All Real Living Is Meeting - In Conversation With Brent Robbins - Part 1
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.8 • 201 Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
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Summary
Brent Dean Robbins is a psychologist, scholar, and all-around thoughtful human whose work has profoundly shaped existential and humanistic psychology.
He is one of those rare thinkers who makes psychology feel alive—not just a collection of theories and data, but a field full of urgent, deeply human questions. He’s a professor of psychology and the director of the Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology program at Point Park University, where he’s helped create one of the most distinctive training programs in the country. He earned his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Duquesne University—home to some of the most beautifully dense phenomenological work you'll ever have to read twice—and is a licensed psychologist in Pennsylvania.
In this two-part conversation, we’ll explore Brent’s career—from his early work critiquing the overmedication of children to his scholarship on metabletics and cultural therapeutics. We’ll also discuss how he’s navigating his current health journey and cancer diagnosis as an existential psychologist and his hopes for the future of the field—how we might reimagine mental health care in ways that embrace the messy, wondrous, irreducible nature of being human.
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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. |
| 0:11.0 | Welcome to the Madden America Rethinking Mental Health Podcast. I'm your host, Justin Carter, and today I get to do something that feels both deeply |
| 0:22.2 | personal and professionally significant. My guest is Dr. Brentine Robbins, a psychologist, scholar, |
| 0:29.6 | and one of those rare thinkers who makes psychology feel alive. You know, like it's actually |
| 0:35.0 | about something important, about being human, about suffering, |
| 0:38.3 | about how we make sense of things when they stop making sense. |
| 0:41.3 | Brent has spent his career at the intersection of existential and humanistic psychology, |
| 0:46.3 | but that's just the academic way of saying he spent a lot of time thinking about the stuff that matters. |
| 0:51.3 | How do we live meaningfully in a world that often feels arbitrary? |
| 0:55.1 | How do we hold onto our humanity when the systems around us seem designed to strip it away? |
| 1:00.4 | How do we get to a point where sadness and anxiety are framed as disorders rather than as a part |
| 1:05.5 | of the deal of being alive? In part one of this conversation, we'll talk about Brent's early |
| 1:10.8 | influences, how he first |
| 1:12.3 | found his way to phenomenology and humanistic psychology, how he became a leading voice in pushing |
| 1:17.2 | back against the over-medicalization of human experience. We'll talk about his work on diagnostic |
| 1:22.0 | reform, his critiques of the DSM, and his belief that we should be diagnosing systems, not people. |
| 1:28.8 | And then, in part two, we get even deeper. |
| 1:31.3 | We talk about his book, The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture, his reflections on mortality, |
| 1:36.8 | and what it means to stare uncertainty straight in the face without turning away. |
| 1:41.8 | So, if you've ever felt that modern mental health care is missing something, |
| 1:45.6 | some deeper acknowledgement of what it actually means to be human, you're in the right place. |
| 1:50.1 | Let's get into it. As we settle in for part one of this interview, let me give Brent a little bit |
... |
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