Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Neil Gong is an assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego, where he researches psychiatric services, homelessness, and how communities seek to maintain social order. Neil's new book, "Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles," published by the University of Chicago Press, offers a detailed look into the starkly different worlds of mental health care in Los Angeles. He contrasts the public safety-net clinics, which strive to keep patients housed and out of jail, with the elite private care centers that cater to the wealthy. He finds that while the public system focuses on survival and containment, often providing only minimal care, the private system aims at rehabilitation and respectability, albeit sometimes at the cost of personal freedom.

Neil’s extensive fieldwork included spending nights in homeless encampments, shadowing social workers, and engaging with patients and families across the socioeconomic spectrum. His work highlights systemic failures and societal indifference but also the humanity of those working and living within these disparate treatment systems. In our conversation, we unpack the critical insights from his book and explore the broader implications of his research. How do these disparate systems reflect our societal values? What can we learn about the intersection of mental health, homelessness, and social policy? And perhaps most importantly, how can we move towards a more equitable and humane approach to mental health care?

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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.

To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here

© Mad in America 2024. Produced by James Moore

Daniel José Gaztambide is an assistant professor of psychology at Queens College and the director of the Frantz Fanon Lab for Decolonial Psychology. His research and clinical work focus on Puerto Rican and Latinx populations, ethnic minority identity, psychotherapy, and the social determinants of health.

Daniel is the author of A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology and the newly published Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique: Putting Freud on Fanon’s Couch.

He earned his doctorate from Rutgers University, where he specialized in multicultural psychology, anxiety, and trauma. Beyond his clinical practice, Daniel is deeply committed to addressing racial injustice through his writing and activism. He has served as a liaison to the American Psychological Association (APA) on racial and ethnic minority issues and contributed to the APA’s 2020-2021 Taskforce on Strategies for the Elimination of Racism, Discrimination, and Hate.

In our conversation, Daniel highlights the importance of cultural humility and understanding the impact of marginalization across race, class, gender, and ability on psychotherapy. His latest book provides a blend of clinical techniques and political strategies to address these complex issues through a decolonial psychoanalytic lens.

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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.

To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here

© Mad in America 2024. Produced by James Moore

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Susan Grundy is an author who writes about the weight of emotional distress and an easier way of being. Her book, Mad Sisters, is a highly personal account of her caregiving journey for an older sister diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 13. When not at her writing desk, Susan can be found walking in nature towards a café. She divides her time between Montreal and London.

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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

Rose Cartwright is a screenwriter and the author of Pure, a hugely successful memoir which was then turned into a series for Channel Four. She is also a writer and producer on Netflix’s 3 Body Problem. Pure portrayed Rose’s autobiographical account of finding that she had OCD, a “mental illness”, and the breakthrough that this medical framework provided her. This was short-lived. In her new book The Maps We Carry, she writes about the dawning realization that the “illness” story she had believed in and publicly advocated for, was wretchedly incomplete and often dangerous.

In this interview, Cartwright charts her journey of painful and lonely disillusionment with the “mental illness” framework. She talks about understanding the place of her own childhood trauma and also the limitations of simplistic trauma narratives. She speaks about the place of psychedelics and meditation in helping her uncover her disconnection, eventually to realize the importance of trusting relationships and communities. In this brutally honest book and interview, Cartwright reflects on the importance of holding all our understandings around mental health and suffering, lightly.

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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 2024. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

In this interview for MIA Radio, Brooke Siem speaks with David Taylor and Mark Horowitz about their publication of the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines, which is of particular note since the Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines is a leading text in medicine worldwide.

David Taylor is the Director of Pharmacy and Pathology at Maudsley Hospital and a Professor of Psychopharmacology at King's College in London. He is also the editor-in-chief of the journal Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology. Beyond academia, he contributes significantly to public health policy as a member of the United Kingdom's Department of Transport expert panel that introduced drug-driving regulations. He is also a current member of the UK government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and is the only pharmacist to have been made an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. David is the lead author of the Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines, a role he has held since their inception in 1993.

The Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines have achieved significant success, with over 300,000 copies sold across 14 editions and translations into 12 languages. David has also authored 450 clinical papers published in prominent journals such as The Lancet, BMJ, British Journal of Psychiatry, and Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. His work has been cited over 25,000 times.

Mark Horowitz is a clinical research fellow in psychiatry at the National Health Service (NHS) in London. He is a Visiting Lecturer in Psychopharmacology at King's College London and an Honorary Clinical Research Fellow at University College London, in addition to being a trainee psychiatrist. Mark holds a PhD from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at King's College London, specializing in the neurobiology of depression and antidepressant action. He is the lead author of the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines and an associate editor of Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology.

Mark co-authored the recent Royal College of Psychiatry's guidance on stopping antidepressants, and his work has informed the recent NICE guidelines on the safe tapering of psychiatric medications, including antidepressants, benzodiazepines, and z-drugs. He has collaborated with the NHS to develop national guidance for safe deprescribing for clinicians and has been commissioned by Health Education England to prepare a teaching module on how to safely stop antidepressants.

Mark has published several papers on safe approaches to tapering psychiatric medications, with contributions in The Lancet Psychiatry, JAMA Psychiatry, and Schizophrenia Bulletin. His interest lies in rational psychopharmacology and the deprescribing of psychiatric medications, which is deeply informed by his personal experiences of the challenges associated with coming off psychiatric medications.

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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 2024. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org