Beatrice Birch is the Founder and Director of Inner Fire, a residential program in rural Vermont, which is unique in one particular way. It provides support for tapering from psychiatric drugs, including antipsychotics, which is an essential aspect of the therapy.

In this interview, Beatrice introduces Inner Fire, tells us about the programme and staff and explains how kindling our inner fire can hold up a mirror that tells people they are worthy and valuable.

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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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Justin Garson is a philosopher and historian of science at the City University of New York. He has published several books and articles on biology, the mind, and madness, including Madness: A Philosophical Exploration in 2022. He also contributes to Psychology Today and Aeon.

His latest book, The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia, was published by St. Martin's Press in April 2026.

In this interview, Justin joins us to talk about the work of Solomon Snyder, whose discoveries ushered in the era of biological psychiatry. We also talk about the race to develop new psychiatric drugs based on his research and the implications for our understanding of psychosis.

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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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Kelsey Osgood is the author of How to Disappear Completely: on Modern Anorexia, which was chosen for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers New Program. Her work has appeared online and in print at The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper's and The New Yorker, among other outlets.

In this interview we talk about Kelsey's new book Godstruck: Seven Women's Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion and her experiences with anorexia and psychiatric drugs.

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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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Psychosis and conditions like Schizophrenia have been tainted with pessimism right from the beginning. Doctors often don't know that recovery is possible and can convey this fatalism to their patients. Prateeksha Sharma's lived experience and research work challenges this pessimism. Prateeksha is a musician, a researcher, a composer, a counselor, and a writer. However, for the longest time, she was only thought of as a patient.

She is a distinguished research fellow at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research in Hyderabad and the founder of Brightside Family Counseling Center. She received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder as a college student and has managed these achievements while navigating the horrors and the gifts of psychosis. Prateeksha's writings critically examine psychiatric systems and foreground survivor perspectives. She brings intellectual depth and personal clarity to what it means to move from being labeled a patient, to being recognized as a person.

In this interview, we discuss psychiatric subjectivation, medical zombification, the silencing effects of diagnosis, and how lived experience completely reshapes the conversation about mental health.

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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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Linda Michaels is a psychologist in private practice in Chicago and a co-founder of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN). She trained at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology and completed the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy program at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. Before becoming a clinician, she worked in marketing, innovation, and management consulting, including work with organizations in the U.S. and Latin America.

Michaels is the chair and co-founder of PsiAN, a public-facing effort focused on helping people understand different forms of psychotherapy and advocate for the kind of care they are seeking. She is also a Consulting Editor at Psychoanalytic Inquiry and Clinical Associate Faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. She is currently a Fellow at the Lauder Institute Global MBA program.

In this conversation, we trace her path from market research to psychotherapy and then to organizing. We talk about what clients say they want from therapy and how training, insurance, and digital platforms have reshaped the conditions under which psychotherapy is practiced and accessed.

We also discuss her writing and research, including PsiAN's national survey work on public attitudes toward therapy ("Going Beneath the Surface: What People Want from Therapy") and a follow-up paper published in 2025 ("The Therapy World Has Changed: Where are We Now?"). We talk about her 2025 article in The American Psychoanalyst, "Corporations in the Consulting Room: What do we stand for, and what stands in our way?" and her edited volume, Advancing Psychotherapy for the Next Generation: Humanizing Mental Health Policy and Practice.

Linda also recounts some of the advocacy work she's done and the adversity PsiAN has faced, including being sued by a major therapy platform, as well as how institutional alliances across our professional organizations are reshaping the contemporary mental health marketplace.

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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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, my name is James. Today, we are discussing the experiences of people who have attempted to stop taking psychiatric drugs. These experiences are captured in a survey undertaken by the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Joining me to talk about this work are Cathal Cadogan and Agnes Higgins, both from Trinity College.

Cathal is an Associate Professor in Practice of Pharmacy at Trinity College. His research focuses on developing supports to help people make informed decisions about starting and stopping psychiatric medication. He was recently involved in a priority setting partnership to identify priorities for future research on reducing and discontinuing psychiatric medicines.

Agnes is a nurse, researcher and academic who has recently retired as a professor in mental health at the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Trinity College. She is a former Chairperson of the Board of Mental Health Reform, Ireland's leading service user organization, campaigning for improvements in mental health services. She is also currently a board member of Kyrie Farm, an innovative initiative combining the benefits of nature, meaningful participation, community and therapy to support mental health recovery.

Their work is part of a wider examination of priorities for future research on reducing and stopping psychiatric medication, and we'll talk about this as well as the findings of their survey. We'll also talk about the role that pharmacists could potentially play when people are considering stopping their psychiatric drugs.

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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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Nisha Gupta is an existential phenomenologist, a depth psychotherapist, a creativity scholar, and an artist. She's an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia and earned her PhD in clinical psychology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. She's also, if she doesn't mind me saying, a bit of a rising star as an early career psychologist, having won early career awards from the APA divisions for both humanistic and qualitative psychology.

Dr. Gupta's work centers on lived experience and the problems of form and method in the field. She is an advocate of the psychological humanities, disseminating psychology to the public as art, including paintings, film, poetry, and literary memoir, for community healing and social change. Her artwork seeks to raise critical consciousness and empowerment regarding marginalized lived experiences, such as sexual and gender oppression, creative madness, and spiritual emergencies. In psychotherapy practice, she integrates depth and liberation psychotherapy perspectives.

In this conversation, we talk about phenomenological filmmaking and what film can capture about distress, identity, time, and relationships that often elude other approaches to psychological research. We also talk about spiritual emergency and the phrase "dark night of the soul," including the difference between those frameworks and the more familiar language of symptoms and disorders.

Dr. Gupta also shares her own experience of navigating a spiritual emergency as a clinical psychologist. We discuss what helped, what did not, what clinicians tend to miss in these situations, and what it would mean to build a better set of responses around people going through them.

Finally, we discuss liberation psychology and collective resilience, including the question of how to think about suffering when its sources are social and political, and how to avoid reducing resilience to individual "grit."

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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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Alicia Ely Yamin is the Director of the Global Health and Rights Project and a lecturer at Harvard Law School. She's also an adjunct senior lecturer on health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Senior Advisor on Human Rights and Health Policy at Partners in Health.

Alicia is known globally for her work on the right to health, economic and social rights, and reproductive justice. She has spent much of her professional life in Latin America and East Africa, including co-founding a health and human rights program with the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos in Lima in 1999.

She has served in major UN and global expert roles, including as one of 10 experts appointed by the UN Secretary-General to the Independent Accountability Panel from 2016 to 2021. Alicia has edited and authored over a dozen books and UN reports, and close to 200 articles. Her most recent book, When Misfortune Becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality, was published in a revised and expanded second edition by Stanford University Press in 2023, with a Spanish edition forthcoming in 2026.

Today, we're bringing her human rights lens to our international mental health systems, including what she's seeing in debates around accountability, consent, and institutional power.

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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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Susanne Paola Antonetta is an accomplished writer and poet, the author of numerous books, and in 2001 her book Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, won a prestigious American Book Award.

Her latest book is The Devil's Castle, Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today.

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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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Kamaldeep Bhui is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford and Honorary Professor at Queen Mary University of London. He is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking work on cultural psychiatry, ethnic inequalities in mental health, and the social determinants of distress. In recognition of his contributions to mental health research and policy, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

He has written extensively on the grim reality of minorities facing higher rates of psychiatric detention and coercion. In an era of algorithmic checklists and time-pressured care, Bhui argues for reclaiming biographical listening and patients' own stories and understandings. Without cherishing lived experience, clinicians lose meaning in their work and patients lose agency, trust, and hope. In this interview, we will discuss how our contexts and culture reach deep within us to inform our experience of pain, and to indicate what is abnormal, why we feel distress, and what it means to heal.

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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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

Elizabeth Cotton is Associate Professor of Responsible Business at the University of Leicester and the founder of Surviving Work, which carries out socially engaged research on mental health and work. She has worked with health teams and trade unions, practiced as a psychotherapist in the NHS, and now runs the Digital Therapy Project, a group of UK and US researchers studying the future of therapy from both sides of the relationship.

In her new book, UberTherapy: The New Business of Mental Health, she explores the effects of reorganizing mental health care around the logic of the app store. Therapy is now something you can scroll through on your phone, match with in seconds, and rate like a ride share. Platforms promise frictionless access and personalized care. What is harder to see is how this new "mental health marketplace" is reshaping what therapy is, how it feels, and who it is really built to serve.

UberTherapy is part political economy, part insider account of therapy work, part literary exploration of what it actually feels like to bring our most distressed selves to the mental health app ecosystem.

In the second part of our conversation, Cotton traces how public austerity and platform capitalism have combined to turn mental health care into a set of digital products, governed by algorithms, data extraction, and dynamic pricing. In this world, qualified human therapists are slowly displaced by AI-driven "solutions," while those who remain are pushed into precarious, low-paid platform work.

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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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org