I think part of why schizophrenia got linked to civil rights protest in the '60s was because mainstream society was coding threats against the smooth running of the state as insanity and treating it as such, and so as that happens you see the evolution of a process in which people with schizophrenia are increasingly feared and our hospitals, particularly the kind of hospital that I look at in the book become to look more and more like prisons, to the point where many of them including the one I talk about actually become prisons.

Depression as one example is an illness that has a chemical basis, but also is deeply embedded in cultural norms about gender, social class, race.

I think that one of the other lessons about what happened here is that open carry laws, even though many police, sheriff departments in Colorado support them, make it much harder for law enforcement to do their jobs.

I think part of why schizophrenia got linked to civil rights protest in the '60s was because mainstream society was coding threats against the smooth running of the state as insanity and treating it as such, and so as that happens you see the evolution of a process in which people with schizophrenia are increasingly feared and our hospitals, particularly the kind of hospital that I look at in the book become to look more and more like prisons, to the point where many of them including the one I talk about actually become prisons.

Particularly with schizophrenia you see a lot of concern that these people could escape and kill people, or they could threaten our political order.

I'm a practicing psychiatrist and I think that I really believe in the advances of psychiatry. Our diagnoses are more precise.

Mental illness is a real thing. It has real material consequences for people who suffer from it and at the time even the most biological finding reflects social context in very important ways, and so I think psychiatry is better off looking both at biology and at social context and really trying to think of the relationship between these and I think doctors and patients are better off that way.