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

Peers Gooding is a Mozilla Foundation Fellow and researcher at the Melbourne Social Equity Institute at the University of Melbourne Law School.

His main research interests are disability law and policy, international human rights law,

the law and politics of mental health, and empirical legal research.

Dr. Gooding describes his scholarship as an interdisciplinary undertaking that blends theoretical

inquiry with applied qualitative research

at the local, national, and international levels.

He has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

and the World Psychiatric Association on recommendations for alternatives to coercion

in mental health.

In this interview, he discusses his journey pursuing a human rights agenda in mental health

and the conceptual and practical difficulties facing those trying to intervene upon

entrenched practices of institutional care. He then talks about the connection between his

longstanding work to prevent coercion and mental health and the digital data-driven direction taken by the field as a whole. He elaborates the regulatory

and ethical issues he has uncovered at the intersection of mental health services and data-driven

technologies and gestures at emerging methods of algorithmic accountability for addressing some of these issues.

So, Dr. Gooding, you have broad theoretical and interdisciplinary interests.

Why don't you tell our readership a little bit about how, about your background and how you got

started working in this field?

Sure. So I grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and I suppose through formative experience with a family

member experiencing a pretty serious crisis and entering mental health services, I gained an interest in the politics of mental health.

My first degree is actually in history and cultural studies.

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