First-Person Knowledge and the Meanings of Madness: An Interview with Gail Hornstein
Psychologist Gail Hornstein discusses her search for the meanings of madness, from asylum artifacts and memoirs to the contemporary peer-support groups reshaping how people understand voices and visions.
Go/No-Go—How Mental Health Research Took a Wrong Turn: An Interview with Author Marianne Apostolides
Marianne Apostolides discusses how Go/No-Go grew from her search for new eating-disorder treatments into a critique of the metaphors, experiments, and technologies shaping contemporary neuroscience and psychiatry. She argues that efforts to reduce distress to circuits, algorithms, and biomarkers often overlook subjectivity, agency, and the human relationships that meaningful care requires.
Unlearn Your Pain: Harnessing the Power of Neuroplasticity – A Conversation With Howard Schubiner
Dr. Howard Schubiner joins us on the MIA podcast to discuss his work and the power of neuroplasticity to address psychological or physiological pain.
How Psychiatry Launders Our Debts: An Interview with Khameer Kidia
Physician-anthropologist Khameer Kidia examines how violence and inequality shape mental distress, arguing for patient autonomy, community care, and structural change beyond diagnosis, medication, and individualized psychiatric treatment.
Faith, Culture, and Coercion: An Interview with Cultural Psychiatrist G. Eric Jarvis
Cultural psychiatrist G. Eric Jarvis discusses religion and mental health, the social determinants of psychosis, and how coercive treatment can deepen mistrust in psychiatric care.
The Madness Pill: How Psychedelics and Stimulants Shaped Biological Psychiatry — An Interview with...
Justin Garson joins us to talk about the work of Solomon Snyder, whose discoveries ushered in the era of biological psychiatry.
Fighting Psychiatric Subjectivation and Helping Others Along the Way: An Interview with Prateeksha Sharma
Prateeksha Sharma reflects on her own experience of recovery from psychosis with the help of music, family, and dogs, sheds lights on the treatment harms that often go unnamed and thus unnoticed, and discusses how to claim narrative, dignity, and voice.
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...
Spiritual Emergency and the Collective Work of Staying Alive: An Interview with Nisha Gupta
Nisha Gupta reflects on spiritual emergency, wounded healing, and why staying alive in times of profound pain is not only an individual task but a collective one.
The Political Systems Driving Abuse in Psychiatry: An Interview with Human Rights Lawyer Alicia...
Alicia Ely Yamin is the Director of the Global Health and Rights Project and a lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She's also...
How Our Blindness to Context Harms Patients and Breaks Practitioners: A Conversation With Kamaldeep...
Kamaldeep Bhui joins us to challenge the myth of clinical neutrality, arguing that culture informs not only patients’ experiences of distress but also clinicians’ judgments about what counts as pathology. From voice-hearing to addiction, meaning depends on context, class, belief systems, and power relations.
UberTherapy and the Enshittification of our Relational Lives: Part 2 of our Interview with...
Elizabeth Cotton traces how digital therapy can block the very thing people come for: a stable, human relationship that can hold fear, dependency, and ambivalence.
UberTherapy and the Enshittification of our Relational Lives: Part 1 of our Interview with...
With UberTherapy, Elizabeth Cotton follows the gig-economy playbook into psychotherapy, where platforms lower costs by depressing wages and standardizing treatment.
Why Critical Mental Health Knowledge Is Essential for Ethical Practice: An Interview with Jan...
In this conversation, Jan DeFehr argues that ethical practice requires access to what the field itself disputes, including the risks people rarely hear about.
The Damage Doesn’t End When the Drugs Do: Diana Rose on Psychiatry’s Long Shadow
Ayurdhi Dhar interviews survivor-researcher Diana Rose on her long-term adverse experiences from psychiatric drugs, survivor knowledge, and the humiliations built into the system.
Medical Organizations Turn Blind Eye to Harms of Maternal Antidepressant Use: A Conversation With...
Adam Urato and Joanna Moncrieff join Robert Whitaker on the Mad in America podcast to discuss the risks posed by maternal use of antidepressants.
Psychotherapy, Spirituality, and Democratic Socialism: A Conversation with Frank Gruba-McCallister
Frank Gruba-McCallister argues that healing must confront capitalism, reclaim spirituality, and advance justice.
Science Under Pressure, Humanity at Stake: An Interview with John Ioannidis
The Stanford professor behind the most famous paper in modern medicine warns that much of today’s research is unreliable, yet insists the project is worth defending.
Therapy in the Age of Self Management and Public Abandonment: A Conversation with Psychological...
Talia Weiner discusses how conservative politics and market logic reshape mental health care.
How to be a Critical Psychologist Without Losing Your Soul: A Conversation With Zenobia...
On the Mad in America podcast, Zenobia Morrill, José Giovanni Luiggi-Hernández and Justin Karter join us to explore the need to raise awareness of psychological approaches that challenge mainstream perspectives.
Is Dialogue the Best Medicine? A Conversation With Jaakko Seikkula
Jaakko Seikkula joins us on the MIA podcast to discuss how Open Dialogue came to be, the research that shows its positive outcomes, how psychiatry has failed to learn from Open Dialogue practice and more.
Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy: A Conversation with Stijn Vanheule
Vanheule urges clinicians to listen for the structure in psychotic thought. He offers clinical examples that reframe hallucinations as a form of creative response to unspeakable dilemmas.
The Poetics and Politics of Our Mental Health Metaphors: An Interview with Laurence Kirmayer
Ayurdhi Dhar interviews influential cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer on how metaphors, histories, and social structures contour our experiences of suffering and healing.
Chemically Imbalanced: Joanna Moncrieff on the Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth
Joanna Moncrieff joins Robert Whitaker to talk about her latest book, titled Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth. They discuss the serotonin story and the fact that there is no good evidence that a serotonergic deficiency is a primary cause of depression.
Psychology’s Small Stories and the Call of the Other: An Interview with David Goodman
Ayurdhi Dhar interviews David Goodman about his vision for a psychology grounded in care for the other, the risks of psychotherapeutic standardization, and why humility—and even embarrassment—may be vital to human flourishing.
