Dr. Ellen Bassuk

What happens when professional expertise collides with deeply personal experience? In this episode, I'm joined by psychiatrist and advocate Ellen Bassuk and her son Daniel Schoonover to discuss their powerful memoir Between Two Worlds: A Psychiatrist and Her Son's Quest for Compassionate Mental Health Care. For decades, Dr. Bassuk worked inside the mental health system while simultaneously navigating it as the mother of a son living with serious mental illness, including schizophrenia. Together, they tell a deeply human story about family, caregiving, advocacy, stigma, resilience, and the painful gaps within America's mental health and educational systems. This conversation explores compassion, recovery, parenting, identity, and what truly humane mental health care could look like.