Kermit Cole: Dialogical Therapy and Quantum Theory Walk Into a Bar…
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental HealthShow Notes
Hello, my name is Bob Whitaker, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Kermit Cole. We'll be speaking about a philosophical enterprise that Kermit is now deeply engaged in. That is, broadly speaking, how humor can help in creating a shared experience that is helpful to the healing process. Kermit, in his experiences of being with people in psychotic states, has seen humor as a moment when a connection can be made. In many ways, this project is bringing Kermit back full circle to his work as a film director, early in his professional career. After dropping out of Oberlin College, he joined a mime troupe that toured the U.S. as well as Italy and Greece, inspired by his interest in humor as well as how connection arises in the spaces between words. One of his first films was a short titled Before Comedy, which is a film performed entirely without words. Another, which he directed in 1994 was titled Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness. I met Kermit shortly after I published my book Mad in America in 2002. He was working at that time as a Residence Director of what might be called a halfway house in Cambridge called Wellmet. This was for people who had been discharged from or who were avoiding stays in psychiatric hospitals. The house was modeled to a degree after the Soteria Project. Then in 2012 after I published Anatomy of an Epidemic, Kermit, Louisa Putnam and I transformed my blog site into a web magazine, also called Mad in America. Kermit was the founding editor of the site, and for the first few years, he was something of a one-man band, posting science reviews, blogs and personal stories at a feverish pace. After retiring from that position, he trained in open dialog therapy, and Louisa and Kermit practiced dialogically inspired therapy with clients in New Mexico. Both Louisa and Kermit are Mad in America Board Members. *** A full transcript of this interview can be found here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/05/kermit-cole-dialogical-therapy-and-quantum-theory-walk-into-a-bar/ 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 2025. 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