Advertise on podcast: Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

This week, we are joined by Chris Masterjohn, PhD. Chris is a nutritional scientist, a former professor, and the founder of Mitome. With a PhD in nutritional science and years of research in mitochondrial biology, Chris's work focuses on translating peer-reviewed science into practical tools for human health. At Mitome, Dr. Masterjohn pioneered the first analysis designed to measure mitochondrial respiratory chain function directly, identifying individual energy bottlenecks and guiding personalized science-backed protocols to optimize the system responsible for over 90% of cellular energy production. His mission is to bring mitochondrial testing out of the rare disease space and into everyday health. In part 2, we discuss the biochemistry of our stress response and the potential benefits of balanced nutrition for those in psychiatric drug withdrawal. *** 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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

This week, we are joined by Chris Masterjohn, PhD. Chris is a nutritional scientist, a former professor, and the founder of Mitome. With a PhD in nutritional science and years of research in mitochondrial biology, Chris's work focuses on translating peer-reviewed science into practical tools for human health. At Mitome, Dr. Masterjohn pioneered the first analysis designed to measure mitochondrial respiratory chain function directly, identifying individual energy bottlenecks and guiding personalized science-backed protocols to optimize the system responsible for over 90% of cellular energy production. His mission is to bring mitochondrial testing out of the rare disease space and into everyday health. In this interview, we discuss why so little is understood about the role serotonin plays in the body and how our mitochondria might play a part in the experince of antidepressant withdrawal. *** 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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Jan N. DeFehr is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Winnipeg and an associate of The Taos Institute and a member of the Faculty for Palestine, Manitoba. She is also a member of the York University Mad Studies Hub. Before entering academia, she spent many years as a clinical social worker, working alongside people who were trying to make sense of their distress within, and often in spite of, the mental health system. Her teaching, research, and course development focus on building public access to critical analyses of that system, drawing on the work of clients and survivors of psychiatry, practitioners, and scholars. Her new book, A Critical Mental Health Primer: Towards Informed Choice in Social Services, Education, and Healthcare(Canadian Scholars, 2025), offers a clear and accessible map of critical mental health scholarship. The book examines scientific critiques of diagnosis, the potential harms of psychiatric labels, the lack of transparency and procedural justice in services, anti-colonial critiques of mental health premises and practices, and the evidence on psychiatric drugs and the DSM. It also gathers non-pathologizing ways of helping that center relational, dialogical, anti-oppressive, and anti-colonial approaches, along with concrete tools for informed choice and everyday support outside of the dominant medical model. In our conversation, we talk about how Jan came to adopt critical perspectives, why she sees access to critical mental health knowledge as a prerequisite for ethical practice, and what it looks like when organizations take informed choice seriously. We move through the key chapters of the book, explore its implications for social workers, educators, and health professionals, and look at how communities can build forms of care that do not depend on diagnosis or coercion. *** 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

In our first podcast of 2026, Robert Whitaker joins us to answer questions submitted by Mad in America readers and listeners. We discuss the validity of ADHD diagnoses, withdrawal and sexual dysfunction risks of SSRI antidepressants, the harms of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), the rise of AI-generated misinformation and much more. *** 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  

Musician and artist Kev G Mor joins us to discuss his experience of psychosis, his daily support strategies, and the pros and cons of having a hundred-pound pit bull terrier for emotional support. Kev is a suicide survivor who grew up with early childhood trauma and has experienced homelessness as a teen, is a single father, and is now again in recovery. His work is about showing what staying well looks like on hard days and keeping it practical for people who live with psychosis. *** 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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Safa Askeri joins us to discuss his experience of antidepressant withdrawal and the gaslighting he was subjected to as he raised concerns with his doctors. "After this happened to me, I know that I can handle anything in life, no matter how hard it is." *** Like to know more about Mad in America or rethinking psychiatry more broadly? On our podcast, Robert Whitaker will answer your questions. Email questions to [email protected] by November 30, 2025 and we'll pick a selection for our December episode. We'd love to hear from you. *** 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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Joining us for a roundtable discussion are Brooke Siem, David Antonuccio, Kim Witzak, Angie Peacock and David Healy. They discuss the challenges of openly discussing psychiatric drug withdrawal, the true meaning of informed consent, getting doctors to acknowledge medication-induced harm and much more. *** 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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

On July 21st 2025, the FDA convened a hearing on maternal use of antidepressants during pregnancy and the impact this use has on fetal development. Around 400,000 children in the United States are born each year whose mothers took antidepressants while pregnant, and so it's easy to see the societal importance of this topic. What are the risks to the fetus, the newborn, and the long-term development of that child? Adam Urato and Joanna Moncrieff were members of that FDA panel, and so too were several others well-known to MIA readers, including David Healy and Joseph Witt-Doerring. The purpose of the panel was to assess whether the FDA needed to put a warning on antidepressants related to their use in pregnancy, and most on the panel spoke of research that told of the need to do so. However, after the panel concluded, the American Psychiatric Association and other medical associations, most notably the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, responded with what can only be described as howls of outrage, issuing press releases and telling the public that the panel was biased and that the real risk during pregnancy was untreated mental illness. These medical organizations asserted that the increased risk of adverse outcomes for children born to depressed mothers is due to the illness and not the drug, and that there was plenty of evidence that antidepressants were a helpful and even life-saving treatment for maternal depression. Here is where we are today. That FDA hearing put two narratives on public display, and most media reports embraced the narrative put forth by the medical organizations. What we will do today is review the evidence that exists on this topic and the response by the medical guilds to a public airing of that evidence. Dr. Adam Urato is Chief of Maternal and Fetal Medicine at the Metro West Medical Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, and he has been speaking and writing about the risk of medications used during pregnancy for years. Dr. Joanna Moncrieff is a UK psychiatrist and researcher who was a co-founder of the Critical Psychiatry Network and is well known for her research on the safety and efficacy of psychiatric drugs. *** 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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Frank Gruba-McCallister is a clinical psychologist, educator, and scholar whose career spans more than three decades of teaching and academic leadership.  He served as Vice President of Academic Affairs at Adler University, where he helped to reorient the institution's mission toward training socially responsible practitioners. His leadership and curricular reforms contributed to Adler's doctoral program receiving the American Psychological Association's Board of Educational Affairs Award for Innovative Practices in Graduate Education in 2007. He has also taught at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology and The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, and worked as a clinician in both medical settings and private practice. Throughout his career, Dr. Gruba-McCallister has been a steady voice at the intersection of critical psychology, humanistic and existential thought, and spiritual inquiry. He is the author of Embracing Disillusionment: Achieving Liberation Through the Demystification of Suffering, a book that examines how internalized oppression and ideological mystification compound human suffering and how healing demands a deep and sometimes painful confrontation with illusions. His newest book, Radical Healing: No Wellness Without Justice, published by University Professors Press, draws from liberation theology, critical theory, existential psychology, and transpersonal thought to explore the structural and spiritual roots of suffering. At its core is a call to restore moral responsibility, to reclaim compassion and justice as central to any meaningful model of care, and to invite those who seek to heal others to do so with humility, courage, and radical honesty. In our conversation, we discuss the origins of this work, the crises that shape our current moment, and what it might mean to envision psychotherapy as both a spiritual and political act. *** 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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org    

John Ioannidis is a Stanford professor, a physician, and one of the most eminent scholars in the world in the field of evidence-based medicine. Ioannidis has spent his career exposing the weak foundations of much of modern medicine. His 2005 paper, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," became the most-viewed article in the history of PLOS Medicine and helped spark a global reckoning with reproducibility. He has since warned about how evidence-based medicine can be hijackedby industry influence, how biased reward systems in academia favor quantity over quality, and how even systematic reviews can recycle flawed data. His critiques extend to psychiatry, where pharma-funded trials often tilt toward positive results, guidelines are shaped by insiders, and neuroscience findings are more fragile than they appear. He is a tenured professor at Stanford and has an extensive background in medicine, epidemiology, population health, and data sciences. As much as he is a champion of good science, Ioannidis is also a lover of the arts and humanities. He's a novelist, teaches poetry, loves operas, and has written libretti for four operas himself. In this interview, he discusses the extensive bias that pervades scientific research, the problematic practices and pressures that enable flawed science, and the significant issues with antidepressant research. At the same time, he reminds us why good science is a gift to humanity and something we must protect for our well-being and dignity. *** 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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Talia Weiner is a psychological anthropologist, licensed professional counselor, and assistant professor of psychology at the University of West Georgia. As a medical and psychological anthropologist, her work focuses on the intersection of social-structural forces and how those forces show up in lived experience, particularly in relation to mental health care. Weiner studies these and other topics with students in the Clinical Ethnography Lab within the University of West Georgia's psychology program. Weiner has an upcoming book titled Therapeutic Inequalities: Mood Disorder Self-Management in Chicago, scheduled for release Jan. 6, 2026, through NYU Press's Anthropologies of American Medicine: Culture, Power, and Practice series. In this interview, Weiner discusses how conservative sociopolitical trends influence psychology and mental health care—how, for example, people with bipolar disorder are expected to monitor and manage themselves in ways that are not only unrealistic but also blur the lines between self and disease. *** 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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

On the Mad in America podcast this week, we explore the importance of raising awareness of psychological approaches that challenge mainstream perspectives. Joining us today are three people who are practising clinical psychologists and who have written for Mad in America. Zenobia Morrill is a critical-liberation psychologist and psychology professor who received her doctorate from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her research interests include critical and liberation psychology, the psychotherapy process, and wider conceptual and ethical issues in psychology and psychiatry. José Giovanni Luiggi-Hernández is a clinical psychologist in private practice, a qualitative researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, a writer for Mad in America and part of the recently launched Mad in Puerto Rico website. His interests include understanding the lived experiences of colonized people using phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and decolonial frameworks, LGBTQ issues and psychotherapy for physical health concerns. Also joining us is Mad in America's lead research news editor, Justin Karter. A graduate in both psychology and journalism, Justin's research and writing span topics in the philosophy of psychology, critical psychology, MAD studies, cross-cultural psychology, qualitative methods, and theories of counselling and psychotherapy. In this conversation, we discuss the possibilities opened up by adopting a critical mindset, identify some of the barriers to working in such a way, and share some key resources to help aspiring psychologists explore alternative approaches. Find a full transcript of this interview here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/08/how-to-be-a-critical-psychologist-without-losing-your-soul/  *** 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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Welcome to MIA Radio. Today, we are pleased to have as our guest Jaakko Seikkula. Jaakko is a psychologist who helped develop the Open Dialogue practice at Keropudas Hospital in Tornio, Finland, in the 1990s, and he is the person who  has conducted the research that told of remarkable longer-term outcomes with this form of care. For the past 15 years, he has developed and led training programs that have seen Open Dialogue practices adopted in 40 countries. He recently published a book titled, Why Dialogue Does Cure. In this interview, we discuss how Open Dialogue came to be, the research that shows its positive outcomes, how psychiatry has failed to learn from Open Dialogue practice and more. *** 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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Jørgen Kjønø, whose stage name is Dex Carrington, is a Norwegian-American stand-up comedian based in Oslo, Norway. He is also an actor, host of the Truth Train podcast, and former travel show host who gained international recognition as the host of Dexpedition, which aired on MTV in over 30 countries. He joins us on the Mad In America podcast to talk about his experience with Lyrica and Zyprexa, including a five-and-a-half-year taper after 10 years on the drugs. *** Find a full transcript of the interview here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/07/horror-psychiatric-drug-withdrawal-dex-carrington/  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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Stijn Vanheule is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and professor of psychology at Ghent University. Trained in the Lacanian tradition, he has written widely on the structure of psychosis, the limits of psychiatric diagnosis, and the importance of attending to the subjective logic of mental distress. His books include The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective, Diagnosis and the DSM: A Critical Review, and most recently, Why Psychosis is Not So Crazy, which offers a reorientation of how clinicians, families, and broader society might understand and engage with psychotic experience. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, case studies, and contemporary cultural examples, Vanheule treats hallucinations and delusions not as meaningless symptoms but as creative responses to existential disruptions. He emphasizes the importance of listening—clinically and socially—not for coherence imposed from the outside, but for the structure and logic within a person's seemingly incoherent world. His approach challenges dominant psychiatric models that prioritize symptom suppression, calling instead for a therapeutic attitude grounded in humility and collaboration. In this interview, Vanheule discusses the role of hallucinations in restoring a shattered sense of meaning, the necessity of admitting one's limitations as a clinician, and the importance of everyday practices—gardening, conversation, shared meals—in building connections that can anchor recovery. Using a depathologizing lens, he discusses that to overwhelming existential challenges that make us all vulnerable, psychosis might not be a crazy reaction after all. *** Find a full transcript of the interview here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/06/why-psychosis-is-not-so-crazy-a-conversation-with-stijn-vanheule/  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 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org