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

Welcome to the Madden America podcast.

I'm Anna Florence, postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health and a science writer for Madin America.

Today, I'm very excited to sit down with Dr. Damius Pira's for an interview about his life, his career, and his mandate as the UN special rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable

standards of physical and mental health. Dr. Pyrrhus is a medical doctor with notable

expertise on mental health and child's health. He took up his functions as UN Special Rapporteur

on August of 2014. He's a professor at the Center for Child Psychiatry, Social

Pediatrics at Bill Nees University, and teaches at the Faculty of Medicine. He's also the director

of Human Rights Monitoring Institute, which is an NGO. He's a visiting professor at the University

of Essex and a distinguished professor at the University of Essex

and a distinguished visitor with the O'Neill Institute

for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.

As a medical doctor, he served as a consultant

as a child development center at Vilnius University Hospital.

Dr. Pyrrhus, thank you so much for joining us today.

Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure.

I wanted to start by talking a little bit about your career.

How did you decide to become a psychiatrist?

It could be a long story. First of all, I decided to study medicine. And it was, let's say, controversial decision because I was hesitating between social sciences, humanities and natural science. So somehow I felt that maybe medicine would be something,

two in one or three in one.

And then when I started to study medicine immediately,

I realized that just fixing body parts, which is, I mean, diagnosing and repairing body parts is very important, but it's not that interesting.

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