Institutional Corruption and Psychiatric Drugs: A Conversation with Lisa Cosgrove

05/27/21 • 47 min

What happens when the ties between the people who study psychiatric drugs and the companies who make them become too cozy? A discussion with UMass Boston psychology professor Lisa Cosgrove.

Lisa Cosgrove, PhD is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston where she teaches courses on psychiatric diagnosis and psychopharmacology. She was a Research Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University (2010-2015) and served as a consultant to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, child psychiatrist Dainius Puras. Lisa and her studentsconduct research that broadly aims to shift the current biomedical paradigm and integrate a human rights approach in mental health policies and practices. Specifically,her research addresses 1) the ethical and medical-legal issues that arise in organized psychiatry because of academic-industry relationships and 2) the ways in which commercialized science reinforces epistemic injustice and undermines an appreciation for the moral and political context of physical and emotional suffering. She is co-author, with Bob Whitaker, of Psychiatry under the influence: Institutional corruption, social injury and prescriptions for reform. Her recent publications have addressed the ethical issues that arise with the use of digital phenotyping and digital psychotropic drugs.

For information on Professor Cosgrove's work on institutional corruption as a fellow at Harvard's Safra Centre see here

What happens when the ties between the people who study psychiatric drugs and the companies who make them become too cozy? A discussion with UMass Boston psychology professor Lisa Cosgrove.

For information on Professor Cosgrove's work on institutional corruption as a fellow at Harvard's Safra Centre see here

Previous Episode

My Favorite Passage: A conversation with Adam Beresford about Iliad, Book 24

Adam and I discuss the famous, moving passage at the end of the Iliad describing the meeting between Achilles and Priam. We talk quite a bit about Achilles' curious account of how Zeus determines humans' fate by doling out happenings from jars of joy and misfortune.

Adam Beresford teaches philosophy and classics at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He has just published a translation of Aristotle's Ethics which you can (and should!) buy here and you can learn more about Adam's work here.

Here is a version of book 24 of the Iliad in case you want to read it for yourself.

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Harvard‘s Galileo Project: A Conversation with Avi Loeb

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Avi Loeb, an Astrophysicist, is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science and former chair of the department of Astronomy at Harvard. He is Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) , the Founding Director of the Black Hole Initiative (BHI), Chair, Breakthrough Starshot Advisory Committee ,and Chair Board on Physics and Astronomy, National Academies . Avi has authored nearly 700 research articles and written 4 books, most recently Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. He has held appointments at the institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as well as in the Weizmen Institute and at Tel Aviv University in Israel.