Madness Radio

What does a life dedicated to love and freedom look like? Laura-Marie River Victor Peace Nopales joins co-hosts Jacks McNamara and Will Hall to explore the most important questions of all — by way of dreams, peace activism, and living in community. Laura-Marie is a queer traveler, maker of zines, radical mental health-er, fat liberation-er, queer liberation-er, and autistic liberation-er, and co-creator of Disabled Resilience Permaculture. (Alternate 58 min version here.) Laura-Marie’s sites: www.listeningtothenoiseuntilitmakessense.com www.ilikeyourstims.com www.instagram.com/xtrikeslutsx https://www.facebook.com/listeningtothenoiseuntilitmakessense https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3gDcxFhXldzUWozp26ykGg https://soundcloud.com/robotmad Las Vegas Radical Mental Health Collective: https://lvrmhc.org Jacks’ website: https://jacksmcnamara.net And check out Jacks’ awesome podcast So Many Wings! https://somanywings.org

Survivingantidepressants.org is one of the leading and longest running communities of mutual and and peer self-help around psychiatric drug withdrawal. Adele Framer – alto strata – founded the site in 2011 and shares her experience and learning on supporting people coming off antidepressants, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines and other medications, including the emerging field of psychiatric medication withdrawal research. (Special thanks to Oddball Magazine for production assistance.) (Alternate 58 min version here.) www.survivingantidepressants.org  

Jyl Ion hears voices, but she refuses to view these non-ordinary experiences as a sign of mental illness. Instead Jyl came off 16 years of multiple toxic medications, talks to her ancestor spirits and has reclaimed access to unsanctioned knowledge. She struggled through the aftermath of sexual violence and was bedridden for two years of illness withdrawing from psychiatric meds – and now emerges as a strong survivor. Today Jyl has turned her voice hearing and her traumatic past into gifts, and works professionally as a forensic medium helping law enforcement solve missing persons cases. Her new book of poetry is called Soft Out Spoken. 58 min version https://jylanais.com/

Do bipolar and psychosis have a healing potential blocked by suppression, medications, and avoidance? What if we could help people safely and intentionally explore, express, and understand these frightening states? Can breathwork ceremonies open the doors of perception like psychedelics — but without the drugs or risks? Are journeys into altered states too dangerous for people with madness  – or just need to be tailored to individual needs? Sean Blackwell had an overwhelming emotional crisis diagnosed as bipolar that emerged into a spiritual awakening that enriched his life. Today he facilitates and researches breathwork groups: intense focused breathing with blindfolds and music to discover the healing potential at the root of psychiatric crisis. His book and YouTube channel is Bipolar or Waking up. You can also listen to part two of the interview here. 58 min version https://www.bipolarawakenings.com https://www.youtube.com/user/bipolarorwakingup https://internationalintegrators.org/nita-gage &

Do early psychosis programs serve healing – or function as surveillance and control? Are treatments for paranoia actually themselves forms of paranoia, based on scientific racism and white supremacy? By defining and enforcing “normal” does psychiatry wage a war on the imagination? Rachel Jane Liebert is a multi-media artist and Critical Psychology senior lecturer at the University of East London, using feminist research to decolonize modern psychiatry. Her new book Psycurity: Colonialism, Paranoia, and the War on Imagination brings her background as a Pakeha (white/settler) New Zealander to free madness from whiteness and express the imaginative potential of states labeled paranoia. 58 min version https://bit.ly/2ohWcQI https://racheljaneliebert.com/ https://uel.academia.edu/racheljaneliebert

Audiobook mp3 of Introduction and Chapter 1 “Persons and Experience”, from The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise, by R.D. Laing, read by Will Hall. Full book .mp3 (cntrl/rtclck save as to download): https://www.madnessradio.net/audio-extra/RDLaingPoliticsOfExperienceLaingAudiobookFULL.mp3 Full book as chapters on this YouTube playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMya78GAdrpxtOjEayvMp1lC88ce21kUb Individual chapters as .mp3 (ctrl/rtclick to save as): https://www.madnessradio.net/audio-extra/RDLaingPoliticsOfExperienceLaingAudiobookCh1.mp3 https://www.madnessradio.net/audio-extra/RDLaingPoliticsOfExperienceLaingAudiobookCh2.mp3 https://www.madnessradio.net/audio-extra/RDLaingPoliticsOfExperienceLaingAudiobookCh3.mp3 https://www.madnessradio.net/audio-extra/RDLaingPoliticsOfExperienceLaingAudiobookCh4.mp3 https://www.madnessradio.net/audio-extra/RDLaingPoliticsOfExperienceLaingAudiobookCh5.mp3 https://www.madnessradio.net/audio-extra/RDLaingPoliticsOfExperienceLaingAudiobookCh6.mp3

Now available as an audiobook!  Based in more than 10 years work in the peer support movement,The Icarus Project and Freedom Center’s 52-page guide is used internationally by individuals, families, professionals, and organizations to support reducing and coming off psychiatric drugs. Includes info on mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs, risks, benefits, wellness tools, psychiatric drug withdrawal, information for people staying on their medications, and much more. Audiobook read by Guide author Will Hall. A ‘harm reduction’ approach means not being pro- or anti- medication, but supporting people where they are at to make their own decisions. Written by Will Hall, with a 55-member health professional Advisory Board, more than 50 collaborators involved in developing and editing, and now available in 14 languages. The Guide and this audiobook are Creative Commons copyright and you have advance permission to link, copy, broadcast, and distribute. (Text version

What if psychiatry recognized that schizophrenia does not exist? How might diagnostic categories (left over from the asylum era) be replaced by spectrums of experience that show how psychotic experiences can also be normal? What if services were oriented around individuals, not the statistical groups of “evidence based” research? And could the mental health system as we know it, which defines health as the absence of disease symptoms, be replaced with a new definition of health, health as empowerment in life? Jim van Os, professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at Maastricht University and member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science with more than 700 publications, is one of the top one percent highly cited scientists in the world. His research combines with the experiential knowledge of people with lived experience of psychosis to envision a radically new direction for the mental health system. (Alternate 58 min version here.) https://www.madnessradio.net/files/SchizophreniaDoesNotExist-vanOs-BMJ.p