Helen Spandler - Uncomfortable Truths in Survivor Narratives

Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Mad in America

Mental Health, Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 212 Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2021

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Helen Spandler is a Professor of Mental Health Studies at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. She is the managing editor of Asylum, a non-profit radical mental health magazine.

She currently holds the Welcome Trust Investigator Award and is the principal investigator on a new research project about the role of MadZines (comics and graphic memoirs created by people with lived experience of psychosocial disabilities) in contesting mental health knowledge and practice.

With over four books and 40 publications to her name, professor Spandler has applied her expertise to a wide range of concerns. She has written about the psychiatric survivor movement, alternate interventions such as therapeutic communities, psychosocial disability, and grassroots activism concerning patient rights.

In this interview, she discusses the importance of placing human suffering before theoretical preferences. She argues that understanding truly listening to psychiatric survivors requires us to get accustomed to uncomfortable truths.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.
0:14.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Mad in America podcast.
0:18.6	I'm your host for today, Ayythi Dhar, assistant professor at Mount Mary University and a science news writer at Mad in America podcast. I'm your host for today, Ayyrdidhar,
0:23.2	assistant professor at Mount Mary University and a science news writer at Mad in America.
0:26.3	If you've not already,
0:27.7	go check out some interesting news on MIA this week.
0:31.3	There is a really interesting blog post
0:33.1	about psychiatry's recent attempts
0:34.9	to distance itself from the chemical imbalance theory.
0:38.3	And there is a new study about online communities providing support to service users
0:42.3	who are going through psychiatric drug withdrawal.
0:45.3	On that note, we have someone today who knows a lot about survivor and service user movements.
0:50.3	We have with us, Dr. Helen Spandler, who is a professor of mental health studies at the University of Central Lancashire, the managing editor of Asylum, which is a radical mental health nonprofit magazine, which I think is going strong now for about 35 years or so, and she's also the principal investigator on a new research project about the role of zines in contesting mental
1:12.5	health knowledge and practice. Dr. Spandlow, welcome to Madin America. Thank you very much for having me.
1:18.8	It's a great honor to talk to you. All right. So today we're going to talk about mental suffering
1:25.2	as disability, a compassion deficit in mental health care,
1:29.1	psychiatric neglect and maybe more stuff. But before we begin, could you give our listeners some
1:34.3	general idea about your approach, your stance, and also what brought you to these issues? Was there
1:41.0	like a defining moment or was it like a slow thing? Just a basic general idea about
1:46.1	yourself and your work. This area has defined my life really, I guess, in one way or another. I grew up
1:53.0	with sort of mental health issues in my family and, you know, I've had my own kind of sort of
1:57.5	struggles up, you know, up to a point and I've always kind of found it really difficult up, you know, up to a point. And I've always kind of found it really
	...

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