Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Paulo del Vecchio is a person in long-term recovery from mental health and addictions, who has been a leader in the peer recovery movement for 40 years. He recently completed a 30-year career at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, where he served in multiple roles including the director of the Center for Mental Health Services and the founding director of the Office of Recovery. Paolo is now an independent advocate, working to advance recovery-oriented policies and practices on national and international levels. In this interview, he speaks with Mad in America’s Leah Harris about his roots as a housing justice activist to his decades of public service at SAMHSA, what worries him most about mental health in today’s America, and where he sees hope in the recovery movement that he helped create. *** A full transcript of this interview can be found here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/06/progress-only-occurs-when-people-make-demands-paolo-del-vecchio/ [https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/06/progress-only-occurs-when-people-make-demands-paolo-del-vecchio/]  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/ [https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/] To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850 [https://pod.link/1212789850] © Mad in America 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org [https://www.jmaudio.org/]

Laurence Kirmayer is one of the most influential figures in cultural psychiatry today. A psychiatrist, researcher, and theorist, he serves as James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University [https://www.mcgill.ca/tcpsych/faculty/laurencekirmayer] and Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry [http://tps.sagepub.com/]. Across decades of work bridging anthropology, psychiatry, and cognitive science, Kirmayer has advanced a complex view of mental health as inseparable from culture, history, language, and political power. His research ranges from Indigenous youth resilience and narrative medicine to the diagnostic metaphors—such as “chemical imbalance” or “trauma”—that reshape identity and possibility. He has helped pioneer integrative approaches that unite phenomenology and neuroscience, including a biopsychosocial model grounded in enactive and embodied cognition [https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/09/biopsychosocial-model-beyond-mind-body-split/], as well as a person-centered, ecosocial framework [https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/10/blueprint-ecosocial-person-centered-psychiatry/] for understanding suffering beyond reductive biological paradigms. His critiques extend to how psychiatric categories reflect colonial histories and obscure social causes [https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/10/from-blame-to-understanding-the-importance-of-social-factors-in-mental-health/], as well as how attempts to localize mental health interventions may still impose Western norms [https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/07/attempts-localize-global-mental-health-miss-mark/]. Kirmayer’s scholarship on narrative, metaphor, and cultural psychiatry [https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/11/transforming-mental-health-care-with-cultural-narratives-and-metaphors/] aligns with ongoing efforts by Indigenous psychologists and anthropologists to reframe trauma and healing through culturally grounded practices, as reflected in recent collaborative work [https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/05/indigenous-traditions-force-a-reckoning-with-the-foundations-of-psychology/] calling for a decolonial turn in psychology. Drawing on 4E cognitive science, he proposes that metaphors are not simply rhetorical tools but embodied and enacted processes [https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/03/can-an-ecological-approach-to-psychiatry-push-past-reductionism/] embedded in local social worlds. These shape how people experience distress and how clinicians make sense of it. His forthcoming book, Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Toward a Poetics of Illness Experience (Cambridge University Press, July 2025), extends these themes by exploring how metaphor, narrative, and imagination shape suffering and healing across cultures, while offering a critical account of the symbolic and political frameworks embedded in contemporary psychiatric and biomedical practice. In this wide-ranging conversation, Kirmayer explores the politics of diagnostic language, the structural roots of suffering, and the poetic potential of metaphor to disrupt conformity and open new avenues for healing. From the medicalization of culturally normative expressions of distress to the reification of trauma, Kirmayer shows how dominant frameworks can limit imagination, flatten complexity, and displace political realities with individualized solutions. He calls for a psychiatry that listens not only to symptoms but to the metaphors and metaphysics that animate people’s lives. *** 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/ [https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/] To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850 [https://pod.link/1212789850] © Mad in America 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org [https://www.jmaudio.org/]

Hello, my name is Bob Whitaker, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Kermit Cole. We'll be speaking about a philosophical enterprise that Kermit is now deeply engaged in. That is, broadly speaking, how humor can help in creating a shared experience that is helpful to the healing process. Kermit, in his experiences of being with people in psychotic states, has seen humor as a moment when a connection can be made. In many ways, this project is bringing Kermit back full circle to his work as a film director, early in his professional career. After dropping out of Oberlin College, he joined a mime troupe that toured the U.S. as well as Italy and Greece, inspired by his interest in humor as well as how connection arises in the spaces between words. One of his first films was a short titled Before Comedy [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q3VaGH0NhQ], which is a film performed entirely without words. Another, which he directed in 1994 was titled Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BbcCFgZ0mo]. I met Kermit shortly after I published my book Mad in America in 2002. He was working at that time as a Residence Director of what might be called a halfway house in Cambridge called Wellmet. This was for people who had been discharged from or who were avoiding stays in psychiatric hospitals. The house was modeled to a degree after the Soteria Project. Then in 2012 after I published Anatomy of an Epidemic, Kermit, Louisa Putnam and I transformed my blog site into a web magazine, also called Mad in America. Kermit was the founding editor of the site, and for the first few years, he was something of a one-man band, posting science reviews, blogs and personal stories at a feverish pace. After retiring from that position, he trained in open dialog therapy, and Louisa and Kermit practiced dialogically inspired therapy with clients in New Mexico. Both Louisa and Kermit are Mad in America Board Members. *** A full transcript of this interview can be found here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/05/kermit-cole-dialogical-therapy-and-quantum-theory-walk-into-a-bar/ [https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/05/kermit-cole-dialogical-therapy-and-quantum-theory-walk-into-a-bar/]  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/ [https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/] To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850 [https://pod.link/1212789850] © Mad in America 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org [https://www.jmaudio.org/]

Welcome to this Mad in America podcast. My name is Robert Whitaker, and I'm happy today to have the pleasure of speaking with Joanna Moncrieff. Dr. Moncrieff is a psychiatrist who works in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. She is a Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at University College, London. In 1990 she co-founded the Critical Psychiatry Network [https://www.criticalpsychiatry.co.uk/], which today has about 400 psychiatrist members, about two-thirds of whom are in the United Kingdom. From my perspective, the Critical Psychiatry Network has been at the forefront of making a broad critique of the disease model of care. Without this network, I don't think that critique would be anywhere near as prominent or as sophisticated as it is today. Dr. Moncrieff is a prolific researcher and writer. Her books include [https://joannamoncrieff.com/upcoming-talks/] De-Medicalizing Misery, The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs, and The Myth of the Chemical Cure. Her latest book is titled Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth. This book in many ways is a follow-up to her 2022 paper [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0] which looked at the serotonin story and concluded that there was no good evidence that a serotonergic deficiency was a primary cause of depression. It caused quite a furor within the media and in psychiatry. *** A full transcript of this interview is availabe here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/04/chemically-imbalanced-joanna-moncrieff-making-unmaking-serotonin-myth/ [https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/04/chemically-imbalanced-joanna-moncrieff-making-unmaking-serotonin-myth/]  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/ [https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/] To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850 [https://pod.link/1212789850] © Mad in America 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org [https://www.jmaudio.org/]

On the Mad in America podcast this week, Brooke Siem, author of May Cause Side Effects, talks with Teralyn Sell and Jenn Schmitz about their journey from working in the prison system to challenging conventional psychiatric narratives in their therapy practice and podcast, The Gaslit Truth [https://pod.link/1726974856]. Dr. Teralyn Sell [https://drteralyn.com/] is a distinguished expert in Psychology and Brain Health, holding a PhD in Psychology and an MS in Counseling Psychology. She bridges the gap between traditional mental health care and integrative brain health solutions with formal training in holistic nutrition and biology. She is the author of Your Best Brain and the co-host of the internationally acclaimed podcast, The Gaslit Truth, where she challenges conventional narratives around mental health and medication. Dr. Teralyn is dedicated to promoting safe medication practices, responsible tapering and a paradigm shift in mental health care, one that prioritizes brain health over symptom management. Jenn Schmitz [https://www.instagram.com/therapistjen/] is redefining the field of psychology with a unique blend of expertise and lived experience. Holding a Master of Science in Clinical Psychology and having spent over a decade as a traditional therapist, Jenn took a bold step beyond the conventional boundaries of Western education and mental health treatment. Her personal struggle, marked by the challenging process of tapering off psychiatric medication, revealed insights that reshaped her entire approach to mental health. As a holistic, de-prescribing consultant, Jenn integrates psychological and brain health expertise with physical wellness, mindfulness and nutrition to safely guide the brain through the intricate process of medication tapering. Jenn hosts The Gaslit Truth podcast along with Dr. Teralyn and is a writer for the international wellness publication, Live, Love and Eat magazine. *** 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/ [https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/] To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850 [https://pod.link/1212789850] © Mad in America 2025. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org [https://www.jmaudio.org/]