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

Hello everyone, welcome to Madden America Radio. My name is Robert Whitaker, and today I have the great pleasure of interviewing

Suzanne Paola Antonetta. She is an accomplished writer and poet, the author of numerous books,

and in 2001 her book Body Toxic and Environmental Memoir, won a prestigious American Book Award.

Her latest book is The Devil's Castle, Nazi Eugenics,

Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates today. Welcome, Suzanne, to Mad in America

Radio. Thank you, Robert. And as you know, your work has been a huge inspiration to me, so thank

you for having done what you've done. Well, thanks for the kind words. That's very nice of you to say.

Well, first of all, I have to say that the devil's castle is such a compelling read,

so well written, so well researched, and I have to tell you, I sat down in the morning and I had finished it by the night.

Oh my goodness.

Probably the biggest sort of way to say how much you enjoyed a book is if you can sit down and you don't want to, you don't want to leave your couch until you finish it.

So that was my experience.

Oh, thank you.

So your book is really interesting. It's like a composite of several parts.

It's a history. It digs into sort of the 150 years

of psychiatry and not just American psychiatry, but Western psychiatry, and into some

of its darkest corners. And you do it in this very novel way by telling the biographical stories

of three people. Paul Schreiber, Dorothy Buck, and of course the third person is you yourself.

That's true.

And that makes it such a nice way to sort of illuminate this history within the context of real lives.

And of course all three of you had responses that I think are memorable and lives that are so memorable in this whole story about psychiatry and psychiatric survivors and that sort of thing.

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