We're All Mad Here

In a single year, Rose went from a happy teenager to an emotionally broken one. Her sister Violet watched in horror as even their psychiatrist father was at a loss for what to do, and wonders if she’ll go crazy too. “Silver Water” by Amy Bloom is read and performed with permission from Bloom’s literary […]

Sir Isaac Newton is considered one of the founding fathers of mathematics, but while he was making his amazing discoveries, he was also dealing with mental illness and had two mental breakdowns in his lifetime, No one really knows what he had- bipolar? Schizophrenia?- but back when Newton was alive, it was actually considered a […]

Ever get weird tingles when you hear a certain sound or feel a certain object? There’s a term for it: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR. The newest internet fad, people have been gleefully giving themselves “brain orgasms” to YouTube videos since about 2011. But where does it come from? Can everyone experience it? www.patreon.com/allmadpodcast […]

First released as a bonus episode, this is an interview I was invited to do with creators of the audiodrama THE DIARIST, Donna and Beth. We talk mental health treatment in the 50s, women’s rights, and Beth’s dog pops in for a visit. If you haven’t listened to THE DIARIST yet, do it! It’s well-written, […]

Rachel interviews playwright Lydia Blaisdell, who wrote her play She Buried the Pistol about her great-grandmother, Cora Blaisdell, who was committed to a California asylum when she was 36. Cora was institutionalized until her death over 30 years later. Lydia discusses the process of finding medical records, what an asylum was like in the 30s […]

In 1988, a woman tried on a new identity as Becky Sue Turner. A few months later, she changed her identity again, to Lori Erica Kennedy. Under this name, she married and had a child, only to kill herself a few years later. Upon going through her things, her former in-laws discovered that she was […]

From 1944-1959, Maurice Duplessis was Premier of Quebec, Canada. He had built a reputation for disregarding the civil liberties of Canadians, and one of his biggest moves was having 20,000 orphans (some of whom weren’t actually orphans) declared mentally deficient. Why? To make money off of them, of course! In the process, the lives of […]

Chris Nowinski’s WWE career, from debut to retirement, lasted almost exactly two years. In 2003, he received a kick to the jaw so severe that he couldn’t remember who he was directly afterward. So he dropped out of the WWE, added a PhD to the Harvard degree he already had, and tried to solve sports’ […]

Justin Strzelczyk was drafted into the NFL right out of college, where he was a standout player. Coaches loved him because he was obsessed with the game and gave his all. But giving his all may have done him in; four years after he was released, Justin got in his car took a 411 mile […]

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), under other names, has been being researched since the 1920s. In the ’50s, it was called “punch drunk syndrome” and was thought to only affect boxers. But recent research has proven that not only can CTE occur in people who have ANY extensive exposure to head trauma, whether it be sports […]