What Does It Mean To Be Called “Crazy” in A Crazy World?
WILL HALL
Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness reveals the human side of mental illness. In this remarkable collection of interviews and essays, therapist, Madness Radio host, and schizophrenia survivor Will Hall asks, “What does it mean to be called crazy in a crazy world?”
More than 60 voices of psychiatric patients, scientists, journalists, doctors, activists, and artists create a vital new conversation about empowering the human spirit. Outside Mental Health invites us to rethink what we know about bipolar, psychosis, schizophrenia, depression, medications, and mental illness in society. Also available in German!
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Interviews include:
Gary Greenberg, Bonfire Madigan, Robert Whitaker, Eleanor Longden, John Horgan, Alisha Ali, Christopher Lane, Clare Shaw, Ethan Watters, Paula Caplan, Jonathan Metzl, Jacks McNamara, Tim Wise, Kalle Lasn, Arnold Mindell, David Burns, Eddie Bartók-Baratta, Miguel Mendías, Matthew Morrissey, Louis Sass, John Rice, Susan McKeown, Mel Gunasena, Sascha DuBrul, Dina Tyler, Rufus May, Steven Morgan, Paul Levy, Leah Harris, Clare Shaw, Daniel Mackler, Cheryl Alexander, Adi Hasanbašic, Linda Andre, Laura Delano, Monica Cassani, Joanna Moncrieff, Richard DeGrandpre, David Cohen, Jacqui Dillon, Lee Hurter, Ari Ne’eman, Pat Bracken, Terry Kupers, David Walker, Philip Morgan, Inez Kochius, Jenny Westberg, Marykate Conor, Caty Simon, David Webb, Ruta Mazelis, Oryx Cohen, Bruce Levine, James Gottstein, Peter Stastny, and dozens more…
Acclaim for
Outside Mental Health:
Voices and Visions of Madness
Christopher Lane
Will Hall’s Madness Radio has long been for many a refuge and an oasis from the overblown claims and corporate interests of American psychiatry and Big Pharma. This collection of interviews and writings—bold, fearless, and compellingly readable—captures Madness Radio’s importance and fierce independence, urging us to think differently and anew about the “thought disorders” involved in illness and wellness, sanity and recovery. Required reading.
Robert Whitaker
This is a brilliant book… Nicely written, and wonderfully grand and big-hearted in its exploration of the world of mental health and much more. Remarkable in scope, Outside Mental Health delves into autobiography, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and spirituality. Will Hall elevates the radio interview format into an art.
Mary O’Hara
An intelligent, thought-provoking, and rare concept…These are voices worth listening to.
Joshua Wolf Shenk
A terrific conversation partner.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone PhD
It is an exhilarating challenge and a great pleasure to be interviewed by Will Hall – a widely knowledgeable and widely explorative interviewer.
Alison Hillman
Outside Mental Health is a must-read, not only for those in the mental health field, family members, and those who experience extreme or altered states, but for anyone interested in creating a more just and compassionate world. Hall’s lyric, authentic voice, woven throughout, speaks powerfully to the dominant narrative about mental illness, and provides hope for transformational change in our approach to emotional distress.
Paul Levy
There are few books that I come across that make me want to drop everything I am doing and immediately read it on the spot. Outside Mental Health is one such book. Will Hall has given us a real gift: this book offers us a new, helpful, liberating—and dare I say, sane—way of re- envisioning our ideas of both the nature of mental health and mental illness in a world gone mad. Truly an inspired, and inspiring, work.
Stanley Siegel
This extraordinary book will make a difference for therapists and “patients” alike. Interviews and essays acknowledge the overuse of medication and hospitalization, but don’t demonize these treatments… Outside Mental Health reads with fierce emotional intensity: journeys shaped by forced treatments, homelessness, and soul-crushing family conflicts, as well as extraordinary triumphs, creativity, and originality.
Susan McKeown
Phenomenal… a tome of treasures, filled with great findings for all kinds of seekers. And it begins with Will Hall’s story, bravely and lovingly told. When I discovered Will’s work after a crisis in my own family, the madness began to make sense. Now in this outstanding book he has brought together a rich trove of fascinating interviews with survivors, philosophers, researchers, artists, psychiatrists, journalists and scientists, all of whom illuminate the darkness and plot innovative strategies for survival and recovery.
Arnold Mindell PhD
Outside Mental Health explores the lived experience of extreme states and psychiatric treatments with openness and curiosity. Will Hall brings lessons learned from his own altered states and work as a therapist to offer fresh perspectives on madness and how to respond to it.
Dr. Pat Bracken MD
The biggest question facing mental health care is: who should be in control and who should make the decisions? Who should say what mental crises are, what treatment should be, and what recovery means? I am truly honored to recommend this book. Will Hall has done an extraordinary job bringing together a wide-ranging and diverse collection, all united by a concern with empowerment. These voices challenge current orthodoxy and constitute a fantastic resource for those who are seeking change.
Gabriella Coleman
Clarity, grace, insight, compassion and most of all wisdom: these are the qualities that you will find in these powerful interviews and writings assembled by long time mental health advocate Will Hall. The lessons that spring forth from these interviews are innumerable but one recurs time and again: without true choice, in other words without freedom, there can be no health, healing and recovery.
Kirkus Reviews, June 2020
An expansive set of interviews and essays that offer a unique perspective on mental health.
Hall, a professional therapist, a former psychiatric patient, and the author of Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs (2011), has been interviewing patients and therapists on his Valley Free Radio show, “Madness Radio,” for a decade. This book assembles more than 60 of those interviews with patients, therapists, and mental health activists who share their very personal and often poignant experiences with psychiatric drugs, hospitalization, and the social stigma of mental illness...readers will learn much about autism, attention deficit disorder, and bipolar disorder and about controversial treatments, such as electroshock therapy... Hall’s interview questions are sensitive and perceptive, and the answers that he receives are frank and sometimes sobering... Hall’s own emotional essay, “Letter to the Mother of a Schizophrenic,” sums up his focus on the humanity of his subjects: “Again and again I am told the ‘severely mentally ill’ are impaired and incapable, not quite human....[W]hen I finally do meet the people carrying that terrible, stigmatizing label of schizophrenia, what do I find? I find a human being.”
A troubling and illuminating collection.
Publishers Weekly BookLife Nonfiction Prize Finalist 2022
This urgent, eye-opening collection of interviews gives voice to mental health patients, activists, therapists and others about who share, with welcome frankness, their experiences within and without what one interviewee calls the “dehumanizing psychiatric system.” Hall, in an impassioned preface, draws on his own history of a diagnosis of schizophrenia and how, after years of feeling abused by traditional treatments, he “prov[ed] a team of psychiatric medical experts completely wrong” and eventually found greater strength, control, and understanding of his mind outside of their care. The powerful interviews that follow, an outgrowth of Hall’s work as the host and creator of the community radio show Madness Radio, reveal similar experiences from people who have found relief outside the system. One attests, “It’s profoundly disempowering to be told there is essentially nothing you can do to help yourself except take medication and hope for the best.”
Hall’s subjects challenge the medical establishment on issues like overmedication—Mad in America author Robert Whitaker makes a compelling case that powerful economic incentives have united the pharmaceutical industry, the American Psychiatric Association, and others in “storytelling” that “that psychiatric disorders were due to chemical imbalances in the brain.” Others discuss how the medicated life can leave one “profoundly emotionally, physically, and existentially disconnected from” the self. Therapist Arnold Mindell argues “medication is used just to calm people down. But everyone goes through these same states at least a little bit.”
Many of Hall’s interviewees find peace and control through meditative practice and spirituality. The discussions of depression, suicidal ideation, what it’s like to live with “voices,” and other pressing mental health issues are nuanced and sensitive. These revealing discussions call for a more balanced approach to treatment, one that recognizes that altered states are part of the human experience and offers something beyond what one interviewee characterizes as “I was told there was something deeply wrong with me that will never go away.”
Takeaway: Powerful interviews about mental-health patients finding peace outside the medical system.