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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

 

Sep 23, 2019

On MIA Radio, we interview Anthropologist Zhiying Ma, who explores mental health care in China, including tensions between Western psychiatry and socially-oriented local frameworks.

Zhiying Ma is a cultural and medical anthropologist and disability studies scholar whose work explores the experiences and rights of those receiving mental health services in China. Her current book project, Intimate Institutions: Governance and Care Under the Mental Health Legal Reform in Contemporary China, investigates how the Chinese state has placed paternalistic responsibilities on families through their role in the care of those diagnosed with serious mental illnesses, in part through the practice of involuntary hospitalization.

Ma came to earn a Ph.D. in Anthropology after questioning psychology’s overemphasis on decontextualized human behavior while majoring in the subject as an undergraduate. She found that anthropology offered the more humanistic and socially oriented lens she was looking for, and this perspective informs her current work.

Ma collaborates with psychiatrists, social workers, human rights activists, lawmakers, families, and those with lived experience to not only conduct research but also to take part in China’s ongoing mental health policy discussions and push for community-based, socially inclusive care that is not simply “care as usual.”

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