Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

On MIA Radio this week, in the first of a number of podcasts focussed on parenting issues, we interview Dr. Craig Wiener, a  licensed psychologist based in Worcester, Massachusetts, who specializes in the treatment of children, adolescents, and families. In addition to over 30 years of private practice, Dr. Wiener is an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health...

P at Bracken is a psychiatrist who questions many of the fundamental assumptions of his field. He has worked as a psychiatrist in rural Ireland, inner-city and multi-ethnic parts of the UK, and in Uganda, East Africa. Bracken, who holds doctoral degrees in both medicine and philosophy, calls for a movement toward critical psychiatry. He was one of the people involved in starting the Critical Psych...

MIA's Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Diana Kopua about the Mahi a Atua approach, the global mental health movement, and the importance of language and narratives in how we understand our world and ease our suffering. D iana Kopua's life resembles the stories she uses in her work. From a psychiatric community nurse to the head of the department of psychiatry for Hauora Tairawhiti in Gisborne, New Zealand,...

This week on MIA Radio , we present a special episode of the MIA podcast to join in the many events being held for World Benzodiazepine Awareness Day, July 11, 2019. 2019 represents the fourth annual awareness day and each year it's held on July 11 which is a significant date because it is the birthday of Professor Heather Ashton. Dr. Ashton is a world-leading expert in benzodiazepines and wrote t...

This week on MIA Radio , we present a special episode of the MIA podcast to join in the many events being held for World Benzodiazepine Awareness Day, July 11, 2019. 2019 represents the fourth annual awareness day and each year it's held on July 11 which is a significant date because it is the birthday of Professor Heather Ashton. Dr. Ashton is a world-leading expert in benzodiazepines and wrote t...

Last year, Lucy Johnstone and her colleagues in the UK launched the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), a set of ideas that represented a sharp departure from the biomedical conceptions that animate the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). This framework shifts the notion of "what is wrong with you" in the DSM to "what has happened to you," and by doing so...

This week on  MIA Radio , we continue our series of discussions with Doctor Lee Coleman. In previous podcasts, we have discussed Lee's  views as a critical psychiatrist  and the role of  psychiatry in the courtroom . This time, we turn our attention to the need for action to address the inherent power held by psychiatry and how society might respond. In this episode we discuss: How language has th...

On MIA Radio this week, MIA's Tim Beck interviewed Dr. Felicity Thomas and Dr. Richard Byng. Dr. Thomas is a Senior Research Fellow in the Medical School and a Senior Research Fellow on the Cultural Contexts of Health in the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter. She is also a co-director (with Professor Mark Jackson) of the  WHO Collaborating Centre on Culture and Health  and works cl...

On MIA Radio this week, MIA's Gavin Crowell-Williamson interviewed Adriane Fugh-Berman, MD, a professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology and in the Department of Family Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC). She is the director of PharmedOut , a GUMC research and education project promoting rational prescribing and exposing the effects of pharmaceutical marketing...

On MIA Radio this week, MIA's Peter Simons interviewed David Cohen, PhD, a social worker, professor of social welfare, and Associate Dean for Research at the Luskin School of Public Affairs of the University of California, Los Angeles. He discussed his path to becoming a researcher focused on mental health, coercive practices, and discontinuation from psychiatric drugs. He studies the social const...

On MIA Radio this week, MIA's Akansha Vaswani interviewed Dr. John Read, a clinical psychologist at the University of East London, about the influences on his work and research on mental health over the years. John worked for nearly 20 years as a Clinical Psychologist and manager of mental health services in the UK and the USA, before joining the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1994, where...

This week on MIA Radio , we present our second chat with Doctor Lee Coleman. In the first interview  in this series, we discussed Lee's career, his views as a critical psychiatrist and his 1984 book Reign of Error .  For this second interview, we focus on psychiatry in the courtroom and why the psychiatric expert witness role may be failing both the individual on trial and society at large. We als...

  On MIA Radio this week, MIA's Jessica Janze interviewed Dr. Jonathan Raskin, in the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz where he serves as department chair and teaches classes in psychology and counselor education. Dr. Raskin's research is focused on constructivist meaning-based approaches in psychology and counseling. He recently authored a textbook titled...

Science and Pseudoscience of Mental Health Podcast: Episode 3 This past week, I had the great pleasure to talk with Dr. Kelly Brogan, a leading voice in natural approaches to women's mental health. Dr. Brogan began her career as a conventional psychiatrist, but following the birth of her first child, she felt bereft of energy and mental clarity and was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition called...

On MIA Radio this week, MIA's Zenobia Morrill interviews Dr. Vance Trudeau, a professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Dr. Trudeau describes a recent study he conducted, alongside a team of researchers, led by Dr. Marilyn Vera-Chang, that has implications for understanding of the long-term impact of antidepressant drug exposure ( see MIA report ). The study, titled Transgenerational hypoco...

This week on MIA Radio , we chat with Doctor Lee Coleman. Lee trained in psychiatry during the 1960s, quickly adopting a sceptical attitude to the newly emerging field of biological psychiatry and rejecting the idea that drugs could be beneficial for so-called 'mental disorders'. By the early 1970s, Lee's professional life was divided between a small home-based practice of psychotherapy and a vari...

Interview by Peter Simons. Dr. Mark Horowitz is a training psychiatrist and researcher and recently co-authored, with Dr. David Taylor, a review of antidepressant withdrawal that was published in  Lancet Psychiatry, which we've written about here at Mad in America (see here) . Their article suggests that tapering off antidepressants over months or even years is more successful at preventing withdr...

This week, MIA Radio presents the fifth in a series of interviews on the topic of the global "mental health" movement." This series is being developed through a UMASS Boston initiative supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundation. The interviews are being led by UMASS PhD students who also comprise the Mad in America research news team. We interview Dr. Gail Hornstein, a Professor of Psyc...

This week on  MIA Radio , we turn our attention to Open Dialogue and we chat with psychotherapist and Open Dialogue trainer Alita Taylor. Alita is a licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, trainer and facilitator based in Tacoma, Washington USA. Her passion is working from a community-based, non-expert, need-adapted Open Dialogue perspective, which utilizes social networks, family, and co-facilitati...

This week on  MIA Radio , we interview Professor Jim van Os. Professor van Os is Chairman of the Division of Neuroscience at Utrecht University Medical Centre, Utrecht, The Netherlands, and Visiting Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at King's College, Institute of Psychiatry in London. He trained in Psychiatry in Casablanca, Bordeaux and the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley Royal Hospi...

In this second interview in our Science and Pseudoscience of Mental Health series, Dr. Sharna Olfman interviews Dr. Darcia Narvaez.  In 1955, Erich Fromm published a book called The Sane Society . The basic premise is that cultures that support our existential needs for love, community, autonomy, creative expression, purpose, meaning, and communion with nature, enable us to become fully actualized...

When we discuss the issue of forced treatment, coercive mental health interventions like involuntary commitment, forced drugging, and electroconvulsive therapy usually come to mind. But force and coercion can be much more subtle. Many researchers and thought leaders have argued that our society mandates us to be happy and perform well-being at all times through cultural norms, media depictions, an...

This week on MIA Radio , we interview Dr. Sandy Steingard. Dr. Steingard is Medical Director at Howard Center, a community mental health center where she has worked for the past 21 years. She is also Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the College of Medicine of the University of Vermont. For more than 25 years, her clinical practice has primarily included patients who have experienced p...

This week, MIA Radio presents the fourth in a series of interviews on the topic of the global "mental health" movement." This series is being developed through a UMASS Boston initiative supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundation. The interviews are being led by UMASS PhD students who also comprise the Mad in America research news team. Over the past three weeks, we have published interv...

Today, we bring you the third in our series of podcasts on the topic of the global mental health movement. Part one of the series featured Dr Melissa Raven and part two featured Jhilmil Breckenridge and Dr Bhargavi Davar. These interviews are led by our Mad in America research news team. In this episode, we interview Dr China Mills . China participated in organizing the open letter in response to...