Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

This week on the MIA podcast we are providing the audio taken from our recent psychiatric drug withdrawal town hall held in May 2021. For our third discussion, we are examining protracted problems that can arise after psychiatric drug withdrawal. Sometimes referred to as post-acute or post-withdrawal syndromes, these experiences can include chronic health problems and sexual dysfunction. What do w...

Hanna Pickard is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. She is also appointed with the William H. Miller Department of Philosophy, the Berman Institute of Bioethics, and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Her expertise is deep and spread across a wide variety of disciplines. As an analytic philosopher, she specializes in philos...

K atrina Michelle is a psychologist and the founder and director of The Curious Spirit , a transpersonally oriented psychotherapeutic practice that encourages transcendent personal exploration to remedy psychological suffering. She is a holistic psychotherapist currently serving as faculty at Columbia University School of Social Work and The Institute for the Development of Human Arts . In additio...

H annah Zeavin is a leading scholar investigating how mediated communications and technology impact our intimate relations. Her most recent work tackles teletherapy and digital mental health communications, which have seen a boon throughout the pandemic . Zeavin is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at the University of California, Berkeley, and affiliated with the Berkeley Cente...

*** Our next psychiatric drug withdrawal town hall discussion will be held on May 14 2021, register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/150023595613 *** This week on the MIA podcast we are providing the audio taken from our recent psychiatric drug withdrawal town hall held in March 2021. This discussion was aired live on March 12, 2021 and the panelists are Dr Giovanni Fava, Dr Peter Groot, Dr Ma...

This episode of "Mad in the Family" discusses the links between nutrition and mental health, and the science that's showing that diet may help improve or even prevent mental health issues in children and adults. Julie Rucklidge: "Taking a one-a-day gummy bear might prevent you from getting scurvy, but it's not meeting the optimal amount that your brain needs." Julia's interest in nutrition and men...

Anne Guy is a member of the council for evidence-based psychiatry ( CEP ) and works with the secretariat for the All-party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence. She's the lead editor and author of " Guidance for psychological therapists: enabling conversations with clients taking or withdrawing from prescribed psychiatric drugs ." (an abridged version can be found here ). This guide...

P eter Sterling, now retired from the University of Pennsylvania, is a well-known neuroscientist, having co-authored a popular text, Principles of Neural Design . He is a lifelong political activist, and historians of psychiatry may remember his public criticisms of psychiatric treatments in the 1970s, most notably of electroshock and antipsychotics. He could also be described as an ethnographer,...

B ethany Morris is an assistant professor of psychology at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she teaches and does theoretical and qualitative research. Dr. Morris is a transdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges critical psychology, literature, philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, and film studies. Early in her career, at Prince Edward Island University and Brock University...

This week on the MIA podcast, we discuss a recent paper that considers the support provided by online support groups when people seek help for psychiatric drug withdrawal. The paper is entitled ' The role of Facebook groups in the management and raising of awareness of antidepressant withdrawal: is social media filling the void left by health services? ' It was published in the journal Therapeutic...

A ctor, singer, writer, and civil rights activist Donzaleigh Abernathy is goddaughter of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and daughter of the Reverend Dr. Ralph David Abernathy, King's best friend and partner in the civil rights movement — who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and became president of it after King's assassination on April 4, 1968. Her mother was civi...

H elen Spandler is a Professor of Mental Health Studies at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. She is the managing editor of Asylum, a non-profit radical mental health magazine . She currently holds the Welcome Trust Investigator Award and is the principal investigator on a new research project about the role of MadZines (comics and graphic memoirs created by people with lived experien...

This week on the Mad in America podcast we turn our attention to prescription-drug-induced akathisia and joining me to discuss this is Jill Nickens. Jill is the president and founder of the Akathisia Alliance for Education and Research , a nonprofit organization formed by people who have personal experience of akathisia. The group includes biochemists, psychologists, nurses, attorneys, business ow...

J anice Haaken is a professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, and a documentary filmmaker. In addition to her work as a professor at Portland State University, Haaken has taught as a Fulbright scholar at Durham University (UK) and University College Cork (Ireland) and as a visiting professor at London School of Economics (UK), York University (UK), and...

This episode of "Mad in the Family" focuses on a non-drug method to bringing out the best in challenging children, particularly those diagnosed with "ADHD." It is called the Nurtured Heart Approach® and its essence is that, in the words of our guest, "the same intensity that drives people crazy is actually the source of a child's greatness." He is the approach's creator, family therapist Howard Gl...

L ucas Richert is the George Urdang Chair in the History of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and historical director for the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy. His work explores prescription and illicit drugs, the American counterculture, and the influence of various power structures within and beyond psychiatry. As a scholar of the pharmaceutical industry, Richert enc...

This week we are sharing the audio taken from our recent psychiatric drug withdrawal town hall held on January 15th 2021. This was our initial, scene-setting discussion and the panelists are Adele Framer, also known as Alto Strata founder of surviving antidepressants, Luke Montagu, co-founder of the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, Swapnil Gupta, a psychiatrists with a specila interest in de...

Mad in America, in partnership with the Council for Evidence Based Psychiatry and the International Institute for Psychiatric Drug withdrawal is arranging a series of free to attend online town hall discussions on psychiatric drug withdrawal. We aim to explore what we do and don't know about safe withdrawal from antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines and stimulants. We will discuss the k...

T homas Teo is a Professor of Psychology in the Historical, Theoretical, and Critical Studies of Psychology Program at York University, Toronto, Canada. He has spent his 20+ year career challenging the status quo in academic psychology. His unique approach to research has been described as both critical and meta-psychological. He often takes the discipline of psychology itself, including its metho...

P iers Gooding is a Mozilla Foundation fellow (2020) and researcher at the Melbourne Social Equity Institute at the University of Melbourne Law School. His main interests are disability law and policy, international human rights law, the law and politics of mental health, and empirical legal research. Gooding describes his scholarship as an interdisciplinary undertaking that blends theoretical inq...

J ennifer White is one of the founders of the Critical Suicidology Network, a growing international network of scholars interested in exploring alternatives to biomedical approaches to suicide prevention. Critical suicidology brings together persons with lived experience, mental health professionals, researchers, and activists " to rethink what it means to study suicide and enact practices of suic...

Tanya Luhrmann is a Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford. Her work explores how cultural contexts shape the experience of mental distress, particularly voice-hearing and the symptoms associated with psychosis. She also turns the lens on the practice of Western psychiatry itself, investigating how the field represents the mind and how these representations influen...

dele Framer, also known by her online handle Altostrata, is the founder of SurvivingAntidepressants.org , a critical and comprehensive peer-support website that features several thousand case histories of psychiatric drug withdrawal. The site is a hub of information on the topic, highlighting methods of safe drug tapering and recovery and underscoring the humanity of those in the grips of withdraw...

N atalie Campo, MD, is an integrative psychiatrist practicing in Nashville, TN. She became interested in holistic treatment modalities in her first year of medical school at the University of Texas. In that same year, she was awarded an NIH grant to study infectious encephalitis in the Amazon Jungle. Upon her return, she sought out a physician whose primary care practice included holistic modaliti...

Kirk Schneider is currently running for President of the American Psychological Association (APA). He is a licensed psychologist and adjunct faculty at Saybrook University and Teachers College, Columbia University. He is well-known as the leading spokesperson for integrative, existential, and humanistic approaches to psychology, which emphasize the therapeutic relationship and the importance of co...