Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

The West Doesn't Have All the Answers: An Interview with Dinesh Bhugra

Dinesh Bhugra is a leading voice in social and cultural psychiatry. He is Emeritus Professor of Mental Health and Cultural Diversity at King's College London and has served as president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the British Medical Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. His many honors include being named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to psychiatry and receiving the Yves Pelicier Prize for his contributions to social psychiatry. A prolific scholar who has authored or edited more than 30 books, Bhugra is also a clinician and a longtime advocate for patients' rights to be heard and understood on their own terms. Throughout his career, he has challenged psychiatry to look beyond symptoms and diagnoses and to attend more closely to culture, community, social conditions, and the lived realities of human suffering. In this interview, we discuss how mental health is shaped by interconnected social, political, geographical, and commercial forces, from poverty and migration to corporate lobbying and the conditions in which people work and live. Bhugra considers what clinicians can learn by listening to patients' own explanations of their experiences, and why symptoms may become more livable when people have meaningful relationships, work, security, and a sense of belonging. We also discuss the psychiatrization of society, the limits of exporting Western psychiatric categories across cultures, and the question of who gets to decide what counts as normal or pathological. *** 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 © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

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

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 © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Unlearn Your Pain: Harnessing the Power of Neuroplasticity – A Conversation With Howard Schubiner

Welcome to the Mad in America podcast. My name is Brooke Siem, and I am the author of the award-winning memoir on antidepressant withdrawal, May Cause Side Effects. Today, I'm excited to have Dr. Howard Schubiner on the show. Dr. Schubiner is an internist and a clinical professor at the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine and has authored more than 100 publications in scientific journals. He lectures internationally and is the author of three books, including his most recent book, Unlearn Your Pain: The Science of Recovering from Chronic Pain, Fatigue, Anxiety, and Depression. *** 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 © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

The Empire of Madness: Why Psychiatry Must Rethink Human Suffering - An Interview with Khameer Kidia

Khameer Kidia is a physician and an anthropologist, works at Harvard Medical School and the University of Zimbabwe, and spends his life between Washington DC and Harare. Kidia has many accolades to his name – he is a Rhodes scholar and a 2023 New America Fellow. His papers have appeared in elite medical journals and his stories in the New York Times. His recent book, which we will discuss, was covered by The Washington Post. His experience navigating two cultures and his expertise across disciplines is what allows him to see that psychiatry, as it currently stands, needs to end. In this interview, we discuss how the tentacles of an exploitative global order reach into people to wreak havoc with their lives and in their minds. Disclosing his own difficult history with stimulant medications, he exposes how current psychiatric practices superficially anesthetize pain in order to return us back on the hamster wheel of productivity. Sharing his mother's struggles with 'nervous breakdowns', Kidia shows us the importance of patient autonomy and liberty, and the grace in letting go when people choose a path that doesn't align with our priorities. *** 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 © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

A Mother's Journey Through Psychiatric Drug Harm and Healing

Chelsea McVeigh began her journey with psychiatric medications at 16, never imagining where it would lead. At 31, during a new pregnancy, she suffered a severe adverse reaction that turned her world upside down. After years of fighting to reclaim her health and sense of self, she's now 37, a mother of two incredible boys and living proof that healing is possible even after the unimaginable. *** 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 © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org