Mad in America: Where Can We Go From Here?

By the mid-1900s, psychology and psychiatry ushered in a medical framework for understanding human emotionality and the treatment of mental distress. This framework won the day. Currently, in the U.S. alone, 42 million people (1 out of 5) are diagnosed with an ’emotional disease,’ and 8 million young people are taking psychotropic drugs for ADHD, depression and other psychiatric illnesses. And the medical model is spreading rapidly across the globe, as more and more nations adopt the U.S. way of doing things.

Join two long-time activists and scholars for a wide-ranging conversation on the madness of contemporary society, the medical model in psychiatry and its use in psychotherapy and counseling, efforts to engage and transform it, and what more we might do. Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, and developmentalist and Lois Holzman, Institute co-founder and author of The Overweight Brain and The End of Knowing, will lead this 4-week online conversation to explore the role that psychology and psychiatry play in our madness and to cultivate different ways to see, be and become.