Pat Bracken - Toward a Critical Self-Reflective Psychiatry
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2019
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pat Bracken is a psychiatrist who questions many of the fundamental assumptions of his field. He has worked as a psychiatrist in rural Ireland, inner-city and multi-ethnic parts of the UK, and in Uganda, East Africa.
Bracken, who holds doctoral degrees in both medicine and philosophy, calls for a movement toward critical psychiatry. He was one of the people involved in starting the Critical Psychiatry Network, an organization of psychiatrists, researchers, and mental health professionals that question the assumptions that lie beneath psychiatric knowledge and practice.
Through his clinical practice and his academic work in philosophy and ethics, he has seen the limits and dangers of standard approaches to mental health in the West. As a result, he has become an advocate for listening to different understandings of madness from those who are routinely ignored and dismissed — namely, service-users and people who themselves experience madness, and those from indigenous and non-Western cultures.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:13.7 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast. I'm Justin Carter. I'm a doctoral student in psychology at |
| 0:19.1 | UMass Boston and the lead research news |
| 0:21.8 | editor for the Madden America website. If you haven't checked out that part of the website before, |
| 0:26.1 | we provide daily coverage of the latest mental health research that challenges the predominant |
| 0:30.3 | biomedical paradigm in psychiatry and psychology. Today, I am very excited to sit down with Dr. Pat |
| 0:35.8 | Bracken for an interview about his life |
| 0:38.0 | and his career as a critical psychiatrist and philosopher. |
| 0:41.4 | Dr. Bracken, who holds doctoral degrees in both medicine and philosophy, is the author of |
| 0:45.8 | trauma, culture, meaning, and philosophy published in 2002, and the co-author, along with Dr. |
| 0:51.4 | Philip Thomas, of post-psychiatry, mental health, and a postmodern world, |
| 0:55.8 | published in 2005. Dr. Bracken has been recognized frequently for his record of international |
| 1:01.2 | clinical work. He has worked as a psychiatrist in rural Ireland, inner city, multi-ethnic parts of the |
| 1:06.8 | UK, and in Uganda, East Africa. Dr. Bracken, thank you so much for joining us today. |
| 1:12.2 | You're welcome. |
| 1:13.2 | I wanted to start by talking a little bit about your upbringing, how it was growing up Irish |
| 1:16.9 | and a Catholic country, and how that may have influenced your thinking and your belief systems. |
| 1:22.5 | Yeah, well, I grew up in Ireland, I guess in the 60s and the 70s where most of my childhood. |
| 1:31.7 | And it was a very different place then, Justin. |
| 1:34.8 | Ireland, it was quite an oppressive society at that time. |
| 1:38.9 | We were very much dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. |
| 1:48.6 | And I'm not anti-Catholic or, you know, I grew up in that tradition and I see a lot of very positive things that religion can bring to people in their |
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