Erik Baker, author of Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, returns to the podcast to talk about self-help and respond to questions and comments submitted by listeners for the second episode of the Anti-Self-Helpline. The Anti-Self-Helpline is a new episode format where listeners write in with their experiences of political struggle so we can take seriously the psychic and emotional content of political experiences.

Erik's essay How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life: https://www.thedriftmag.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-my-shitty-life/

Erik Baker is Lecturer on the History of Science at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, n+1, The Baffler, Jewish Currents, and The Drift, where he is Senior Editor. His first book Make Your Own Job published with Harvard University Press in January 2025.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

The British state is currently imprisoning activists from the Palestine movement without trial. Many of them are engaging in a hunger strike, demanding an end to censorship, immediate bail, right to a fair trial, the de-proscription of Palestine Action, and an end to shut down the death-making work of Elbit Systems. Charlie Thomas joins the podcast to talk through these developments and reflect on his own experience of being incarcerated for his work in the Palestine solidarity movement. We talk about the increasing waves of repression coming from the government in recent years as well as what we need to learn, as a movement, from experiences of incarceration and criminalisation. 

PRISONERS FOR PALESTINE LINK: https://prisonersforpalestine.org/

Charlie Thomas is a researcher, trade unionist, and a member of Workers For a Free Palestine. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

I went on the Death Panel podcast to talk about the past, present, and future of the NHS. Death Panel is a podcast about the political economy of health, hosted by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, Phil Rocco, and Jules Gill-Peterson

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Jake Romm joins the podcast to explain why anti-semitism and zionism have more in common than separates them. In this conversation we discuss the work of mid-century thinkers such as Jean Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, as well recent scholarship from Nadia Abu El-Haj and the writing of Palestinian political prisoners, to better understand the many consistencies between anti-semitic and zionist ideology. This conversation draws on two of Jake's recent essays ('Elements of Anti-Semitism' and 'Idée Fixe' both published in Parapraxis Magazine) and references a short course he recently ran with the Psychosocial Foundation titled Zionism as an Antisemitism.

Jake Romm is a writer and human rights lawyer based in Brooklyn. He is associate editor of Protean Magazine and the US Representative for the Hind Rajab Foundation. His writing has appeared in The Nation, the Brooklyn Rail, The Baffler, Parapraxis and elsewhere.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

We talk about Wes Streeting. Who is he, what are his politics, and what does it mean for health policy in Britain? 

Jonas Marvin is a writer and researcher based in Stoke-on-Trent. He is the author of a forthcoming book, The Breaking of the English Working Class (Spring 2026, Verso), cohost of Life of the Party podcast, and blogs at Marx’s Dream Journal.

Ruth Pearce is a Lecturer in Community Development at the University of Glasgow and a researcher specializing in trans healthcare. She has edited two books (The Emergence of Trans and TERF Wars) as well as special issues of the International Journal of Transgender Health (Fertility, reproduction and body autonomy) and Sexualities (Trans Genealogies). She is also the author of Understanding Trans Health.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Lily Scherlis joins the podcast to talk about her recent essay Experiences in Groups, which was published in the most recent issue of n+1 magazine and documents her experience of attending a Group Relations conference in the English countryside. Group relations refers to an offshoot of psychoanalytic theory and practice which applies the ideas of Wilfred Bion, to understand group dynamics and organizational structures. 

Lily is a a writer, artist, and PhD candidate living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in publications such as n+1, Harper's, The Guardian, Parapraxis, The Baffler, The Drift, and many other publications. Her work often addresses ideas from psychoanalysis, pop-psychology, and the history of social science. 

Lily's essay, Experiences in Groups can be read here: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/essays/experiences-in-groups/

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Candela Potente and Ramsey McGlazer join to discuss the life and work of Marie Langer; a psychoanalyst who grew up in Red Vienna and fled fascism after fighting in the Spanish Civil War. After fleeing to Argentina she co-founded the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, before being forced to leave the country under the threat of anti-communist death squads. She then found herself in Mexico, supporting the Nicaraguan Revolution by helping to build their mental health infrastructure. This conversation looks at what her legacy offers us in a time of rising fascism and institutional complicity. 

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Ramsey McGlazer lives in Oakland, California, and teaches at UC Berkeley. His first book, Old Schools, was published in 2020, and he is working on a book currently called "The Clinic and its Double," about aesthetics and radical psychiatry in Italy and Brazil. His public writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lux Magazine, n+1, and Parapraxis, among other places. He lived in Argentina a lifetime ago and has more recently translated several books from the Spanish by Argentine writers. These include, most recently, Rita Segato's The War Against Women (published by Polity in 2025).

Candela Potente is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hans Kilian and Lotte Köhler Center at Ruhr-University Bochum and the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin. She works on the epistemology of psychoanalysis, taking case studies from its transnational history, and her research has been published in the journals Penumbra, Problemi International, and TRANSIT. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a degree in Philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Hannah Proctor, author of Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, returns to the podcast to talk through questions and comments submitted by listeners for the first episode of the Anti-Self-Helpline. The Anti-Self-Helpline is a new episode format where listeners write in with their experiences of political struggle so we can take seriously the psychic and emotional content of political experiences.

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Hannah Proctor is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, interested in histories and theories of radical psychiatry. She is a member of the editorial collective behind Radical Philosophy, and has been published in Jacobin, Tribune, The New Inquiry and elsewhere.Hannah Proctor is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, interested in histories and theories of radical psychiatry. She is a member of the editorial collective behind Radical Philosophy, and has been published in Jacobin, Tribune, The New Inquiry and elsewhere. Her first book Burnout published with Verso Books in 2024. 

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SUBMIT TO THE HELPLINE VIA ANY OF THE PODCAST SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Micha Frazer-Carroll and Sasha Warren are back on the podcast to discuss the Dialectics of Liberation Congress: a conference that brought together the likes of R. D. Laing, David Cooper, Kwame Ture (FKA Stokely Carmichael), Herbert Marcuse, Allen Ginsburg, CLR James, Angela Davis, Carolee Schneemann, and many more in London, 1967. The congress attempted to theorize and resist violence in all its forms, we discuss what took place at this weird and intense event and what we can learn from it today. 

Sasha Durakov Warren is a writer based in Minneapolis. He cofounded the group Hearing Voices Twin Cities and is the author of the fantastic book Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt which published last year with Common Notions. He runs the substack Of Unsound Mind. 

Micha Frazer-Carroll is an author, journalist and editor living in London.  She was previously an editor at the magazine gal-dem and has written for publications including the Guardian, Vogue, Huck, and DAZED magazine. Micha is also the author of Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health which was published in 2023 by Pluto Press. 

All samples in this episode come from the film Dialectics Of Liberation - Anatomy Of Violence (Villon films). 

Submit to the ANTI-SELF-HELPLINE here: https://linktr.ee/redmedicine.xyz 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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Emily Lim Rogers and Rouzbeh Shadpey join the podcast to talk about the history of chronic fatigue under capitalism. We explore the way in which medical knowledge reflects and enacts the need for capitalist society to monitor, measure and discipline workers before situating conditions like ME/CFS within these dynamics.  

Emily Lim Rogers is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, with secondary appointments in Asian American and Diaspora Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She has a book forthcoming with Duke University Press called Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness

Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, writer, and musician. Rouzbeh has exhibited and performed at TULCA (Ireland), documenta fifteen (Germany), The Mosaic Rooms (UK), Poetry Project (New York), MUTEK (Montréal), and more. His writing appears in artistic and academic journals, including Parapraxis, Decolonial Hacker, Weird Economies, Syllabus Project, and Momus. His musical practice, under the name GOLPESAR / گلپسر , combines avant-garde electronics, guitar, spoken word, and Iranian sonics.

ANTI-SELF-HELPLINE SUBMISSIONS: https://forms.gle/8npHMJmsSXjEdc8s5 

JULY 10th panel information: https://www.outsavvy.com/event/28215/thinking-together-for-consolation-and-towards-liberation 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/