It's Not Just In Your Head

Fellow mental health counselor Kevin Gallagher joins us to talk about the history of addiction in America, its causes, and cures. Kevin shares  what he learned first-hand about America's broken approaches to addiction treatment while he struggled through his own past addiction, which led him toward intensive research and writing on the history of addiction and why we approach and conceptualize it the way we do today.  Is addiction a moral problem? Why did the "war on drugs" position addiction around (highly racialized) individual criminality? Are people born with "addictive personalities" as a result of defective brains and chemical imbalances? What's missing from today's so-called "trauma informed" approach to addiction popularized by experts such as Gabor Maté?

ATTENTION! This is a Boring Dystopia/Obligatory 'don't sue us' message:  This podcast provides numerous different perspectives and criticisms of  the mental health space, however, it should not be considered medical  advice. Please consult your medical professional with regards to any  health decisions or management.

Read Kevin Gallagher's 10 part Mad In America series on the history of addiction here:

In this episode we interview Roy Grinker, cultural anthropologist and author of Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness. His book is broken into three sections: capitalism, wars, and the mind and body.

ATTENTION! This is a Boring Dystopia/Obligatory 'don't sue us' message:  This podcast provides numerous different perspectives and criticisms of  the mental health space, however, it should not be considered medical  advice. Please consult your medical professional with regards to any  health decisions or management.

A listener shared with us that they felt that in episode #030 it sounded like we were shaming people who take psych meds. We wanted to clarify our stance with this brief response for anyone who has felt shamed when we speak critically about the pharmaceutical industry and biologically driven approaches to mental health treatment. 

ATTENTION! This is a Boring Dystopia/Obligatory 'don't sue us' message:  This podcast provides numerous different perspectives and criticisms of  the mental health space, however, it should not be considered medical  advice. Please consult your medical professional with regards to any  health decisions or management.

The speaker in this trailer is Roy Grinker, cultural anthropologist and author of Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness. Get early access to this episode at patreon.com/itsnotjustinyourhead.

Max interviews author of the polemical book Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu, about the ways the so-called Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) uses fake empathy, mental health language, and superficial discourse on trauma to protect its material interests at the expense of lower wage workers.  The mental health field itself is positioned within the PMC strata and tends to lack class consciousness - part of what sparked the creation of this very podcast. But the PMC as a whole appears to deny any class positionality to the point of dissociation so that it lives in a world of fantasy to explain society, making it "the most delusional class" according to Liu. Near the end, conversations about psychoanalysis and today's cognitive-behavioral "customer satisfaction survey" therapies turn into cackling and managed grief.  

Catherine's references:

-Coming Up Short: Working Class Adulthood in An Age of Uncertainty, Jennifer Silva

ATTENTION! This is a Boring Dystopia/Obligatory 'don't sue us' message:  This podcast provides numerous different perspectives and criticisms of  the mental health space, however, it should not be considered medical  advice. Please consult your medical professional with regards to any  health decisions or management.

This is a teaser clip of a full patrons-only episode we did on Sigmund Freud, the "father of psychotherapy." In our patrons-only discord chatroom, we were asked to answer questions about Freud such as: In what ways were Freud's ideas used to liberate vs oppress? Is psychoanalysis still needed? What material conditions helped create Freud's analysis? Why is psychoanalysis so inaccessible? What would Freud say about our culture if he were alive today?

Get early access to full episodes at patreon.com/itsnotjustinyourhead.

Kristen Ghodsee joins us to talk about sex and sexuality across the varied socialist experiments that took place for most of the 20th century in Eastern Europe. She acknowledges the well-known atrocities (purges, famines, secret police, gulags) - but cautions listeners to understand that  "heavy handed state socialism" was not the only form of socialism from 1917 to 1991 across Eastern Europe. Based on decades of ethnographic research, Ghodsee argues that despite some of the failures of socialist experiments (state socialism, goulash communism, market- and "self management" socialism, and many more), women consistently self-report having enjoyed sexual relationships more than women self-report in capitalist countries.

You can get Ghodsee's book "Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence" anywhere books are sold.

ATTENTION! This is a Boring Dystopia/Obligatory 'don't sue us' message:  This podcast provides numerous different perspectives and criticisms of  the mental health space, however, it should not be considered medical  advice. Please consult your medical professional with regards to any  health decisions or management.

Get early access to our full interview with Kristen Ghodsee, author of "Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence," at patreon.com/itsnotjustinyourhead.