Eric Maisel is a psychotherapist, a PhD in counseling psychology, a creativity coach, and the author of over fifty published books. While I first discovered him through his “Rethinking Mental Health” blog for Psychology Today, his education and work in the field span back far before that — far before I was diagnosed with depression at ten years old, and far before I was born. Eric questions what he terms the “mental disorder paradigm,” and broaches controversial questions most would rather avoid:

Does mental illness actually exist? Are SSRIs medicine, or rather just “chemicals with strong effects?” What is medicine?

We addressed the first of those questions in a conversation with Eric back in 2017, and in this interview, I join Eric in-person in San Francisco to dig into the second question. Finally, on the eve before I journey into the Amazon to work with Ayahuasca, I share some reflections of mine on the third question. In this episode of Redeeming Disorder, those questions all prove to be fascinating launching pads into a discussion of labels, language, institutional (and psychiatric) authority, meaning-making and life purpose.

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