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

Hello, everyone. This is Amy Biancoli. Our guest today is Banning Lion, author of The Chair and the Valley, a memoir of

trauma, healing, and the outdoors. An account of the abuse he suffered after being hospitalized

in a psychiatric facility at age 15 and the long journey toward joy and awe that followed.

His memoir was published this spring by Penguin Random House. He first

wrote about his experiences in 1993 for the New York Times and more recently for the Washington Post.

Based in California's Bay Area, Lion is an outdoor educator and backpacking guide whose engagement

with nature was a key force in his recovery.

His website is banning lion.com, and that's lion with a why.

Banning lion, thank you so much for being here today.

And thank you for writing this book.

I have to say that I shed a lot of tears while reading it,

and I tore through it. It's a fabulous read. And I didn't just cry during the difficult parts,

and there are some incredibly tough parts, really painful, but there are also moments of

profound beauty, start to finish.

And that's part of what really struck me about your book.

But the pain beauty thing, almost the yin-yang, leads, in a way, it kind of leads to the story itself,

because the title and the subtitle really convey that.

You've got the chair representing the horrendous trauma you experience while hospitalized

and then other trauma later on.

And then you've got the valley, the healing you found in nature.

So the reader knows going in that that's the arc of the story toward healing.

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