In this podcast, which comes on the heels of reports linking social media use to reduced self-esteem in teen girls, eating-disorders therapist Shira Collings discusses person-centered, socio-culturally aware approaches to dealing with disordered eating and other food-related challenges in youth (and adults). Shira Collings, M.S., N.C.C., is Mad in America’s Assistant Editor for MIA Continuing Education and the Youth Coordinator for the National Empowerment Center. She received her B.A. in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.S. in Counseling and Psychology from Troy University. As a person with lived experience of recovery from diet culture, disordered eating, and trauma, Shira is passionate about supporting others in finding freedom with food, body acceptance, and the ability to be their full, authentic selves and live according to their values. She is an advocate for trauma-informed, person-centered approaches to mental health care.

Mad in America: Science, Psychiatry and Social Justice

Shira Collings - New Perspectives on Eating Disorders

Helena Hanson is professor and chair of translational social science and health equity and associate director for the center for social medicine at UCLA. As a psychiatrist and anthropologist, she has spent much of her career researching how race, class, gender, and social determinants of health affect psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. Growing up in 1970's Oakland and Berkeley, California, Hansen witnessed the consequences of deinstitutionalization and mass incarceration policies firsthand. Losing family members to both the prison and mental health systems gave her a personal understanding of the social and structural failures she interrogates in her work today. She also draws on the principles she learned as a participant in AIDS-related activism to mobilize community organizations and champion mutual aid groups in combatting our current mental health crises. In this interview, Hansen discusses how race and class affect psychiatric diagnoses and subsequent treatment, the moral implications of psychiatric diagnosis, structural competency, and more.

Helena Hansen - Combatting Structural Racism and Classism in Psychiatry

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric diagnosis that carries a heavy social stigma. However, experts have also questioned the validity and utility of the label. In response, some experts and service-user groups have called for different conceptualizations and terms for those experiencing psychotic symptoms. Doctors Matcheri Keshavan and Raquelle Mesholam-Gately are currently tackling this issue. They recently completed a project in collaboration with the Consumer Advisory Board of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, MA, examining the benefits and drawbacks of renaming schizophrenia. Matcheri Keshavan, M.D. is the Stanley Cobb Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Academic Head of Psychiatry and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Raquelle Mesholam-Gately, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is also the director of the Consumer Advisory Board and conducts neuropsychology research in the Psychosis Research Program at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. In this interview, they discuss what they learned about the issues surrounding the renaming of schizophrenia in their research with consumers and service users. In particular, they reflect on how this psychiatric diagnosis can impact the therapeutic alliance necessary for effective treatment and the overall quality of life of people diagnosed.

Matcheri Keshavan and Raquelle Mesholam-Gately - Why Some Experts and Patients Want to Rename Schizophrenia

This week we talk with Professor Jim van Os and Doctor Peter Groot about their latest study which looks at the effectiveness of tapering strips to help people get off antidepressant drugs. Jim van Os is Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Public Mental Health at Utrecht University Medical Centre, the Netherlands and Peter Groot works with the User Research Centre of UMC Utrecht. They both are involved with the development and study of tapering strips which are pre-packaged, gradually reducing dosage tablets that facilitate tapered withdrawal from psychiatric drugs. In this interview, we discuss their latest research paper which examines tapering strips in real-world use. *** Download Mad in America's new mobile app here. Available for Apple or Android mobile devices, keep up to date as we publish new audio interviews or browse our archive.  

Jim van Os and Peter Groot - When Assessing Antidepressant Withdrawal Methods, RCTs Fall Short

Ursula Read is a research fellow and associate at King's College London. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from University College London, where she studied family experiences of mental illness and help-seeking and Ghana. Currently, her research addresses Global Mental Health, and she utilizes participatory research methods to explore the relationship between mental illness and social exclusion internationally. Her recent work focuses on mental health care in Ghana, drawing attention to the need for rights-based approaches to mental health care. In doing so, she questions the movement for Global Mental Health: asking what this movement is doing currently and imagining what it could become. Her research brings to light how those in the Global North and high-income countries can overlook what rights-based approaches to mental health care may actually look like when incorporated into Global Mental Health and enacted on the ground. She also is deeply concerned with the structural and social determinants of health and mental health and their interconnection with community resources, places of worship, faith, and overall health promotion.

Ursula Read - Rights Based Global Mental Health and Social Exclusion

Michael Ungar is the founder and director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University in Canada. He is also a family therapist and professor of social work. He has received numerous awards, such as the Canadian Association of Social Workers National Distinguished Service Award (2012), and has authored around 15 books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles. Dr. Ungar’s work is globally recognized and centers on community trauma and community resilience. In particular, his work explores resilience among marginalized children and families, especially those involved with child welfare and mental health services, refugees, and immigrant youth. His research is spread across continents and challenges our traditional notions of trauma and resilience. Analyzing people’s risks and available resources, he scrutinizes simplistic ideas of individual perseverance and grit in the face of trauma. Instead, he implicates the role of context, circumstances, and ill-suited services in contributing to people’s psychological suffering.

Michael Ungar - Looking Beyond Self-Help to Understand Resilience

Patricia Rush, M.D., M.B.A. is an internal medicine physician whose scientific focus is complex chronic illness.  Her over 40-year career has focused on working with underserved populations and promoting universal access to high-quality medical care. She spent 20 years in the Cook County (Illinois) Health System, including six years as director of their emergency department. From 2000-2008 ran a trauma-informed solo private medical practice in Chicago. During this time, she completed in-depth interviews with more than 500 patients, which led her to identify a group of high-risk individuals with serious illnesses who also had a consistent pattern of extreme stress at a young age, including profoundly disordered sleep and emotional distress. Until her retirement, Dr. Rush was also an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago and now teaches neurodevelopment as a member of the Physician Workgroup of the Child Trauma Academy. She was a co-founder and serves as a co-director of the Center for the Collaborative Study of Trauma, Health Equity, and Neurobiology, or THEN, in Chicago. The nonprofit works at the intersection of science education and social justice, exploring and communicating the links between early emotional trauma, inequality, human development, and chronic illness to a network of professionals and the public. In this interview, she discusses a new and more integrated way to understand and treat physical and mental ailments in people of all ages that has important implications for how we raise our children.

Patricia Rush - Getting to the Root Causes of Suffering

Marcela Ot'alora works with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) as the principal investigator for government research into MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. In addition to her role as principal investigator, she also worked as a co-therapist during earlier phases of MDMA psychotherapy research and currently leads the MDMA therapy training for MAPS. Ms. Ot'alora also works as a therapist using both ketamine and fine arts to treat trauma. Ot'alora approaches her work with a humility learned from years of therapeutic experience:  “My clients and the participants in our studies have taught me that their healing looks so different than anything I could have imagined. If I come in leaving that agenda, leaving that bias aside, and being present with whoever is in front of me, they will surprise me every time about how healing works for them.” In this interview, we discuss her research into MDMA-assisted psychotherapy and how the use of MDMA differs from more traditional substances such as antidepressants. We will also discuss ketamine-assisted therapy, the therapeutic use of fine arts, and the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs.

Marcela Ot'alora - MDMA Assisted Psychotherapy and Therapeutic Humility

Michelle Funk is the Unit Head of the Policy, Law, and Human Rights at the Department of Mental Health and Substance Use at the World Health Organization. She has created and leads the WHO Quality Rights Initiative that aims to assess and improve human rights standards in existing services and advance the full implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). In this interview, we discuss the launch of the new “Guidance on Community Mental Health Services: Promoting Person-Centred and Rights-Based Approaches.” The document is grounded on the principles of recovery and rights-based approaches. It presents successful examples of best practices in mental health service provision respecting dignity, moving to zero coercion, and eliminating neglect and abuse. Among the best practices showcased in the document are Open Dialogue as practiced in Tornio, Finland, Soteria Berne in Switzerland, Afiya House in Western Massachusetts, Basal Exposure Therapy in Norway, and Hearing Voices Support Groups. The Guidance builds on the momentum created by the critical voice of Dainius Pūras, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health. Puras criticized the dominance of the biomedical model in the Mental Health field and highlighted the harms associated with ignoring the social determinants of health that impact a person’s mental health, such as violence, poverty, lack of proper nutrition, housing instability, lack of universal health coverage, discrimination and others. In our conversation, Michelle Funk described the process of engaging stakeholders and persons with lived experience throughout the design and development of the document, the challenges of ensuring geographical representation given the global inequalities, and the hopes for the future.

Michelle Funk - WHO and the Sea Change in Mental Health

Ilana Mountian is a researcher drawing on psychoanalytic, critical, decolonial, and feminist philosophies. She is the author of Cultural Ecstasies: Drugs, Gender, and the Social Imaginary, exploring discourses around drug use, gender, and drug policy. She is currently working on a book that will be published later this year by Routledge about otherness and mental health, focusing on immigration, drug use, and transsexuality. Mountian is a member of the Discourse Unit, a group led by well-known critical psychologists Erica Burman and Ian Parker. The Discourse Unit is dedicated to providing teaching resources for qualitative and feminist work, producing radical academic work, and developing critical perspectives in action research. In addition to her work as a researcher, Mountian is a psychoanalyst and a postdoctoral lecturer at the University of Sao Paulo Brazil and Manchester Metropolitan University. In this interview, she discusses intersectionality and drug use, the disease model of addiction, psychiatric labels, and psychiatry's place in creating “otherness.”

Ilana Mountian - Discourse, Drug Use, and Psychiatry

This week on the MIA podcast we are providing the audio taken from our recent psychiatric drug withdrawal town hall held in May 2021. For our third discussion, we are examining protracted problems that can arise after psychiatric drug withdrawal. Sometimes referred to as post-acute or post-withdrawal syndromes, these experiences can include chronic health problems and sexual dysfunction. What do we know and not know about responding to long- term health problems after coming off psychiatric drugs? For references and slides mentioned in the discussion, visit this link: https://www.madinamerica.com/pdwref/ Panelists Adele Framer Adele Framer resides in San Francisco, USA. A survivor of 11 years of antidepressant withdrawal syndrome, in 2011, under the pseudonym Altostrata, she founded the peer support site SurvivingAntidepressants.org, currently containing more than 6,000 longitudinal case histories from its 14,000 members. A widely recognized patient advocate, she is a lay expert in psychiatric drug tapering and withdrawal syndromes. Will Hall Will Hall is a schizophrenia diagnosis survivor and longtime organizer with the psychiatric survivor movement. He is a PhD candidate at Maastricht University and lead researcher on the Maastricht World Survey on Antipsychotic Drug Withdrawal, and author of the Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs, as well as host of Madness Radio and a co-founder of the Hearing Voices Network USA. David Healy David Healy is a Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton Canada. He has been raising concerns about withdrawal from antidepressants since the mid-1990s and was an expert witness in a successful legal case about withdrawal and dependence in 2004. He figures we have made little or no progress sorting the issues out and now have a major public health crisis on our hands. Nicole Lamberson Nicole Lamberson is a physician assistant as well as a patient suffering protracted harm following a rapid medical “detox” from prescribed benzodiazepines/Z-drugs & other psychotropic polypharmacy. She co- founded The Withdrawal Project, serves on the Medical Board of Benzodiazepine Information Coalition, & does outreach for Medicating Normal-The Film.

Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal - Post Withdrawal Experiences

Hanna Pickard is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. She is also appointed with the William H. Miller Department of Philosophy, the Berman Institute of Bioethics, and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Her expertise is deep and spread across a wide variety of disciplines. As an analytic philosopher, she specializes in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, moral psychology, and clinical ethics. She also worked for a decade at The Oxfordshire Complex Needs Service, a specialist service in the NHS for people diagnosed with personality disorders and complex needs. Her work tends to address the sticky debates that arise in clinical practice. She has over 35 academic publications and has co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction. Pickard maintains an important thread between clinical work in the real world and her philosophical writings, attending to topics like the nature of mental disorders, delusions, agency, character, emotions, self-harm, violence, placebos, therapeutic relationships, decision-making capacity, the self and social identity, and attitudes towards mental disorder and crime. In this interview, she discusses her novel and possibly controversial model for understanding addiction, the numerous shortcomings of the neurobiological model, the importance of centering patient agency, and her work in therapeutic communities.

Hannah Pickard - Responsibility Without Blame in Therapeutic Communities

Katrina Michelle is a psychologist and the founder and director of The Curious Spirit, a transpersonally oriented psychotherapeutic practice that encourages transcendent personal exploration to remedy psychological suffering. She is a holistic psychotherapist currently serving as faculty at Columbia University School of Social Work and The Institute for the Development of Human Arts. In addition to her practice, she also serves as the director of harm reduction for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and formerly worked as the executive director of the American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences (ACISTE). To demystify awakening experiences through storytelling and art, she is also producing the film When Lightning Strikes. Beginning in the world of traditional social work, Michelle was drawn to transpersonal psychology after her own spontaneous spiritually transformative experience. She now works to help create communities capable of holding these often difficult experiences, as western societies often lack the language and cultural understanding needed to integrate them into daily life. In this interview, we discuss the place of psychedelics in psychotherapy, how spiritually transformative experiences can be mistaken for ‘mental illness,’ and the various resistances we have to these experiences.

Katrina Michelle - Psychedelics, Transformative Experiences and Healing

Hannah Zeavin is a leading scholar investigating how mediated communications and technology impact our intimate relations. Her most recent work tackles teletherapy and digital mental health communications, which have seen a boon throughout the pandemic. Zeavin is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at the University of California, Berkeley, and affiliated with the Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society. Zeavin is also a visiting fellow at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU in 2018. Her first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, will be published by MIT Press this summer. Zeavin serves as an editorial associate and author for numerous publications, including the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is also a co-founder of The Science, Technology, and Society Futures Initiative. In this interview, she discusses her upcoming books and all things mediated communication, teletherapy, and technology. Zeavin approaches human relationality, including therapy, from the perspectives of literature and media studies. She explores the history of psychoanalysis and other forms of therapy, garnering fresh insights into our relationship with technology and each other–without the usual moral tenor of psychologists. She also draws upon her research to discuss how care may take unexpected forms through technologies, enabling distanced intimacy and social change that transcends the psychology of the individual. We close by addressing the feminization of care labor, care as a cover for capture and control, and shifts in how we understand care, now and in the future.

Hannah Zeavin - Questioning the Moral Panic Around Teletherapy

*** Our next psychiatric drug withdrawal town hall discussion will be held on May 14 2021, register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/150023595613 *** This week on the MIA podcast we are providing the audio taken from our recent psychiatric drug withdrawal town hall held in March 2021. This discussion was aired live on March 12, 2021 and the panelists are Dr Giovanni Fava, Dr Peter Groot, Dr Mark Horowitz and Professor Joanna Moncrieff. For this discussion, we asked what science and research can tell us about the experience of withdrawal. We discuss research effort that has called into question long-held professional beliefs about the effects of psychotropic drugs on the brain and nervous system. Panelists Giovanni Fava Dr Giovanni Fava is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has authored more than 500 scientific papers and performed groundbreaking research in several fields. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. Peter Groot Dr Peter Groot is a researcher who started using antidepressants. His own experiences helped him to develop a practical solution proposed by many patients to help prevent withdrawal problems from antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs. Mark Horowitz Dr Mark Horowitz is a training psychiatrist and psychiatric academic at University College London who is currently coming off psychiatric drugs. His work and research focuses on how to safely stop psychiatric medication. Joanna Moncrieff Dr Joanna Moncrieff is a psychiatrist based in community mental health services in North East London. She also teaches and researches at University College London. Joanna is one of the founding members and the co-chairperson of the Critical Psychiatry Network.

Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal - Exploring the Science

Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, a new weekly discussion that searches for the truth about psychiatric prescription drugs and mental health care worldwide. This podcast is part of Mad in America’s mission to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care. 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 we 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 psychiatric care around the world. For more information visit madinamerica.com To contact us email podcasts@madinamerica.com

hubhopper

Mad in America: Science, Psychiatry and Social Justice

hubhopper