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

Welcome to another edition of Mad in America Radio. I am Robert Whitaker, and I am very pleased to have as our guest today, Peter Sterling.

Peter is a lifelong political activist, a well-known neuroscientist who has retired from the

University of Pennsylvania, and an ethnographer. He lives now part-time in a rural part of Panama.

We're here to talk about his recent book, What is Health? I became fascinated

by this book after watching one of his talks in which he stated that the book was meant to address

this question, which I found very provocative. What does our species require for a healthy life,

and can we achieve this with drugs? This is a question with obvious relevance to psychiatry,

and we will explore that question in the next hour. Welcome, Peter. Thank you, Bob. I'm very happy

to be here. I thought it would be good to start with your history of political activism, and the

reason is, in a way, it's that political activism that eventually led to a

spark that in some ways inspired you eventually to write this book. And when I read about your life,

I was a little surprised to read about how your parents were communists and you were a red baby.

Can you talk about how being raised in that environment actually stirred

in you a life of political activism and really an awareness of social inequality and wanting

to do something about it? Sure, I'll try. So I was born in 1940. And my parents in the 1930s

and the 1940s until about 1955 were members of the Communist Party of the United States of America.

And what people don't realize now, because there's been, you know, 60 years of vilification of the communists, is that it was a political party. It was a political

movement, which was fairly popular in many ways. They ran candidates for president, for Congress,

for city councils. They were organizers of unions. The UAW was very dependent in the mid-1930s on the energy of

communists. They wrote American literature of that period. Arthur Miller, maybe wasn't a

member of the Communist Party, but he was sentenced to a year in jail for refusing to answer questions

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