psychophobia* podcast

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” — Václav Havel — — Stevie Nicks lost her creativity , her zest for life, and her body to a benzodiazepine cocktail prescribed by a psychiatrist she trusted. A friend who tried the same regimen was on his back by evening. It took three months in a clinic to de...

"These are not the side effects of the medication. These are the effects of the medication. " — R.D. Laing — — The former head of the American Psychiatric Association once called Robert Whitaker "a menace to society." Bob says he'd put it on his gravestone. In this conversation, Michael traces the through-line from the unlikely apprenticeships that taught Bob to take seriously the people most of t...

“ I am still learning. “ — Michelangelo, at age 87 — Sandy Halperin was a Harvard professor so brilliant he could deliver two-hour lectures from memory. A decade into his early-onset dementia diagnosis, Steve Orfield says he was still sharper than most people who didn’t have the condition. When Steve asked CNN’s producers why their ongoing feature kept telling the story of Sandy’s decline rather t...

“ I mean Negative Capability , that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” -- John Keats — Certainty is seductive. It simplifies a noisy world, ends evaluation, and offers the relief of a settled answer. But the moment we feel certain, something else quietly closes down: curiosity, and with it, the capacity to perce...

psychophobia* podcast '“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves." — Etty Hillesum — — In a Rome Bookstore, Nita stumbled on R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self in her early twenties. She never quite recovered. What followed wasn’t a career path - it was a calling. Drawn to London in the early 1970s, Nita Gage entered the orbit of Laing’s radical communities,...

psychophobia* podcast “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”— Samuel Johnson — — Alcohol is one of the most culturally protected forms of psychological escape - normalized, celebrated, and rarely examined with the seriousness it demands. Beneath its social acceptability lies something more unsettling: a substance that numbs not only pain, but possibil...

psychophobia* podcast “You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”― Terence McKenna — The psychedelic renaissance is being sold as a revolution in healing- but beneath the hype lies something far messier...

psychophobia* podcast “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal — — Inside one of the quietest rooms on earth, the usual assumptions about the mind begin to break down. The anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories was originally built for acoustic research, but it has become something else entirely - a place where people encounter their...

What if the institutions designed to help us understand the human psyche are actually afraid of them? Hosted by Dr. Michael R. Montgomery, this podcast explores the uncomfortable questions. Together, we’ll examine how the mental health systems meant to heal us instead perpetuate cycles of dependency. Welcome to the Psychophobia* Podcast. — Follow us on * psychophobia.com — Substack — LinkedIn — @p...

psychophobia* podcast “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. ” — R.D. Laing — — What if the institutions designed to help us understand the human psyche are actually afraid of them? Hosted by Dr. Michael R. Montgomery, this podcast explores the uncomfortable questions. Together, we’ll examine how the mental health systems meant to heal us instead perpetuate cycles of depe...