Sluggish

I’m starting an interview series — there are so many people whose brains I want to pick and a podcast feels like the perfect format for it. To kick off these conversations, I bring you a great chat I had with Micha Frazer-Carroll on her new book, Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health.

Micha is a writer and editor based in London whose work focuses on the theme of liberation, and when she sent this book to me, I honestly screamed, because I’ve been waiting for something like this to exist. (Micha also quoted my work in this book which is to me, the highest honor, and I’m so excited to be included in a book that I love so much.)

Mad World weaves together disability justice with mad studies and abolition to give us a political view of mental health that prioritizes solidarity, self-advocacy, and autonomy. What I love about it most is just how complicated it is — Micha gives us lots of questions with lots of different answers, and embraces the fact that there is a lot we can’t know, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together to make change.

This is an expansive conversation full of big ideas about the limits of rationality, the complicated nature of diagnosis, the liberating power of art, and all the big possibilities to be found in embracing disability and refusing to disavow each other in our political movements. I had so much fun chatting with Micha and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

[episode transcript]

Order Mad World (Pluto Press): www.bit.ly/madworldbook

Follow Micha on Twitter and Instagram, or check out her website

Mentioned in this episode:

* Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton & Artie Vierkant

* Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk

* Crip Theory by Robert McRuer

* Lydia X.Z. Brown on disavowal (@ 37:00)

* Toward an Informed Consent Model for All Drugs by Devon Price

* Recovery In The Bin

* The MadZines project

* Making Mad History: Mad Pride 2022, by the Campaign for Psychiatric Abolition

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Gray and I listened to the (extremely frustrating) Adderall episode of the podcast Science Vs and we got a little stuck on this thing they said about stimulants keeping people with ADHD from crashing their cars. So I dug up the citation they referenced and asked Gray to help me read the numbers, and we found that they left out some very inconvenient findings. Transcript with links and notes below.

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In part 2 of this critical series on the concept of timeblindness, we explore just how common the experience of always running out of time really is with the help of a little social psychology research. PLUS: a little detour on the pro-business history of industrial psychology and discussion of how culture affects our perception of time.

For transcript and sources, see the full post on sluggish.substack.com

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Where did the idea of "timeblindness" come from? And what does research on time perception actually say about it? Let's take a stroll through Google Scholar.

For transcript and sources, check out the full post on sluggish.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sluggish.xyz/subscribe