Mad in the World

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Channel • 6 Shows

Mental Health

Mental Health

Updated twice weekly
Mental Health

Mental Health

Updated twice weekly
Mental Health

Mental Health

Updated 4 May
Science

Science

Updated weekly
Mental Health

Mental Health

Updated 01/02/2025
Mental Health

Mental Health

Updated 06/12/2023

6 days ago

Meeting Life Unmedicated: Aging, Protracted Withdrawal and Healing - A Conversation With Marsha Zaritsky

Marsha Zaritsky is a licensed mental health therapist certified in Internal Family Systems. She joins us to explain how her experience with polypharmacy and psychiatric drug withdrawal has changed and informed how she practices. *** 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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

6 days ago

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32 min
20 May

Faith, Culture, and Coercion: An Interview with Cultural Psychiatrist G. Eric Jarvis

Eric Jarvis is a Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University whose work brings attention to areas often overlooked in mainstream psychiatry, including religion, coercion, the social determinants of psychosis, and culture. He directs the Cultural Consultation Service, the First Episode Psychosis Program, and the Culture and Psychosis Working Group at the Jewish General Hospital, and is Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry. His research looks closely at how religious belief, spiritual practice, moral worlds, language, migration, racism, and social context shape how people experience distress, meaning, and healing. In this conversation, we explore how faith, culture, and power shape mental health practice. We discuss Jarvis's work on religion and spirituality in cultural psychiatry, his research on culture and the social causes of psychosis, and his studies of coercion in first-episode psychosis. We also talk about category fallacies, looping effects, and what happens when biomedical explanations of suffering collide with spiritual, familial, and community-based understandings of distress. *** 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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

20 May

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47 min
6 May

Kindling Our Inner Fire: A Residential Program Where Drug Tapering is the Norm

Beatrice Birch is the Founder and Director of Inner Fire, a residential program in rural Vermont, which is unique in one particular way. It provides support for tapering from psychiatric drugs, including antipsychotics, which is an essential aspect of the therapy. In this interview, Beatrice introduces Inner Fire, tells us about the programme and staff and explains how kindling our inner fire can hold up a mirror that tells people they are worthy and valuable. *** 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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

6 May

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40 min
29 Apr

The Madness Pill: How Psychedelics and Stimulants Shaped Biological Psychiatry — An Interview with Justin Garson

Justin Garson is a philosopher and historian of science at the City University of New York. He has published several books and articles on biology, the mind, and madness, including Madness: A Philosophical Exploration in 2022. He also contributes to Psychology Today and Aeon. His latest book, The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia, was published by St. Martin's Press in April 2026. In this interview, Justin joins us to talk about the work of Solomon Snyder, whose discoveries ushered in the era of biological psychiatry. We also talk about the race to develop new psychiatric drugs based on his research and the implications for our understanding of psychosis. *** 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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

29 Apr

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44 min
02/12/2017

George Atwood - Shattered Worlds, the Experience of Personal Annihilation

This week on MIA Radio, we interview Dr. George Atwood. Dr. Atwood has devoted a substantial part of his life to the study and treatment of what he refers to as 'so-called psychosis'. He has authored or coauthored several books, including The Abyss of madness published in 2011 and more than one hundred articles. In the episode we discuss: The story of how Dr. Atwood came to be interested in "so-called psychosis," including what piqued his interest as a high school student, and his work under mentors Austin DesLauriers and Silvan Tomkins. An overview of his more recent work on intersubjective theory with collaborator and friend, Robert Stolorow. After studying what he refers to as "madness" for over 50 years, Dr. Atwood offers his perspective that madness is not a disease or illness existing within a person, but a subjective experience of self-dissolution or catastrophe. How diagnostic classification systems can result in the false reification of mental diseases in a way that obscures individual realities. The phenomenological approach, or the study of individual human subjective experiences, as offering a hopeful future in a shifting away from "illness" or "disorder" frameworks. How psychotherapy, as a healing process, includes the relational context between clinician and patient, meriting a dedication to personal histories and contexts rather than overt symptoms. The history of the term "schizophrenia," and how terms such as these are embedded in a Cartesian medical model. A few of Dr. Atwood's clinical cases and particularly his perspectives on "so-called psychosis" and "so-called bipolar disorder." Dr. George Atwood's Personal Website with Works and Lectures To get in touch with us email: podcasts@madinamerica.com © Mad in America 2017

02/12/2017

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55 min
21/12/2023

Shamanism and the Celtic shaman path towards healing

We are delighted to be presenting this third episode of Fields of Healing where we discuss a healing field that is becoming more and more visible and popular within Irish healing circles. Shamanism is what many people might think of as something pagan and definitely something from 'over there', maybe South America or Siberia or Mongolia, not something Irish. Yes, it is something from 'over there' for sure, though more accurately something associated with indigenous healing practices in any part of the world. In Ireland, much of our traditional indigenous healing practices and even words have been disappeared. By various colonial usurpers, latterly by the catholic church and probably significantly influenced by the so called age of reason and science. Of course, healing practices, medicine men and women, remained in folklore and to a large extent perhaps could only survive within this dimension until recent decades, where we have seen a huge increase in interest and practices grounded in our very own indigenous healing. Celtic shamanism has re-emerged within this development and even still, lost words and descriptions are slowly beginning to emerge that give meaning to these practices. For now, shamanism can and does offer a way of being that encompasses this old and contemporary spiritual holistic healing modality.

21/12/2023

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55 min
8 Apr

The Fight for the Soul of Psychotherapy: An Interview with Linda Michaels

Linda Michaels is a psychologist in private practice in Chicago and a co-founder of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN). She trained at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology and completed the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy program at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. Before becoming a clinician, she worked in marketing, innovation, and management consulting, including work with organizations in the U.S. and Latin America. Michaels is the chair and co-founder of PsiAN, a public-facing effort focused on helping people understand different forms of psychotherapy and advocate for the kind of care they are seeking. She is also a Consulting Editor at Psychoanalytic Inquiry and Clinical Associate Faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. She is currently a Fellow at the Lauder Institute Global MBA program. In this conversation, we trace her path from market research to psychotherapy and then to organizing. We talk about what clients say they want from therapy and how training, insurance, and digital platforms have reshaped the conditions under which psychotherapy is practiced and accessed. We also discuss her writing and research, including PsiAN's national survey work on public attitudes toward therapy ("Going Beneath the Surface: What People Want from Therapy") and a follow-up paper published in 2025 ("The Therapy World Has Changed: Where are We Now?"). We talk about her 2025 article in The American Psychoanalyst, "Corporations in the Consulting Room: What do we stand for, and what stands in our way?" and her edited volume, Advancing Psychotherapy for the Next Generation: Humanizing Mental Health Policy and Practice. Linda also recounts some of the advocacy work she's done and the adversity PsiAN has faced, including being sued by a major therapy platform, as well as how institutional alliances across our professional organizations are reshaping the contemporary mental health marketplace. *** 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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

8 Apr

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1hr 11min
26/05/2021

Hannah Pickard - Responsibility Without Blame in Therapeutic Communities

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 philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, moral psychology, and clinical ethics. She also worked for a decade at The Oxfordshire Complex Needs Service, a specialist service in the NHS for people diagnosed with personality disorders and complex needs. Her work tends to address the sticky debates that arise in clinical practice. She has over 35 academic publications and has co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction. Pickard maintains an important thread between clinical work in the real world and her philosophical writings, attending to topics like the nature of mental disorders, delusions, agency, character, emotions, self-harm, violence, placebos, therapeutic relationships, decision-making capacity, the self and social identity, and attitudes towards mental disorder and crime. In this interview, she discusses her novel and possibly controversial model for understanding addiction, the numerous shortcomings of the neurobiological model, the importance of centering patient agency, and her work in therapeutic communities.

26/05/2021

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57 min
07/10/2017

Bonnie Burstow and Nick Walker - An Introduction to Cognitive Liberty

This week, Mad in America editor Emily Sheera Cutler presents the first in a series of interviews that examine the many important issues around forced treatment and cognitive liberty. The series will examine philosophical, theological, and sociological perspectives on coercive treatment. In this first part, Emily interviews two well known and very respected academics and activists Bonnie Burstow and Nick Walker. Central to both Bonnie and Nick's work is the concept of cognitive liberty or freedom and integrity of the mind. Early proponents of cognitive liberty have defined it as the right to control one's own consciousness and be free from mind-altering drugs and technologies, as well as the right to use mind-enhancing drugs and technologies without facing legal consequences. Contemporary proponents of cognitive liberty have expanded the definition to include the right to experience and express each and every thought, feeling, state of mind, and belief as long as it does not harm anyone else. Both Bonnie and Nick describe cognitive liberty as the right to express oneself authentically. In this first episode, they get to the core of why so many human rights activists oppose forced treatment – it can interfere with people's rights to be themselves. In this episode we discuss: How Bonnie became an antipsychiatry activist and scholar, and why she sees the institution of psychiatry as a human rights violation How Nick became a neurodiversity scholar through his involvement with the Autistic rights movement The difference between the neurodiversity paradigm, which views neurological, mental, and cognitive differences on the natural spectrum of human diversity, and the pathology paradigm, which assumes there is a right way or healthy way of being and to differ from it is unhealthy What it means for each person to have cognitive liberty and be able to express their own unique way of being and processing the world without repercussions How psychiatry curtails our cognitive liberty and freedom of mind by pathologizing difference to justify forceful and coercive measures The social model of disability, which states that people are disabled by lack of access and discrimination, not by medical conditions or internal deficits How the social model of disability intersects with neurodiversity and antipsychiatry but also falls short That Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) constitutes a human rights abuse against Autistic children, forcing and coercing them to act more normal and less different That other behaviour therapies and even humanistic therapies can be coercive as well That the autism industry profits off of the pathology paradigm, convincing parents there is something wrong with their Autistic children and that it is not okay to be Autistic, and their children need to be subjected to ABA and other "treatments" How antipsychiatry and neurodiversity intersect with feminism and queer studies Why it is necessary for educators to teach students "mad literacy" from an early age The importance of writing and publishing literature with accurate, positive representations of neurodivergent and Mad people How we can build communities in which people support one another through emotional distress without violating anyone's autonomy or restricting anyone's freedom Why the conventional notion of "suicide prevention" is problematic and can serve to take away people's coping skills How the ideas of somatic therapy can help us support people in distress Relevant Links Bonnie Burstow Nick Walker Bonnie Burstow's articles for Mad in America The Bonnie Burstow Scholarship in Antipsychiatry Autonomous Press Throw Away the Master's Tools: Liberating Ourselves from the Pathology Paradigm by Nick Walker Neuroqueer: An Introduction by Nick Walker The social model of disability vs. the medical model of disability To get in touch with us email: podcasts@madinamerica.com © Mad in America 2017

07/10/2017

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1hr 18min
22 Apr

Finding God and Leaving Psychiatry: An Interview With Kelsey Osgood

Kelsey Osgood is the author of How to Disappear Completely: on Modern Anorexia, which was chosen for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers New Program. Her work has appeared online and in print at The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper's and The New Yorker, among other outlets. In this interview we talk about Kelsey's new book Godstruck: Seven Women's Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion and her experiences with anorexia and 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. 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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

22 Apr

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46 min

The Mad in America podcast hosts discussions that search for the truth about psychiatric prescription drugs and mental health care worldwide. This podcast is part of Mad in America’s mission to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care. 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.

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Mad in the World

Top Shows

Meeting Life Unmedicated: Aging, Protracted Withdrawal and Healing - A Conversation With Marsha Zaritsky

Faith, Culture, and Coercion: An Interview with Cultural Psychiatrist G. Eric Jarvis

Kindling Our Inner Fire: A Residential Program Where Drug Tapering is the Norm

The Madness Pill: How Psychedelics and Stimulants Shaped Biological Psychiatry — An Interview with Justin Garson

George Atwood - Shattered Worlds, the Experience of Personal Annihilation

Shamanism and the Celtic shaman path towards healing

The Fight for the Soul of Psychotherapy: An Interview with Linda Michaels

Hannah Pickard - Responsibility Without Blame in Therapeutic Communities

Bonnie Burstow and Nick Walker - An Introduction to Cognitive Liberty

Finding God and Leaving Psychiatry: An Interview With Kelsey Osgood

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