Psychology professor Randy Frost, author of Buried In Treasures, discusses his work on hoarding, people who collect so much stuff excessively that it disrupts their lives or creates a health or fire hazard, including how to help people without risking adding to the problem through intrusive or drastic intervention.

rfrost@smith.edu

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:36 — 48.2MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Editor Sabrina Chapadjiev discusses the new Seven Stories Press anthology Live Through This: On Creativity and Self Destruction, a rich collection of women artists sharing intimate accounts of cutting, alcoholism, suicide, abuse, madness and other self harm and how it relates to their creativity.

Authors include bell hooks, Bonfire Madigan Shive, Patricia Smith, Annie Sprinkle, Inga Muscio, Kate Bornstein, and Nicole Blackman.

http://sabrinachap.com/LTT

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:36 — 47.3MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Advocate and bipolar survivor Steven Morgan talks about his experiences with spirituality and meditation, including healing through dream work.

Listen to the recent profile the New York Times did of Steven at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/07/16/health/healthguide/TE_BIPOLAR_CLIPS.html and check out Steven’s writing at http://www.vermontrecovery.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:09 — 46.0MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Long time Icarus Project organizer, open source computer software architect, and graduate doctoral student Jeffrey Goins discusses his psychiatric experiences and insights from the world of technology applied to the world of madness.

Topics include the Eli Lilly Zyprexa memos scandal and intellectual property rights; freedom in a surveillance society; prophecy and ancient wisdom, and the “end of forgetting.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:52 — 48.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Oregon Mental health counselor Ron Unger discusses his experiences with altered states of consciousness, and how cognitive behavioral therapy can be a useful alternative to medication and mainstream psychiatric treatment. Ron is a longtime organizer with the human rights organization Mindfreedom International, and his website is http://www.recoveryfromschizophrenia.org/blog/

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:06 — 47.7MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Clinical Psychologist David Lukoff talks about his madness experience and the spiritual transformation it triggered. David went on to become a leading figure in the field of Transpersonal Psychology and works to bring greater spiritual awareness into mainstream mental health practice.

http://www.spiritualcompetency.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:48 — 45.6MB)

Subscribe: RSS

UK video activist and writer Mel Gunasena on her mystical experiences and forced psychiatric hospitalization. Mel is the director of Evolving Minds, a documentary film about spiritual experiences and what gets labeled “psychosis” by the mental health system. She also discusses the art therapy project in Sri Lanka she helped found to assist traumatized tsunami-affected children.

See a trailer for the film at http://www.undercurrents.org/minds and check out the Sri Lanka project at http://www.art-2-art.org

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:09 — 43.2MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Community organizer and writer Michael Gennarelli talks about his 8 years of psychiatric treatment as a child and his stays at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Michael reads his poetry about these painful experiences and discusses his activism, including an after school program for kids and the Misled Youth Network.

http://www.misled-youth.org
http://www.123communityspace.org
http://www.fountainhouse.org
http://www.theicarusproject.net

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:00 — 44.9MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Recovery leader and survivor Ed Knight talks about Zen, Insight, and Christian meditation and “schizophrenia,” including discrimination against people with psychiatric labels at meditation retreats, the link between spiritual awakening and madness, and living beyond “managing symptoms.”

http://www.professored.com
http://www.recoverycircles.org

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:47 — 48.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Warsaw Poland psychologist Bogna Szymkiewicz discusses “wounded states of consciousness,” what the mind and body do when trauma is activated, as well as how trauma affects our relationships and what we can do to recover.

http://www.bogna.info

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:03 — 47.7MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Blacks in the UK are much more likely than white people to be locked up, put on drugs, and mistreated in the mental health system.

Social scientist Philip Morgan of London’s Tower Hamlets African and Caribbean Mental Health Organization (THACMHO) discusses the legacy of slavery, survivor-run advocacy for system change, and an innovative project reclaiming Black identity through historical research.

http://www.thacmho.org.uk

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:24 — 47.1MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Clinical psychologist Jay Joseph details medical science’s 30-year failed quest to find any link between genetics and diagnoses of mental disorders, and debunks widely held beliefs in the psychiatric profession, including the idea of “genetic predispositions” for mental illness.

Jay is the author of The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity, and the Fruitless Search for Genes and The Gene Illusion: Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology Under the Microscope.

http://www.jayjoseph.net

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:09 — 46.9MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Harvard University faculty Paula Caplan, author of They Say You’re Crazy: How The World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal and editor of Bias In Psychiatric Diagnosis.

Paula was on one of the writing committees for the DSM and offers an insightful perspective on the politics behind psychiatric pseudo-science. She discusses mental disorder labeling, including bipolar and post-trauma stress disorder, from a feminist perspective.

http://www.psychdiagnosis.net
http://paulajcaplan.net

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:31 — 51.8MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Counselor and researcher Joe Goodbread discusses his more than 25 years experience working with madness and extreme states using Process Oriented Psychology, an innovative approach based in the work of Carl Jung and developed by Arnold Mindell.

Joe describes listening to the meaning in experience, helping people unfold their states, taoism, dreams, rank differences, and working with the body. Joe is a senior faculty at the Process Work Institute and author of The Dreambody Toolkit and Radical Intercourse.

http://www.aamindell.net
http://www.processwork.org

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:47 — 48.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Award-winning journalist Philip Dawdy, formerly a writer with the Seattle Weekly newspaper, discusses how forced psychiatric treatment and drugging are ineffective responses to violent crime and the so-called “dangerous mentally ill.” Philip is the writer of the excellent blog about Big Pharma profiteering and mental health policy

http://www.FuriousSeasons.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:40 — 50.1MB)

Subscribe: RSS