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

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Madden America. I'm Leah Harris, your host for today, and I'm thrilled to bring you this conversation with our guest,

Sasha Durekhoff Warren.

Sasha is the author of the new book, Storming Bedlam, Madness, Utopia, and Revolt, published by Common Notions Press.

Sasha is a writer based in Minneapolis, his experiences within the psychiatric

system, and a commitment to radical politics led him to co-found the group Hearing Voices Twin

Cities, which provides an alternative social space for individuals to discuss often stigmatized

extreme experiences and network with one another.

Following the George Floyd uprising in 2020, he founded the project of Unsound Mind,

to trace the histories of psychiatry, social work, and public health connections to policing, prisons, and various disciplinary and

managerial technologies. Welcome, Sasha. It is so great to have you here with us today. First of all,

I want to congratulate and thank you for this outstanding new critical history of psychiatry

that you've written here.

And I was wondering if you could maybe start off by telling our listeners a little bit more about yourself, as well as the genesis of this book.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so delighted to be here. As far as the genesis of the book goes,

psychiatry is a field that I've had personal relationship to for pretty much my whole life,

either personally or in my family,

but it was also something that I just kind of took for granted for a long time and didn't really think too much about.

Certainly didn't think of it as like a field that

has had some sort of direct relationship with politics or economics or anything like that. I knew

that it did, but I just kind of took it for granted for a long time. But I was always interested

in like radical politics since a very young age. I was reading like anarchist politics

...