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

Welcome back to the Madden America Rethinking Mental Health podcast. I'm your host, Justin Carter. And today we're picking up where we left

off with Dr. Brent Dean Robbins, psychologist, scholar, and someone who has spent his life thinking deeply

about what it actually means to be human. In part one, we talked about the big picture stuff.

Brent's early influences, his critiques of mainstream psychiatry, and his work in diagnostic reform.

If you haven't listened to that yet, I'd recommend going back and checking that out first.

Now, in part two, we get personal.

We talk about Brent's book, A Medicalized Body, and Anacetic Culture, which unpacks how modern medicine

tries to shield us from the rawness of suffering and death, and in doing so,

maybe dulls what it means to really live. We explore his love for humanistic psychology and its

untapped potential, and we talk about his own health journey, what it means to confront mortality,

not just as a psychologist, but as a person, living in real time with all the uncertainty and rawness that

entails. For me, this is one of the most important conversations I've had the pleasure of having

on this podcast. Here we go. This links up to your book, The Medicalized Body and Anasetic Culture,

which goes beyond the sort of usual critique of medicalization, maybe critical psychiatry

work that we're taking social problems and moving them into the medical sphere and actually says

that this becomes a, you know, this can be, the medical gaze can be a useful lens in solving

certain sorts of problems, but when it becomes a dominant cultural gaze

through which we interpret ourselves and the world, it becomes really problematic and

pathogenic, as you say.

Could you say more about how your work on medicalization connects up to sort of the cultural

problems that you see being at the root of some of the mental

...