Hello and welcome to the Mad at America Rethinking Mental Health podcast.

If you're new here, hello, my name is James and I'll be your host as we ask critical questions

about the state of psychiatry and psychology in the 21st century. In this podcast,

we examine mental health with a critical eye by speaking with psychologists, psychiatrists,

and people with lived experience. When you hear such conversations, you realize that much of what is

believed to be settled in mental health is actually up for debate.

Is mental health a matter of faulty biology or is there more to it?

Are the treatments used in psychiatry helpful or harmful in the long term?

Are psychiatric diagnoses reliable?

With the help of our guests, we examine these questions and so much more.

One thing that I felt quite strongly was that

it was disgusting that as a teenager, I had a doctor who never once said, is there any reason

you might feel this way? So what we've been told is that our depression and anxiety are pathologies,

they're irrational misfiring. And one of the things that

connected all the different causes of depression that I learned about is actually the realization

that far from being pathologies, these are perfectly understandable and natural responses.

If you're depressed and anxious, you're not a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with

unmet needs. What's our job and what does society really need? Society needs informed consent

around the use of these drugs. So the harm that has been done is by a profession that doesn't

provide informed consent because that has led to a misunderstanding of what the drugs do.

That has led to many, many, many people being on the drugs long term. And by the way, all the data says

that with this new disease model of care, the burden of mental disorders has gone up.

...