ADHD Diagnoses, Examining the Psyche, Withdrawal and PSSD Risks, ECT Harms and More: Robert Whitaker Answers Reader Questions
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Madden America Podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:15.0 | Hello, this is James, and welcome to the Madden America podcast. |
| 0:19.0 | This is our first episode of 2026 and I'm delighted to be |
| 0:23.0 | joined by Robert Whittaker. Bob is with us today to answer questions sent in by Madden America |
| 0:28.7 | readers. Thank you to all of you who took the time to provide such thought-provoking and important |
| 0:34.7 | questions. And so without further ado, let's get going. Bob, welcome. |
| 0:41.2 | So good to see you again. Thanks for joining me to be on the Madden America podcast again. |
| 0:47.1 | Thank you, James, for this opportunity to interact with Matt and America readers. It's something I look |
| 0:51.6 | forward to every year. You've sent me some of the questions already, and they're really great questions, and so I think we're going to have a really nice discussion here. Let's kick off. So, yeah, as we said in the introduction, these are all questions submitted by Mad and America readers, listeners. They've come through in various forms, quite an eclectic mix, I think, of things to ask about. |
| 1:11.0 | So the first one's from Kristen, and Kristen asks, I'm wondering what you actually think of the ADHD |
| 1:17.1 | diagnosis. I was put on antidepressants at 13, went through severe withdrawal at age 21, and was |
| 1:24.5 | misdiagnosed and medicated for bipolar mania for years. |
| 1:28.3 | Now in my 30s I've finally put together that I had ADHD the entire time. |
| 1:33.6 | No medication works, so I just do without. |
| 1:36.7 | Thanks for this question. |
| 1:38.3 | I mean, the ADHD diagnosis, of course, is in fact a construct. |
| 1:43.0 | By that we mean that there was no identification of a |
| 1:46.6 | pathology or an abnormality in the brain that distinguishes as someone we're going to say |
| 1:51.7 | who has ADHD from the non- ADHD person. And basically what you see in terms of the diagnosis |
| 1:58.3 | is they're just saying if we give people a survey on how |
| 2:02.5 | of their fidgety that somehow theoretically measures their attention and we take those who |
| 2:10.6 | score at the highest on that scale and we say oh that's the group with ADHD people who are constructing |
... |
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