The Political Systems Driving Abuse in Psychiatry: An Interview with Human Rights Lawyer Alicia Ely Yamin
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental HealthShow Notes
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. *** Thank you for being with us to listen to the podcast and read our articles this year. MIA is funded entirely by reader donations. If you value MIA, please help us continue to survive and grow. https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/ To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850 © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org
More from Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
How does a wounded world wound us in return? Can we be mindful and offer intimate attention to pain and trauma? We answer these and other questions with Will Adams who is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Duquesne and completed his clinical psychology internship at McLean Hospital, affiliated with Harvard Medical School. Dr. Adams is the author of A Wild and Sacred Call: Nature-Psyche-Spirit, published by SUNY Press, a book that explores the deep connections between human psychology, the natural world, and spirituality. His work brings together phenomenology, relational psychoanalysis, Gestalt therapy, transpersonal psychology, and contemplative traditions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Christian mysticism. His scholarship invites us to reconsider the relationship between self and world, mind and nature, and psychological healing and spiritual life. In this very personal interview, we'll be speaking with him about how a lifetime of contemplative practice came to his rescue during the most traumatic time in his life, the possibilities of a relational understanding of human and more-than-human experience, and what psychology might learn from contemplative traditions and our relationship with the natural world. *** Thank you for being with us to listen to the podcast and read our articles this year. MIA is funded entirely by reader donations. If you value MIA, please help us continue to survive and grow. https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/ To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850 Sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://www.madinamerica.com/newsletter-sign-up/ © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org
In this episode of the Mad in America podcast, Brooke Siem speaks with Selma Eikelenboom, a forensic scientist and medical examiner whose career has spanned psychotherapy, medicine, emergency care, surgery, and forensic investigation. Eikelenboom works as a forensic medical examiner investigating cases involving psychoactive medications and acts of violence. In this conversation, Brooke and Selma explore what she has learned from investigating these cases, and the questions her research raises about the relationship between psychoactive drugs, genetic variation, and violent behavior. *** Thank you for being with us to listen to the podcast and read our articles this year. MIA is funded entirely by reader donations. If you value MIA, please help us continue to survive and grow. https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/ To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850 Sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://www.madinamerica.com/newsletter-sign-up/ © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org Statement on use of AI The Mad in America podcast does not use generative AI (GenAI) to create its content. All interviews are recorded live, and editing and transcription are carried out by humans. We do use AI-assisted audio processing during the editing stage to achieve the best possible sound quality. This is provided by https://auphonic.com and is used solely to enhance the audio, not to generate or alter the podcast's content.
Alicia Martin is an Australian community pharmacist, a member of the Not Broken Project and founder of TaperMate. Through her work in pharmacy, Alicia saw patients struggling with unusual and severe symptoms when they tried to stop their antidepressants and realized there was little support when people wanted to stop long-term medications. Rather than waiting for the system to catch up, she started building a solution. TaperMate now supports people across the world to track and adjust hyperbolic tapering plans through a simple mobile app and provides personalized tapering plans and advice for patients across Australia through a pharmacist-led telehealth tapering clinic. *** Thank you for being with us to listen to the podcast and read our articles this year. MIA is funded entirely by reader donations. If you value MIA, please help us continue to survive and grow. https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/ To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850 Sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://www.madinamerica.com/newsletter-sign-up/ © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org Statement on use of AI The Mad in America podcast does not use generative AI (GenAI) to create its content. All interviews are recorded live, and editing and transcription are carried out by humans. We do use AI-assisted audio processing during the editing stage to achieve the best possible sound quality. This is provided by https://auphonic.com and is used solely to enhance the audio, not to generate or alter the podcast's content.
Gail Hornstein is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Mount Holyoke College. Across a long and influential career, her work has moved between psychology, psychoanalysis, history, qualitative research, and the study of first-person accounts of madness. She is the author of To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, a biography of the pioneering psychiatrist and psychoanalyst best known for her intensive psychotherapeutic work with people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses. She is also the author of Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness, which explores what first-person narratives, asylum artifacts, patient memoirs, and the Hearing Voices Movementcan teach us about the meanings of madness and the limits of conventional psychiatric explanation. Dr. Hornstein is also the creator of the Bibliography of First-Person Narratives of Madness in English, which lists more than 1,000 books by people who have written about madness from their own experience. More recently, she has conducted extensive research on Hearing Voices Groups in the United States, examining how these groups work, the different functions they serve, and what members find useful about them. In 2019, Gail spoke with Mad in America about first-person accounts of madness and global mental health. In this conversation, we will begin with Gail's own intellectual formation and her early interest in psychological approaches that take subjective experience seriously. We will then turn to Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and the question of whether first-person accounts should be treated as clinical illustrations or as knowledge in their own right. From there, we will move into Agnes's Jacket, the Hearing Voices Movement, and Gail's recent research on what Hearing Voices Groups make possible for people who hear voices, have visions, or experience other extreme states. *** Thank you for being with us to listen to the podcast and read our articles this year. MIA is funded entirely by reader donations. If you value MIA, please help us continue to survive and grow. https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/ To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850 Sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://www.madinamerica.com/newsletter-sign-up/ © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org Statement on use of AI The Mad in America podcast does not use generative AI (GenAI) to create its content. All interviews are recorded live, and editing and transcription are carried out by humans. We do use AI-assisted audio processing during the editing stage to achieve the best possible sound quality. This is provided by https://auphonic.com and is used solely to enhance the audio, not to generate or alter the podcast's content.
Merrick Daniel Pilling is an Associate Professor and Interim Co-Director of the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is the author of Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice and the co-editor of Interrogating Psychiatric Narratives of Madness: Documented Lives. His new book, Mad Studies: The Basics, introduces Mad Studies as a field that has emerged from community activism and the perspectives of people who have been psychiatrized, institutionalized, criminalized, and otherwise dehumanized by what Merrick refers to as the psy complex. It organizes itself around two basic questions: What can Mad Studies help us understand? And what can Mad Studies help us do? Those questions will guide our conversation today. We'll begin with Merrick's own path into this work, then move into psychiatric documentation and narrative, and then spend most of our time with Mad Studies: The Basics—its account of some origins of the field, its critique of psychiatric common sense, and its insistence that Mad Studies is simultaneously a way of interpreting the world and a form of critical praxis. *** Thank you for being with us to listen to the podcast and read our articles this year. MIA is funded entirely by reader donations. If you value MIA, please help us continue to survive and grow. https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/ To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850 © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org