Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.

Hello, my name is Bob Whitaker, and I'm very pleased today to have as our guest, Ula Andreas Underland.

In 2015, he opened the Lake Erdal Recovery Center

to provide medication-free treatment

to those who wanted such treatment

or to patients who wanted to taper from their psychiatric drugs.

As Mad in America has urged for a paradigm shift in psychiatric care,

this is a center that very much embodies that paradigm shift, and we have long considered it

as one of the most important initiatives in the Western world. So we're really pleased today to

have Ula to tell us about the Recovery Center. It's

evolution and some of the struggles it has faced in political financial circles. So Ula,

so great to have you here. Thank you for being our guest. Thank you very much, Bob. I'm appreciated

to be invited to your very important program. So let's go back a little bit to the beginning, and that is, why did you do this?

You know, what was your involvement with the psychiatric world before you started the center,

and then what motivated you to take this big leap into such an important and daring initiative,

I'd say?

You know, I had to start a little bit in my background.

I was raised in a suburb of Oslo, the capital of Norway, close to the largest psychiatric

hospital at that time, Dekomark.

When I was 16 years old, I started actually to work at the kitchen in Dekomark. And when I was 18 years old, I started actually to work at the kitchen in Dicemark.

And when I was 18 years old, I was already a father of a lovely daughter.

And then I educated as a nurse.

...