Mad In America: Science, Psychiatry And Social Justice

This week on MIA Radio we interview Dr. Duncan Double. Duncan is a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust. He is founder of the Critical Psychiatry Network and also runs a critical psychiatry blog. He edited the book Critical psychiatry: The limits of madness published in 2006 and has written a number of journal articles and book chapters. We talk about Duncan’s experiences as a critical psychiatrist working within a bio-medically oriented profession. In this interview we discuss: How reading Freud as a teenager led Duncan to his interest in psychiatry. That, early in his training, he found it difficult to take to the overly physicalist aspects of what he was expected to learn. How he became interested in the work of RD Laing and Thomas Szsaz. How he left his studies for a time, working with drug users in London, studying for a psychology degree and working in banking. The formation of the Critical Psychiatry Network in January 1999. How critical psychiatrists take a differen