Finalist
Assessment:
Plot/Idea: Hall’s construct is creatively defined and flows smoothly from the start. The idea of restructuring mental health, with a strong emphasis on mental diversity, is both relevant and noteworthy.
Prose: Powerful, almost lyrical prose drives the message home, and Hall’s style is equally comforting and intense.
Originality: Hall offers a novel and innovative take on mental wellness—focusing on empowerment as a tool for healing—that will provoke deep thought and influence systemic change.
Character Development/Execution: The diverse stories that Hall offers glide across the pages, immediately drawing readers in while generating profound reflection. The intimacy Hall elicits brings his subject to life; in artistic fashion, he paints evocative portraits alongside a meaningful and well-executed call to action.
Date Submitted: October 23, 2022
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 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.
Great for fans of: Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America, DJ Jaffe’s Insane Consequences.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A
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.
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.
A terrific conversation partner.
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.
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.
