Crazy Making

In this episode, I speak with Sarah Redikopp about self-harm and self-mutilation. Sarah is a mad and lived experience activist-academic and PhD candidate in the Graduate Program of Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Sarah’s research uses critical and feminist theory and methods to critique psychiatric knowledges about self-harm. Drawing on insights from mad studies, queer and feminist affect theory, critical and feminist disability studies, and critical race theory, Sarah’s scholarship engages directly with lived experience accounts to co-create relational, intersectional, and contextualized engagements with self-harm and to inform social justice outcomes in “mental health” research. At the heart of Sarah’s work is a commitment to witnessing across difference and intervening into the pathologization of distress to inform social change. Sarah’s work has been published in scholarly, community, and grassroots publishing venues, including Sociology of Health and Illness (2022, 2023) and The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies (2021), Canada Watch (2021), and more. Sarah lives and works as a white settler in Tkaronto/Toronto, on the traditional lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples.

In this episode I speak with Joyce Tsui. Joyce is a nursing professor in the School of Community and Health Studies at Centennial College, and a PhD candidate at York University in Toronto, Canada.  Her clinical background is in the area of gerontological nursing. She's worked in the long-term care sector as a Unit Leader and Nurse Classifier with the Ontario Ministry of Health and long-term care and Behavioural Support Outreach nurse, and an interprofessional nurse educator. Her current doctoral research examines the academic accommodation process in Higher Learning institutions while interrogating practices of the medicalization of mental health challenges. In other words what Joyce's work will unearth is the ways in which college and university students become forced into medical categories and labels primarily psychiatric in order to be considered for academic accommodations in their respective school programs.

In this episode, I speak with Ruth Stackhouse. She is founder/director of The Friendly Spike Theatre Band, a Mad/Disability People's Theatre, in Toronto. Her unique name stands for 'double mercy', Ruth (Ruth) Stackhouse. She has helped create and present many productions throughout the course of the company's thirty year plus trajectory. She holds an associate degree from The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, an Honours BA from The School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University, and a Master of Arts from The School of Critical Disability Studies at York University. Her work toward a Mad/Disability Culture is recognized by the City of Toronto Access Award, and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal.

In this episode, I am joined by Dr. Lauren Tenney. Lauren is a psychiatric survivor, activist, artist, author, and academic, first involuntarily committed in 1988 at age 15. Her/Their work aims to expose the institutional corruption, which is a source of profit for organized psychiatry, and to abolish state sponsored human rights violations, such as murder, torture and slavery. Lauren holds a PhD in environmental psychology. Books mentioned: The Routledge International Handbook of Mad Studies Racism in Psychology: Challenging Theory, Practice, and Institutions

In this episode, I speak with Katinka Blackford Newman about her experience with being on psychiatric medications, and the havoc they wreaked on her life, causing a black hole of misery, pain, and loss. She has subsequently come off the medications, regained control of her life, and fully recovered. Recovered from the medications, that is. Katinka is an award-winning documentary film-maker, journalist and author. She is inspired by extraordinary stories about ordinary people and is passionate about exposing miscarriages of justice. Trained at the BBC, Katinka has made films for all the UK terrestrial channels and in the US for Discovery, National Geographic, and Animal Planet. She has directed full drama-documentary shoots in challenging environments such as Peruvian prisons and jungles in the Philippines. Her work includes intimate observational documentaries on sensitive subjects such as child abuse, addiction, incest and murder within a family.  Awards and nominations include the Mental Health Media Award, Broadcast Best Documentary, BAFTA Best Factual Documentary and an International Emmy. She is the author of a best-selling book, The Pill That Steals Lives, exposing the link between anti-depressants and mass killings. The book is published by John Blake Publishers. She also runs the website  www.AntidepressantRisks.org.

This episode marks the fourth episode of a series on child and youth mental health. I speak with Cindy Jiang, a doctoral student at York University in critical disability studies. At the time of this interview, Cindy is working on the development of the website Madness Canada. Check it out.

This episode marks the third episode of a series on child and youth mental health. I speak with Dr. Nazilla Khanlou. Nazilla is an associate professor in the School of Nursing and Women’s Health Research Chair in Mental Health at York University. In my conversation with her, Dr. Khanlou helps us understand some of the most pressing issues facing young people today, particularly people with intersecting marginalized identities such as disability and racialization. She talks to us about resilience, but not the individualized way we understand it, rather, a more complex notion of the concept, drawing attention to the structural dimensions of resilience and coping.

This episode marks the second episode of a series on child and youth mental health. I speak with Sharry Taylor about youth mental health, particularly, how identity develops in young people in the context of mental health and illness. She takes us on a journey of what it might be like for the developing young person as they grapple with making sense of what it means to have disruptions in their mental health. Sharry is a schoolteacher and doctoral student at the University of Toronto, engaging in research on identity theory and identity development in the context of youth mental health.

Crazy Making presents a variety of topics related to mental health and mental illness and will engage in discussions ranging from depression, to mad studies, to critical mental health movements, to the politics of the DSM. Some salient questions that we might ask here are: 1. Who benefits from the existence of psychiatry, and to what degree? 2. Who/what is disadvantaged by the existence of psychiatry? 3. What ways are there of conceptualizing human suffering other than those framed by the medical model? In this podcast, we learn from critical mental health scholars, psychiatric survivors, the mad community, antipsychiatry activists, dissident professionals, advocates, anarchists, humanists, posthumanists and assemblages of many other subversive critics. Dr. Simon Adam is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at York University, Canada, long-time mental health advocate and critical psychiatry activist. He is a researcher on the politics of mental health and mental illness, examining the implications of the medicalization of the human condition. Listen to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Reach out to us by email at [email protected] and follow us on Instagram. This podcast is written and hosted by me, Simon Adam, and edited, mixed, and mastered by Umang Antariksh Sagar and Yhasmina Garcia Martinez. The music piece in this podcast is called Thinking Music by Kevin MacLeod. Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4522-thinking-music License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license