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

Hello and welcome to the Mad in America podcast. This is Justin Carter. I'm a doctoral student in

psychology and the editor of the

research news section at the Madden America website. We provide daily reports of the latest

research and debates in psychology and psychiatry and conduct interviews with leading figures

in the field. Today, I am fortunate to be doing such an interview with Kirk Schneider.

Kirk Schneider is currently running for president

of the American Psychological Association, or the APA. He is a licensed psychologist and an adjunct

faculty at Saybrook University and Teachers College, Columbia. He is well known as the leading spokesperson

for integrative, existential, and humanistic approaches to psychology,

which emphasized the therapeutic relationship and the importance of confronting the deep

paradoxes of being human and the conflicts that arise from them in psychotherapy.

He's authored or co-authored 12 books, including the Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy, The Spirituality of

Aw, Challenges to the Robotic Revolution, the polarized mind, why it's killing us and what we can

do about it, and most recently, the depolarizing of America, a guidebook for social healing.

Many trainees in counseling and clinical psychology will recognize Schneider

from the APA psychotherapy training videos featuring his therapy work. Schneider is campaigning to serve

as president of APA to quote, address the existential crises that are now flaring all about us.

He puts it this way. Quote, we are in crisis racially,

politically, and environmentally. We are in crisis with gender and sexual injustices. We are in

crisis with mental and physical health. In short, America is poised on the precipice. And if our profession fails to grasp this problem,

we are in fact in danger of inflaming it. In this interview, Schneider discusses his path into

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