Pat Bracken: I grew up in Ireland in the sixties and seventies, and it was a very different place then. How has that influenced your thinking and your belief systems? Justin Karter: You grew up in a Catholic country. Listen to the audio of the interview here.
The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. As a result, he has become an advocate for listening to different understandings of madness from those who are routinely ignored and dismissed - namely, service-users and people who themselves experience madness, and those from indigenous and non-Western cultures. Through his clinical practice and his academic work in philosophy and ethics, he has seen the limits and dangers of standard approaches to mental health in the West. He was one of the people involved in starting the Critical Psychiatry Network, an organization of psychiatrists, researchers, and mental health professionals that question the assumptions that lie beneath psychiatric knowledge and practice. He has worked as a psychiatrist in rural Ireland, inner-city and multi-ethnic parts of the UK, and in Uganda, East Africa.īracken, who holds doctoral degrees in both medicine and philosophy, calls for a movement toward critical psychiatry.
Pat Bracken is a psychiatrist who questions many of the fundamental assumptions of his field.
