2025

How to be a Critical Psychologist Without Losing Your Soul: A Conversation With Zenobia Morrill, José Giovanni Luiggi-Hernández and Justin Karter 08/13/2025

How to be a Critical Psychologist Without Losing Your Soul: A Conversation With Zenobia Morrill, José Giovanni Luiggi-Hernández and Justin Karter On the Mad in America podcast this week, we explore the importance of raising awareness of psychological approaches that challenge mainstream perspectives. Joining us today are three people who are practising clinical psychologists and who have written for Mad in America. Zenobia Morrill is a critical-liberation psychologist and psychology professor who received her doctorate from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her research interests include critical and liberation psychology, the psychotherapy process, and wider conceptual and ethical issues in psychology and psychiatry. José Giovanni Luiggi-Hernández is a clinical psychologist in private practice, a qualitative researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, a writer for Mad in America and part of the recently launched website. His interests include understanding the lived experiences of colonized people using phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and decolonial frameworks, LGBTQ issues and psychotherapy for physical health concerns. Also joining us is Mad in America’s lead research news editor, Justin Karter. A graduate in both psychology and journalism, Justin’s research and writing span topics in the philosophy of psychology, critical psychology, MAD studies, cross-cultural psychology, qualitative methods, and theories of counselling and psychotherapy. In this conversation, we discuss the possibilities opened up by adopting a critical mindset, identify some of the barriers to working in such a way, and share some key resources to help aspiring psychologists explore alternative approaches. Find a full transcript of this interview here: *** 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 Moore /episode/index/show/jfmoore/id/37758510

Is Dialogue the Best Medicine? A Conversation With Jaakko Seikkula 07/30/2025

“I Made it Through the Horrors of Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal” A Conversation with Comedian Dex Carrington 07/09/2025

Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy: A Conversation with Stijn Vanheule 06/25/2025

Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy: A Conversation with Stijn Vanheule 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 and delusions not as meaningless symptoms but as creative responses to existential disruptions. He emphasizes the importance of listening—clinically and socially—not for coherence imposed from the outside, but for the structure and logic within a person’s seemingly incoherent world. His approach challenges dominant psychiatric models that prioritize symptom suppression, calling instead for a therapeutic attitude grounded in humility and collaboration. In this interview, Vanheule discusses the role of hallucinations in restoring a shattered sense of meaning, the necessity of admitting one’s limitations as a clinician, and the importance of everyday practices—gardening, conversation, shared meals—in building connections that can anchor recovery. Using a depathologizing lens, he discusses that to overwhelming existential challenges that make us all vulnerable, psychosis might not be a crazy reaction after all. *** Find a full transcript of the interview here: 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 Moore /episode/index/show/jfmoore/id/37089315

A Therapist Navigating Antidepressant Withdrawal: Nelson Lee on the Power of the Present Moment 06/11/2025

“Progress Only Occurs when People Make Demands” Paolo del Vecchio Reflects on a Life of Federal Service 06/04/2025

The Poetics and Politics of Our Mental Health Metaphors: An Interview with Laurence Kirmayer 05/21/2025

The Poetics and Politics of Our Mental Health Metaphors: An Interview with Laurence Kirmayer 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 imbalance” or “trauma”—that reshape identity and possibility. He has helped pioneer integrative approaches that unite phenomenology and neuroscience, including a , as well as a for understanding suffering beyond reductive biological paradigms. His critiques extend to how , as well as how . Kirmayer’s scholarship on aligns with ongoing efforts by Indigenous psychologists and anthropologists to reframe trauma and healing through culturally grounded practices, as reflected in recent calling for a decolonial turn in psychology. Drawing on 4E cognitive science, he proposes that metaphors are not simply rhetorical tools but embedded in local social worlds. These shape how people experience distress and how clinicians make sense of it. His forthcoming book, Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Toward a Poetics of Illness Experience (Cambridge University Press, July 2025), extends these themes by exploring how metaphor, narrative, and imagination shape suffering and healing across cultures, while offering a critical account of the symbolic and political frameworks embedded in contemporary psychiatric and biomedical practice. In this wide-ranging conversation, Kirmayer explores the politics of diagnostic language, the structural roots of suffering, and the poetic potential of metaphor to disrupt conformity and open new avenues for healing. From the medicalization of culturally normative expressions of distress to the reification of trauma, Kirmayer shows how dominant frameworks can limit imagination, flatten complexity, and displace political realities with individualized solutions. He calls for a psychiatry that listens not only to symptoms but to the metaphors and metaphysics that animate people’s lives. *** 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 Moore /episode/index/show/jfmoore/id/36638065

Kermit Cole: Dialogical Therapy and Quantum Theory Walk Into a Bar… 05/07/2025

Kermit Cole: Dialogical Therapy and Quantum Theory Walk Into a Bar… 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 joined a mime troupe that toured the U.S. as well as Italy and Greece, inspired by his interest in humor as well as how connection arises in the spaces between words. One of his first films was a short titled , which is a film performed entirely without words. Another, which he directed in 1994 was titled . I met Kermit shortly after I published my book Mad in America in 2002. He was working at that time as a Residence Director of what might be called a halfway house in Cambridge called Wellmet. This was for people who had been discharged from or who were avoiding stays in psychiatric hospitals. The house was modeled to a degree after the Soteria Project. Then in 2012 after I published Anatomy of an Epidemic, Kermit, Louisa Putnam and I transformed my blog site into a web magazine, also called Mad in America. Kermit was the founding editor of the site, and for the first few years, he was something of a one-man band, posting science reviews, blogs and personal stories at a feverish pace. After retiring from that position, he trained in open dialog therapy, and Louisa and Kermit practiced dialogically inspired therapy with clients in New Mexico. Both Louisa and Kermit are Mad in America Board Members. *** A full transcript of this interview can be found here: 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 Moore /episode/index/show/jfmoore/id/36435705

Chemically Imbalanced: Joanna Moncrieff on the Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth 04/30/2025

Teralyn Sell and Jenn Schmitz: Breaking Out of the Prison of Prescribing and Finding the Freedom of Therapy 04/16/2025

Teralyn Sell and Jenn Schmitz: Breaking Out of the Prison of Prescribing and Finding the Freedom of Therapy 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 the co-host of the internationally acclaimed podcast, The Gaslit Truth, where she challenges conventional narratives around mental health and medication. Dr. Teralyn is dedicated to promoting safe medication practices, responsible tapering and a paradigm shift in mental health care, one that prioritizes brain health over symptom management. is redefining the field of psychology with a unique blend of expertise and lived experience. Holding a Master of Science in Clinical Psychology and having spent over a decade as a traditional therapist, Jenn took a bold step beyond the conventional boundaries of Western education and mental health treatment. Her personal struggle, marked by the challenging process of tapering off psychiatric medication, revealed insights that reshaped her entire approach to mental health. As a holistic, de-prescribing consultant, Jenn integrates psychological and brain health expertise with physical wellness, mindfulness and nutrition to safely guide the brain through the intricate process of medication tapering. Jenn hosts The Gaslit Truth podcast along with Dr. Teralyn and is a writer for the international wellness publication, Live, Love and Eat magazine. *** 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 Moore /episode/index/show/jfmoore/id/36149390

Psychology’s Small Stories and the Call of the Other: An Interview with David Goodman 04/09/2025

Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics: End of an Era for Independent Journals? An Interview With Giovanni Fava 03/26/2025

Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics: End of an Era for Independent Journals? An Interview With Giovanni Fava 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 Psychosomatics under Dr. Fava’s guidance presented a very different evidence base to its readers. First, his journal told of how clinical experiences should govern our understanding of the impact of psychiatric treatments, particularly over longer periods of time. Second, his journal told of how RCTs and meta-analyses when used to direct clinical practices can lead to harm. Third, his journal told of the corrupting influence of pharmaceutical money on the creation of psychiatric diagnoses and drug trials. When Dr. Fava became editor of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics in 1992, it had a low impact factor. When he resigned as editor in 2022, it had an impact factor that made it one of the most influential journals in psychiatry and psychology. He left the journal in good hands in 2022 and he remained involved as an honorary editor. However, in December, Karger fired one of the two editors in chief, Dr. Fava then resigned as honorary editor, and most of the editorial board resigned as well. The future of this journal, which had been so essential to our understanding of the impact of psychiatric treatments is now unclear. *** 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 Moore /episode/index/show/jfmoore/id/35788895

Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

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