Dangerous Gifts: Rethinking Madness, Healing, and Human Connection - A Conversation With Sascha du Brul

Sascha du Brul will be well-known to most Mad in America listeners. He's been a leading activist in psychiatric circles for more than two decades now.  He co-founded The Icarus Project and worked closely with the Institute for the Development of Human Arts. His interests lie at the intersection of the public mental health system and the Mad Underground. *** 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 Sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://www.madinamerica.com/newsletter-sign-up/ © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

How does a wounded world wound us in return? Can we be mindful and offer intimate attention to pain and trauma? We answer these and other questions with Will Adams who is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Duquesne and completed his clinical psychology internship at McLean Hospital, affiliated with Harvard Medical School. Dr. Adams is the author of A Wild and Sacred Call: Nature-Psyche-Spirit, published by SUNY Press, a book that explores the deep connections between human psychology, the natural world, and spirituality. His work brings together phenomenology, relational psychoanalysis, Gestalt therapy, transpersonal psychology, and contemplative traditions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Christian mysticism. His scholarship invites us to reconsider the relationship between self and world, mind and nature, and psychological healing and spiritual life. In this very personal interview, we'll be speaking with him about how a lifetime of contemplative practice came to his rescue during the most traumatic time in his life, the possibilities of a relational understanding of human and more-than-human experience, and what psychology might learn from contemplative traditions and our relationship with the natural world. *** 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 Sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://www.madinamerica.com/newsletter-sign-up/ © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

In this episode of the Mad in America podcast, Brooke Siem speaks with Selma Eikelenboom, a forensic scientist and medical examiner whose career has spanned psychotherapy, medicine, emergency care, surgery, and forensic investigation. Eikelenboom works as a forensic medical examiner investigating cases involving psychoactive medications and acts of violence. In this conversation, Brooke and Selma explore what she has learned from investigating these cases, and the questions her research raises about the relationship between psychoactive drugs, genetic variation, and violent behavior. *** 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 Sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://www.madinamerica.com/newsletter-sign-up/ © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org Statement on use of AI The Mad in America podcast does not use generative AI (GenAI) to create its content. All interviews are recorded live, and editing and transcription are carried out by humans. We do use AI-assisted audio processing during the editing stage to achieve the best possible sound quality. This is provided by https://auphonic.com and is used solely to enhance the audio, not to generate or alter the podcast's content.

Alicia Martin is an Australian community pharmacist, a member of the Not Broken Project and founder of TaperMate. Through her work in pharmacy, Alicia saw patients struggling with unusual and severe symptoms when they tried to stop their antidepressants and realized there was little support when people wanted to stop long-term medications. Rather than waiting for the system to catch up, she started building a solution. TaperMate now supports people across the world to track and adjust hyperbolic tapering plans through a simple mobile app and provides personalized tapering plans and advice for patients across Australia through a pharmacist-led telehealth tapering clinic. *** 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 Sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://www.madinamerica.com/newsletter-sign-up/ © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org Statement on use of AI The Mad in America podcast does not use generative AI (GenAI) to create its content. All interviews are recorded live, and editing and transcription are carried out by humans. We do use AI-assisted audio processing during the editing stage to achieve the best possible sound quality. This is provided by https://auphonic.com and is used solely to enhance the audio, not to generate or alter the podcast's content.

Gail Hornstein is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Mount Holyoke College. Across a long and influential career, her work has moved between psychology, psychoanalysis, history, qualitative research, and the study of first-person accounts of madness. She is the author of To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, a biography of the pioneering psychiatrist and psychoanalyst best known for her intensive psychotherapeutic work with people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses. She is also the author of Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness, which explores what first-person narratives, asylum artifacts, patient memoirs, and the Hearing Voices Movementcan teach us about the meanings of madness and the limits of conventional psychiatric explanation. Dr. Hornstein is also the creator of the Bibliography of First-Person Narratives of Madness in English, which lists more than 1,000 books by people who have written about madness from their own experience. More recently, she has conducted extensive research on Hearing Voices Groups in the United States, examining how these groups work, the different functions they serve, and what members find useful about them. In 2019, Gail spoke with Mad in America about first-person accounts of madness and global mental health. In this conversation, we will begin with Gail's own intellectual formation and her early interest in psychological approaches that take subjective experience seriously. We will then turn to Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and the question of whether first-person accounts should be treated as clinical illustrations or as knowledge in their own right. From there, we will move into Agnes's Jacket, the Hearing Voices Movement, and Gail's recent research on what Hearing Voices Groups make possible for people who hear voices, have visions, or experience other extreme states. *** 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 Sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://www.madinamerica.com/newsletter-sign-up/ © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org Statement on use of AI The Mad in America podcast does not use generative AI (GenAI) to create its content. All interviews are recorded live, and editing and transcription are carried out by humans. We do use AI-assisted audio processing during the editing stage to achieve the best possible sound quality. This is provided by https://auphonic.com and is used solely to enhance the audio, not to generate or alter the podcast's content.

Merrick Daniel Pilling is an Associate Professor and Interim Co-Director of the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is the author of Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice and the co-editor of Interrogating Psychiatric Narratives of Madness: Documented Lives. His new book, Mad Studies: The Basics, introduces Mad Studies as a field that has emerged from community activism and the perspectives of people who have been psychiatrized, institutionalized, criminalized, and otherwise dehumanized by what Merrick refers to as the psy complex. It organizes itself around two basic questions: What can Mad Studies help us understand? And what can Mad Studies help us do? Those questions will guide our conversation today. We'll begin with Merrick's own path into this work, then move into psychiatric documentation and narrative, and then spend most of our time with Mad Studies: The Basics—its account of some origins of the field, its critique of psychiatric common sense, and its insistence that Mad Studies is simultaneously a way of interpreting the world and a form of critical praxis. *** 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  

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  

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

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

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