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Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

By: Mad in America
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The Mad in America podcast examines mental health with a critical eye by speaking with psychologists, psychiatrists and people with lived experience. When you hear such conversations, you realise that much of what is believed to be settled in mental health is actually up for debate. Is mental health a matter of faulty biology or is there more to it? Are the treatments used in psychiatry helpful or harmful in the long term? Are psychiatric diagnoses reliable? With the help of our guests, we examine these questions and so much more. This podcast is part of Mad in America's mission to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care and mental health. We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change. On the podcast over the coming weeks, we will have interviews with experts and those with lived experience of the psychiatric system. Thank you for joining us as we discuss the many issues around rethinking mental health around the world. For more information visit madinamerica.com To contact us email podcasts@madinamerica.com© Mad in America 2025 Hygiene & Healthy Living Physical Illness & Disease Psychology Psychology & Mental Health
Episodes
  • Using Lived Experience to Challenge Systemic Prescriber Inexperience in Antidepressant Withdrawal
    Jun 24 2026

    Carla Delgado is a San Diego native with eight years of experience in healthcare and a master's in healthcare administration. She also has a personal story of SSRI withdrawal, and we discuss how her background in healthcare administration helped to navigate the healthcare system, which has not been that friendly for people experiencing antidepressant withdrawal.

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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

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    28 mins
  • Mercy, Magic, and the Medical Humanities: An Interview with Jussi Valtonen
    Jun 10 2026

    Jussi Valtonen is a neuropsychologist, an adjunct researcher with the Finnish Centre for Evidence-Based Orthopedics (FICEBO), a professor of writing at the University of the Arts Helsinki, and a columnist for the Finnish Medical Journal. He works clinically as a neuropsychologist, and his research and writing sit at the crossroads of mind and brain through the health humanities.

    Jussi is an award-winning novelist as well. His novel They Know Not What They Do won Finland's top literary prize and has been translated into multiple languages. Alongside his scholarly work, he leads the Health, Narrative, and the Arts initiative at Uniarts Helsinki, which offers training in narrative skills for professionals in healthcare and social work and brings literary, artistic, and humanistic ways of thinking into conversation with clinical care.

    In this conversation, we turn to Jussi's recent work helping to build narrative medicine groups in Finland, first with clinicians and now increasingly with neurological patients, as well as to his broader effort to show why the humanities are one of the rare places where clinicians and patients alike can recover forms of attention, listening, interpretation, and moral imagination that dehumanized healthcare systems work to erode.

    ***

    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

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    49 mins
  • Anthropology, Arctic Iceland and Antidepressant Withdrawal: A Conversation With Fiona Frenzen
    Jun 3 2026

    Born in Germany and raised in Denmark, Fiona Frenzen is a qualified teacher with a master's degree in anthropology. For years, she had a dream about living in Iceland, seeking the grounding and healing effect of nature. But due to her health challenges and severe withdrawal syndrome, this dream seemed unrealistic. However, this past fall, she moved to a rural part of Iceland where she began teaching at the local elementary and high school.

    She dreams about putting her degree in anthropology to use by working in research and contributing to the awareness of the risks of antidepressants and the difficulties of 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 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

    Show More Show Less
    38 mins
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