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Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health


The Mad in America podcast, hosted by James Moore, examines mental health with a critical eye by speaking with psychologists, psychiatrists and people with lived experience.

When you hear such conversations, you realise that much of what is believed to be settled in mental health is actually up for debate. Is mental health a matter of faulty biology or is there more to it? Are the treatments used in psychiatry helpful or harmful in the long term? Are psychiatric diagnoses reliable? With the help of our guests, we examine these questions and so much more. 

This podcast is part of Mad in America’s mission to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care and mental health. 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. 

On the podcast over the coming weeks, we will have interviews with experts and those with lived experience of the psychiatric system. Thank you for joining us as we discuss the many issues around rethinking mental health around the world.

For more information visit madinamerica.com

 

Oct 14, 2017

This week on the Mad in America podcast we interview Olga Runciman. 

Olga is an international trainer and speaker, writer, campaigner, and artist. She co-founded the Danish Hearing Voices Network and sees the role of the Hearing Voices Movement as post-psychiatric, working towards the recognition of human rights while offering hope, empowerment, and access to making sense of individual experiences. 

Olga was a psychiatric nurse working in social psychiatry but today she is a psychologist and since 2013 she has had her own private practice in Denmark, working with people who have been labelled schizophrenic or psychotic. Olga is herself a psychiatric survivor and a voice hearer too.

In this interview we discuss Olga’s professional and personal experiences of the psychiatric system and how she now helps and supports healing and recovery in others.

In the episode we discuss:

How Olga became a specialist psychiatric nurse in Denmark, believing at the time the reasons given for psychiatric diagnoses.

  • How she came to see that there was little evidence or corroboration to underpin the diagnosis and treatment that she witnessed.
  • How Olga was also a voice hearer, but kept this hidden from her psychiatric colleagues.
  • How, when experiencing stress and trauma, Olga came to be admitted to a psychiatric ward, diagnosed as schizophrenic and treated with a cocktail of psychiatric drugs.
  • Olga’s experiences of the antipsychotic drug Clozapine.
  • How Olga came to stop her psychiatric drugs which she had been taking for ten years.
  • Psychiatry’s story of hopelessness and chronic illness that is so often sold to patients.
  • How Olga now views her work from a post-psychiatry perspective.

Relevant links:

Psycovery

Olga’s posts on Mad in America 

The Hearing Voices network

International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal 

Postpsychiatry: a new direction for mental health 

To get in touch with us email: podcasts@madinamerica.com

© Mad in America 2017