Gary Greenberg, journalist for Harpers, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and others, discusses being a subject in a clinical drug trial, how depression is manipulated by advertising and Big Pharma, and the social medicalizing of experience.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:47 — 47.5MB)

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Two topics: A Northampton, Massachusetts woman talks about her near-fatal drug reaction to an off label prescription of Lamictal, and Brooklynne Michelle discusses the Mosh Knit podcast — about knitting and bipolar.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:58 — 31.2MB)

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Riot Grrl instigator Bonfire Madigan Shive talks about her family, the mental health system, living outside the mainstream and her creative inspiration as a visionary musician.

http://www.bonfiremadigan.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:15 — 47.0MB)

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Longtime Freedom Center ally Mt. Holyoke College Professor Gail Hornstein discusses first-person accounts of people who have lived through madness, and previews her upcoming book Agnes’s Jacket.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:29 — 49.0MB)

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UK psychiatrist Philip Thomas discusses the globalization of psychiatry and pharmaceutical company expansion world-wide, including how community empowerment and traditional ways of care can challenge western individualism based medical model of mental health.

Check out Phil’s book Post-Psychiatry: Mental Health in a Postmodern World, and his essay “Challenging the Globalization of Psychiatry”, both written with Irish psychiatrist Pat Bracken.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:01 — 46.8MB)

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John Horgan, who has written for Scientific American, Discover, and the New York Times, talks about neuroscience, genetics, the placebo effect psychedelic drugs, and more.

John is the author of The Undiscovered Mind: How The Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation, Rational Mysticism, and The End of Science. He also hosts a video blog at http://www.bloggingheads.tv

http://www.johnhorgan.org

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:59 — 52.2MB)

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Paul Levy, who went through psych hospitalizations as part of a spiritual emergence process and became a Buddhist teacher, discusses his book The Madness Of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis.

http://www.awakeninthedream.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:10 — 46.0MB)

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Rocky Caravelli talks about his recovery from 25 years of methamphetamine and heroin addition and a bipolar diagnosis through treatment with Ibogaine, a visionary plant medicine from indigenous people in West Africa, and his work helping many others heal.

Rocky is director of Ibogaine treatment center Awaken In The Dream house in San Francisco de Nayarit, Mexico.

http://www.awakeninginthedream.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:12 — 65.5MB)

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Long time Freedom Center organizer Chaya Grossberg talks about her experiences with madness, medications, her explorations of spirituality, being a client at Windhorse Associates, and how her healing path has brought her to be a teacher of local yoga and writing classes.

http://www.chayagrossberg.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:56 — 70.0MB)

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Richard DeGrandpre, former editor of Adbusters magazine and author of Ritalin Nation, discusses his new book, The Cult of Pharmacology, and how the popular conception of “addiction” behind the War On Drugs is scientifically inaccurate: social context, learning, morality and meaning determine how drugs affect us, not simple addiction chemistry.

http://www.anxiousmind.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:35 — 76.4MB)

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Keely Malone, organizer with Freedom Center, and Arise for Social Justice, talks about her work with Quabbin Mediation training people in “Active Bystandership,” teaching how to not passively witness harm such as bullying, violence, or crisis, but to become actively involved, and how this can change situations and make communities more responsible.

http://www.quabbinmediation.org/html/tba.html

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:36 — 72.3MB)

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Award winning journalist Philip Dawdy, former Seattle Weekly writer, discusses his research on pharmaceutical companies and mental heath. Philip is the writer of the excellent blog Furious Seasons.

http://www.furiousseasons.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02:50 — 79.7MB)

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17 year old Sonia Peterson speaks with great insight about being locked up and forced to take drugs at age 12 and living with a bipolar diagnosis. Plus a short documentaty produced by Darbey Penney and Peter Stastny on Nazi killings of psychiatric patients, and an interview with original Freedom Center leading organizer Vikki Gilbert.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:40 — 100.1MB)

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Psychiatric survivor Krista MacKinnon talks about her experiences with extreme states and spirituality, and her current work as a family advocate with Toronto, Canada’s Family Outreach and Response Program, an innovative way of helping families from beyond the limits of the medical approach.

http://www.familymentalhealthrecovery.org

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:29 — 47.2MB)

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Dr. Pat Bracken, Irish psychiatrist, philosopher and co-author of the book Post-Psychiatry: Mental Health in a Post-Modern World, discusses community development as an alternative to individualistic and harmful Western mental health care world wide, including a critique of the PTSD diagnosis and its treatment based on his work in Uganda.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:19 — 52.5MB)

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