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Never Never Never Give Up with Rose777 Rose 777 has rebuilt her life so many times she has lost count. At 17, she was taken from her grandparents’ home in the middle of the night and sent to a Utah wilderness troubled teen program, strip-searched, isolated, and prohibited from casual conversation. She got out in 10 weeks by treating the whole thing like a game. She tried to rebuild. Then at 19 she woke up permanently paralyzed, cause unknown, and rebuilt again learning to drive with hand controls.  She built a career, performed onstage, and volunteered for a decade at the rehab where she had once been a patient. Then she lost it all again. Her independence, which she had treated as proof of survival, had quietly left her isolated and exposed to danger. She experienced homelessness while profoundly disabled, survived a violent marriage, and flew to Louisiana with almost nothing except her wheelchair, her medical supplies, and a plaque that read: Never Never Never Give Up. From there Rose spent nearly a decade producing Crrow777 Radio, creating hundreds of episodes while learning to remain open-minded across ideological difference without surrendering her own judgment. In this episode of ReThreading Madness, Rose sits down with Bernadine Fox to talk about reinventing yourself not once but repeatedly, what you carry when you start over with nothing, and what it means to finally step forward to tell your own story. Music It's Alright by Shari Ulrich Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

No Compass, No Boundaries: The Writers of Off the Map This week on Rethreading Madness, Bernadine Fox sits down with Seema Shaw, self-taught visual artist, writer, and organizer of Professional Artistic Growth Made Accessible (PAGMA), a free professional development program for Vancouver visual artists and writers with lived experience of mental health issues. Seema co-edited Off the Map: Vancouver Writers with Lived Experience of Mental Health Issues, published this May by Belle Press, alongside Betsy Worland and Kate Bird, and has her own creative nonfiction piece in the collection. Seema talks about how chronic illness redirected her toward visual art, how a daily challenge with tiny tags became a decade-long commitment to collage, and why she built PAGMA, a project that grew from one small discussion group in 2021 into something that now encompasses both visual art and writing mentorship, workshops, and the anthology itself. Also on the show: three contributors to Off the Map read from their work. Sandra Yuen, visual artist, musician, and writer, reads her poem “Turmoil.” Quinn Martens, visual artist and first-time fiction writer, reads from “I Tap,” a science fiction psychological thriller about a street photographer with an anxiety disorder navigating surveillance and digital life. And Merle Ginsberg reads “The Cost,” a poem about living with manic depression for forty years, introduced by one of the most quietly devastating lines in the book: it has no compass, no boundaries, it shakes with power silently. Music by Shari Ulrich Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

Stories That Carry Us: Wanda John-Kehewin and Ying Wang on Trauma, Art, and the Weight We Inherit In this episode of ReThreading Madness, Bernadine Fox speaks with two artists whose work refuses to look away. Wanda John-Kehewin is a Cree poet, author, and storyteller from Kahwin Cree Nation who came to Vancouver pregnant, running from intergenerational trauma, and stayed. She talks about writing through depression, colonization, and the grief that passes through the matrilineal line, including her children's book Mia Wears Orange, born from her daughter's terror that residential school was coming for her. Ying Wang is a self-taught filmmaker whose debut feature Sisters, made with her younger sister as both subject and performer, follows a young woman's severe eating disorder after immigrating to North America. Ying talks about rejecting the false hope she saw in other films about eating disorders and choosing fiction over documentary to get to something darker and truer. Together these conversations circle a shared question: what does the body carry that the mind hasn't named yet, and what does it take to make art from the inside of that?   Music by Shari Ulrich Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

The Lens Changes: Two Poets on Identity, Trauma, and Reinvention Through Art  Two BC artists. Two very different entry points into the relationship between making things and surviving your own life.  Sherry Duggal is a Vancouver-based multidisciplinary artist, actor, writer, poet, and dancer whose work moves through identity, culture, belonging, and intergenerational memory. She performed at the Mad Arts Coffeehouse, part of the Connection Salon's Mad Pride events in Vancouver, and brought a sequence of poems that traced her own arc: from Indian mythology through her ancestors, through the comedy of her current family dynamics, through who she is becoming, and finally into who she has become. She reads live from her poem Chapati, recently accepted for publication by Hungry Zine, a piece about food, silence, and the weight of what gets passed down through generations without ever being named. She talks about art not as hobby but as way of life, about depression and the neuroscience of redirecting thought, about teaching AP Psychology and watching her students medicated in numbers that trouble her. Art, she says plainly, is the only thing that healed her. Nate Nate Nainers is a peer support worker, writer, and what they call a multidimensional clown. Their debut poetry collection Smokin' Holy Spirits, published with Galleon Books, is a surrealist journey through leaving evangelical Christianity, the destabilization that followed, psychosis, substance misuse, and the long process of finding ground again. They grew up Mennonite Brethren, K to 12 in Christian school, summer Bible camps, worship team, youth group, the whole architecture of it, and they trace a direct line from being five years old and terrified of hellfire to their OCD diagnosis decades later. The connection between evangelical indoctrination and religiously themed OCD is something they did not have language for until four years ago, and the conversation they have with Bernadine about where that line falls, about Prophet Bob in his van prophesying at prayer retreats, about the psychiatric ward and who ends up in which, is one of the more quietly explosive exchanges RTM has aired. They read their poem Spam live, and it is worth hearing twice. Both guests came up through the Connection Salon, a low-barrier exhibition space committed to underrepresented artists and artists with lived experience. Both are making work that does what RTM exists to do: put the human being back in front of the diagnosis and let them speak for themselves. You can order Nate's book at https://bookshop.org/p/books/smokin-holy-spirits/1f64da2a6d3942bf?ean=9781998122349&bkshp-astro=t Music Shari Ulrich, Fearless Soul, Omar Rudberg Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

Loosening the Lock: A window into Borderline; A Door into Psychedelic Therapy Two conversations. Two very different entry points into the same territory: what happens when your nervous system, your brain chemistry, or your relationship to your own thoughts puts you outside the frame of what the world considers manageable. Stefan Kirby, co-founder of the Mindscape Psychedelic Institute and a marriage and family therapist in training, walks through what psychedelic therapy actually is, how it works, and what it is good for. He is precise about the landscape: psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA, ibogaine, DMT, and cannabis, each with its own pharmacology, its own dose range, its own research base, and its own risks. What connects them is the mechanism he describes as loosening the programming, the unconscious loops of thought, emotion, and memory that most people are living inside without knowing it. He explains metacognition, cognitive diffusion, set and setting, and the difference between a psycholytic session where the client can still talk and a larger dose journey that is primarily internal. He also does not soften the risks: unqualified practitioners, boundary violations, sexual misconduct, financial exploitation, destabilization in people vulnerable to psychosis or mania. He names the wild west quality of a field that is still largely unregulated and lays out what someone should be asking before they sit with anyone. Pippa Scott is a writer, singer, and award-winning photographer who grew up between Vancouver and the UK, spent a decade in the film industry, and did not receive a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder until she was 35. Her book, Paper Girls Burn, traces what those decades actually felt like from the inside: the dial permanently turned to maximum, the abandonment terror, the attachment wounds from a childhood of constant movement, the misdiagnoses that explained some things but missed the full picture. She reads from the book live, a passage about being eight years old, screaming through the night, and grieving a broken crayon thrown in the bin because it was alone and she could not bear that. It is one of the most quietly devastating pieces of writing about a child's interior life you will hear on this program. She also takes apart the misogyny embedded in the BPD diagnosis itself: its roots in the idea that women are hysterical, overemotional, and too much, the way men get missed entirely and funneled into anger or sex addiction diagnoses instead, and the cost of that for everyone. Her book launch is at the Vancity Culture Lab in Vancouver on September 25th, with proceeds going to the Canadian Mental Health Association. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

They Sent Her Home Five Times: Aaisha Alvi on Postpartum Psychosis and the Lindsay Clancy Case   This episode was recorded on August 30, 2026, the day the jury was still deliberating in the Lindsay Clancy trial. Clancy is the Massachusetts mother whose defense argues she was experiencing postpartum psychosis when she killed her three young children in 2023. That case is the backdrop for this conversation.   Aaisha Alvi's story is very similar to Clancy’s except in her case, after many attempts to get help, a psychiatrists finally heard her desperate pleas. Aaisha is a postpartum psychosis survivor, awareness advocate, and author of A Mom Like That: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis. She experienced postpartum psychosis twice: once after the birth of her daughter, and once after a miscarriage at fourteen weeks. Both times she sought help. Both times, repeatedly, she was dismissed.  Both of these occurrences are not included in the statistics gathered to determine the prevalence of PPP. The first episode resolved on its own after four months, during which Aaisha believed her family intended to harm her daughter, that her daughter was an adult pretending to be a baby, and that her husband had plans to abuse the child. She was taken to the doctor twice during this time and sent home both times with no screening and no diagnosis. She only understood what had happened to her years later, after writing her book. The second episode was worse. She returned to her doctor five times as her symptoms escalated from depression through intrusive thoughts to command hallucinations directing her to harm strangers on the street and to throw herself into traffic. She told doctors she was hearing voices. She told them she was being compelled to do evil things. She asked to be hospitalized. She was sent home each time, told she was grieving, told she appeared to be coping well, told she was having a panic attack. It was only when a perinatal psychiatrist spent ninety minutes with her, took a full case history, and involved her husband that she was finally recognized as psychotic and given the right medication. She stabilized within a week and a half. The conversation covers the full picture: what postpartum psychosis actually is, how it differs from postpartum depression, why the hallucinations and delusions feel completely real to the person experiencing them, why calling it rare is inaccurate and dangerous, why being disturbed by your thoughts does not mean you are safe, and what the Lindsay Clancy case reveals about how thoroughly the medical system fails women in psychotic crisis. Aaisha is precise, generous, and unflinching. This is essential listening for anyone who has given birth, loves someone who has, or works anywhere near perinatal care. Find Aaisha at @AaishaAlviWrites on social media and her memoir A Mom Like That at most book retailers and libraries. Music by Shari Ulrich and Edith Wallace Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

Language Lives in My Wounds: Personality Disorders, Structural Violence, and the Politics of Vulnerability Ahana Mulgaonker is an independent scholar and writer based in Austin, Texas, who writes outside the margins of academia on a blog called Tenderly Borderline. This is the first time she has spoken publicly about her work, and it is a conversation worth hearing closely. Her essay, The Politics of Vulnerability, argues that borderline personality “disorder” and other personality “disorder” diagnoses are not descriptions of individual pathology but political acts. They function, she argues, to absorb and erase the evidence of structural violence, redirecting attention from the systems that wound people toward the people who carry those wounds. She calls this PD phobia: not simply discrimination against people with these diagnoses, but a broader social fear and disgust directed at visible woundedness itself, a way of absolving society of ethical responsibility by blaming those it has harmed. Ahana traces this through her own experience: immigrant displacement, upper caste Indian family dynamics, childhood abuse, heterosexism, and ableism. The diagnosis did not explain what happened to her but instead covered the tracks of it. The conversation moves through several ideas that RTM listeners will want to sit with. Reification, borrowed from Marxist theory, describes how the complex histories and power relations that produce a person's distress get erased and displaced onto individual personality traits, just as the sweatshop disappears into the price tag of an iPhone. ‘Childism’, an emerging framework, names the oppression of children as the foundation of all other oppressions, with PD phobia functioning as its continuation into adulthood, protecting adult authority by diagnosing away the evidence of what that authority does to children. And emotional regulation, the clinical standard used to measure whether someone is managing their distress appropriately, she reframes as a demand that the hurt conform to the same system that caused it. She also introduces what she is developing as anti-sanity theory: an extension of anti-psychiatry that interrogates not just psychiatry but the broader social norms of sanity itself, and the ways sanity naturalizes the status quo while casting resistance to it as disorder. Bernadine connects all of this to the lived reality RTM listeners know: that society's response to distress is to silence it, medicate it, and seclude it, and that asking someone to behave as if they have not been harmed is its own form of harm. This is a conversation that keeps opening up the more you sit with it. Find Ahana at tenderlyborderline.substack.com and on Instagram and Bluesky at @antisanitygirl. Music by Shari Ulrich ad Omar Rudberg Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

You Are Not Broken: Reclaiming Yourself After Trauma with Jenna Rae McWatters   Trigger warning:  this episode talks about experiences around human trafficking and child exploitation What happens when a child grows up surrounded by violence, sexual abuse and instability—and later has to untangle what survival taught her about love, sex, relationships and herself? In this deeply personal conversation, Australian survivor and advocate Jenna Rae McWatters speaks openly about being trafficked as a teenager, the grooming that made exploitation feel normal, and the complicated ways childhood trauma continued to shape her life. She talks about hypersexuality, shame, dissociation and the difficulty of recognizing yourself as a victim when you have spent years believing you were simply making your own choices.  But this conversation isn't simply about what happened to Jenna. It is about what happened after and the process of reclaiming the parts of herself that had been pushed into the shadows. Jenna describes learning to reconnect with her body through somatic work, developing self-compassion, and refusing the expectation that survivors must become perfectly “healed” before they are allowed to live fully. She challenges the shame attached to the word victim, speaks about the hostility she encounters online when she tells her story, and explores why survivors need permission to be complicated, imperfect and fully human. Jenna is also developing Inner World Mechanics, a framework designed to explore the relationship between mind and body and help people understand their own inner processes with greater compassion. At the heart of her work is a simple but powerful idea: we don't have to spend our lives chasing some imagined state of perfect healing. We can learn to meet ourselves where we are and discover that the parts of us we once considered shameful may have something important to teach us. Music by Shari Ulrich and Tom Odell Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

Unmasked: Autism, Burnout, and the Daughter the System Failed   Samia McCall came to advocacy the hard way. A former attorney and law professor, she spent thirty years cycling through mental health diagnoses, medications, and therapists, none of which helped, because none of them were looking for the right thing. She is autistic. So was her daughter Masa. Masa died by suicide in November 2023, six months after a suicide attempt that the system met with judgment, a prison-like inpatient stay, and Prozac, a medication with known suicide risk in young people. This conversation does not stay at the level of grief, though grief is present throughout. Samia is precise and methodical about what went wrong and why. She walks through how autism presents differently in girls and women, how masking from an early age leads to autistic burnout that gets misread as depression, and why the treatments prescribed for depression can actively make autistic burnout worse. She explains the well-documented link between autism and suicide that her own therapist dismissed when Samia brought her the peer-reviewed research, suggesting instead that the researchers needed to do a better job of disseminating their findings. The systemic failures she names are specific. Twice-exceptional children, gifted and disabled, fall through the gap between gifted programming and special education with neither side catching them. CBT does not work for autistic people and can cause harm. SSRIs are contraindicated for many autistic people, a fact handed out like routine information nowhere. Autistic burnout requires the removal of demands, deep rest, and sensory reduction, not more engagement, not more exposure, not a safety plan on a clipboard. Masa was brilliant, empathetic, and deeply connected to the natural world. She was also an undiagnosed autistic girl in a system that never once looked for autism in her, and when Samia found the research herself and brought it forward, she was told she was wrong. By the time a diagnosis came, Masa had had years of masking, years of shame, and a nervous system that had been in chronic overload for most of her life. What the medical model offered her was inadequate, punishing, and in at least one case actively harmful. Samia is clear that Masa did not make a choice. Her brain shut down from pain. This is a conversation about what that means, and about what needs to change so other children do not fall through the same gaps. Samia McCall is a writer, advocate, and spiritual guide who lost her daughter Mesa to suicide after years of misdiagnosis and failed mental health interventions. A late-diagnosed autistic woman herself, she co-founded SEEN, a visibility movement of mothers whose children died by suicide while actively seeking help from the mental health system. She brings a former attorney's precision and a mother's grief to the fight for a world that accommodates autistic people rather than trying to fix them. Music by Shari Ulrich Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

Writing Through It: Indigenous Voices, Trauma, and the Art of Telling Without Breaking This episode brings together two writers whose work does something precise and difficult: it tells the truth about trauma without weaponizing it, reaches into the hardest parts of lived experience and finds a way to hand something back to the reader.Wanda John-Kehewin, Cree writer and poet from Kehewin Cree Nation, talks about what drove her from the edge of the world in northern Alberta to the coast of BC, a pregnant woman running toward the only future she could imagine for her child. She traces the arc of her writing through depression, through grief, through a master of fine arts at UBC, through the moment she learned what intergenerational trauma actually was and finally had words for what her family had been carrying. She talks about the matrilineal line with precision and depth: the biological reality that daughters carry their grandmothers' eggs, that trauma travels not only through behavior and coping but through the body itself. Her poetry, she explains, was never a direct confession. It was a way to tell the story sideways, to infer what she was not yet ready to say aloud, to let readers in only as far as they were willing to go. Her children's book Mia Wears Orange came out of a moment she was carrying privately, her daughter terrified she was about to be sent to residential school, and a chance conversation with an editor who recognized that the story needed to exist in the world. The residential schools did not end, Wanda and Bernadine agree. They became the Sixties Scoop. They became Child and Family Services. The fear that the system can take your children is not historical. It is present tense.Sandra Yuen, artist, advocate, and writer, is releasing her first prose poetry collection, I Want to be Buried Standing Up, written on a friend's old Remington typewriter during a period of profound transition. She reads from the collection live, a poem called Shaving Cream that starts with a man lathering his torso and ends somewhere near God and oysters. She talks about what it means to write into the neurodivergent mind, to follow the poem where it insists on going, and to find out who you are in the process of making something. This is her fourth book. Her first was a memoir about her experience with schizophrenia.Two writers. Two very different paths into language. One conversation about what it costs and what it gives back to tell the truth. Music by Shari Ulrich Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

Title: Pulling the Canoe to Shore: Healing, Mad Movements, and the Stories That Set Us Free This episode brings together two very different voices connected by a single thread: what it means to reclaim your own story when the world has tried to define you.Randy Tate, Indigenous artist and healer from the Nisga'a and Gitxsan territories, shares the storytelling he offered at a Connection Salon Mad Pride event. At the centre of it is a teaching he carries everywhere: the canoe metaphor. When the river fills with debris and your canoe fills with tears, the elder's instruction is not to fight harder but to pull to shore, make a fire, eat, drink water, talk about your pain, and rest for however long it takes. Randy traces that teaching through 22 years of sobriety, through the intergenerational trauma of residential school that shaped his father, through the scars he saw on his father's back as a child without yet having words for what they meant, and through the ceremonies, cold showers, morning prayers, and art practice that make up his daily healing life. He talks about the inner child, the safety pin he carries to remind him of his grandmother's hands, the daughter he lost, and the life he did not expect to have but is grateful for.Matthew Jackman, international mad activist and doctoral researcher at the University of Sydney, is mapping something larger: the global mad movements, plural, that have grown from lived experience of psychiatric harm and collective resistance to it. His research interviews 44 people across a wide range of cultural and structural contexts, centering the global majority and global south, where the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is a primary tool for fighting institutionalization, forced treatment, and the dehumanization that follows the label of madness. He walks through what the movements share across their differences: Sanism, rights violations, and the permission that dehumanization grants to do harm in the name of treatment. He also names what divides them, the tension between reform and abolition, between consumer identity and survivor identity and mad identity, each carrying different relationships to the system and different visions of what change looks like.Bernadine connects both conversations to why Rethreading Madness exists at all: to break the gatekeeping that kept mental health consumers from talking to each other, from accessing information that wasn't filtered through the industry that was supposed to be serving them.  Music by Sherry Ulrich, Tom O'Dell, and Fearless Soul Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

Leaving the Faith, Finding Yourself: Life After Mormonism with Audra Phelps What happens when leaving a religion means risking the loss of your community, your identity, and even your closest relationships? In this powerful conversation, Bernadine Fox speaks with Audra Phelps about her experience leaving the Mormon Church and the complex emotional landscape that follows. Together they explore the grief of losing a community that once shaped every aspect of life, the anger that can emerge when long-held beliefs are questioned, and the difficult realization that some relationships may have been built on conditions rather than authenticity. Audra shares how fear, guilt, and self-doubt can linger long after someone leaves a high-control religious environment, and why healing requires learning to trust yourself again. The conversation also examines the role of grief in recovery—not simply grieving a belief system, but grieving family connections, friendships, and a sense of belonging that may suddenly feel uncertain. Audra discusses the importance of allowing emotions such as anger, hurt, and frustration to be felt rather than suppressed, and how moving through those emotions can become a path toward healing, self-discovery, and personal freedom. This is a thoughtful exploration of religious trauma, identity, and what it means to build a life rooted in authenticity after walking away from a system that once defined who you were. Audra founded Mama Audra to help moms unravel the web of old beliefs after leaving the LDS church to discover their own identity as a woman and mom. With over 15 years of experience in international education and coaching, she discovered her passion in supporting moms grappling with grief, mom guilt, and identity loss after a faith crisis. Audra began her career as a high school biology teacher, was raised in the church, and then moved overseas with her family to work in international schools. When she finally made the life-altering decision to leave the church, she found herself sinking in uncertainty, lonelier than she'd ever been before, and constantly feeling like she was failing her children. Through years of self-discovery and coaching, she has walked the path to uncovering beliefs that resonate, building relationships with her children based on love and trust, and navigating the loneliness that comes from starting all over again. She is now focusing her work on the unique challenges that ex-Mormon moms are navigating. Audra is reaching back to help them feel confident in who they are and blaze their own path , on their own terms. Music by Shari Ulrich Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

The Intersectionality of Mental Health, MAID, and Suicidality with Rebecca Deutsch Bernadine Fox sits down with Rebecca Deutsch, PhD candidate in Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies at York University, for a conversation that refuses to stay on safe ground. The topic is Medical Assistance in Dying and the still-unresolved question of whether Canadians whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental disorder should have access to it. This episode was recorded before the June 17, 2026 release of the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying report, which recommended indefinitely excluding people with mental illness from MAID eligibility. A dissenting opinion from three senators noted that more than two-thirds of witnesses called were publicly opposed to expansion and that people with lived experience were not prioritized. That critique lands directly in the middle of everything discussed here. Rebecca brings lived experience of suicidality and loss alongside months of close discourse analysis of the MAID MDSUMC policy documents. What she found in that language tells you a great deal about whose suffering counts. She traces how "suicidality" gets invoked as a threat in the policy, used to separate valid requests from illegitimate ones, and what that framing does to people navigating both realities at once. The conversation moves into the structural: Canada's history of eugenic practice running through asylum institutionalization into the present, where MAID expands while housing, community support, and meaningful care remain inaccessible. Rebecca describes a case where a woman cancelled her MAID request after community funding allowed her to leave a living situation that was making her disability unmanageable. The request was not for death. It was for conditions she could survive in. The through-line across all of it is who is in the room when these decisions get made. Psychiatrists, lawyers, and doctors shaped this policy. No one with lived experience was consulted. No Indigenous elders were brought in. Rebecca and Bernadine are clear: MAID without housing, community, and the genuine participation of affected people is not a compassionate policy. This is one of those episodes that stays with you. This is one of those episodes that stays with you. Music by Shari Ulrich, Tom Odell, Fearless Soul  Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

People, Place and Purpose: Jim Gottstein on Dismantling a Mental Health System That Harms the People It Claims to Help Jim Gottstein is an Alaskan lawyer who, at 29, found himself jumping out of a second floor window in his underwear at 1am after days without sleep. He was hauled off to a psychiatric facility, told he would never practice law again, and that he would need to be on neuroleptics for the rest of his life. He went on to win multiple Supreme Court cases. Jim joins Bernadine today to talk about his Report on Improving Mental Health Outcomes, a heavily sourced paper co-authored with four other researchers and built for policymakers and funders that lands like a gut punch to nearly everything mainstream psychiatry asks us to accept as fact. The report's argument is not subtle: the mental health system's standard treatments are colossally counterproductive and harmful, they are routinely forced on unwilling patients, and the research backing them has been manipulated, ghost-written, and in some cases outright falsified by the pharmaceutical companies funding it. The numbers are hard to sit with. Since the introduction of Thorazine in the mid-1950s, the disability rate among people diagnosed with serious mental illness has increased more than six-fold. The current long-term recovery rate for people maintained on neuroleptics sits at 5%. Approaches that avoid neuroleptics from the start, like Open Dialogue in Finland and the original Soteria House study, achieved recovery rates near 80%. People who get off neuroleptics after being on them see that number climb back to 40%. None of this, Jim says, is being presented to the judges making commitment decisions. The conversation goes deep into the full architecture of what is wrong. They talk about the chemical imbalance myth that official psychiatry now quietly disavows while individual psychiatrists continue to use it to secure compliance. They talk about the way disagreeing with your own diagnosis gets recorded as a symptom of your illness. They talk about the legal fiction of informed consent, the use of psychiatric incarceration as social control, and the research showing that hospitalization is astronomically correlated with increased suicide rates rather than reduced ones. They talk about the legal system's near-total failure to represent people facing commitment, proceedings the report characterizes plainly as shams. And they talk about what psychiatry does to children, including infants, and what happens when a six year old in Massachusetts named Rebecca Riley is given neuroleptics and dies, and the psychiatrist who prescribed them is granted immunity to testify against her parents. But this episode is not only about what is broken. Jim and Bernadine spend real time on what actually works. Open Dialogue, which meets people in crisis within 24 hours, keeps them out of hospital, and reduced schizophrenia diagnoses in its region of Finland by 90%. Peer respites, small home-like settings staffed entirely by people with lived experience, built on trust and voluntary participation rather than authority and compliance. Soteria House. Housing First. Employment as a therapeutic intervention. The Hearing Voices Network. Warm lines that will not call the police on you. Non-police community response teams. Psychotherapy. A range of international programs, from Zimbabwe to Japan to Sweden to Belgium, built around the report's central organizing principle: that what people need to recover is not drugs and incarceration but people, place, and purpose. His book, The Zyprexa Papers, is available on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, Kindle and Audible. His Report on Improving Mental Health Outcomes and is the subject of his presentation at the PAIMI Symposium in October. Music by Shari Ulrich Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca

David Roche on Reclaiming Humanity Beyond Appearance What happens when the thing the world notices first about you becomes the very thing that teaches others how to see? In this deeply moving conversation, Bernadine Fox sits down with David Roche, a celebrated storyteller, disability arts pioneer, and recipient of the Order of Canada.  This is a re-air of a 2022 interview done in Memory of David who recently passed away.  Born with a facial difference, David spent decades challenging the assumptions people make about beauty, worth, disability, and belonging. Together they explored the hidden ways our culture equates beauty with goodness and difference with danger—from Hollywood villains marked by scars to the everyday biases that shape how we see ourselves and others. David reflected on a life that has taken him from childhood innocence and devastating rejection to activism, performance, recovery, and international recognition. Along the way, he offered a powerful reminder that every one of us carries a hidden sense of being "not enough" and that healing begins when we stop hiding those parts of ourselves. Warm, funny, insightful, and profoundly human, this conversation asked us to look beyond the face we present to the world and consider what it means to truly belong. It is ultimately a story about resilience, community, and discovering that our greatest differences may also be our greatest gifts. Music by Shari Ulrich, Christina Acquilara, and Joni MItchell Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support. www.rethreadingmadness.ca