Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health Mad in the World

Neil Gong is an assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego, where he researches psychiatric services, homelessness, and how communities seek to maintain social order. Neil's new book, "Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles," published by the University of Chicago Press, offers a detailed look into the starkly different worlds of mental health care in Los Angeles. He contrasts the public safety-net clinics, which strive to keep patients housed and out of jail, with the elite private care centers that cater to the wealthy. He finds that while the public system focuses on survival and containment, often providing only minimal care, the private system aims at rehabilitation and respectability, albeit sometimes at the cost of personal freedom.
Neil’s extensive fieldwork included spending nights in homeless encampments, shadowing social workers, and engaging with patients and families across the socioeconomic spectrum. His work highlights systemic failures and societal indifference but also the humanity of those working and living within these disparate treatment systems. In our conversation, we unpack the critical insights from his book and explore the broader implications of his research. How do these disparate systems reflect our societal values? What can we learn about the intersection of mental health, homelessness, and social policy? And perhaps most importantly, how can we move towards a more equitable and humane approach to mental health care?
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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.
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© Mad in America 2024. Produced by James Moore

Julia Hotz is a solutions-focused journalist based in New York City. She is the author of the forthcoming book, The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging. Her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, the Boston Globe, Time, and more.
After studying Sociology at the University of Cambridge, she joined the Solutions Journalism Network, where she helps other journalists rigorously report on what's working to solve today's biggest problems. Before becoming a journalist, Julia worked as a teacher, bartender, pizza server, and summer camp forest ranger. She enjoys hiking, biking, dancing, running, budget traveling, and building the longest road around Catan.
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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 2024. Produced by James Moore

Jessica Schleider is a clinical psychologist, researcher, and founding director of the Lab for Scalable Mental Health (www.schleiderlab.org).  She’s a leader in single-session interventions for youth mental health – an evidence-based approach that aims to provide help that’s accessible, doable, and affordable for populations around the world and is already available via open-access programs.  On her own and with colleagues, she’s published a wide array of articles and book chapters and co-wrote a self-help book,  The Growth Mindset Workbook for Teens. Most recently, she’s the author of Little Treatments, Big Effects: How To Build Meaningful Moments that Can Transform Your Mental Health. 
Currently an associate professor of medical sciences of Northwestern University, Schleider earned her PHd in clinical psychology from Harvard and completed her doctoral internship in clinical and community psychology at Yale School of Medicine.
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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 2024. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Sasha Durakov Warren is the author of the new book Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt published by Common Notions Press. Sasha is a writer based in Minneapolis. His experiences within the psychiatric system and a commitment to radical politics led him to co-found the group Hearing Voices - Twin Cities, which provides an alternative social space for individuals to discuss often stigmatized, extreme experiences and network with one another.
Following the George Floyd uprising in 2020, he founded the project Of Unsound Mind to trace the histories of psychiatry, social work, and public health's connections to policing, prisons, and various disciplinary and managerial technologies.
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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 2024. Produced by James Moore

Milutin Kostić is a practicing Serbian psychiatrist trained in the tradition of biological psychiatry who has become a new figure in the critical psychiatry movement. Affiliated with the Institute of Mental Health in Belgrade, Serbia, he is currently a Fulbright scholar working alongside Lisa Cosgrove in Boston to challenge established norms in psychiatry and psychology.
Kostić utilizes his extensive training and traditional research methods to question the fundamental assumptions of his field. For example, Kostić critiques the flawed premises of genetics research in depression, arguing that it overlooks the heterogeneity of human experience. He uses analogies to illustrate how psychiatry often pathologizes normal human emotions, drawing parallels to how medical conditions are misunderstood when the context is ignored, like trying to treat the lungs alone in a society overrun by air pollution.
We will also discuss his latest study, which emphasizes the benefits of de-medicalizing experiences of depression rather than quickly resorting to diagnoses and subsequent treatments with medication or psychotherapy. His research also sheds light on the effects of biological narratives on patient perspectives, the complexities of drug dependency, and the profound impact of psychiatric diagnoses on individual identity.
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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 2024. Produced by James Moore

Rodrigo Nardi is a psychiatrist and psychologist. He obtained his psychology degree in the year 2000, and following that, he obtained a certificate in CBT, and a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology at Universidade Evangélica de Paraná. He obtained his M.D. degree in 2010, and in 2016, he completed his psychiatry residency at Penn State. Altogether, Dr. Nardi has worked as a Mental Health Professional for more than 20 years, covering from individual psychotherapy to inpatient and outpatient psychiatry, substance use treatment, and interventional psychiatry. His passion for teaching and learning has led to the creation of the True Psychiatry Network and the development of a mentoring program designed to address the most frequent challenges related to psychiatric training.
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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 2024. Produced by James Moore