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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

 

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  2. Sarah Fay - Cured: A Memoir

Sarah Fay - Cured: A Memoir

Aug 2, 2023

This week on the Mad in America podcast, we are joined by Sarah Fay. Sarah is an author, an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, a freelance writer at The New York Times and elsewhere, a certified mental health peer recovery support specialist, and a mental health keynote speaker who’s spoken to audiences across the country about recovery from mental illness.

We have previously spoken with Sarah about her book, Pathological: A True Story of Six Misdiagnoses, which told the story of her twenty-five years spent in the mental health system.

For her follow-up work, Cured: A Memoir, Sarah writes about her recovery from mental illness. She says, “During the twenty-five years I spent in the mental health system, not one clinician mentioned the word recovery. I ended up one of those “hopeless” cases—diagnosed with bipolar disorder, chronically suicidal, and unable to live independently. Yet I recovered. Not remission. Full recovery.”

In this interview, we discuss why "cured" is such a seldom-used word in psychiatry. We talk about the power of finding hope, the peer recovery movement, and much more.

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Mad in America podcasts and reports are made possible, in part, by a grant from the Thomas Jobe Fund.

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.

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