Preview Mode Links will not work in preview mode

Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Go/No Go - How Mental Health Research Took a Wrong Turn: An Interview with Marianne Apostolides

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

Go/No Go - How Mental Health Research Took a Wrong Turn: An Interview with Marianne Apostolides

Jul 29, 2026

Marianne Apostolides is the award-winning author of eight books, four of which have been translated and published internationally. She is a two-time recipient of the Chalmers Arts Fellowship and winner of the K.M. Hunter Award for Literature. Her books include I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind, Deep Salt Water, Voluptuous Pleasure: The Truth about the Writing Life, and Swim. Moving across fiction, memoir, and literary nonfiction, her work often returns to the body, desire, memory, and the stories we tell about ourselves.

Her latest book is Go/No-Go: A Journey Into the Research and Treatment of Mental Health Disorders, which has been called “required reading for anyone with a stake in mental health care.”

Marianne has described the book as beginning in 2022, during a period of creative and emotional crisis, when she encountered a research article that changed how she understood the human mind. In the prologue, she writes that we have “reached a dead end” in our current approach to mental health disorders. The book traces how we arrived there and where we might turn instead.

***

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