Dr. Khameer Kidia on "Empire of Madness," Colonialism, and Reimagining Mental Health Care

This week, Brian sits down with Dr. Khameer Kidia, a writer, anthropologist, and global health physician on the faculty at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. A Rhodes Scholar from Zimbabwe, Kidia has spent more than a decade working on mental health research and advocacy in his home country, and his writing has appeared in outlets including The New England Journal of Medicine, Slate, The Yale Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. They discuss Kidia’s acclaimed new book, Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone, which argues that Western mental health care too often treats symptoms while ignoring the larger systems driving distress, including colonialism, racism, inequality, and exploitation. The book draws from Kidia’s clinical work in the United States and his long-running mental health work in Zimbabwe. In the conversation, Brian and Dr. Kidia explore how Zimbabwe shaped the roots of the book, why Kidia makes the provocative call for “the end of psychiatry,” and how social conditions like debt, housing insecurity, racial inequity, and economic precarity can become health hazards in their own right. They also discuss the limits of a medication-first model, and what more humane alternatives such as social prescribing, Housing First, and community-based care could look like in practice.