We're All Mad Here

You’ve probably heard the phrase “mad as a hatter.” But what about hatting made people so mad? www.patreon.com/allmadpodcast Episode artwork by Brandie Titus

Rachel details her recent experience in an NYC psych ER. Spoiler: it really sucked.

Veronica Lake was one of the most famous actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age, despite the fact that her career only lasted about 11 years. Battling what was probably untreated schizophrenia through bad marriages and other tragedies, Veronica never felt like she belonged in Hollywood.

Rachel does a dramatic reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER. Acquired from Project Gutenberg. www.patreon.com/allmadpodcast

Stanley McCormick lived a charmed life as a member of a prominent Chicago family until his early thirties. After years of showing signs of mental illness, he was diagnosed with dementia praecox at the age of 32. His wife Katharine, the first woman in America to earn a biology degree, tried to convince his doctors […]

26 year old Emma Fillipoff disappeared on November 28, 2012. A talented writer and photographer, Emma moved across the country from her friends and family at the age of 25. While initially having a great time, she started to exhibit strange behavior: obsessively rearranging objects, claiming to hear furniture talk, and paranoia that she was […]

Schizophrenia is described by the DSM 5 as a “severe and chronic” mental illness, characterized by disorder thinking and auditory hallucinations. But there’s more to schizophrenia than just hearing voices. Happy Thanksgiving, listeners! www.patreon.com/allmadpodcast

Medical science has a dark history with human experimentation. In 1920, a behavioralist and his graduate assistant wanted to see if Pavlov’s theory of conditioning in animals could be applied to humans, too. For the cleanest of slates, they decided to use a 9 month-old baby who became known as Little Albert. Over three months, […]

Mildred Mitchell-Bateman was a woman ahead of her time. A female, black hospital supervisor by the time she was 33, Mitchell-Bateman served not only as the director of West Virginia’s mental health department, but was also chosen by President Jimmy Carter himself to serve on his mental health commission. Working in the field until the […]

Many thanks to Kate for inviting me to cover this topic with her! Check out her pod here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ignorance-was-bliss/id1341566170?mt=2 www.patreon.com/allmadpodcast

Imagine the crunching of an apple causing you intense rage, or sending you into a panic attack. People with misophonia- literally “hatred of sound”- deal with this on a daily basis. As yet unrecognized by the WHO and APA, misophonia is a little-known disorder that nevertheless affects perhaps 20% of the population. Petition

Nikola Tesla, born in present-day Croatia, is known as one of the founding fathers of electricity. He started to invent things as a young child, while also dealing with possible Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and hallucinations. After moving to America and getting into a lifelong tiff with Thomas Edison, Tesla filed for over 700 patents and lent […]

I got a call a few weeks ago from a friend informing me he’d just inadvertently attended a cult meeting. The Landmark Forum (formerly The Forum, and EST) is marketed as a collection of seminars about leadership, public speech, and relationship skills. Sounds pretty innocent, and even helpful… but according to records, Landmark seminars, which […]

In the 1600s, two hospitals opened in the southeast of France to house and treat the destitute of the area. As with most of our facilities, they failed at this for a few hundred years before they started to make any headway. But by the mid-1800s, l’Hopital Bicetre and Hopital universitaire Pitie-Salpetriere, operated by the […]

Dr Franz Mesmer, the namesake of “mesmerisation”, believed that ill health was caused by a buildup of fluid in the human body. He also believed that some people (himself included) had the power to move that fluid out of the way with their mere concentration. Mesmer became incredibly popular in Europe in the late 18th […]

In 1795, James Tilly Matthews was thrown into Bethlem Hospital for accusing the Prime Minister of treason. While there, he started to believe that a terrorist gang was playing with his brain using magnetic waves, which they used to affect his physical and emotional health. Over 10 years, he explained this device, called an Air […]

In 2004, the family of missing woman Brooke Henson were notified that Brooke’s social security number had shown up on a job application in New York City. Brooke’s family was cautiously optimistic- though they wanted their family member to be alive, none of the other information matched their Brooke. And they were right to doubt, […]

Esther Reed was 30 years old when the law finally caught up with her. After over a decade of petty crime that escalated into multiple identity thefts, the Secret Service was after her for possible espionage and a murder. What began as Esther’s effort to escape her crippling social anxiety disorder spun out of control, […]

Social Anxiety Disorder, when it first appeared in the DSM III in 1980, wasn’t thought to have much of a negative effect on the people who had it. But as more research was done, it was discovered that social anxiety disorder could actually wreak havoc on someone’s life. From shying away from higher education to […]

“I was spanked as a child, and I turned out fine,” goes the usual response to one speaking out against spanking. But is anyone who was spanked ACTUALLY fine, or are the effects of the punishment showing themselves in insidious ways? Some escape the effects, but most don’t.