Listen to “They’re Coming to Take You Away” on The Unspeakable: Click here.
About the Interviewer Meghan Daum:
Meghan Daum is the author of five books, including The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars, which The New York Times named a Notable Book of 2019. Her last book was the collection of original essays The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, which won the 2015 PEN Center USA Award for creative nonfiction. She is also the editor of the New York Times bestseller Selfish, Shallow & Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not To Have Kids. Her other books include the essay collection My Misspent Youth, the novel The Quality of Life Report, and Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, a memoir. For more than a decade, she was an opinion columnist for The Los Angeles Times. Her work has also appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Vogue. She is an adjunct associate professor in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she was once a student herself.
Intro to the interview from The Unspeakable podcast website:
Most people associate forcible detentions in psychiatric wards with barbaric practices of the past. But as Canadian investigative journalist Rob Wipond reports in his new book, involuntary psychiatric treatment is all too common today. In Your Consent Is Not Required, Rob shows just how little agency patients often have in their own care and, moreover, how the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry benefit from as many people as possible being classified as “mental patients.” In this conversation, he talks with Meghan about how psychiatric interventions can be weaponized against patients, why therapies such as electroshock remain so widely used, and how wellness checks and calls to suicide hotlines can result in massive overreach that traps patients in a deeply-flawed and often poorly regulated system.
For paying subscribers: Rob stayed overtime for a more personal conversation about how he feels about his life and career these days and how he went from acting in local theater, performing music, and doing various kinds of community work to being an investigative reporter. He also shared his theory as to why Canadians do so well in American late-night television. To hear that portion, become a paying subscriber at meghandaum.substack.com