Mad In America: Science, Psychiatry And Social Justice

This week on the Mad in America podcast we interview Olga Runciman.  Olga is an international trainer and speaker, writer, campaigner, and artist. She co-founded the Danish Hearing Voices Network and sees the role of the Hearing Voices Movement as post-psychiatric, working towards the recognition of human rights while offering hope, empowerment, and access to making sense of individual experiences.  Olga was a psychiatric nurse working in social psychiatry but today she is a psychologist and since 2013 she has had her own private practice in Denmark, working with people who have been labelled schizophrenic or psychotic. Olga is herself a psychiatric survivor and a voice hearer too. In this interview we discuss Olga’s professional and personal experiences of the psychiatric system and how she now helps and supports healing and recovery in others. In the episode we discuss: How Olga became a specialist psychiatric nurse in Denmark, believing at the time the reasons given for psychiatric diagnoses. How she came