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

Hello, I'm Peter Simons, a news reporter for Madden America, and I'm pleased to have with me today, David Cohen.

David Cohen is Professor of Social Welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs

of the University of California, Los Angeles, and also the Associate Dean for Research.

He studies the social construction of psychoactive drug effects,

the union of law and psychiatry within a grim medicalization system,

and envisages alternatives to the current mental health industrial complex and the medicalization of everyday life. He has also taught in

Canada and France and for over 20 years held a private practice to help people withdraw from

psychiatric drugs. His first book, published in 1990,

was challenging the therapeutic state, critical perspectives on psychiatry and the mental health

system. His latest book, published in 2013, with colleagues Stuart Kirk and Tommy Gomery,

is Mad Science, Psychiatric Coercion, Diion, diagnosis, and drugs. Hi, David, and welcome.

Thank you, Peter, for having me. Thank you for being here. So first, I would like to ask about your

background. How did you become interested in the mental health field? I know that you do have a social

work background. So I was wondering,

what was your experience in the beginning working with people? So I started out as a social worker

in late 1975 in Montreal, Canada. And about nine years later, in in 1984 I entered a PhD program in social

welfare at Berkeley and so in that intervening time I was a caseworker and a

community organizer in a family counseling agency, in a juvenile court, in a civil

liberties association, in a community health center. And in each of those places, I witnessed

firsthand how psychiatry was used to excuse misbehavior and to constrain

misbehavior. And this was pre-DSM-3. So I can't really say what the mental health

...