Mad In America: Science, Psychiatry And Social Justice

Khameer Kidia is a physician and an anthropologist, works at Harvard Medical School and the University of Zimbabwe, and spends his life between Washington DC and Harare. Kidia has many accolades to his name – he is a Rhodes scholar and a 2023 New America Fellow. His papers have appeared in elite medical journals and his stories in the New York Times. His recent book, which we will discuss, was covered by The Washington Post. His experience navigating two cultures and his expertise across disciplines is what allows him to see that psychiatry, as it currently stands, needs to end. In this interview, we discuss how the tentacles of an exploitative global order reach into people to wreak havoc with their lives and in their minds. Disclosing his own difficult history with stimulant medications, he exposes how current psychiatric practices superficially anesthetize pain in order to return us back on the hamster wheel of productivity. Sharing his mother's struggles with 'nervous breakdowns', Kidia shows us the impor