To fend off American and European imperialism in the nineteenth century, Japan strove to strengthen itself by drawing on the most updated ideas and practices from around the world. By the 1880s, this included the introduction of Western-derived psychiatry and its ideas about mental illness. The first Japanese psychiatrists claimed that mental illnesses requi ... Show More
Feb 2023
Jane Lasonder, "Red Alert: The Inside Story of Prostitution and Human Trafficking" (Scholten Uitgeverij BV, 2016)
We love the tradition of the Amsterdam red light district, where many women stand in the windows in their underwear. Busloads of tourists and school children come by every day to look at them. In the Netherlands, where it has been taken out of the dark and made legal, we can even ... Show More
1h 2m
Oct 2022
Kirsty Loehr, "A Short History of Queer Women" (Oneworld Publications, 2022)
Kirsty Loehr talks about her new book, A Short History of Queer Women (Oneworld Publications, 2022). Queer women have always existed – let’s put them back in the history books No, they weren't ‘just friends’! We’ve read Jane Eyre, but what about the five hundred love letters Char ... Show More
33m 4s
Nov 24
Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edges of it. He performed alongside the brightest stars, wrote scores of plays, and toured the United States and England, but he neve ... Show More
1h 4m
Jan 2023
Matthew Smith, "The First Resort: The History of Social Psychiatry in the United States" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Social psychiatry was a mid-twentieth-century approach to mental health that stressed the prevention of mental illness rather than its treatment. Its proponents developed environmental explanations of mental health, arguing that socioeconomic problems such as poverty, inequality, ... Show More
43m 12s
Apr 2021
Lucas Richert, "Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture" (MIT Press, 2020)
"Antipsychiatry," Esalen, psychedelics, and DSM III: Radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. The upheavals of the 1960s gave way to a decade of disruptions in the 1970s, and among the rattled fixtures of American society was ... Show More
46m 4s
Dec 2023
Helena Vissing, "Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Trauma Treatment for Perinatal Mental Health" (Routledge, 2023)
Today we spoke with Dr. Helena Vissing about her new book Somatic Maternal Healing Psychodynamic and Somatic Trauma Treatment for Perinatal Mental Health (Routledge, 2023). What does the research of neuro science, immunology and biology tell us about the complex links between tra ... Show More
1h 3m
Sep 2023
Alexander Stille, "The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune" (FSG, 2023)
In the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill was introduced and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors in New York City. Its founders, Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, wanted to start a revo ... Show More
44m 53s
Mar 2021
The Evidence: Mental health and the pandemic
Year two of the pandemic, and in tandem with rising rates of illness, death, acute economic shock and restrictions on everyday life, mental health problems have risen too. Claudia Hammond and her panel of global experts answer listeners’ questions about the pandemic of mental ill ... Show More
49m 59s
May 2024
Fauzia Husain, "The Stigma Matrix: Gender, Globalization, and the Agency of Pakistan's Frontline Women" (Stanford UP, 2024)
As developing states adopt neoliberal policies, more and more working-class women find themselves pulled into the public sphere. They are pressed into wage work by a privatizing and unstable job market. Likewise, they are pulled into public roles by gender mainstreaming policies ... Show More
53m 22s