John Read - Fighting for the Meaning of Madness
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2019
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On MIA Radio this week, MIA's Akansha Vaswani interviewed Dr. John Read, a clinical psychologist at the University of East London, about the influences on his work and research on mental health over the years.
John worked for nearly 20 years as a Clinical Psychologist and manager of mental health services in the UK and the USA, before joining the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1994, where he worked until 2013. He has published over 140 papers in research journals, primarily on the relationship between adverse life events (e.g. child abuse/neglect, poverty, etc.) and psychosis. He also researches the negative effects of biogenetic causal explanations on prejudice, the opinions, and experiences of recipients of antipsychotic and antidepressant medication, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in mental health research and practice.
John is on the Boards of the Hearing Voices Network – England, the International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal and the UK branch of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (www.isps.org). He is the Editor of the ISPS scientific journal 'Psychosis.'
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry and social justice. |
| 0:13.4 | Hello, this is James, and welcome to the Madden America podcast. |
| 0:17.9 | And on the podcast this week, doctoral student Akansha Vaswani interviews Professor John |
| 0:24.0 | Reid. So thank you for being with us here today, Dr. Reed. And we're really interested in |
| 0:30.0 | hearing more today about, you know, your varied areas of research. But before we dive into that, |
| 0:36.4 | I'd like to ask how and why did you get involved in |
| 0:40.7 | critiquing mainstream psychiatric practices? What were some of the questions that intrigued you |
| 0:47.4 | initially when you started working as a clinical psychologist? Okay. I think I got psychology because, like most teenagers, I spent a lot of time trying |
| 0:59.0 | to figure out why all the adults were screwed up. |
| 1:02.0 | And I was on a good day, on a bad day, I spent lots of time to figure out why I was so screwed |
| 1:08.0 | up. |
| 1:09.0 | And on most days, it seemed like the whole world was a bit of a mess. |
| 1:13.3 | And communication was not good within my own family, |
| 1:17.8 | which I had some inkling was because, you know, |
| 1:20.5 | was to do with my father being a fighter pilot in the Second World War |
| 1:24.3 | and continually losing, seeing close friends shot out of the sky. |
| 1:30.0 | And he was fairly non-communicative and understandably so. |
| 1:35.2 | But I didn't know that as a child. |
| 1:36.7 | He explained it to me later. |
| 1:39.4 | So, I mean, I think that generation had a lot of that sort of thing going on. |
| 1:43.5 | But I think, as I say, most teenagers struggle at times. |
| 1:47.3 | And I thought, rightly or wrongly, that one way to deal with it, that would be to study psychology and try and understand myself and people a bit better. |
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