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

My name is Tim Beck. Welcome to the Madden America podcast. Today I'll be interviewing Hans Scott Meyer, who is a professor of human services at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia.

Over the last 50 years, he has worked within a wide variety of human service settings, including residential homes,

community health centers, inpatient psychiatric units, homeless use shelters, transitional living programs, and prisons.

Around two decades ago, he transitioned into academia, where he now does research in the

liminal spaces between human services, psychology, cultural theory, and literature.

His recently published book titled Post-Capitalist Subjectivity in Literature and Anti-Sychiatry

asked the question, how might we be different if we didn't live in a capitalist society?

By drawing on Marxist and post-Marxist theory and conducting nuanced analysis of the professional writings of anti-psychiatrists,

including Franco Basaglia and

R.D. Leng and the work of fiction writers, including Franz Kafka and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.

The text identifies alternative conceptualizations of self and community.

Welcome, Hans. Thanks so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure to be here with you to talk about your work.

And a pleasure to be here with you, Tim. So to get started, I just want to acknowledge that what a rich and diverse collection of experiences you've had over your life. And I imagine this must be a continual source of inspiration in the research that you do. Can you unpack this history a little bit for us and explain how it is that you

found your way into academia after working in all these different contexts? Sure. It's always,

like with the book, an interesting process to think through a certain kind of lineage, a certain

kind of trajectory in terms of what bits and

pieces you pay attention to in response to a particular context and series of inquiries.

So what I'm going to talk about a little bit is certainly both extremely partial but pointed in terms of how I got here,

wherever that is. In 1971, when I was still in high school, I volunteered at a place called,

this is tell you how long ago, Furcrest Mental Retardation Center.

That language in and of itself is extremely interesting.

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