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Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Gordon Warme - The Relationship Between Culture and Psychiatric ‘Disorders’

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

Gordon Warme - The Relationship Between Culture and Psychiatric ‘Disorders’

Oct 28, 2017

This week we interview Dr Gordon Warme. Dr Warme is a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry. He trained with Karl Menninger at the Menninger Clinic in the US and at Heidelberg University in Germany, and has been a faculty member at the Menninger Clinic, the University of Kansas, and has been an academic at the University of Toronto for 40 years.

His most recent book, published in 2016 is Brain Evangelists: How Psychiatry Has Convinced Us to Believe in Its Far-Fetched Science and Dubious Treatments in which he blows the whistle on modern psychiatry, arguing that, in the long history of medicine, biological and chemical “abnormalities” in psychiatric patients have never been identified, and labels such as schizophrenia and depression are misleading metaphors that dehumanize patients.

In the episode we discuss:

How Dr Warme came to specialise in psychiatry.
His experience of being trained by doctors who had a strong psychoanalytic approach.
That Sigmund Freud wanted psychiatry to be scientific, but Dr Warme feels that this led Freud astray.
The relationship between culture and psychiatric ‘disorders’.
Watching, describing and talking as important therapeutic skills to develop.
Dr Warme’s view of how drugs are used in psychiatry and that he hasn’t prescribed for many years.
The Rosenhan Experiment.
Where psychiatry is heading as a profession.

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