"Everybody Can Recover": Fighting Psychiatric Subjectivation and Helping Others Along the Way: An Interview with Prateeksha Sharma
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2026
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Psychosis and conditions like Schizophrenia have been tainted with pessimism right from the beginning. Doctors often don't know that recovery is possible and can convey this fatalism to their patients. Prateeksha Sharma's lived experience and research work challenges this pessimism. Prateeksha is a musician, a researcher, a composer, a counselor, and a writer. However, for the longest time, she was only thought of as a patient.
She is a distinguished research fellow at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research in Hyderabad and the founder of Brightside Family Counseling Center. She received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder as a college student and has managed these achievements while navigating the horrors and the gifts of psychosis. Prateeksha's writings critically examine psychiatric systems and foreground survivor perspectives. She brings intellectual depth and personal clarity to what it means to move from being labeled a patient, to being recognized as a person.
In this interview, we discuss psychiatric subjectivation, medical zombification, the silencing effects of diagnosis, and how lived experience completely reshapes the conversation about mental health.
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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. |
| 0:14.4 | Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Madden America podcast. Psychosis and psychotic conditions like schizophrenia were tainted |
| 0:22.2 | with pessimism right from the beginning, from the days of a male Creplin. Doctors themselves don't |
| 0:28.2 | think or know that recovery is an option, and they often convey this fatalism, this defeated |
| 0:33.7 | attitude to their patients. Today's conversation challenges all of that. Today I'm speaking |
| 0:39.6 | with Patricia Sharma, someone who brings honesty, courage, and deep reflection to conversations about |
| 0:45.8 | psychiatry and lived experience. This is not just a discussion about systems. It's about people, |
| 0:50.8 | about how labels can shape lives, about harm that often goes unnamed and thus unnoticed, |
| 0:57.5 | about reclaiming narrative, dignity and voice. |
| 1:00.8 | Pritika helps us think differently and more humanely about what mental health means in real life. |
| 1:06.7 | She is a writer and a mental health advocate whose work critically examines psychiatric systems and foregrounds survivor perspectives. |
| 1:15.3 | She brings intellectual depth and personal clarity to what it means to move from being labeled a patient to being recognized as a person. |
| 1:25.5 | So in this episode, we discussed psychiatric harm, the politics of diagnosis, |
| 1:30.0 | how lived experience completely reshapes the conversation about mental health, |
| 1:34.9 | and how dogs and music can help recovery from psychosis. |
| 1:38.7 | So if you hear a dog or two in the background, just know they're there giving us company. |
| 1:43.8 | I hope you'll listen with |
| 1:45.1 | curiosity and openness. Pratikshah, welcome to Mad in America. Thank you, Ayradi. Thanks for having me. |
| 1:52.5 | So let's dig in. Okay, the first thing we will do is kind of go over your background a little bit |
| 1:57.1 | so we can give our readers and listeners some context. So your personal lived experience, could you share a little bit so we can give our readers and listeners some context. So your personal lived experience, |
| 2:03.3 | could you share a little bit with us? I was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. It was that |
| 2:11.2 | time called manic depression. And the year was 1992. I was in the final year of college at that time. And of course, all the, |
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