Khameer Kidia — Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone - with Bina Venkataraman

An urgent rethinking of the Western approach to mental health, which treats the symptoms rather than the exploitative systems causing our distress—by a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Medical School physician-anthropologist—offering lessons from the rest of the world.What if the mainstay of mental health care involved cancelling onerous debt, giving poor people free housing, and paying reparations to the descendants of slavery and colonialism? In Empire of Madness, Dr. Khameer Kidia re-evaluates the Western approach to mental health, which medicates symptoms instead of changing the structures that harm the human psyche. A physician and researcher whose own family suffers from the psychological effects of colonialism, Kidia highlights the limitations of the Western mental health model by reporting from the front lines of mental health crises at home, in the clinic, and during a decade of fieldwork.Clear-eyed and openhearted, Kidia asks the nuanced questions unaddressed by our current mental health model: How do history, culture, and politics shape mental distress? Are hoarding and burnout medical diagnoses or social problems? Why are schizophrenia outcomes sometimes better in poor countries without antipsychotics? Can a traditional healer treat mental illness better than a Western-trained clinician? For those living in poverty, can cash replace pills?With rigorous research, cutting analysis, and illuminating prose, Kidia invites us to reimagine mental health as a global idea where our wellbeing is mutual and everyone’s voice—patients, caregivers, and healthcare workers alike—matters.Khameer Kidia is a writer, physician, and anthropologist at Harvard Medical School and University of Zimbabwe. A Rhodes Scholar and 2023 New America Fellow, Kidia has worked on global mental health research, practice, and advocacy for the last decade. His writing has been published in New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet Psychiatry, The New York Times, Slate, Yale Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Born in Zimbabwe, Kidia lives between Harare and Washington, D.C.Kidia is in conversation Bina Venkataraman, an executive leader, journalist, and science & innovation policy strategist who has led mission-driven teams at The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT, and in The White House. She is the author of The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age (Riverhead, 2019), named a top business book by The Financial Times and a best book of the year by National Public Radio.  Her work has been motivated by a deep commitment to public service and an ethic to mentor and uplift talented people around her. She has also taught in the program on science, technology, and society at MIT and at Harvard. An alumna of Brown University and the Harvard Kennedy School, Venkataraman grew up in a small town in Ohio and has since lived on three continents.PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593594285?ic_referral=bSTUiHiQZ8HKsHcDU4sBNwi7BbM-T6vGuAdCybOBfgAwMx2qF9MzvtnsYcUQPmNdMU99dAP3L7ZvEcGPmvh6aQSxQ5zwFJ9SpF1QgxCkbQb56ftiM8NtSqR7CWbeK3XTzL-BraU