1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:10,560 [Music] 2 00:00:10,560 --> 00:00:13,840 What does it mean to be called "crazy" in a crazy world? 3 00:00:13,840 --> 00:00:18,000 Listen to Madness Radio, voices and visions from outside mental health. 4 00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:27,680 [Music] 5 00:00:27,680 --> 00:00:30,800 Welcome to Madness Radio, this is your host Will Hall. 6 00:00:30,800 --> 00:00:37,600 And today I'm joined by co-host and show producer Jessica Gallinger. Welcome Jessica. 7 00:00:37,600 --> 00:00:40,960 Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. 8 00:00:40,960 --> 00:00:45,520 It's great to have you and before we introduce our guests I want to just welcome you to your 9 00:00:45,520 --> 00:00:50,320 first time co-hosting on Madness Radio and thanks for your work producing and you actually 10 00:00:50,320 --> 00:00:56,000 found our guest and you found the book and I'm very excited to have him on the show today. 11 00:00:56,000 --> 00:01:00,800 So maybe we could just introduce you to the listeners. Just say a little bit about how you came 12 00:01:00,800 --> 00:01:06,240 to be co-host and producer for the show and what your connection to all this is. 13 00:01:06,240 --> 00:01:13,280 I'd be happy to. I had my first involuntary hospitalization about a handful of years ago 14 00:01:13,280 --> 00:01:21,760 and at the time I believed everything that I was told by my psychiatrist in the mental health system 15 00:01:22,880 --> 00:01:30,240 the experience for me felt euphoric, it felt deeply spiritual and meaningful and transformative 16 00:01:30,240 --> 00:01:35,440 but when I came out of the altered state I didn't really know how to make sense of everything 17 00:01:35,440 --> 00:01:40,960 that had happened and psychiatrist came in and told me that none of it meant anything and I couldn't 18 00:01:40,960 --> 00:01:47,360 trust my thoughts and feelings and that I had to surrender basically my body and my mind to the 19 00:01:47,360 --> 00:01:50,960 psychiatric system which is how I think of what happened now. 20 00:01:50,960 --> 00:01:54,400 Yeah, welcome to the club Jessica and it happened to a lot of us. 21 00:01:54,400 --> 00:02:04,800 Thank you. Yeah, so Madness Radio was I think the first resource I found of folks who were like me 22 00:02:04,800 --> 00:02:10,560 and I got to hear voices of people who had similar experiences and felt the same discomfort 23 00:02:10,560 --> 00:02:16,240 with how they were treated so it opened a door to a community of people who could give me some 24 00:02:16,240 --> 00:02:23,600 explanations that I had been lacking and dispelled some of the confusion and loneliness that I had felt 25 00:02:23,600 --> 00:02:29,760 so I'm very grateful for your work in Madness Radio. Well, and I'm really glad to be participating 26 00:02:29,760 --> 00:02:34,960 today. Welcome Jessica and how are you doing now? I mean where are you at with Madness and Altered 27 00:02:34,960 --> 00:02:41,200 States and psychiatry and all that these days? Thank you. I'm well. I'm doing really well. I 28 00:02:41,200 --> 00:02:48,320 withdrew from drugs against medical advice four years ago and it was a rough transition. I would say 29 00:02:48,320 --> 00:02:53,920 it was about a year for me to kind of feel like I came back to feeling normal. What drugs were you 30 00:02:53,920 --> 00:03:02,000 taking? The one that really messed me up was respirodone but I've been on a number lithium was the one 31 00:03:02,000 --> 00:03:09,520 I was on most consistently and so yeah I'm doing well now I would say I'm someone who if there is 32 00:03:09,520 --> 00:03:15,120 something really distressing I am someone who could be at risk for psychosis if I don't get enough sleep 33 00:03:15,120 --> 00:03:23,600 so I still see myself as having that in my life I suppose but day to day I have no impairments. I 34 00:03:23,600 --> 00:03:29,840 am well I am completing a second undergraduate degree in science at the moment and interested in 35 00:03:29,840 --> 00:03:37,520 studying adverse effects of psychiatric drugs and alternative biological physiological notions 36 00:03:37,520 --> 00:03:42,720 of what's happening in psychosis and hoping to do graduate school in that area. 37 00:03:42,720 --> 00:03:50,480 So you're studying science? I'm studying science my original goal when I started it almost a decade 38 00:03:50,480 --> 00:03:58,480 ago now was to apply to medical school and then I had my first psychosis and was hospitalized and 39 00:03:58,480 --> 00:04:05,120 following that I realized that I would never be able to be licensed to be a doctor. I might be 40 00:04:05,120 --> 00:04:10,000 able to get into medical school and complete a medical degree but no one would license me and in 41 00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:16,160 fact I can't even get licensed to drive a car right now. You're in Canada now? I'm in Canada I'm in 42 00:04:16,160 --> 00:04:21,520 British Columbia. Yeah if I had a family doctor I might be able to do that but no one's willing to 43 00:04:21,520 --> 00:04:29,440 support my driver medical because I am unmedicated and I have a terrible diagnosis and so no one wants to 44 00:04:29,440 --> 00:04:36,080 get behind that. Yeah this is psychiatric Jim Crow that's basically what that is that systematic denial 45 00:04:36,080 --> 00:04:42,960 or rights and you discovered our guest in his book Justin Garcin. Do you want to introduce Justin 46 00:04:42,960 --> 00:04:49,440 and welcome on the show? Yeah I would love to. Justin is a professor of philosophy at Hunter College. 47 00:04:49,440 --> 00:04:55,120 He studies changing paradigms of madness. He's the author of the academic book madness of 48 00:04:55,120 --> 00:05:01,040 philosophical exploration by Oxford University Press as well he occasionally writes for Eon 49 00:05:01,040 --> 00:05:07,680 Psychology Today and Madden America. We're really glad to have you with us Justin. Thank you so much 50 00:05:07,680 --> 00:05:13,840 I'm really happy to be here. Yeah Justin I'm really excited about your book. Congratulations madness 51 00:05:13,840 --> 00:05:18,640 of philosophical exploration and what caught my attention right away is that you're making a distinction 52 00:05:18,640 --> 00:05:23,760 between the kind of dominant view which is madness is a failure of the system it's a breakdown 53 00:05:23,760 --> 00:05:32,080 it's some kind of dysfunction and another approach which is actually a very deep philosophical trend 54 00:05:32,080 --> 00:05:38,480 or thread we could say that you explore very deeply in your book which is the idea that madness is 55 00:05:38,480 --> 00:05:44,880 a way of dealing it's a creative response it's a way of coping with things it's actually some way that 56 00:05:44,880 --> 00:05:50,800 the individual develops a strategy for dealing with what they're experiencing and this is exactly 57 00:05:50,800 --> 00:05:57,040 what RD Lang saw madness as I think it's a view that is extremely useful and certainly something 58 00:05:57,040 --> 00:06:02,160 that I have found useful in my own life and I thought it was interesting also how you're not just 59 00:06:02,160 --> 00:06:08,480 simply making it an either or between these two things like for example you know Jessica mentioned 60 00:06:08,480 --> 00:06:14,160 sleep the reality is that anyone that doesn't get sleep is going to be psychotic if you want to call 61 00:06:14,160 --> 00:06:20,080 it that I mean some of a sooner than later and Jessica you and I are part of the sooner club 62 00:06:20,080 --> 00:06:28,000 maybe but anyone is going to go psychotic so it's not about tossing all of the biological breakdown 63 00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:34,640 views out the window but rediscovering this whole other story which is that actually maybe these 64 00:06:34,640 --> 00:06:40,080 are strategies that the organism or the individual is using so I really I found your book really 65 00:06:40,080 --> 00:06:44,880 interesting and I'm really happy to have you on the show and be talking with you and Jessica about it 66 00:06:45,760 --> 00:06:51,840 thank you yeah so how did you first get interested in this how did you start to step outside of the 67 00:06:51,840 --> 00:06:57,520 dominant view and recognize that there was this other view madness as strategy that you wanted to 68 00:06:57,520 --> 00:07:05,600 explore well I think I've always been interested in our ideas about psychiatry and ideas about madness 69 00:07:05,600 --> 00:07:12,720 I have a lot of madness in my family a few months after I was born so in the early 70s my dad was 70 00:07:12,720 --> 00:07:20,080 actually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and what's funny not funny ha ha funny ironic is that he 71 00:07:20,080 --> 00:07:27,120 was working under the president Richard Nixon at the time and he started forming these delusional 72 00:07:27,120 --> 00:07:34,160 beliefs that he was being surveilled and spied upon by Nixon which is you know Nixon I mean later 73 00:07:34,160 --> 00:07:40,000 people started to figure out that Nixon loved bugging his staff whenever they would get out of line 74 00:07:41,280 --> 00:07:47,680 but his belief started really spiraling into something much more extreme he thought you know his doctor 75 00:07:47,680 --> 00:07:53,920 put a tracking device in his anus he thought my mom was a government spy he thought the Washington 76 00:07:53,920 --> 00:08:01,760 post was writing stories about him but at the time he was very well read he knew about R.D. Lang he 77 00:08:01,760 --> 00:08:08,560 had read rolloam and some of the transpersonal psychologists and so he was willing to see a 78 00:08:08,560 --> 00:08:15,200 psychiatrist but only under the condition that he wasn't going to be drugged and he found a psychiatrist 79 00:08:15,200 --> 00:08:21,920 who was able to help him and work with him in some ways and he was able to continue working for the 80 00:08:21,920 --> 00:08:30,080 government for about 10 years or so 1980s 1986 everything changes he started having voices again 81 00:08:30,080 --> 00:08:38,160 he had again the delusional belief that God was talking to him and telling him to use his 82 00:08:38,160 --> 00:08:45,280 position in the government to promote nuclear disarmament and so he was trying to promote nuclear 83 00:08:45,280 --> 00:08:51,360 disarmament and he he thought that the French actress Catherine de Nove was talking to him and 84 00:08:51,360 --> 00:08:58,560 giving him guidance and support but at that point psychiatry changed immensely so he would be 85 00:08:58,560 --> 00:09:05,440 hospitalized he was diagnosed this time with bipolar disorder he was given a combination of drugs 86 00:09:06,160 --> 00:09:12,640 in his case it was a combination of withium and mullerl in that particular combination is actually 87 00:09:12,640 --> 00:09:19,600 known to be neurotoxic now so that pretty much took care of the voices or at least dampened them 88 00:09:19,600 --> 00:09:25,760 enough so he was able to function at least according to our our society's conception of what 89 00:09:25,760 --> 00:09:33,840 good functioning is the drugs eventually caused pretty serious motor problems and then I'll just 90 00:09:33,840 --> 00:09:40,000 say this in the late 80s I was diagnosed with depression I was hospitalized for about six weeks 91 00:09:40,000 --> 00:09:46,400 this was the height of the pro-zac revolution and so all of the messaging that I got was there was 92 00:09:46,400 --> 00:09:53,040 a chemical imbalance in my brain it could be reversed by using this particular drug and so I'm 93 00:09:53,040 --> 00:09:58,160 I'm very much a child a product of these dysfunction centered messages. 94 00:09:58,880 --> 00:10:05,440 It's so interesting so your dad had two experiences in two different eras the 70s when it was more 95 00:10:05,440 --> 00:10:11,920 maybe available to have a psychotherapy in less medication and less pharma oriented approach and 96 00:10:11,920 --> 00:10:16,960 then he has another experience in the 80s and things have just really shifted I mean pharma is basically 97 00:10:16,960 --> 00:10:22,240 dominated the neuroscience has come in and now he's just really heavily medicated. 98 00:10:23,520 --> 00:10:29,680 So then at what point did you get interested in stepping out of the chemical imbalance pro-zac 99 00:10:29,680 --> 00:10:37,520 revolution thinking about your own depression? Well a lot of it probably started in graduate school 100 00:10:37,520 --> 00:10:43,040 so I decided I wanted to be a philosophy professor and I was interested in mental illness and 101 00:10:43,040 --> 00:10:48,480 you know this whole question of who decides what's normal who decides what's abnormal I mean it 102 00:10:48,480 --> 00:10:54,160 was always clear to me growing up with my dad that he probably could have avoided a lot of the 103 00:10:54,160 --> 00:11:00,880 hospitalizations if people just chilled out a little bit and had somewhat more expansive ideas about 104 00:11:00,880 --> 00:11:07,120 what was normal I mean he was harmless but he scared people in his apartment complex with his ideas 105 00:11:07,120 --> 00:11:13,120 about God and Catherine de Nove and I just thought you know how much agony could he potentially have 106 00:11:13,120 --> 00:11:19,520 avoided if people just had slightly more expansive ideas about what's normal what's acceptable 107 00:11:19,520 --> 00:11:26,160 what's tolerable but in graduate school I came across this little book and it was called why 108 00:11:26,160 --> 00:11:33,680 we get sick and it was written in 1994 one of the authors is a psychiatrist Randolph Nessie and the 109 00:11:33,680 --> 00:11:40,000 other author was an evolutionary biologist George Williams and the idea behind the book is that 110 00:11:40,000 --> 00:11:45,840 we'll never really understand health and disease unless we look at it in the big picture of the evolution 111 00:11:45,840 --> 00:11:51,280 of life on earth and when we do that what we'll find is that some of the things that we think of 112 00:11:51,280 --> 00:11:58,480 as diseases are actually your body's designed mechanisms for dealing with problems so they talk 113 00:11:58,480 --> 00:12:05,200 about fever is an obvious example people used to think that fever was a disease they used to just 114 00:12:05,200 --> 00:12:11,200 combat it with drugs and bleeding and vomiting we've got to destroy this fever that's taking the 115 00:12:11,200 --> 00:12:15,920 patient's life and then a few hundred years ago somebody said well wait a minute you know maybe 116 00:12:15,920 --> 00:12:21,680 fever is actually part of your body's designed mechanism for dealing with infection and of course 117 00:12:21,680 --> 00:12:27,280 that's the theory that we understand today so the authors in this book they have this one little 118 00:12:27,280 --> 00:12:34,560 chapter called our mental disorders diseases and they talk about depression and a few other things 119 00:12:34,560 --> 00:12:40,560 and they say no not all mental disorders are diseases some of them are kind of like fever they're like 120 00:12:40,560 --> 00:12:48,960 designed responses to the problems of life and they started talking about depression specifically 121 00:12:48,960 --> 00:12:55,280 and they said that depression far from being a chemical imbalance in some cases actually just your 122 00:12:55,280 --> 00:13:01,760 brains wake up call like your brain trying to tell you that something in your life is not going well 123 00:13:01,760 --> 00:13:08,720 and needs more attention and that respect it's just as functional as just as designed as fever or even 124 00:13:08,720 --> 00:13:14,880 physical pain you experience when you put your hand on a hot fire and when I read that I just thought 125 00:13:14,880 --> 00:13:22,320 you know does anybody understand how subversive this book is I mean here's some scientists who are 126 00:13:22,320 --> 00:13:28,320 it's like they're throwing a hand grenade in the psychiatric establishment and if anybody really 127 00:13:28,320 --> 00:13:34,560 read and understood what they're saying this would call for profound transformations and how we think 128 00:13:34,560 --> 00:13:40,880 about madness and how we treat madness to the extent that treatment makes sense and so that really 129 00:13:40,880 --> 00:13:47,440 prompted me on this journey of looking historically at changing paradigms of madness and changing ideas 130 00:13:47,440 --> 00:13:53,440 about psychiatry. Yeah I sometimes think about depression I mean everybody's different people have 131 00:13:53,440 --> 00:13:59,200 different experiences but it's almost like one part of the person is going on strike against another 132 00:13:59,200 --> 00:14:04,880 part of the person like people they say okay I have depression I have low mood I can't get out of 133 00:14:04,880 --> 00:14:09,760 bed well let's you know let's treat that let's help you get your mood up let's help you get out of bed 134 00:14:09,760 --> 00:14:14,400 but wait a second if you talk to the person they're in a terrible relationship where they're being 135 00:14:14,400 --> 00:14:20,160 emotionally abused and the depression might be like you said like a wake up call a part of them is 136 00:14:20,160 --> 00:14:26,480 refusing to go along where another part of them maybe the more conscious part really wants to hold on 137 00:14:26,480 --> 00:14:31,920 and wants to keep going or someone who's in a lousy job or some kind of life circumstance that they 138 00:14:31,920 --> 00:14:38,640 need to be awakened up to by the depression so the depression has a purpose and I love that idea 139 00:14:38,640 --> 00:14:44,480 of bringing in the evolutionary biology perspective because that's something that's been noted is that 140 00:14:44,480 --> 00:14:50,960 if psychosis is purely breakdown then why does it persist for the species why wouldn't it be 141 00:14:50,960 --> 00:14:57,680 selectively drop away in the evolutionary process because it doesn't provide any kind of advantage 142 00:14:57,680 --> 00:15:03,120 it provides a disadvantage but then if we think about it as actually functional as like a wake up call 143 00:15:03,120 --> 00:15:09,360 or the possibility of the organism going beyond its circumstances by going into visionary or 144 00:15:09,360 --> 00:15:15,920 super creative or breaking the rules of social convention then we can see how psychotic experience 145 00:15:15,920 --> 00:15:20,880 if we if we want to call it that could be very useful to the species and can actually confer 146 00:15:20,880 --> 00:15:27,200 some advantage and then if you think about it in terms of like an initiation into a healer or profit 147 00:15:27,200 --> 00:15:32,640 or some kind of spiritual leader role when then absolutely that's functional to the species so 148 00:15:32,640 --> 00:15:38,960 yeah absolutely love the way you put that and I love this idea of depression or some of the things 149 00:15:38,960 --> 00:15:46,000 that we call psychosis can really be the organism's protest against a form of life that's just no longer 150 00:15:46,000 --> 00:15:53,040 no longer functional you know the sane response to an insane world and if you think of it like a 151 00:15:53,040 --> 00:16:00,480 disease or malfunction or disorder you're not thinking okay have the conditions of life that creates 152 00:16:00,480 --> 00:16:07,680 so much depression and anxiety and so-called personality disorders and what we call a psychosis 153 00:16:07,680 --> 00:16:14,320 have the conditions of life just become intolerable in a way that the most natural thing is to rebel 154 00:16:14,320 --> 00:16:22,000 against them and let me just say real quickly about the evolutionary psychiatry and a lot of people 155 00:16:22,000 --> 00:16:28,800 don't like applying evolutionary perspectives to think about human behavior because they think 156 00:16:28,800 --> 00:16:35,120 about eugenics and they think about all kinds of terrible abuses of these kinds of evolutionary 157 00:16:35,120 --> 00:16:42,000 perspectives and I'm not sold on the evolutionary perspectives at all but what I do think is remarkable 158 00:16:42,000 --> 00:16:48,480 about them and what I think is remarkable about this book is precisely what you said that people 159 00:16:48,480 --> 00:16:55,440 who come from an evolutionary background are generally thinking about function purpose design if 160 00:16:55,440 --> 00:17:01,680 something persists in the human species across a lot of different cultures and it's a significant 161 00:17:01,680 --> 00:17:07,920 proportion of the population say with depression or anxiety or there's always been these experiences 162 00:17:07,920 --> 00:17:15,200 that we now describe as psychosis if something persists for a long time across a large subset of 163 00:17:15,200 --> 00:17:21,280 the human population the first question somebody from an evolutionary perspective comes up with is 164 00:17:21,280 --> 00:17:26,160 well what is this for what's it doing it's just like if you look at the kidney or the appendix or 165 00:17:26,160 --> 00:17:33,120 some weird appendage on some old insect you think I wonder what this was for so I think that that's 166 00:17:33,120 --> 00:17:40,400 what I most value of the evolutionary perspective purpose function design and I think what's important 167 00:17:40,400 --> 00:17:46,080 about your book as well is that you're not discounting that there may be times when there's breakdown 168 00:17:46,080 --> 00:17:52,800 or dysfunction like I know that for me and for a lot of us looking at environmental toxins or 169 00:17:52,800 --> 00:17:58,080 looking at exposure or medication side effect for example you mentioned prozac well we know that 170 00:17:58,080 --> 00:18:05,520 one of the side effects of prozac is hello mania so it may be that we want to be open to the usefulness 171 00:18:05,520 --> 00:18:11,520 of an altered state like mania as a strategy but then on the other hand we might want to sometimes 172 00:18:11,520 --> 00:18:16,880 just simply say oh stop taking the prozac that's going to solve your manic state so I like that you have 173 00:18:16,880 --> 00:18:22,720 an awareness of that nuance you're not trying to proselytize or replace one perspective 174 00:18:22,720 --> 00:18:28,800 with the other you're trying to actually more balance our consideration of what's going on? 175 00:18:28,800 --> 00:18:34,480 Yeah I mean on one hand absolutely the moment you start thinking that okay maybe something like 176 00:18:34,480 --> 00:18:39,840 depression or many of the cases that we think of as depression are actually functional 177 00:18:39,840 --> 00:18:45,840 purposeful they're the organisms revolt against a untenable life circumstances then immediately 178 00:18:45,840 --> 00:18:52,000 you have to also start thinking about dysfunction okay how can these very delicate programs be 179 00:18:52,640 --> 00:18:58,400 dysregulated or spiral out of control so I think that if you think of depression or some of the things 180 00:18:58,400 --> 00:19:03,840 we call psychosis as somehow functional you could also imagine that there are conditions under which 181 00:19:03,840 --> 00:19:09,680 they're not going to work right or conditions when environmental circumstances might throw them off 182 00:19:09,680 --> 00:19:15,440 that said though I do have the feeling that a lot of times when I talk with psychiatrists 183 00:19:15,440 --> 00:19:21,120 there's a sense of okay just in your right this is so interesting you know function and dysfunction 184 00:19:21,120 --> 00:19:26,320 and I agree that we should be pluralistic in our perspectives but then sometimes there's an almost 185 00:19:26,320 --> 00:19:32,720 immediate knee-jerk response to go toward dysfunction like okay I can see how maybe some of the things 186 00:19:32,720 --> 00:19:38,080 that you're describing it about depression maybe it's the organisms revolt against a untenable 187 00:19:38,080 --> 00:19:43,360 life circumstances but really I mean when you get to psychosis that's really dysfunction right let's 188 00:19:43,360 --> 00:19:50,720 see how far we can explore these alternative function purpose-based framings yeah I think one of the 189 00:19:50,720 --> 00:19:56,080 things I'm often doing as a counselor working with people is just trying to understand the situation 190 00:19:56,080 --> 00:20:01,280 like what is the situation that the person is in it usually involves their relationships 191 00:20:01,280 --> 00:20:06,720 and their life choices and the situation the circumstances the oppressions that they're involved with 192 00:20:06,720 --> 00:20:13,440 that are affecting them I was thinking with the word function we might be setting ourselves up 193 00:20:13,440 --> 00:20:20,160 for some trouble just with that word it kind of implies productivity I would say so from an 194 00:20:20,160 --> 00:20:26,160 evolutionary biology perspective maybe selection is a more neutral word that doesn't carry some of 195 00:20:26,160 --> 00:20:33,680 the baggage that we have with function but I wanted to ask Justin in your book you talk about 196 00:20:33,680 --> 00:20:40,960 the dual mind and how I believe there was I forget what thinker suggested we have two hemispheres 197 00:20:40,960 --> 00:20:48,400 therefore we have two minds and the structure of the dual mind allows self-reflection and self-awareness 198 00:20:48,400 --> 00:20:55,440 and madness is implicit in that structure could you talk about that a little bit yeah absolutely 199 00:20:55,440 --> 00:21:01,280 and I agree entirely the word function is very loaded because it has these kind of dual meaning 200 00:21:01,280 --> 00:21:06,160 on the one hand it could point to something like design you know well what if depression is really 201 00:21:06,160 --> 00:21:12,960 a designed response it's functional in this kind of deep way that it evolved for a reason but yes 202 00:21:12,960 --> 00:21:19,040 then the function also has this kind of ugly sense of productivity you know depression and anxiety 203 00:21:19,040 --> 00:21:25,200 are bad because they make you a less productive worker and so we need to get you up and functioning 204 00:21:25,200 --> 00:21:32,400 again so that's a good point and I am aware of this kind of ugly other meaning of the notion of 205 00:21:32,400 --> 00:21:37,600 function where everything is about getting people up to speed and back to work then that raises the 206 00:21:37,600 --> 00:21:45,840 question is society itself functioning or maybe it's society that's breaking down that's dysfunctional 207 00:21:45,840 --> 00:21:51,520 and so disconnecting with society or going against the grain of society might actually be functional 208 00:21:51,520 --> 00:21:55,920 from a different perspective but I think you're absolutely right that we should not conflate 209 00:21:55,920 --> 00:22:03,200 the idea here of function and strategy with productivity and all the neoliberal values I think 210 00:22:03,200 --> 00:22:09,840 this is something that Lang mentioned that you can be in formation with the herd or the flock 211 00:22:09,840 --> 00:22:16,560 but if you're in formation and you're in line if the flock is going the wrong direction then 212 00:22:16,560 --> 00:22:22,320 know if you're out of formation but you're going in the right direction you're the one who's more 213 00:22:22,320 --> 00:22:28,080 on track so that I think is really important point that you raised Jessica that we not conflate 214 00:22:28,080 --> 00:22:34,800 those two things yeah I love that metaphor in Lang about the formation of jets and they're all moving 215 00:22:34,800 --> 00:22:39,920 in the one wrong direction and then one of them starts moving in the right direction but of course 216 00:22:39,920 --> 00:22:48,000 it's going to be seen as a disorder dysfunction somehow but yeah you mentioned Arthur Wiggins so I 217 00:22:48,000 --> 00:22:53,360 mean one of the things that I do in the book is I just look at these traditional thinkers from the 218 00:22:53,360 --> 00:22:59,520 history of madness really going back to the Greeks and then you know some of the medieval thinkers 219 00:22:59,520 --> 00:23:06,640 and some of the early enlightenment thinkers like Robert Burton and then I found this whole treasure 220 00:23:06,640 --> 00:23:13,760 trove of thinkers in the 1800s who I think were really exploring this idea that what we think of this 221 00:23:13,760 --> 00:23:20,800 madness could be purposeful in some way so you have a German psychiatrist a German physician 222 00:23:21,280 --> 00:23:29,520 Johann Christian August Heinroth who has this 800 page treatise on madness and in a lot of ways it 223 00:23:29,520 --> 00:23:35,360 reads like a traditional medical treatise there are various ways that the mind can fail to work 224 00:23:35,360 --> 00:23:41,120 the way it's supposed to but then at one point about halfway through he starts describing this one 225 00:23:41,120 --> 00:23:47,440 condition and he says it's like the patient is entering into a kind of dream world of images and 226 00:23:47,440 --> 00:23:55,200 and ideas but then he's very clear he says but nature itself is bringing about this kind of pause 227 00:23:55,200 --> 00:24:00,480 in the patient's normal relationship to their environment because they're dealing with something 228 00:24:00,480 --> 00:24:08,160 that's just too incredibly painful to confront so nature in its infinite wisdom has kind of 229 00:24:08,160 --> 00:24:13,760 allowed the patient to enter into this dream world and the best thing in those cases is just to allow 230 00:24:13,760 --> 00:24:21,040 it to run its course and allow nature to have its healing what years he writing that this was 1818 231 00:24:21,040 --> 00:24:27,600 which he has this remarkable textbook of mental disturbances or textbook of the disturbances of 232 00:24:27,600 --> 00:24:33,280 mental life but a lot of my I spent years just digging through these old texts and occasionally 233 00:24:33,280 --> 00:24:39,280 would find this utter gem like that and I would think where has this been in the history of psychiatry 234 00:24:39,280 --> 00:24:45,360 the whole history of man is why don't we know about these gems where people start speculating about 235 00:24:45,360 --> 00:24:53,040 the hidden purpose or function of madness and even a Philippe Pinell who's thought of really is one 236 00:24:53,040 --> 00:24:58,960 of the heroes of the history of psychiatry and helped to introduce this much more humanistic 237 00:24:58,960 --> 00:25:06,320 perspective to the asylums of Paris breaking off the chains of the mad patients people remember 238 00:25:06,320 --> 00:25:13,920 that but when you actually read his work he was very very fascinated with this idea that some of the 239 00:25:13,920 --> 00:25:19,280 things that we think of as psychosis might be kind of like fever they might have some kind of a 240 00:25:19,280 --> 00:25:27,360 healing or cathartic power and in the best of cases maybe you want to let them run their course maybe 241 00:25:27,360 --> 00:25:32,880 you don't want to drug and restrain the patient and throw them into a dark room and force them to take 242 00:25:32,880 --> 00:25:39,360 their medications really break through advice at the time and if that's true if that psychosis or 243 00:25:39,360 --> 00:25:46,480 madness these altered states do play some kind of positive role then that's we should remember embedded 244 00:25:46,480 --> 00:25:52,640 in cultural traditions it's embedded in the way in which institutions surrounding individuals 245 00:25:52,640 --> 00:25:57,840 are set up to take care of that and to respond to it because you know we think of individuals as 246 00:25:57,840 --> 00:26:04,560 individuals but historically people are not as individualized as they are in contemporary consumerist 247 00:26:04,560 --> 00:26:11,520 capitalism so I think part of the puzzle here is that we've lost that kind of institutional 248 00:26:11,520 --> 00:26:17,200 tradition response there are no elders there are no cultural traditions there are no rituals 249 00:26:17,200 --> 00:26:25,040 that people can respond to those breakdowns that weird behavior that kind of psychotic expansion 250 00:26:25,040 --> 00:26:32,560 and then to fill the gap here comes capitalism saying oh this is a market for our drugs this is more 251 00:26:32,560 --> 00:26:37,840 patients for insurance billing for our hospitals and then it just kind of compounds the disconnect 252 00:26:37,840 --> 00:26:43,760 and the dysfunction that happens I like that point will and it reminds me of the introduction of your 253 00:26:43,760 --> 00:26:52,720 book Justin where you're talking about hypotheses and the magicians and how western medicine exists 254 00:26:52,720 --> 00:27:00,400 by defining itself against so-called magical traditions so I wonder how much of the predicament 255 00:27:00,400 --> 00:27:07,280 we're in now is because all of the cultural traditions that honored mystical or other ways of 256 00:27:07,280 --> 00:27:14,640 knowing have been excluded from legitimate healing those traditions have been extinguished violently 257 00:27:14,640 --> 00:27:22,480 in many cases could you talk about that yeah that's a great point I'm remembering the book by 258 00:27:22,480 --> 00:27:29,120 Ethan Waters where he pointed out to me that there's research showing that a lot of traditional 259 00:27:29,120 --> 00:27:37,040 responses to madness or voice hearing or altered states that is seen within a religious context 260 00:27:37,040 --> 00:27:43,200 oh this is spirit possession it's a magic kind of pre enlightenment understanding but actually 261 00:27:43,200 --> 00:27:49,280 the outcomes are better like why is it that treating someone as they're possessed by demons or 262 00:27:49,280 --> 00:27:55,280 gin why is it that people actually go through it and then come back to the society well it has some 263 00:27:55,280 --> 00:28:01,440 of these basic ingredients like you provide framework of meaning you keep the person included in 264 00:28:01,440 --> 00:28:06,720 society you have an expectation that they're going to get better I mean sure it's not in a technological 265 00:28:06,720 --> 00:28:14,640 we could say scientific way but it's actually works better in terms of actually taking care 266 00:28:14,640 --> 00:28:20,240 of the person and I like what you said Jessica as well because the definition against these magical 267 00:28:20,240 --> 00:28:27,120 traditional ways was also very much a political struggle and it takes place in colonial context 268 00:28:27,120 --> 00:28:31,920 also took place in the u.s. I don't know exactly the history but at some point the pharmaceutical 269 00:28:31,920 --> 00:28:38,080 industry and like you were saying Justin with your father the social psychiatry the interest in 270 00:28:38,080 --> 00:28:43,200 Freud and psychotherapy and not to say that there weren't problems in that but that was there and 271 00:28:43,200 --> 00:28:49,520 it was in place up until the 60s and and 70s and then in really in the 80s with the deregulation 272 00:28:49,520 --> 00:28:55,600 that comes in with Reaganism the pharmaceutical industry just really starts expanding into health care 273 00:28:55,600 --> 00:29:01,280 in general until there's this political economic struggle that has pushed down and suppressed 274 00:29:01,280 --> 00:29:08,320 this other way of looking at madness yeah I mean I'm glad that you brought up the Hippocratics 275 00:29:08,320 --> 00:29:14,560 in the early Greek tradition because yeah they absolutely this dysfunction centered point of view 276 00:29:14,560 --> 00:29:21,440 goes back you know early early times it's always been part of our collective language you know the 277 00:29:21,440 --> 00:29:29,040 Hippocratic doctor who wrote on the sacred disease probably 400 BC says all the different forms 278 00:29:29,040 --> 00:29:35,280 of madness are just blockages of air flow to the brain you have the four humors the blood and the 279 00:29:35,280 --> 00:29:41,840 yellow bio I think in the black bio and they can get out of hand or imbalanced relative to one another 280 00:29:41,840 --> 00:29:47,440 and then they block the flow of air to the brain and then the person goes mad and of course today 281 00:29:47,440 --> 00:29:53,360 we see the Hippocratic doctor as these heroic figures they were finally bringing 282 00:29:53,360 --> 00:30:00,480 at least trying in their own way to bring medicine into this more naturalistic scientific 283 00:30:00,480 --> 00:30:05,760 medical yes they were wrong about the four humors and some of their specific explanations of course 284 00:30:05,760 --> 00:30:12,400 were wrong but their thought of is very heroic and particularly their thought of as heroic in relation 285 00:30:12,400 --> 00:30:20,400 to this more kind of spiritual magical tradition one of the basic ideas being that the things that 286 00:30:20,400 --> 00:30:26,080 we call madness a lot of times are punishments from the gods but the gods are trying to get you to 287 00:30:26,080 --> 00:30:32,640 reform some aspect of your personality or character but you have to make the go to the temple and make 288 00:30:32,640 --> 00:30:39,760 the amends and today people can look back to that and it's so easy to only see the negative 289 00:30:39,760 --> 00:30:46,720 stigmatizing power of that yes that's absolutely negative stigmatizing messaging to say that 290 00:30:46,720 --> 00:30:53,520 you're mad because god is punishing you and so I agree that we've made a major advance because we 291 00:30:53,520 --> 00:31:00,480 generally do not frame people's mental health crises as you know god is punishing you but 292 00:31:00,480 --> 00:31:08,640 I think because of that people completely fail to see the value of taking a spiritual or trans 293 00:31:08,640 --> 00:31:14,400 personal dimension to thinking about some of our mental health problems and just real quickly 294 00:31:14,400 --> 00:31:20,960 on the subject of anthropology and voice hearing there's this wonderful work now by Tanya 295 00:31:20,960 --> 00:31:28,240 Lurman who's an anthropologist and she looks at voice hearing specifically and people who have been 296 00:31:28,240 --> 00:31:34,560 diagnosed with schizophrenia or who would meet the criteria for schizophrenia she's done work in the 297 00:31:34,560 --> 00:31:42,880 United States Ghana and India and one of the things that she's shown is that in the United States when 298 00:31:42,880 --> 00:31:50,560 these kinds of experiences are framed as symptoms of a disease in good hypocratic fashion people 299 00:31:50,560 --> 00:31:58,560 tend to experience their voices as far more hostile as far more alien as far more unpleasant 300 00:31:58,560 --> 00:32:05,680 and in the communities that she's studied in places like Ghana and India people tend to have a 301 00:32:05,680 --> 00:32:13,040 cultural framework well these voices are probably deceased ancestors or spirits and then the tone of 302 00:32:13,040 --> 00:32:20,800 the voices the content of the voices is appropriately different people tend to experience them as being 303 00:32:20,800 --> 00:32:30,000 far more beneficial as being more guiding and so I do think that there is a kind of a real urgency to 304 00:32:30,000 --> 00:32:36,720 be open-minded about these frameworks and say look they work you may have your own personal opinions 305 00:32:36,720 --> 00:32:43,120 about spiritual versus materialistic outlooks but they work for people and we need to figure out ways 306 00:32:43,120 --> 00:32:49,680 of creatively reintroducing these perspectives into the conversation for sure. Yeah this comes up a 307 00:32:49,680 --> 00:32:56,640 lot there is so much that we can learn from traditional religious indigenous approaches but it's not 308 00:32:56,640 --> 00:33:03,360 about going backwards and just suddenly surrendering our critical thinking and just submerging ourselves 309 00:33:03,920 --> 00:33:10,800 into aligned devotion and veneration uncritically of those traditions but it's more thinking about what 310 00:33:10,800 --> 00:33:18,240 is it about those traditions that works why is it that for some people being given the message that 311 00:33:18,240 --> 00:33:24,800 yes this is an angry god or this is a demon or this is a gin or this is a possession state why is it 312 00:33:24,800 --> 00:33:30,800 that actually is more of a useful way of understanding it than your brains broken you've got a thought 313 00:33:30,800 --> 00:33:36,160 to sort of we're just going to hit you with anti-psychotics and then good luck getting a job that's way 314 00:33:36,160 --> 00:33:42,880 way below your potential because you're tranquilized and we're going to call that recovery and so for 315 00:33:42,880 --> 00:33:48,640 me it has to do with these crucial ingredients and the ingredients have to do exactly with what your 316 00:33:48,640 --> 00:33:54,720 book is about Justin seeing that there's some meaning or purpose there's a reason that this is here 317 00:33:54,720 --> 00:34:00,320 and whether it's about changing my life in terms of changing my job or thinking about my 318 00:34:00,320 --> 00:34:05,760 relationships or maybe I just need to have more independence in my life or whatever that early warning 319 00:34:05,760 --> 00:34:11,120 sign might be or whether it's you know in a different context about well I need to think about 320 00:34:11,120 --> 00:34:18,000 my relationship to my ancestors or my relationship to god and in a contemporary framing the relationship 321 00:34:18,000 --> 00:34:24,640 to god doesn't have to be like you submit yourself to the authority of the church elder it can be about 322 00:34:24,640 --> 00:34:31,200 well what is my destiny on the earth what is my potential I mean I study Jungian psychology and 323 00:34:31,200 --> 00:34:38,320 definitely the teleology or the purpose of any symptom is seen within the context of the unfolding 324 00:34:38,320 --> 00:34:43,760 of the unique creative contribution that the individual needs to make you know your family may 325 00:34:43,760 --> 00:34:48,160 expect you to be a doctor your sister might be a doctor your brother might be a doctor you're in 326 00:34:48,160 --> 00:34:54,080 med school boom you get hit with anxiety depression well actually maybe your destiny and your 327 00:34:54,080 --> 00:35:00,320 true talents don't lie with the expectations of your family or imitating the context that you're in 328 00:35:00,320 --> 00:35:05,680 maybe they have to do with rediscovering aside of yourself it's more emotional more sensitive 329 00:35:05,680 --> 00:35:10,880 more creative than was welcomed in your family and then you're going to pursue a destiny and then 330 00:35:10,880 --> 00:35:16,400 you have a relationship to your symptoms where the symptoms start to be more cooperative they start 331 00:35:16,400 --> 00:35:22,400 to be more guides they start to be more signals and messaging from your deeper purpose I mean I come 332 00:35:22,400 --> 00:35:28,080 from a family of artists my father's a writer my mother's an actor my brother is a musician and 333 00:35:28,080 --> 00:35:34,080 visual artist a painter so I was the black sheep of the family going into healing and being involved 334 00:35:34,080 --> 00:35:41,920 with the community in them since so I understand my breakdown my crisis in the system in some ways as 335 00:35:41,920 --> 00:35:50,480 helping me to get in touch with and discover what my real flourishing could be and then developing 336 00:35:50,480 --> 00:35:57,440 that relationship with my muse or with my young talks about the diamond is the not demon that's 337 00:35:57,440 --> 00:36:03,760 possessing you but the guardian spirit that is you know trying to point you in the right direction 338 00:36:03,760 --> 00:36:07,920 and it might be pointing you in the right direction by hitting you over the head with a stick 339 00:36:07,920 --> 00:36:12,480 a bunch of times to get your attention but you can't just try and get rid of the stick because 340 00:36:12,480 --> 00:36:17,040 it's a part of you it's some deeper part of you this guiding certain potential that maybe you 341 00:36:17,040 --> 00:36:22,480 didn't realize and then of course the problem is that when you have spiritually minded people 342 00:36:22,480 --> 00:36:28,640 imposing this framework because I would never impose this on anyone but what I want to do and I 343 00:36:28,640 --> 00:36:33,920 think this is the genius of the hearing voices movement is to create context where you can explore 344 00:36:33,920 --> 00:36:38,880 the possibilities and you can hear different examples of different people who've gone different 345 00:36:38,880 --> 00:36:44,720 ways and you can sort of say not how do I imitate them or which is right but to say well what's right 346 00:36:44,720 --> 00:36:52,480 for me what is my path what is my way forward? Justin you mentioned mental illness in the past being 347 00:36:52,480 --> 00:36:58,960 thought of is potentially caused by an angry god I wonder if an angry god is a worse metaphor 348 00:36:58,960 --> 00:37:06,320 than a chemical and balance theory and the reason I say that is if I'm imagining an angry god 349 00:37:06,320 --> 00:37:12,080 you could externalize that or you could kind of take a more contemporary youngy and approach as 350 00:37:12,080 --> 00:37:18,480 will said talking about a demon aspect of ourselves that guards and protects us and guides us 351 00:37:18,480 --> 00:37:26,160 so there's something more honest about an angry god because it's obviously a metaphor I would say 352 00:37:26,160 --> 00:37:35,360 whereas something like a chemical and balance theory is asserting itself as science and I see 353 00:37:35,360 --> 00:37:43,120 a lot of harm in that if the science doesn't unequivocally support it because what it's doing is it's 354 00:37:43,120 --> 00:37:50,960 ripping out all of the other potential meanings or significance of a psychosis of an altered state 355 00:37:50,960 --> 00:37:59,120 and reducing it to this two-dimensional chemical theory so I guess I'm saying I'm more comfortable 356 00:37:59,120 --> 00:38:07,520 with things that are unscientific then psychiatry representing pseudo science unscientific invites 357 00:38:07,520 --> 00:38:13,520 through imagination and it's not oppressive and it doesn't authoritatively determine the meaning of 358 00:38:13,520 --> 00:38:19,280 an event what do you think about that? Yeah I mean I think that's such a good point these are all 359 00:38:19,280 --> 00:38:24,640 when it comes to the chemical and balance theory this is a metaphor this is a narrative this is 360 00:38:24,640 --> 00:38:32,080 a fictional framework that is sometimes useful for some people oh the chemicals in your brain aren't 361 00:38:32,080 --> 00:38:37,600 balanced the right way and that's why you're having these terrible experiences and that's exactly 362 00:38:37,600 --> 00:38:44,480 the problem if we just looked at it for what it is just another metaphor another framework that may 363 00:38:44,480 --> 00:38:50,720 or may not be helpful may or may not be empowering for some people I wouldn't have as much of a 364 00:38:50,720 --> 00:38:57,200 problem with it the problem is that this is presented as if it's cutting edge science and I think that 365 00:38:57,200 --> 00:39:03,840 the whole family of chemical and balanced theories from the dopamine theory of schizophrenia and 366 00:39:03,840 --> 00:39:10,240 serotonin theory of depression I mean I think all of them have been pretty uniformly debunked 367 00:39:10,240 --> 00:39:17,280 and we do have to look at them as okay these are narratives and metaphors that might help us or 368 00:39:17,280 --> 00:39:24,560 might not help us and now it's just a question of okay well which narratives are most helpful one of 369 00:39:24,560 --> 00:39:30,400 the things that my dad experienced in the 80s was sometimes the voice of God would get very angry 370 00:39:30,400 --> 00:39:37,440 sometimes God was pretty cool and helpful and sometimes God was very pissed off and would do and say 371 00:39:37,440 --> 00:39:43,040 just awful and atrocious things I remember once my dad went to the hospital and he said look give me 372 00:39:43,040 --> 00:39:50,240 some of those drugs because I can't deal with this guy anymore but at least when you have this idea 373 00:39:50,240 --> 00:39:59,600 okay here's an angry God you can start asking questions you can start taking a curious and compassionate 374 00:39:59,600 --> 00:40:06,080 approach is in the hearing voices movement nobody ever asked my dad you know what do you think this 375 00:40:06,080 --> 00:40:12,480 angry God wants why do you think God is so angry do you think he's trying to hurt you does he want to 376 00:40:12,480 --> 00:40:19,360 protect you is he looking out for you you know what's behind this God's anger do you want to ask God 377 00:40:19,360 --> 00:40:27,440 why he's so angry that opens up a whole field for people to start you know taking these compassionate 378 00:40:27,440 --> 00:40:34,160 curious approaches and a little bit I've read on this topic is both of you I'm sure 379 00:40:34,800 --> 00:40:40,560 know far more about the hearing voices network in these various paradigms and movements but so much 380 00:40:40,560 --> 00:40:48,240 of what I've read is that taking up a curious and compassionate approach can change the content 381 00:40:48,240 --> 00:40:54,000 and change the emotional tone of these voices where as soon as they're seen as they always were 382 00:40:54,000 --> 00:41:01,920 from my dad starting in the 1980s as the symptom of a disease to be eradicated or at least managed 383 00:41:01,920 --> 00:41:08,400 with drugs that seemed to only make things worse for him and there is no standpoint there is no 384 00:41:08,400 --> 00:41:15,360 perspective where he could have said okay what's the ultimate meaning or purpose or function of 385 00:41:15,360 --> 00:41:20,400 these voices are these voices looking out for me are they trying to put my life on a slightly 386 00:41:20,400 --> 00:41:27,680 different path that just that option wasn't really available just drugs or no drugs that I think is 387 00:41:27,680 --> 00:41:33,360 probably the biggest problem with psychiatry is that it's colonized these questions of what does it 388 00:41:33,360 --> 00:41:38,720 mean to be human what does it mean to suffer how do I want to make sense of my life what is my life 389 00:41:38,720 --> 00:41:43,440 about what is the purpose of my life what am I all those things are just reduced to our is your 390 00:41:43,440 --> 00:41:49,280 brain functioning or not and then of course the chemical imbalance approach is very closely tied 391 00:41:49,280 --> 00:41:56,000 to the pseudoscience around medications that oh the medications work by correcting these chemical 392 00:41:56,000 --> 00:42:00,880 imbalances and and once we're inside of that framework then you just get locked in you don't have an 393 00:42:00,880 --> 00:42:06,880 alternative but then the other side of is to say well yes okay if you take powerful drugs if you 394 00:42:06,880 --> 00:42:13,680 take tranquilizers or you take prozac because prozac in some ways is chemically similar to how cocaine 395 00:42:13,680 --> 00:42:18,640 operates um they're going to have an effect on you I mean yeah they'll be placebo they'll be 396 00:42:18,640 --> 00:42:24,000 expectation but there's certain effects because they're drugs that's part of the pseudoscience 397 00:42:24,000 --> 00:42:29,520 is obscuring the fact that these are drugs so I like what you said just about yes maybe sometimes I 398 00:42:29,520 --> 00:42:35,600 do want to just tranquilize myself out of this experience I mean that's a very human thing that 399 00:42:35,600 --> 00:42:40,560 we all of us we all just kind of numb ourselves out sometimes you know we want to just switch off or 400 00:42:40,560 --> 00:42:48,000 just tranquilize ourselves but then if it's inside of that authoritarian you have to take this pill 401 00:42:48,000 --> 00:42:54,720 because of this broken brain that you have suddenly the entire conversation that we usually have 402 00:42:54,720 --> 00:43:00,320 about drugs which is what are the risks what's the toxic side effect of these drugs well we know there's 403 00:43:00,320 --> 00:43:05,440 with drugs there's no free lunch you can't just get high and then stay high there's going to be some 404 00:43:05,440 --> 00:43:11,920 cost but somehow we've lost that common sense conversation around psychiatric drugs because of 405 00:43:11,920 --> 00:43:17,680 this pseudoscience authoritarianism that comes in so I think that's crucial for starting to 406 00:43:17,680 --> 00:43:24,320 have a conversation that actually is more connected with what is possible for people rather than just 407 00:43:24,320 --> 00:43:31,680 imposing one perspective absolutely and sometimes as I mentioned with my dad and he would say look give 408 00:43:31,680 --> 00:43:37,440 me some of these drugs that you have because I don't want to listen to this guy anymore he understood 409 00:43:37,440 --> 00:43:43,680 better what he was doing which was I need something that's going to buffer these terrible experiences 410 00:43:43,680 --> 00:43:49,280 that I'm having in the terrible emotions that I'm having connected with these experiences and I 411 00:43:49,280 --> 00:43:56,160 know some of the drugs that you have will do that for me and one person I'm a big fan of nowadays is 412 00:43:56,160 --> 00:44:04,160 Johanna Moncreefe I really respect and admire her work and I admire her as a person I mean she really 413 00:44:04,160 --> 00:44:11,840 gets a lot of attacked frequently by other psychiatrism she's just a very cool very mellow person in 414 00:44:11,840 --> 00:44:17,840 the face of that but I love the basic framework that she talks about is the distinction between these 415 00:44:17,840 --> 00:44:25,200 drug-centered and disease-centered models of drug action for millennia we've known that drugs can help 416 00:44:25,200 --> 00:44:32,560 manage your emotions alcohol and opium and hasheation people have always used drugs for helping to 417 00:44:32,560 --> 00:44:39,120 manage their feelings and their thoughts and put themselves in slightly altered states and sometimes 418 00:44:39,120 --> 00:44:44,880 that can be helpful but then you can also ask when it comes to alcohol or 419 00:44:44,880 --> 00:44:51,680 hash or opium or whatever you could say look I get that you're using this and I get that this is 420 00:44:51,680 --> 00:44:56,640 helping you to navigate some of these really rough feelings I wonder if it's the kind of thing you 421 00:44:56,640 --> 00:45:02,720 should be doing forever and I'm wondering what kind of risks you might be getting yourself into by 422 00:45:02,720 --> 00:45:09,440 using these kinds of drugs so let's have a conversation about risks and benefits of the very powerful 423 00:45:09,440 --> 00:45:14,480 mind altering drugs that you're using and one of the things that she points out which I think is 424 00:45:14,480 --> 00:45:22,560 100% correct is that and then 1970s and 1980s as soon as we move to this disease-centered framework 425 00:45:22,560 --> 00:45:30,800 of drug action as soon as we moved to the idea that these drugs the anti-psychotics or anti-depressants 426 00:45:30,800 --> 00:45:37,600 are somehow reversing a chemical imbalance that whole conversation got short-circuited there's 427 00:45:37,600 --> 00:45:43,200 a normative sense is well you have to take these drugs because they're reversing the underlying 428 00:45:43,200 --> 00:45:50,240 disease process we could no longer have that conversation of look I'm happy to give you some of 429 00:45:50,240 --> 00:45:54,800 these drugs I'm happy to give you the sleeping pills because you haven't slept for a couple days 430 00:45:54,800 --> 00:46:00,560 this is clearly taken a toll on your mental health I'm happy to give you a low dose anti-psychotic 431 00:46:00,880 --> 00:46:05,760 because you don't want to hear these awful voices and the awful things that they're saying so 432 00:46:05,760 --> 00:46:11,440 let's have a conversation about pros and cons just as we would if we were going to be you know some 433 00:46:11,440 --> 00:46:17,440 smoking opium or something like that we would have a conversation about pros or cons and yeah I 434 00:46:17,440 --> 00:46:22,960 think that we can't it's hard to have that conversation if you think we're dealing with diseases 435 00:46:22,960 --> 00:46:29,520 chemical imbalances and so forth if it's all right I'd like to read a couple sentences from your 436 00:46:29,520 --> 00:46:34,560 book Justin and then we should have a conversation about it so this is near the end of your book 437 00:46:34,560 --> 00:46:43,520 you write it is as if during the period from 1952 to 1992 a kind of collective amnesia descended 438 00:46:43,520 --> 00:46:49,760 upon mainstream American psychiatry and all of the thinkers who advocated this teleological viewpoint 439 00:46:49,760 --> 00:46:55,920 such as Freud and Goldstein and Sullivan and even the anti-psychiatrist like Lang where suddenly 440 00:46:55,920 --> 00:47:01,200 as if we're speaking a different language they were not saying things that were empirically false 441 00:47:01,200 --> 00:47:06,720 they were saying things that were confused or nonsensical or saying things in a language we have 442 00:47:06,720 --> 00:47:12,880 forgotten how to translate I can only leave this as a question for historians and sociologists to 443 00:47:12,880 --> 00:47:20,720 answer so we're not historians and sociologists but I thought it was an intriguing paragraph maybe 444 00:47:20,720 --> 00:47:29,040 we have some ideas about what happened but you're in 1992 absolutely yeah I mean in a sense that was 445 00:47:29,040 --> 00:47:34,640 really the goal of the whole book is to look at the history of madness in terms of a clash between 446 00:47:34,640 --> 00:47:41,760 these two paradigms the dysfunction centered paradigm and then madness as strategy this function 447 00:47:41,760 --> 00:47:47,760 purpose adaptation paradigm which is different from the way that historians often do it 448 00:47:47,760 --> 00:47:54,160 they'll often describe the history of psychiatry as a clash between biological and psychological 449 00:47:54,160 --> 00:48:00,640 points of view and I didn't really want to do that I wanted to describe it in terms of pathology 450 00:48:00,640 --> 00:48:06,560 and purpose you know either of the people who see disorder disease dysfunction or you have the 451 00:48:06,560 --> 00:48:12,800 people who see function purpose and adaptation yes you can also look at psychiatry's history as a 452 00:48:12,800 --> 00:48:19,520 clash between biological and psychological points of view but when you look at it instead in terms of 453 00:48:19,520 --> 00:48:26,320 purpose and pathology or function and dysfunction you just get this very different narrative this very 454 00:48:26,320 --> 00:48:32,960 different cast of characters and one of the things that I was trying to do as well with the book is 455 00:48:32,960 --> 00:48:40,320 to try to understand our current predicament as clearly as possible as I see it what happened in the 456 00:48:40,320 --> 00:48:48,000 70s and 80s wasn't so much that there is a biological cakeover of psychiatry wasn't so much okay now the 457 00:48:48,000 --> 00:48:54,400 brain people I want to have their say it was really a dysfunction centered paradigm which I think 458 00:48:54,400 --> 00:49:00,560 took over and this is important because it's not just limited to this brain based chemical 459 00:49:00,560 --> 00:49:06,640 imbalance the chemical imbalance theory is one expression of this dysfunction centered view but 460 00:49:06,640 --> 00:49:13,200 I see the same thing in some strands of cognitive behavioral therapy which will say okay your 461 00:49:13,200 --> 00:49:20,320 anxiety your depression what's going on is that there is some dysfunctional loop of thoughts and 462 00:49:20,320 --> 00:49:25,600 feelings that are creating your symptoms and so either way whether you're looking at something 463 00:49:25,600 --> 00:49:31,920 like depression as a result of a chemical imbalance or whether you're taking this more psychological 464 00:49:31,920 --> 00:49:36,880 point of view and you're looking at in terms of some kind of a dysfunctional loop of thoughts and 465 00:49:36,880 --> 00:49:43,120 feelings either way the core ideas the notion of dysfunction and it seems to me that that's the idea 466 00:49:43,120 --> 00:49:50,400 that we really have to kind of rally our forces against not so much the bio point of view because 467 00:49:50,400 --> 00:49:56,000 if you think about it evolutionary psychiatrists take a biological point of view they take this 468 00:49:56,000 --> 00:50:01,440 evolutionary brain center point of view but I don't think that there's anything particularly wrong 469 00:50:01,440 --> 00:50:06,960 with a biological point of view so as I see it the culprit that I wanted to expose at the end of the 470 00:50:06,960 --> 00:50:14,960 book was this dysfunction centered perspective one thing that I'm writing a book on now is what exactly 471 00:50:14,960 --> 00:50:23,120 happened in the 1970s that made this dysfunction centered framework so central to our collective 472 00:50:23,120 --> 00:50:30,080 language to the point where so many people have no idea that there are even any alternatives to that 473 00:50:30,080 --> 00:50:35,440 I think that there are probably a plurality of different forces just really quickly I mean 474 00:50:35,440 --> 00:50:41,440 A there is of course issues where many psychiatrists felt like drugs were helping people to leave the 475 00:50:41,440 --> 00:50:47,040 hospital and they said okay psychoanalysis has not been helping my patients leave the hospital 476 00:50:47,040 --> 00:50:52,320 but core promising did help my patients leave the hospital so there was that I think 477 00:50:52,320 --> 00:50:58,400 psychiatrists tend to be insecure relative to the rest of medicine there tends to be this feeling 478 00:50:58,400 --> 00:51:04,160 like well we're not real doctors or we're not seen as being real doctors so I think that this 479 00:51:04,160 --> 00:51:10,480 dysfunction centered disease centered chemical and balanced centered framing kind of spoke to that 480 00:51:10,480 --> 00:51:16,880 insecurity and that is psychoanalysing psychiatry but I think that there's some truth to that I do 481 00:51:16,880 --> 00:51:24,320 think big pharma has some role to play chemical imbalance messaging was extraordinarily lucrative 482 00:51:24,320 --> 00:51:30,640 for an industry that's always looking for the next blockbuster drug I mean I think there's a lot of 483 00:51:30,640 --> 00:51:36,720 reasons why the chemical imbalance framing took over but I think one was that this particular scientist 484 00:51:36,720 --> 00:51:44,000 that I'm writing about named Solomon Snyder he's the one that came up with this dopamine hypothesis 485 00:51:44,000 --> 00:51:51,520 of schizophrenia in the mid 1970s and he did have some laboratory evidence some scientific evidence 486 00:51:51,520 --> 00:51:56,960 he really did believe that if you get to the bottom of schizophrenia what you'll find is dopamine 487 00:51:56,960 --> 00:52:02,240 abnormality so I think that one of the things that happened is that people took theories 488 00:52:02,240 --> 00:52:07,600 like Solomon Snyder's this dopamine theory and said aha finally we have this 489 00:52:07,600 --> 00:52:16,320 rigorous scientific justification for this new dysfunction centered point of view and everybody 490 00:52:16,320 --> 00:52:22,640 kind of leapt on that and use that as a poster child to advance this new vision it's a huge question 491 00:52:22,640 --> 00:52:28,400 so you raised a number of things I think that the de-institutionalization question it's right that 492 00:52:28,400 --> 00:52:37,680 psychiatrists were seeing boorazine and the anti-psychotics that were coming in as accompanying people 493 00:52:37,680 --> 00:52:44,480 returning to the community but there's more to that story because there was also suddenly federal 494 00:52:44,480 --> 00:52:50,480 money that started to come in to de-institutionalize and to get people on social security checks so that 495 00:52:50,480 --> 00:52:54,720 they actually had the financial possibility of that independence and there were a number of different 496 00:52:54,720 --> 00:53:00,160 factors that go into that story because I think that does also become kind of a dominant narrative 497 00:53:00,160 --> 00:53:06,800 that okay the drugs allowed people to get into the community whereas actually prior to the 60s 498 00:53:06,800 --> 00:53:12,720 and 50s there were a lot of people that went into hospitals they had a schizophrenia diagnosis or they 499 00:53:12,720 --> 00:53:18,640 had a manic depressive illness diagnosis and then they came out of the hospitals there was a transitory 500 00:53:18,640 --> 00:53:25,600 there was a kind of idea in the early DSM of schizophrenia being a reaction a schizophrenic reaction 501 00:53:25,600 --> 00:53:30,960 to a life circumstance but I wanted to go into your question of why does the dysfunction 502 00:53:30,960 --> 00:53:39,040 paradigm we could say become so dominant and my question is whether it's very useful to political 503 00:53:39,040 --> 00:53:47,040 and economic status quo's including the status quo the family being in violet and we don't question 504 00:53:47,040 --> 00:53:53,440 child raising or abuse or incest or violence or even subtle emotional abuse that's happening 505 00:53:53,440 --> 00:53:58,160 in the family because I think in the 60s and 70s you had this huge questioning and you've got 506 00:53:58,160 --> 00:54:03,920 nuclear war is everyone everyone's mind you've got the war in Vietnam is on everyone's mind you have 507 00:54:03,920 --> 00:54:10,880 to president and his brother president to be murdered by obviously a corrupt political system and so 508 00:54:10,880 --> 00:54:15,840 I think a lot of people are asking well maybe it's the system that's broken and then there's this 509 00:54:15,840 --> 00:54:24,000 huge pushback so maybe the enforcement of a no it's not the system it's you is part of the Reagan 510 00:54:24,000 --> 00:54:30,880 corporate counter revolution against the 60s and 70s protest movements I mean that's just a question 511 00:54:30,880 --> 00:54:36,160 that I have because I know that the dominant narrative of it's a biological problem in the sense of 512 00:54:36,160 --> 00:54:44,080 a broken brain came not just with pharmaceutical industry but it was this alliance between the pharmaceutical 513 00:54:44,080 --> 00:54:50,640 industry government policy the profession of psychiatry that was really under attack and also the 514 00:54:50,640 --> 00:54:56,160 families that felt under attack because if you start to question well maybe society is driving people 515 00:54:56,160 --> 00:55:02,960 crazy the status quo in the family the corporations and the government starts to become threatened so 516 00:55:02,960 --> 00:55:08,800 that's that would be I think an interesting way of answering the question of why did this become so 517 00:55:08,800 --> 00:55:19,040 dominant I think the time period is interesting that you selected in the book 1952 to 1992 if we think 518 00:55:19,040 --> 00:55:27,120 just a little before 1952 that's a very dark chapter for folks with so-called severe mental illness 519 00:55:27,120 --> 00:55:36,000 we have first this is a bit grim we have the Nazi Holocaust the folks who were the first to be 520 00:55:36,000 --> 00:55:44,240 targeted and exterminated were people with developmental delays mental defects severe mental illness 521 00:55:44,240 --> 00:55:49,520 and in fact the gas chambers were designed to be used by psychiatrists for them to kill their patients 522 00:55:49,520 --> 00:55:57,920 shortly after that I believe in the 40s is when the man who invented lobotomies got a Nobel prize 523 00:55:57,920 --> 00:56:06,480 and then shortly after that is when we have the development of anti-psychotics as you said chloropromazine 524 00:56:06,480 --> 00:56:13,840 which was discovered when they were searching for new anesthetics and the first name for it was actually 525 00:56:13,840 --> 00:56:19,440 a vegetative stabilizer they realized they could give it to people to sedate them basically outside of 526 00:56:19,440 --> 00:56:27,200 an anesthetic context and mellow them out reduce behavioral problems and so on so I guess I don't 527 00:56:27,200 --> 00:56:31,280 have an answer to your question I just think that period is really interesting because it seems like 528 00:56:31,280 --> 00:56:36,160 the answer is going to have to account for the really significant period that happened just 529 00:56:36,160 --> 00:56:42,320 one or two decades prior to that yeah absolutely and I mean it's so fascinating with the 530 00:56:42,320 --> 00:56:49,200 chloropromazine and these generally were not thought of as anti-psychotic drugs is having some 531 00:56:49,200 --> 00:56:55,680 specific power to reverse the disease process underlying schizophrenia they are often described 532 00:56:55,680 --> 00:57:01,920 as major tranquilizers and so there was more of a sense that these are pills that can help some 533 00:57:01,920 --> 00:57:08,000 people manage their emotions and their thoughts until they can really get to the core of the 534 00:57:08,000 --> 00:57:14,320 problems that they're facing but yeah one of the things that I think we do have to constantly 535 00:57:14,320 --> 00:57:22,000 challenge is these mainstream narratives the mainstream narrative of the 60s was you know you 536 00:57:22,000 --> 00:57:28,720 had a bunch of terrible psychiatrist who would blame everything on the mother you know the schizophrenia 537 00:57:28,720 --> 00:57:37,120 genic mother or the refrigerator mother or the traumatizing family and these poor parents were so 538 00:57:37,120 --> 00:57:44,080 stigmatized and then thank goodness this heroic you know disease centered model came along and 539 00:57:44,080 --> 00:57:49,760 liberated patients and their families from all of the terrible shame and stigma that they were 540 00:57:49,760 --> 00:57:55,520 working under and of course there is some truth to that there were some pretty stigmatizing 541 00:57:55,520 --> 00:58:00,960 and shame centered narratives out there but to suggest that that was the only narrative and thank 542 00:58:00,960 --> 00:58:07,280 goodness that this disease centered model came along and liberated all of these patients and 543 00:58:07,280 --> 00:58:14,160 their families from shame and stigma I mean then it's such an incredible caricature of the 544 00:58:14,160 --> 00:58:21,840 plurality of different visions and voices yeah it's also a misrepresentation of Lang's view because 545 00:58:21,840 --> 00:58:31,200 Lang saw that yes okay maybe the parents are creating a very disturbed context for their kid that 546 00:58:31,200 --> 00:58:38,480 can generate these terrible binds that lead to the strategy of psychosis and the strategy of madness 547 00:58:38,480 --> 00:58:43,920 but Lang really emphasized that the parents themselves had been socialized into a larger 548 00:58:43,920 --> 00:58:51,680 context and that's why he kind of zoomed out from the family into society itself as being disturbed 549 00:58:51,680 --> 00:58:59,600 and normalcy itself as being a problem that needs to be addressed yeah one thing I do like about Lang 550 00:58:59,600 --> 00:59:06,720 specifically was that he said okay yes of course there are family dynamics that can help us 551 00:59:06,720 --> 00:59:12,720 understand what's going on in these mental health crises and what we call psychosis but yes I 552 00:59:12,720 --> 00:59:19,920 think he always looked at family dynamics as a microcosm of greater social forces and he was always 553 00:59:19,920 --> 00:59:27,680 trying to understand how family dynamics are themselves byproducts of these greater social forces so 554 00:59:27,680 --> 00:59:34,560 my sense in his work the point was never you know we're going to blame mommy and daddy for all of your 555 00:59:34,560 --> 00:59:41,120 problems the point is we need to look at how these social forces impact you directly and via this 556 00:59:41,120 --> 00:59:48,480 particular institution called the family but it seems like today even mentioning the link between 557 00:59:48,480 --> 00:59:55,200 say childhood abuse and neglect on the one hand an adult mental health crises on the other it 558 00:59:55,200 --> 01:00:01,440 almost seems like taboo to talk about and I think that's why some people who have written extensively 559 01:00:01,440 --> 01:00:08,800 on the link between abuse or neglect and later mental health crises I think you know they tend to be 560 01:00:08,800 --> 01:00:15,840 attacked like John Reed for example yeah yeah on this topic it tends to be attacked pilloried 561 01:00:15,840 --> 01:00:21,200 ridiculed oh you're just trying to bring us back to the battle days when we blame everything on 562 01:00:21,200 --> 01:00:25,680 you know mom and dad yeah well I think it speaks to a problem in the culture which is that we tend to 563 01:00:25,680 --> 01:00:32,400 be focused on find the bad guy and get rid of the bad guy and there's a quite a moral puritanism 564 01:00:32,400 --> 01:00:38,640 that's endemic to American culture which maybe feeds into the idea of chemical imbalances 565 01:00:38,640 --> 01:00:43,680 because we've sort of figured out what the problem is we can identify it as something it's external 566 01:00:43,680 --> 01:00:49,680 and that we can eradicate it it's almost like the war on mental illness the war on on schizophrenia 567 01:00:49,680 --> 01:00:56,560 and that misses the complexity and we don't so much of the mental health system I think and the 568 01:00:56,560 --> 01:01:03,280 the role of psychiatry is to kind of manage guilt it's like how to take guilt off of the individual 569 01:01:03,280 --> 01:01:08,160 that's very appealing if you're not able to be so-called productive in society it's very 570 01:01:08,160 --> 01:01:13,120 appealing a narrative that says well it's not me it's my chemical imbalance well my belief is 571 01:01:13,120 --> 01:01:18,880 that why can't we be compassionate and forgiving without having to just transfer guilt onto the 572 01:01:18,880 --> 01:01:24,560 chemical imbalance I mean there's a way in which we sort of use psychiatrists as a way of saying okay 573 01:01:24,560 --> 01:01:28,720 you know you have this family problem you have this problem with this individual now you're doing 574 01:01:28,720 --> 01:01:35,280 the right thing because you're under the care of the authority figure and well I think it's 575 01:01:35,280 --> 01:01:41,920 a much too simplistic a way of understanding the complexity of it that there's individuals and they 576 01:01:41,920 --> 01:01:48,960 may have some pathway that involves challenging their parents or they may have some pathway 577 01:01:48,960 --> 01:01:54,640 that involves taking personal responsibility but that doesn't mean that everything has to land on 578 01:01:54,640 --> 01:01:58,720 it's all up to you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps or it's all going to be 579 01:01:59,280 --> 01:02:04,880 blaming the parents and I think that there's an atmosphere of fear and scapegoating around 580 01:02:04,880 --> 01:02:09,840 madness around mental health that's driving a lot of this I mean the mental health system is really 581 01:02:09,840 --> 01:02:16,560 a way of society managing its fear of madness and normalizing a certain response to it so that we 582 01:02:16,560 --> 01:02:21,600 don't have to think about this thing that we're afraid of and there's parallels with what we do with 583 01:02:21,600 --> 01:02:27,760 our elders and what we do with death that we put them out of the frame entirely because we just 584 01:02:27,760 --> 01:02:33,280 wanted to be on this productive track rather than going into these realms that are going to be scary 585 01:02:33,280 --> 01:02:38,080 and confusing and then maybe they challenge us to answer these kind of deep existential questions 586 01:02:38,080 --> 01:02:44,800 that no outside authority can answer for us but you know instead we just push them all 587 01:02:44,800 --> 01:02:49,440 all away and it becomes more fodder for the taboo 588 01:02:49,440 --> 01:02:57,680 Well Justin I really appreciated reading your book and I found it validating to read the idea 589 01:02:57,680 --> 01:03:04,720 of these thinkers going back centuries even seeing function in so-called mental illness and 590 01:03:04,720 --> 01:03:12,080 redeeming that from contemporary psychiatry where it's been buried however I also had a feeling of 591 01:03:12,080 --> 01:03:20,560 grief reading your book too because all of the thinkers well perhaps they had private experiences 592 01:03:20,560 --> 01:03:27,040 that we don't know of but I would say they were all writing outside of their own experience 593 01:03:27,040 --> 01:03:35,760 these were all folks reflecting on clinical patients and I just my wish for the future is that 594 01:03:35,760 --> 01:03:43,120 we get to write our own stories we get to have our own theories and write them and get published 595 01:03:43,120 --> 01:03:50,480 and be considered important thinkers that scholars care about and that our stories are more diverse 596 01:03:50,480 --> 01:04:00,400 they're not just the reflections of you know social authorities so to speak. Yeah absolutely absolutely 597 01:04:00,400 --> 01:04:08,240 I think it's worth feeling grief and worth feeling upset about and struck by the fact that these are 598 01:04:08,240 --> 01:04:16,000 almost always with some exceptions you know like Burton who himself struggled with melancholy and 599 01:04:16,000 --> 01:04:21,680 said he was writing as a way of kind of struggling with his own mental health issues but it was 600 01:04:21,680 --> 01:04:30,320 almost always physicians speculating about the nature of the problems that their patients were having 601 01:04:30,320 --> 01:04:37,840 was the physicians and the patients and there was very little idea that you know the patients these 602 01:04:37,840 --> 01:04:47,200 mad voices would have any legitimacy any say any special insight into their own issues and into their 603 01:04:47,200 --> 01:04:55,360 own crisis so in my view I think that's the most exciting path forward right now is just getting away 604 01:04:55,360 --> 01:05:02,080 from the people who claim to be professionals getting away from the people who claim to have this 605 01:05:02,080 --> 01:05:09,520 kind of distanced authoritative take on understanding madness or mental health crises I think the 606 01:05:09,520 --> 01:05:16,480 future is in peer support in therapeutic communities that are led by service users patients 607 01:05:16,480 --> 01:05:22,800 ex-patients psychiatric survivors I mean I think that that's exactly where the future is I hope 608 01:05:22,800 --> 01:05:29,360 that's exactly where the future is going for sure me too yeah you're here I also wanted to ask you about 609 01:05:29,360 --> 01:05:34,960 what you're working on now I believe you're writing a new book is that the case yeah absolutely I'm 610 01:05:34,960 --> 01:05:42,640 writing now a trade book so the book that I wrote was an academic book largely for colleagues I'm 611 01:05:42,640 --> 01:05:50,320 really excited to be writing a book that brings some of these ideas to a more general audience how did 612 01:05:50,320 --> 01:05:59,200 we get biomedical frames come to dominate the conversation in the 1970s in 1980s and it looks 613 01:05:59,200 --> 01:06:06,800 specifically at the life and times of one particular neuroscientist and psychiatrist Solomon Snyder 614 01:06:06,800 --> 01:06:12,400 and some of the other psychiatrists in the 1960s they thought they were helping people 615 01:06:12,400 --> 01:06:19,600 reframing some of these mental health crises in terms of biological problems of the brain and I 616 01:06:19,600 --> 01:06:26,080 think that their vision was really kind of appropriated by psychiatry and by some of the pharmaceutical 617 01:06:26,080 --> 01:06:33,040 companies in ways that were not helpful at all do you wanted a drug that would mimic certain aspects 618 01:06:33,040 --> 01:06:39,280 of psychosis or schizophrenia and once you had a drug like that then you could figure out exactly 619 01:06:39,280 --> 01:06:45,680 what was going on in the person's brain and then you would get at the biological roots of madness 620 01:06:45,680 --> 01:06:52,800 and so part of the book is just looking at this very weird chapter of American psychiatry that a lot of 621 01:06:52,800 --> 01:07:00,480 people don't know about where psychiatrists were frantically trying to put patients on drugs like LSD 622 01:07:00,480 --> 01:07:06,800 and speed in order to create a kind of temporary schizophrenia so they could figure out what was 623 01:07:06,800 --> 01:07:13,600 happening in the brain that's the short version of the book so just wrapping things up if you don't 624 01:07:13,600 --> 01:07:18,720 mind just in letting listeners know how they can contact you if they have questions about your 625 01:07:18,720 --> 01:07:24,720 work or one they know how they can read more of your publications that kind of thing. Yeah absolutely 626 01:07:24,720 --> 01:07:32,400 I have a website it's just in garson.com so it's easy to remember and that has some of the things that 627 01:07:32,400 --> 01:07:38,480 have written and it has a link where you can reach out to me and there's different things about 628 01:07:38,480 --> 01:07:44,640 my work and how I got interested in this topic so you could go there and dig through some of the 629 01:07:44,640 --> 01:07:51,120 other stuff that I've been working on. And remind us the name of your book? The book that I wrote two 630 01:07:51,120 --> 01:07:57,040 years ago is called madness, a philosophical exploration and then the one that I'm working on now 631 01:07:57,040 --> 01:08:03,600 is called the madness pill, the quest to create insanity in one doctor's discovery that 632 01:08:03,600 --> 01:08:10,560 transforms psychiatry that one won't be out for a little while. Justin Garcin thank you so much 633 01:08:10,560 --> 01:08:17,360 for joining us on madness radio. Thank you it was really really a pleasure to talk to you both I 634 01:08:17,360 --> 01:08:23,920 really grateful to be invited. And Jessica thank you for co-hosting and being show producer for this 635 01:08:23,920 --> 01:08:30,320 episode really appreciate it. It's my pleasure. You've been listening to an interview with Justin 636 01:08:30,320 --> 01:08:36,320 Garcin. Justin is a professor of philosophy at Hunter College. He studies changing paradigms of 637 01:08:36,320 --> 01:08:42,160 madness. He's the author of the academic book madness of philosophical exploration by Oxford 638 01:08:42,160 --> 01:08:48,080 University Press and he occasionally writes for eons, psychology, today and madden america. 639 01:08:48,080 --> 01:08:55,520 And that's all the time we have on madness radio thanks for tuning in. 640 01:09:03,280 --> 01:09:09,360 What does it mean to be called crazy in a crazy world? Listen to madness radio voices and visions 641 01:09:09,360 --> 01:09:20,000 from outside mental health. 642 01:09:20,000 --> 01:09:22,600