The Political Systems Driving Abuse in Psychiatry: An Interview with Human Rights Lawyer Alicia Ely Yamin
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2026
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
Alicia Ely Yamin is the Director of the Global Health and Rights Project and a lecturer at Harvard Law School. She's also an adjunct senior lecturer on health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Senior Advisor on Human Rights and Health Policy at Partners in Health.
Alicia is known globally for her work on the right to health, economic and social rights, and reproductive justice. She has spent much of her professional life in Latin America and East Africa, including co-founding a health and human rights program with the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos in Lima in 1999.
She has served in major UN and global expert roles, including as one of 10 experts appointed by the UN Secretary-General to the Independent Accountability Panel from 2016 to 2021. Alicia has edited and authored over a dozen books and UN reports, and close to 200 articles. Her most recent book, When Misfortune Becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality, was published in a revised and expanded second edition by Stanford University Press in 2023, with a Spanish edition forthcoming in 2026.
Today, we're bringing her human rights lens to our international mental health systems, including what she's seeing in debates around accountability, consent, and institutional power.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Madden America Podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:14.4 | Alicia Eliyaman is the director of Global Health and Rights Project at Harvard Law School. |
| 0:20.6 | She's also an adjunct senior lecturer on health policy and management at the Harvard |
| 0:24.5 | T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a senior advisor on human rights and health policy |
| 0:29.1 | at Partners in Health. |
| 0:31.0 | Alicia is known globally for her work on the right to health, economic and social rights, and |
| 0:36.2 | reproductive justice. She has spent much of her |
| 0:38.8 | professional life in Latin America and East Africa, including co-founding a health and human rights |
| 0:43.1 | organization in Lima. She has served in major UN and global expert roles, including as one of |
| 0:49.4 | 10 experts appointed by the UN Secretary General to the Independent Accountability Panel from 2016 to 2021. |
| 0:56.3 | Today, we're bringing her human rights lens to our international mental health systems, |
| 1:01.5 | including what she's seeing in debates around accountability, consent, and institutional power. |
| 1:06.6 | Alicia, thank you so much for coming to the Mad America podcast. It's wonderful to have you here. |
| 1:10.7 | Thank you so much. It's great to be podcast. It's wonderful to have you here. |
| 1:13.6 | Thank you so much. It's great to be here. I'm a fan. |
| 1:19.3 | To start, I'd love to back up and get a sense of how you found your way into this work. |
| 1:26.3 | How did your own history, your intellectual journey lead you into human rights law and then into public health and international human rights work? |
| 1:32.9 | I grew up between Argentina and the United States. My mother's family is from Argentina, |
| 1:40.1 | and I likely would have grown up there, except that there was a pretty brutal civic military dictatorship. So I really grew up in the United States but had maintained close ties. And on the |
| 1:48.0 | other side of my family, my father's father was a labor activist, a union organizer. So I really was |
| 2:00.1 | growing up very aware of human rights issues, but more as kind of political, social demands. |
| 2:08.3 | In college, I went to college at a time where the United States was invading Central America. |
... |
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