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

Hi, this is James and welcome to the podcast. And this week we are sharing the audio taken from our recent psychiatric drug withdrawal town hall held on January the 15th, 2021.

This was our initial scene setting discussion, and the panelists are Adele Framer, also known as Alto Strata, founder of surviving antidepressants,

Luke Montague, co-founder of the Council for Evidence-based

Psychiatry, Swapnil Gupta, a psychiatrist with a special interest in deprescribing, and John

Reid, Professor of Psychology and Chair of the International Institute for Psychiatric Drug

Withdrawal. Our next event in this series will be held on March 12th, 2021,

and registration details will be available on Madden America in early February.

Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today

for our first in a new discussion series dedicated to psychiatric drug withdrawal. And on behalf of

our partners, the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry and the International Institute for

Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal, we're so grateful that so many of you decided to join us. My name is James.

I work for Mad at America as the host of the MIA podcast. And before we get

started today, I want to touch on what we hope to achieve with these discussions. So our aim really

with this series is to get to discuss honestly and openly the many issues faced by those wanting

to come off psychiatric drugs safely.

So partnering with the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry and the International Institute

for Psychiatric Drug withdrawal, we hope to collect together experience and knowledge that

will add to an important societal discussion.

So we aim to explore what we do and don't know about

safe withdrawal from antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines and stimulants.

And we will be discussing the knowledge, skills and experience necessary to support those who

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