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

Welcome, everybody. My name is Robert Whitaker, and we're glad you're joining us for another

episode of Mad in America

Radio. Today I'm very pleased to have as our guest, Yaku Sekula. Yako is a psychologist who

help develop open dialogue practice at Karaputas Hospital in Torniel Finland in the 1990s.

And he is the person who really has conducted the research that is told of remarkable longer-term outcomes with this form of care.

For the past 15 years, he has developed and led training programs that have seen open dialogue practices adopted in, at last reading, I think, 40 countries.

And he recently published a book on openogue titled Why Dialogue Does Cure.

Yako, it's such a pleasure to have you here today with us.

Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Well, one of the first things I'd like to do, Yako, is actually ask you a sort of a personal question,

and that is where you grew up in Finland,

and what motivated you to become a psychologist and start down this path of open dialogue therapy?

Well, of course, it has been a question to myself also when I was in the high school.

So I really, it was like excluding options, what would I like to do?

And one of the last option was to start to study psychology, and that's what I did.

And then coming to work in a clinical field, I think that, of course, you always have some family history and I think that

the main part of my family history to have interest of psychological issues is that I lost

my father pretty young. I was 10 years of age and living in this kind of situation with my mom and so on.

I think that those were causes to have an interest on psychology.

You know, I always think when people pursue this field,

they do have sort of personal reasons for doing so in their past and whatever.

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