ReThreading Madness: Recent Episodes
ReThreading Madness Radio
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Trigger Warning: This program talks about sibling violence and suicide ideology.
This week on ReThreading Madness, Bernadine Fox speaks with three individuals - Sandra Yuen, Penny Marie, and Venge - about survival, identity, creativity, and what it means to keep living in a world that often punishes difference. Sandra Yuen who lives with schzophrenia discusses her new prose poetry collection I Want to Be Buried Standing Up, the tactile magic of writing on an old typewriter, neurodivergence, and creating art that refuses neat categories. Penny Marie shares the devastating realities of sibling abuse, growing up autistic and trans in a violent environment, and the lifelong impact of being scapegoated inside a family system that refused to protect her. Venge reflects on suicide, isolation, and the unexpected way a cat named Linus became the reason she stayed alive long enough to rediscover connection, nature, and herself. Together, these conversations explore what happens when people reclaim the stories that others tried to silence and how creativity, animals, language, and truth-telling can become acts of survival.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Jann Arden
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A Conversation with Jonathan Rogers at 89 on Getting Old and Dying
Host Bernadine Fox is joined by Jonathan Rogers — animator, artist, former supervising producer at Disney and Marvel, stand-up comedian, and the man she was once engaged to — for a rare and honest conversation about aging, dying, and what remains. At 89, Jonathan reflects on a career that took him from Second City Toronto to NBC to Hollywood, on the childhood sexual abuse that shaped the first part of his life, on losing the ability to draw after more than eight decades as an artist, and on what it feels like when the tangible world begins to fade, the body begins to slow down, when one becomes invisible to the world, and what it feels like to be near the end of a life that was genuinely well-lived.
Music: Shari Ulrich
Photo by: Jim Neiss
Transcripts available upon request to rethreadingmadness@coopradio.org
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The Marks We Miss: Forensics, Trafficking, and the Path to True Trauma-Informed Justice
*Trigger Warning:* This episode contains detailed discussions regarding human trafficking, domestic violence, and sexual assault. It includes forensic descriptions of non-fatal strangulation, and the trafficking of children. We also discuss systemic failures affecting Indigenous and Black communities. Listener discretion is strongly advised.
Trauma is the primary driver of mental health struggles; Rethreading Madness exists to expose how it happens and, more importantly, how we can survive it
Host Bernadine Fox speaks with Canadian author and dental professional James Frizzel who is a forensic dental professional with specialized training from McGill University, the Sûreté du Québec, and the University of Tennessee’s "Body Farm." A graduate of Harvard Medical School’s "Train the Trainer" program for human trafficking, he also holds certifications in strangulation prevention and clandestine grave recovery. Drawing on that background, Frizzel discusses the overlooked connections between domestic violence and sex trafficking, the physical and neurological effects of non-fatal strangulation, and why medical and law enforcement systems routinely misidentify or dismiss victims. They also cover the disproportionate impact on Indigenous and Black women and girls in Canada and the US, what a genuinely trauma-informed response could look like from disclosure through to court, the particular harm done to children trafficked within their own families, and the gap between legislation on the books and justice in practice. The conversation also takes in the Epstein files and what communities and professionals need to understand if survivors are going to be better protected.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Lauren Daigle
Transcripts available upon request to rethreadingmadness@coopradio.org
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BiPolar Princess: Victoria Maxwell
What happens when a spiritual awakening is mistaken for psychosis? And what if the difference between harm and healing is simply being listened to?
In this powerful and often funny conversation, Victoria Maxwell joins ReThreading Madness to talk about bipolar disorder, psychosis, stigma, and the fine line between spiritual experience and mental health crisis. A former actor turned internationally recognized theatrical keynote speaker, Victoria shares how a meditation retreat catapulted her into an altered state that was both profoundly meaningful and deeply destabilizing. For years, her experience was pathologized without curiosity—until one nurse asked a single question that changed everything.
Together, Bernadine and Victoria unpack language reclamation (“crazy,” “mad,” “bipolar princess”), media portrayals of violence and mental illness, workplace stigma, and what happens when leaders model vulnerability from the top down. This episode is honest, nuanced, and unexpectedly humorous—a reminder that lived experience is not a stereotype, and that healing often begins with being seen.
This episode includes snippets of comedic shows from Danny Docimo from ZaniesComedy and David Granrier from Stand Up For Mental Health.
Victoria Maxwell is an internationally recognized keynote speaker, performing artist, and mental health advocate who blends three decades as an actor with lived experience of bipolar disorder, anxiety, and psychosis. Named a mental health leader by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, her theatrical keynote That’s Just Crazy Talk has been recognized by the Mental Health Commission of Canada as one of the country’s top anti-stigma interventions. Victoria is also a blogger for Psychology Today and serves as a Lived Experience Strategic Advisor for BC Mental Health and Substance Use Services. Learn more at www.victoriamaxwell.com.
Music: I Found Myself/Clendening, It’s Alright/Shari Ulrich, YOY/Siibii
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In this powerful and grounded conversation, Bob Joseph, author of 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, joins Bernadine Fox to unpack the law that has governed Indigenous lives in Canada since 1876.
The Indian Act was not simply administrative policy. It was a system of control. It defined identity, stripped women of status, imposed elected governance systems, confined communities to reserves, criminalized ceremonies, and enforced assimilation through residential schools. It treated Indigenous peoples as wards of the state and positioned culture itself as something to erase. And while parts of the Act have been amended, it remains in force today.
Together, Bernadine and Bob explore the deeper question: How does this law connect to mental health? Housing crises. Drinking water inequities. Substance use. Higher incarceration rates. Intergenerational trauma. When children were taken, languages banned, land reduced, and communities fractured, the damage was not incidental. It was structural. The trauma did not begin in families. It began in policy.
Bob challenges listeners to move beyond guilt toward responsibility. Reconciliation is not sentiment. It requires learning what we were not taught and understanding how law shaped lived experience. If we want to address mental health in Indigenous communities, we must first understand the system that created the conditions.
Bob Joseph is the Co-Founder and CEO of Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. and has been providing Indigenous relations training since 1994. For over three decades, he has helped thousands of individuals and organizations understand the history, policy, and lived realities that shape Indigenous–non-Indigenous relations in Canada and beyond. His clients include all levels of government, Fortune 500 companies, financial institutions such as the World Bank, and organizations across North America and internationally. An award-winning author of 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, Bob is widely recognized for translating complex legal and historical realities into accessible, practical learning. He has served as an associate professor at Royal Roads University, guest lectured at numerous academic institutions, and facilitated global Indigenous round tables, including a United Nations-connected gathering in Switzerland. His work bridges education, reconciliation, and informed responsibility, equipping Canadians to better understand the lasting impact of colonial policy on Indigenous communities today.
music by Shari Ulrich
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Historical Mad Voices from Inside the Asylum with Michael Rembis
What happens when we stop telling the history of psychiatry from the doctor’s perspective and start listening to the people who lived it? In this powerful and wide-ranging conversation, historian Michael Rembis, author of Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum, joins Bernadine Fox to explore what changes when Historical Mad Voices from Inside the Asylum with Michael Rembis we center the voices of those labeled “mad.” Drawing from firsthand accounts of institutionalization between 1830 and 1950, Rembis reveals a long and often hidden history of resistance, reform, abuse, survival, and self-advocacy. The asylum was never a neutral or purely benevolent space. It was contested from the very beginning. Together, they examine psychiatric power, forced treatment, gendered confinement, trauma pathologization, violence narratives in the media, and the enduring struggle to be heard within systems that claim to help. This episode moves beyond simplistic binaries of “care” versus “control” and instead asks deeper questions: Who gets to define madness? Who holds authority? And what happens when we reclaim our own stories? This is a conversation about history, yes—but also about the present moment, and the ongoing fight for dignity, agency, and community care.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Sia
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Racial Battle Fatigue: Truth, Treaties, and Mental Health with Red Thunderwoman
Write Up: In this powerful episode of ReThreading Madness, Bernadine Fox sits down with Michelle Robinson, also known as Red Thunderwoman — a Sahtu Dene activist, political organizer, and host of the Native Calgarian Podcast. Together they explore the deep and ongoing intersections between racism, media, mental health, colonial policy, and what Michelle calls “racial battle fatigue.” From land acknowledgments to treaties, from internalized racism to systemic healthcare discrimination, Michelle speaks candidly about the emotional toll of living in a country that still resists truth while claiming reconciliation. The conversation moves beyond surface-level allyship into harder territory: how Indigenous erasure was built into Canadian education, media, and law; how racism shapes mental health outcomes; and how colonial systems continue to police, dismiss, and pathologize Indigenous voices. Michelle reflects on growing up navigating internalized racism, raising a proud Dene daughter in a climate of rising hate, and why mental health conversations cannot be separated from oppression dynamics. This is not an abstract discussion — it is lived reality. But this episode is also about solutions. Michelle outlines concrete pathways forward through meaningful listening, engaging Indigenous voices in good faith, amplifying media accountability, and acting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action and the National Inquiry’s Calls to Justice. This conversation invites listeners to move past fear-based narratives and into relationship — to see Indigenous people not as caricatures or symbols, but as neighbors, leaders, and full human beings. Honest, challenging, and urgent, this is an episode about what it takes to heal in a system not designed for everyone.
Music Shari Ulrich
Photo Michelle Robinson
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After My Mother Died: In Conversation with Christa Ovenell, Funeral Director and End-of-Life Doula
In this episode of ReThreading Madness, Berni Fox is joined by Christa Ovenell, funeral director, end-of-life doula, and founder of Death’s Apprentice, for a deeply honest conversation about death, grief, and what it means to live alongside loss. Speaking shortly after the death of her own mother, Christa reflects on the strange dissonance of grieving personally while holding professional knowledge about dying, funerals, and end-of-life care. Together, they explore what death really looks like beyond movies and platitudes, and why avoiding conversations about mortality often leaves the living more vulnerable. Christa shares how her mother’s final weeks unfolded, how grief collided with the holiday season, and what helped her survive that first raw stretch after loss. The conversation gently challenges cultural habits that rush, sanitize, or silence grief, and instead invites curiosity, ritual, and community. From what not to say to someone who is grieving, to why funerals and gatherings still matter, Christa offers practical, compassionate insights rooted in both lived experience and decades of deathcare work. This episode is for anyone who has lost someone, fears losing someone, or knows they will someday. It’s about making space for complexity, letting grief be what it is, and learning how to show up for ourselves and others when death enters the room. Honest, humane, and quietly radical, this conversation reminds us that facing death more openly can deepen how we live.
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Choosing to Breathe with Emma Stevens
In this episode, Emma Stevens joins Bernadine on ReThreading Madness to talk about what it means to choose life, truth, and selfhood after years of silence, fragmentation, and survival. An adult adoptee raised to feel gratitude rather than grief, Emma reflects on how early relinquishment, adoption, and unspoken trauma shaped her sense of identity and belonging. She speaks candidly about the long internal work of listening to the parts of herself that were forced to stay quiet, and the moment when merely surviving was no longer enough.
The conversation weaves through themes from Emma’s memoirs, including Choosing to Breathe and The Gathering Place, where she traces her search for truth about her origins and the slow, deliberate process of reuniting a fractured sense of self. Emma describes how identity can splinter when a child learns early that certain questions, emotions, or needs are unwelcome, and how reclaiming wholeness requires welcoming even the most wounded parts back into the story. Her reflections are raw, meditative, and grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction.
Emma also speaks about her earlier experience of exploitation within a therapeutic relationship, explored in A Fire Is Coming, and how earlier attachment wounds created vulnerability to professional harm. Rather than centering pathology, this episode focuses on agency. On learning to trust one’s own perception, on speaking truth to power, and on choosing to breathe fully into a life that is no longer shaped by secrecy or coercion. This is a conversation for anyone who has felt they were performing themselves for others, and who is ready to begin living from a place that is truly their own.
You can find Emma’s books on Amazon
Bernadine’s monologue 50 Years After I Fled can be downloaded at https://www.spreaker.com/episode/fifty-years-after-i-fled-rural-alberta-is-still-failing-to-protect-its-children--69044526
Music by Shari Ulrich, Omar Rudberg
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In this week’s episode of Rethreading Madness, Bernadine speaks with psychologist and long-time MindFreedom International board member Al Galves about the deep systemic issues in contemporary mental health care. Drawing from decades of clinical practice and activism, Al challenges the dominant bio psychiatric model, arguing that most people experiencing extreme states are not suffering from “broken brains,” but are responding to pain, trauma, and social conditions that have gone unrecognized. He explains how the profession’s unquestioned assumptions shape public attitudes, legal systems, and the treatment people receive — often to their detriment. Together, they explore the work of MindFreedom International, an organization founded by survivors of forced psychiatric treatment who refused to accept coercion as care. Al details the MindFreedom Shield, a global solidarity network that mobilizes members to advocate for individuals who have been involuntarily hospitalized or forcibly medicated. Through coordinated phone calls, emails, and public pressure, Shield members confront institutions directly, helping free people or improve their conditions while offering something even more vital: the knowledge that someone on the outside sees them, believes them, and is fighting for their human rights. The conversation widens to look at why coercive practices persist, how legal systems reinforce them, and what happens when professionals treat trauma as pathology instead of a human response to harm. Bernadine and Al discuss the dangers of a society that equates distress with incompetence, the long history of dismissing survivors’ realities, and the urgent need for alternatives such as Soteria houses, Open Dialogue, and peer-led supports. This is a powerful episode for anyone interested in human rights in mental health, systemic reform, or survivor-driven advocacy — and a reminder that solidarity can be lifesaving.
Music: Shari Ulrich
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A Word About Mental Health
In this episode, we turn the spotlight on the power of creative expression and shared dialogue. Host Bernadine Fox speaks with three remarkable guests who have helped shape and sustain this ongoing community conversation: A Word About Mental Health Isabella Mori, MEd — writer, retired counsellor, and organizer of A Word About Mental Health — discusses how storytelling, poetry, and connection can support recovery and understanding. Léa Taranto, a disabled Chinese Jewish Canadian writer living with OCD and comorbid disorders, shares how writing becomes both anchor and release. Her debut novel, A Drop in the Ocean, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Forest of Reading’s White Pine Award. Lynn, a retired English professor, writer, and advocate for brain health, reflects on her experiences as a participant in the series and on the healing power of shared presence and curiosity. Together they explore what happens when we talk openly about mental health, how art and community intertwine, and why sometimes the most powerful act of healing begins with a single word. A Word About Mental Health: where stories, art, and conversation help rethread the world one voice at a time.
Music by Shari Ulrich, Billie Ellish and Callum Scott
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www.rethreadingmadness.ca
From Bunny Hugs to Transgression: Conversations on Healing and Identity with Todd Rennebohm
Todd Rennebohm is a Canadian mental health advocate, author, public speaker, and host of the podcast Bunny Hugs and Mental Health, where he creates a free, open space for honest conversations about mental illness, trauma, suicide attempts, addiction, and recovery. A suicide attempt survivor who is in long-term recovery from substance abuse, Todd brings lived experience and compassion to dialogues with professionals, survivors, and families affected by mental health and addiction. His podcast has featured hundreds of episodes of candid storytelling and is recognized among top mental health podcasts for its combination of depth, vulnerability, and warmth. Bunny Hugs Podcast+1 Todd is also the author of the children’s book Sometimes Daddy Cries, a story told through the eyes of a child whose father experiences depression, designed to help families talk about mental health with sensitivity and insight.
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www.rethreadingmadness.ca
Homecoming: Ovid Thomas Reclaims History on the Poundmaker Cree Nation
This week on ReThreading Madness, Bernadine speaks with Ovid Thomas, a Sixties Scoop survivor and social media creator known for his educational content on Cree history and the Poundmaker Cree Nation. Taken from his family at just two weeks old, Ovid grew up in a non-Indigenous home in northern Manitoba, facing abuse, neglect, and systemic discrimination.
Ovid shares his journey of survival—from enduring racial bias in education and being falsely accused of cheating, to challenging policies that barred First Nations students from university-track courses. He opens up about how trauma, partial deafness, and years of misdiagnosis shaped his early life, and how returning to his community became a path toward healing.
Together, Bernadine and Ovid explore his reconnection with the Poundmaker Cree Nation, where he discovered family, belonging, and cultural roots long denied to him. They discuss his efforts to correct mistranslations of speeches by Poundmaker and Big Bear, his research into colonial distortions of Cree history, and his ongoing fight against medical and institutional racism.
This conversation moves from the personal to the political—linking Ovid’s lived experience with the
broader legacy of colonial systems that continue to harm Indigenous peoples. It’s a story of truthtelling, reclamation, and resilience.
Music by Shari Ulrich
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www.rethreadingmadness.ca
Theo Cuthand, TherapyToo, and Venge Dixon on Art, Neurodiversity, Therapy Harm and Survival
This episode brings together three voices working at the intersections of madness, creativity, survivorship, and resistance, each approaching mental health from lived experience rather than abstraction. Theo Jean Cuthand is a celebrated Indigenous filmmaker, visual artist, and game creator whose work explores Queer and trans identity, Indigeneity, love, and madness. With films and installations shown internationally, from MoMA and the Whitney Biennial to Berlinale and ImagineNATIVE, Theo speaks about using experimental media and game design to make inner experience visible. His video game A Bipolar Journey draws directly from his lived experience of bipolar disorder, challenging clinical narratives by centering self-knowledge, agency, and art as survival. Amy Nordhues joins the conversation as a survivor of therapist abuse and co-creator of the documentary series #TherapyToo. Groomed and assaulted by a psychiatrist as an adult, following earlier childhood abuse, Amy has become a leading advocate exposing harm within therapeutic and faith-based systems. She is the author of the award-winning memoir Prayed Upon: Breaking Free from Therapist Abuse and speaks candidly about what happens when systems meant to help instead exploit vulnerability, and why survivor-led storytelling is essential for accountability and change. Also joining is Venge Dixon, a writer, poet, visual artist, and contributor to Off the Map, an anthology of writings about mental health. Venge reflects on living with mental illness across a lifetime and using creative practice as a way to resist the rigid, punitive categories imposed on people labeled “crazy.” Her work explores creativity as both self-definition and responsibility, particularly for those living outside social norms and within marginalized identities. Together, these guests explore how art, storytelling, and truth-telling function not as therapy-lite or inspiration narratives, but as acts of survival, resistance, and reclamation. This episode asks what becomes possible when lived experience is treated as knowledge, and when people most impacted by mental health systems are centered in shaping the conversation.
You can find more information about Theo Cuthand at https://www.tjcuthand.com/
If you are interested in donating to the Docuseries TherapyToo information on how to do that can be found on their facebook page https://www.facebook.com/people/TherapyToo-Docuseries/61577028284959/
Venge Dixon can be found on Instragram at https://www.instagram.com/vengetable/
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www.rethreadingmadness.ca
Beyond “Don’t Kill Yourself… Yet”: Practical Tools for Survival with Michael McTeique
Content note: This episode discusses suicidal ideation in a non-graphic, supportive, and prevention-focused context.
What happens when depression stops being a passing feeling and becomes a constant internal state — a relentless stream of thoughts that slowly drains away your will to live? In this deeply personal and thought-provoking episode of ReThreading Madness, Bernadine Fox speaks with Michael McTagg about his own seven-year experience living with chronic suicidal depression and the unconventional system he developed to survive it. Michael discusses the difference between acute suicidal crisis and long-term suicidal thinking, the limitations and dangers of current crisis intervention systems, and why many people emerge from psychiatric intervention feeling more traumatized rather than helped. From his perspective as both someone who lived through chronic suicidality and someone who later volunteered on a suicide prevention hotline, he reflects candidly on what works, what doesn’t, and what often gets missed entirely in conversations about suicide. At the center of the conversation is Michael’s concept of “life force” — the idea that depression is not simply sadness, but the gradual erosion of vitality through constant internal attacks, self-criticism, fear, shame, and emotional exhaustion. He shares the “life hacks” he developed to interrupt those destructive thought patterns, reclaim agency over his inner world, and slowly rebuild a reason to stay alive. This is not a clinical conversation. It is a raw and exploratory discussion about consciousness, survival, emotional energy, and what it means to fight for yourself when your own mind feels unsafe.
As reviewed in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/books/how-not-to-kill-yourself-clancy-martin.html
Music by Shari Ulrich
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www.rethreadingmadness.ca
Fifty Years After I Fled: Rural Alberta is Still Failing to Protect Its Children
In this extraordinary solo episode of ReThreading Madness, host Bernadine Fox steps out from behind the mic to share one of the most personal stories she has ever told on air. Fifty years ago, as a 16-yr old teenager in rural southern Alberta, Bernadine ran away to save her life. She was growing up in a small farming community shaped by isolation, silence, and deeply entrenched cultural norms that left children vulnerable and without protection. In this monologue, she reflects on what it meant to grow up in a landscape where for some danger was ever-present and help was miles away. Now, half a century later, a family estate process brought her back into the systems she had escaped. What unfolded in that rural courtroom echoed patterns she remembered from childhood — disbelief, minimization, and narratives that made her feel unseen. She describes these events from her own lived perspective, exploring how trauma, geography, and culture intersect in ways that continue to leave rural women and children behind. Bernadine also speaks to the broader crisis: in many rural areas, sexual and domestic violence rates remain significantly higher than in cities, and lifesaving services remain out of reach. Silence, she argues, protects the status quo — not children. This is not a story about blame. It is a story about systems, intergenerational harm, and what happens when progress bypasses entire small pockets of the country. It is also a story of reclamation. Bernadine shares her decades of work as a mental-health advocate, writer, disability-rights activist, artist, and host of this very program, reminding listeners that none of us are not defined by what was done to us, but by the life we build in its aftermath. Raw, poetic, and fiercely courageous, this episode challenges us to reconsider what safety means, who receives it, and who is left behind. A necessary listen for anyone concerned with trauma-informed justice, rural equity, or the ways silence travels across generations — and what it takes to break it.
The episode is rounded off with a re-air of an interview with Jamie Smallboy and Alli Geisbrecht (Gees Brecht) here to talk about a piece of art that was exhibited at Gachet’s Oppenheimer Annual show that addresses issue of MMIWG2S – which stands for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2 Spirit people. Jame is Cree and single mother of five from Maskwachees, Alberta. She is a full-time student at Langara and te founder of the Red Ribbon Skirt Project for the families of our MMIWG2S. Ally is a child of immigrants from Hong Kong who reside in Vancouver / Chinatown. She is an activist, person of colour, mental health occupational therapist, and a resident of Vancouver’s DTES. The piece of artwork these two collaborated on combines photographic images by Ally and with poetry by Jamie. Jamie shares this poem with us on this episode.
music by Shari Ulrich and Good Vibes Tribe
If this episode moves you, helps you think differently, or sparks a conversation, please take a moment to like, share, or follow wherever you listen.
Your support helps us keep amplifying lived experience and changing how we talk about madness, trauma, and recovery—one voice at a time.
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Kevin Jesuino Reveals the Magic of Theatre Terrific and Richard Lett Let’s Us in on what Makes Magic for Him.
Kevin Jesuino is a first-generation Portuguese settler, performance-maker, director, choreographer, artist educator, and community arts organizer. He is a passionate advocate for the arts and a firm believer that everyone should have access to both creating and experiencing art and culture. Kevin is continually working to make the arts more inclusive and accessible for all. On his website, he writes: “Since 2004, my artistic practice has been driven by a radical interdisciplinary integration of performance, socially engaged art, and digital media. I create work—including performance, video art, temporary public artworks, and participatory installations—that is fundamentally rooted in the belief that art serves as a catalyst for collective emancipation. My central focus is to establish co-creative spaces that facilitate an embodied exchange of care and dialogue among participants. Through experiential processes, I explore urgent themes such as accessibility, unseen histories, gender and sexuality, and urbanism across both public and private domains.”
In this lively and insightful conversation with Bernadine Fox, Kevin delves into the meaning and purpose of art—its impact on individuals and communities alike—and shares his deep connection to Theatre Terrific, a vital arts organization in Vancouver, BC. Theatre Terrific pioneers inclusive opportunities for artists of all abilities to develop performance skills and collaborate on original theatrical productions. Its work challenges audiences to confront their assumptions and be moved by thought-provoking, boundary-pushing art. Every class, workshop, and production brings together a diverse mix of people—across physical, developmental, mental health, and neurodiverse spectrums, alongside practicing actors—who are collectively exploring inclusive approaches to theatre-making.
Most recently, Theatre Terrific presented their newest work, Dance Floors Memoirs, at the Vancouver Fringe Festival—continuing their legacy of inclusive, community-rooted performance.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Leela Gildray
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In Memoriam of the incredible JD Derbyshire, writer, comedian, mad activist, performer, playwright, theatre maker, director, inclusive educator and innovator.
Tonight on ReThreading Madness we re-air JD Derbyshire talking with Bernadine about being mad and the need for individuals who live with mental health challenges to have agency in their lives and to consider coming out. And laughing - we laughed a lot. But one always did in the company of JD.
“I don’t think we know much about the human brain and mental illness. The more I talk to other people; it seems like we all have are individual experiences with our moods and our thinking. Medication may be a part of that but we need to empower people to become aware of their emotional lives and thinking styles. Like this idea; Maybe it is possible to learn how you think and feel and know your limits and what happens when you get triggered and to still live a life taking calculated risks.”
“There are just so many negative representations of people with mental illness in theatre and film and television, often written and performed by people who haven’t experienced mental illness. And these characters are almost always twisted or broken… In my experience and with a lot of MAD people I know, it is not like that at all. “ from Auburn Lane
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Meditation and Mindfulness with Alan Murdock & Impact of child sexual abuse survivors with Charlene Hellson
Since 1992, Alan Murdock has immersed himself in Soto Zen practice, seeking the stillness and clarity meditation can bring. But as a survivor of child sexual abuse, Alan also knows that mindfulness isn’t always gentle—sometimes it can open the door to old wounds and deep discomfort.
Today, Alan serves on the practice committee at the Cedar Rapids Zen Center in Iowa, while also working professionally as a creative consultant and founder of Murdock Media Production. In this conversation with Bernadine, he speaks candidly about the complicated relationship survivors may have with meditation. Together, they explore both the healing potential and the hidden risks of mindfulness when one’s sense of self has been fractured by trauma.
Alan offers insight into how survivors can recognize when meditation is helping—and when it might be hurting—and shares practical guidance on what to do if negative responses arise.
his is not just a conversation about meditation. It’s about navigating the fine line between healing and harm, and how survivors can approach mindfulness with both hope and caution.
And then, Charlene Hellson is a proud Blackfoot who comes from the Siksika nation. Her grandfather was from the Kainai nation both of which are from the Blackfoot Confederacy in Southern Alberta. She currently lives on the west coast of Canada. Charlene has a background in the arts and is an actor, and writer who produces poem and short plays. Academically, she was trained in psychology and anthropology. She is currently working the College of Physicians and Surgeons as an Indigenous Patient Navigator. Charlene came to the program to chat about the impact on survivors of trauma when they are told that they are strong. Charlene gives us a good insight into how trauma operates in her life and inside of her, especially that which we are not conscious about. Dealing with the trauma helped her to understand not just herself but her mother as well. She described her trauma as a shawl of pain that was heavy, poisoning her, and then how taking it off lightened the load immensely.
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Mental Health and the Post – Secondary Student with Angela Sterritt
A few weeks ago, Angela Sterrit, an award-winning investigative journalist, TV, radio, and podcast host, and national bestselling author from the Wilps ‘Wii K’aax of the Gitanmaax community (Gitxsan Nation on her dad’s side and from Bell Island, Newfoundland, on her maternal side) gave a keynote address on mental health and the post-secondary student. What she has to say is shocking. Not only is mental health a serious problem among post-secondary students a problem, it is such a known problem university install bars in windows of residences to stop students from jumping.
Who is Angela: (from her website: https://angelasterritt.com/) She has “worked as a television, radio, and digital journalist at CBC for more than a decade. She also hosted the award-winning CBC original podcast Land Back. Her book Unbroken is part memoir and part investigation into the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls. It became an instant national bestseller in May 2023. Unbroken was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Awards, one of Canada’s oldest and most prestigious literary prizes. It was also nominated for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Award for Best Non-Fiction Book in Canada.” Angela announced her new book, Breakable, “will investigate how racism and colonialism cultivate harmful behaviors in men and how Indigenous men and communities are breaking cycles of unhealthy notions of masculinity.” Angela has won an Academy Awards (Canadian Screen Award) for Best Reporter of the Year in Canada, a national Radio Television Digital News Association award, an RTDNA award, along with being named in Vancouver Magazine’s Power 50 list of the city’s 50 most influential people. She is a motivation speaker who addresses issues such as “overcoming adversity, breaking stereotypes, and creating change and relationships in Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities”.
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Forrest Lang, Author of Angel Blue: A Song of Redemption, talks about his journey through trauma
Trigger Warning: We talk about childhood trauma in this program. Please make sure you do what you need to to take care of yourself.
Meet Forrest. With an artist’s hands and a life forged in resilience, Forrest Lang has lived a journey carved by trauma, tempered by addiction, and transformed through recovery. His path moves through child abuse, foster care, and homelessness to sobriety, service, and purpose. Today, he speaks not just for himself, but for every survivor searching for light in the dark—offering strength, truth, and the promise of healing.
Forrest is a tattoo artist, father, and military veteran and resides in La Jolla, California. He is the author of Angel Blue: A Song of Redemption.
Bernadine and Forrest virtually sat down and talked about trauma in the way only two trauma survivors can. From his website we grabbed this information and found that it was true for this program as well. "Forrest’s ability to connect with his audience stems from personal experiences. He understands the struggles and doubts that individuals face on their path to success, and he uses his own story as a source of inspiration. Through his engaging storytelling and relatable anecdotes, Forrest creates an atmosphere of trust and authenticity, allowing his audience to truly connect with his message. …
Forrest covers a wide range of topics, including goal setting, overcoming adversity, vulnerability, and suicide prevention. … Forrest believes that true transformation occurs when individuals are equipped with the tools and mindset necessary to take control of their own destiny. Forrest is also the author of “Angel Blue, a Song of Redemption,” a memoir on overcoming trauma and success. His written works serve as a valuable resource for individuals seeking long-term guidance and inspiration."
Join us.
You can find his book on Amazon or on his website angelbluebook.com
Music by Shari Ulrich and Siibii
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Heidi Little and Her Journey to Heart-based Learning and Education
For 30 years Heidi Little hails out of Regina Saskatchewan before she moved to Mexico and then to Austin Texas. She has been teaching and using music to give people the sacred space to explore and decide who and what they are here for. Heidi has created The Center for Heart Based Education and The Center for Advancement in Social Emotional Learning. She has written 14 books on heart based education. Including the foundation of the Center for Advancement with it's 8 stacking modules offer tools and techniques that connect to the heart and inner guidance system we all have. According to Heidi, despite the ways in which we flounder trying to find ourselves, inside we know who and what we are AND when we are given safe, brave space to ‘come home to self’ we can find that for ourselves. Bernadine Heidi talk about single motherhood, dealing with terminal illness and finding your way out of that twice, find ourselves, participating in waterkeepers, Dr. Emoto’s work on how our intentions affect water and therefore ourselves. And she mentions things like soul house, source energy, plant medicine and other things that mostly went over my head. Come and listen as I try and keep up around navigating your own inner guidance systems to find what are your unique gifts, mission and purpose for being on the planet.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Heidi Little
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Cass Freeman is an Improviser, Activist, Journalist and all-round funny person. She joins us to talk about the benefits of Improv theatre for our mental health. She teaches Improv and is setting up class starting in September specifically for folks with mental health challenges. She chats with Bernadine about what Improv is, why its important, and how it can help all of us overcome fear, embrace positivity and learn to inspire others. Classes are open to anyone who self-identifies as living with a mental health challenge and she does not require any disclosures.
Then Shanice Docksin joins Bernadine for a very serious conversation about her experience with therapy abuse and exploitation. And while that is what we are going to talk about here, that is not the most important thing about Shanice. She is a leading Black businessewoman who has experienced her fair share of failures, challenges, and success. She transformed herself from a broken-home mentality to one of Oklahoma City’s very own published authors whose published works include "Unplugged". Shanice is also a public speaker, coach, and a mental health/domestic violence advocate. Shanice is one of those examples that tells us those who have been victimized by therapy abuse and exploitation are not chosen because they poor fragile, broken people.
Music by Shari Ulrich, Kelly Clarkson, and Sons of Legions
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Courage to Come Back Winner in Mental Health: Theresa Duggan’s Journey
From childhood trauma to becoming a beacon of hope for others, Theresa Duggan’s story is one of resilience and transformation. After surviving years of sexual abuse and a suicide attempt 12 years ago, she struggled with undiagnosed bipolar disorder for much of her life — so paralyzed by her condition she couldn’t even brush her teeth or leave the house. Everything began to shift when she was properly diagnosed. Theresa works in hospital psych wards, supporting others facing mental illness. As someone who has walked the same path, she builds trust quickly with clients, offering them something rare: true understanding. Theresa’s journey is a powerful example of how tragedy and healing can exist side by side — and how lived experience can become a lifeline for others. Although winning the award happened 15 years ago, she credits it with changing how she takes on the world.
And Richard Lett/Comedian and Spoken Word Artist We are then joined by Richard Lett in an interview we did a couple months back – but really wanted to get his voice back out there. He talks about alcoholism and change and growth. He always brings his particular form of comedy and spoken word to whatever stage he is standing on.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Omar Rudberg
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Off the Map 2
In this episode of ReThreading Madness, Bernadine has the joy of talking to four more writers from Off the Map: Vancouver Writers with lived experience of mental health issues. Seema Shah was the powerhouse behind Off the Map. She along with Betsy Warland and Kate Bird compiled and edited 33 different authors to put together this anthology of stories and poems published by Bell Press. Seema is also one of the writers and she joins us today along Quin Martins, Sandra Yuen, and Merle Ginsburg to talk about what inspires them to write these pieces. Each one of them graces us with a reading of their work.
Music by Shari Ulrich & Jake Banfield
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Exploring Transference with Amy Avalon
Trigger Warning: discusses therapy abuse
Bernadine sits down (virtually) with Amy Avalon, a retired psychotherapist and passionate advocate for survivors of sexual and emotional abuse by their therapists. Together, they traverse the issue of transference: What is it? How does it play out in our lives, and specifically in therapy? How can we work with it or use it to understand ourselves? When we are experiencing transference with our therapists, how do we talk about it and, most importantly, how should a therapist respond to those disclosures and what they should and should not do? Music by Shari Ulrich
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Art at Outsiders and Others with Redrum the Sticker Artist
“Outsiders and Others is a non-profit art Society with a focus on bringing non-traditional artists to the forefront. Their artists identify as outsider, folk, self-taught, visionary, intuitive, and artists with disabilities.” Outsiders and Others defines outsider art as the work of those who have no formal training, create art for themselves to record their life experiences or document historical events (not necessarily for an audience), and use non-traditional materials (like found objects). In May, Mental Health Awareness month, Outsiders and Others presented Brain Child featuring artworks from Caro Embling, REDRUM, and Gabriel Ostapchuk. We had the opportunity to speak with Yuri Ajars. Artistic Director and Curator, about this exhibit and the gallery. We also chatted with Redrum, the sticker artist (@redrum_ays_crew). Redrum describes the different neurodiverse and disability issues he copes with daily but also how important art has been to his process specifically in inspiration around images and topic. You can find Outsiders and Others In Vancouver and at
https://www.outsidersandothers.com/
Music by Shari Ulrich
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Off the Map with writers Angela J. Gray, Venge Dixon, Mary O’Toole with music by Ren
Trigger Warning: Song by Ren Gill includes foul language
May 1st 2025 saw the release of Off the Map an anthology of prose and poetry that has to do with mental health. ReThreading Madness had privilege of speaking to 3 of the writers included in this publication. Venge Dixon is a nonbinary lesbian who writes, creates art (and comic books) and make music. She wraps a heart-warming story about a very difficult time in her life around a cat named Linus who showed up and put a wrench in her plan’s to die. Angela J. Gray is an emerging black writer who writes about the “impact of colonization on children of African/Caribbean Diaspora who were adopted into white homes” in what, in her case, looks just like 60s Scoop. Mary Phyllis O’Toole says “ she writes, not only for emotional catharsis, but to shine a light on schizophrenia.” All of them share a portion of their writing with us during this hour. In addition, we have included a song entitled “Hi Ren” by Ren Gill, a musician from the UK who used music to have a conversation with himself about his current state of mental health and in, so doing, gives us an incredible inside view of what his world is like while leaving us all inspired and hopeful.
Music by Shari Ulrich & Ren Gill
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Courage to Come Back: Rachel Fehr (2017) and David Chalk (2025)
The most obvious thing about Rachel Fehr and David Chalk is that they are not defined by diagnoses and for both of them they have carried several labels. All of which are important only in that they defied them all. Rachel is the 2017 Courage to Come Back award winner in mental health. In the years since then, she has gone from teaching marital arts to attending classes and using what she learned to parse out which of the psychiatric diagnoses she was given were accurate and which were misdiagnoses -and then realizing as is so usual her autism had been misdiagnosed as borderline. From this she created new and positive life skills and taken her life that much farther. Now she wants to use her skills to create a traditional medicine farm as 2nd stage housing for men coming out of prison. David won the Courage to Come Back award this year (2025) has defied every assumption adults had about him as a child. He created his own businesses and was a millionaire at 28 years despite being told graduating from high school that the only life he could hope for was welfare, jail, or a psych ward. Despite his success he held a burdensome reality. His ADHD messed with his focus. His Dyslexia messed with his ability to read. And his pragnuh… meant he had a difficult time just recognizing faces – any faces. But clearly David is not someone his accepts what others might consider fate. At 62 years he participated in a program which led to him being able to read in 11 hours. Now, he is developing an educational program that can be used around the world to help others to do the same.
Music by Shari Ulrich
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Therapy Harm Resistance Project with Natalie Russ
Natalie Russ is a psychologist and psychotherapist, with a background in dialogue and deliberation, training pedagogy, and community organizing. She was harmed in a twelve-year psychodynamic therapy beginning in adolescence, as well as in post-harm therapies with well-meaning therapists who, like most in the mental health industry are not trained to support therapy harm survivors. In addition to content creation, she writes and publishes poetry on her therapy harm and post-abuse therapy experiences. Her particular areas of interest include post-abuse therapies and therapist education on working with therapy harm survivors. (taken from https://www.natalierusspsyd.com/therapy-harm)
Natalie Russ joins us to discuss her recent work establishing the Therapy Harm Resistance Project (THRP), an advocacy and support endeavor to address therapy harm as a disavowed reality in the mental health field. We are creating content and resources for survivors, clients, and therapists, hoping to support a broader and ever-growing therapy harm resistance movement. We seek to join others within the therapy harm resistance space to build conversation and capacity. This movement needs a thriving ecosystem of activism, advocacy, scholarship, training, and victim/survivor support infrastructure.
Music by Shari Ulrich, Jann Arden,
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Nothing About Us Without Us with Carolie Mazel-Carlton
Caroline Mazel-Carlton is a suicide attempt survivor who, since moving out of a staffed psychiatric group home in 2009, has worked tirelessly to create change in the mental health system and has developed and re-defined peer roles in a number of settings in the public and private sector. She works with Wildflower Alliance, which “supports healing and empowerment for our broader communities and people who have been impacted by psychiatric diagnosis, trauma, extreme states, homelessness, problems with substances and other life-interrupting challenges.” They do this through peer support, alternative healing practices, providing education, and advocacy. Essential to their work is “recognizing and undoing systemic injustices such as racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, transmisogyny, and psychiatric oppression.” On this program we talk about the incredible healing value of peer support and harm reduction around suicide.
Music by Shari Ulrich and We Three
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Mad Pride Art Café 2025 with Richard Lett, CR Avery, and Lea Taranto
Trigger Warning: some of the language used in creative material may be offensive to some people.
These three artists performed live at the Mad Pride Art Café at the Gathering Place in downtown Vancouver, BC. Richard brought his particular form of comedy and spoken word. CR performed musical/spoken word pieces that can only be heard to fully appreciate. And Lea gave us a reading from her new book A Drop in the Ocean.
Music: Shari Ulrich, Shawn Mendes, Jelly Roll, and Scott
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Building Self-Worth with Tavares Garrett
Tavares A. Garrett CNC, CPT, BCS is a “Health & Transformation Educator, Motivational Speaker, Mentor, Author, Servant Leader, Energy Giver/Healer, Podcast and TV Host. He's certified by NASM (National Academy Of Sports Medicine) and is the owner of The Body Synthesis.” As you listen you will recognize that Tavares is someone who uses his skill to connect and listen with people to create an environment to help that individual build self-worth. He comes and chats with Bernadine to talk about what are the ingredients to transform pain and trauma into rediscovering self and building self-worth: necessary for taking action and making change happen. “He loves to help others re-build & rediscover themselves through nutrient-rich, preventative medicine coaching, behavioral change, fit-nutrition, sobriety support and enlightenment.” Tavares has published several books including, “Kissed by the Wind” “A book of Poems and Passions” Volumes 1, 2 & 3 and “I Like That” A Book of Inspirational quotes, The Body Synthesis - Guide To A Better Mind, Guide To A Better Body, The P.F.O. Method and is the Host of Living Your Truth w/ Tavares & The Black Love Xperience Podcast.”
Music by Shari Ulrich, Ana Clendening, Omar Rudberg
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Raising Drug Resistant Kids with Elisa Fortise Christiansen
Elisa Fortise Christensen joins RTM to discuss her 30-year history of addiction with prescription drugs which she developed after a back injury. She has been clean for many years but that addiction spurred her on to examine how to protect her kids from the same fate. Elisa is an American author, poet and public speaker who has been through some real-life challenges but who lives her life with gratitude, love and passion. She has written 8 books all of which focus on approaching life with what she calles “crazy courage and deep gratitude.” We sat down to discuss the material she has outlined in her book “Teen Warrior: Raising Drug-Resistant Kids”
You can find more information about Elisa at https://www.authorelisa.com
Music by Jelly Roll and Shari Ulrich
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Judy and I on Dissociative Identities
This program comes out of seeing one more untrained therapist postulate that folks with dissociative identities (formerly known as multiple personalities) are rare and dysfunctional or simply do not exist. Judy and I are here to push back against this assumption that couldn’t be farther from the truth. If you are a woman in Canada and haven’t heard of Judy Rebick, you haven’t been paying attention. Judy is a Canadian writer, journalist, political activist, and is considered one of Canada’s leading feminists. She was the former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) and held the Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy. She rubbed elbows and engaged with politicians in intense discussions. She has been the TV host for CBC programs and was the founder and publisher for rabble.ca. Judy is known as a vocal spokesperson to legalize abortion and taking on a protestor with a pair of garden shears pointed at Dr. Morgentaler. She is the author of Heroes in My Head (2018) which outlines not just her political life but that of her personalities.
And while my audience has come to know me over the years, for the purpose of this program it is important that I fill you in a bit more. I am a graduate of Emily Carr University and an established visual artist, curator, and instructor. I worked as a film production manager before becoming a peer support worker and consultant for those with childhood trauma and dissociative identities. For 30 years, I have been an award-winning mental health advocate and am the host of this program which is Canada’s longest-running syndicated show on mental health where we disregard colonial-based ideas about mental health and the DSM. I am a survivor of human trafficking and spent years speaking out against organized crime. I currently provide peer support through TELL the Therapy Exploitation Link Line to survivors of therapy abuse and exploitation. I am a public speaker providing workshops on TAE and facilitating peer support groups for fellow survivors. And I have, like Judy, authored a memoir, Coming to Voice, which chronicles surviving an abuse therapist and the role my dissociative identities played in saving my life.
So to dispel the myth that folks with DI are fragile and dysfunctional, Judy and I are here to answer the questions sent into ReThreading Madness listeners of what DI is from our lived experience.
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ADHD, PTSD, and Autism with Randi-Lee Bowslaugh
Randi-Lee Bowslaugh is a fellow warrior out there around the issue of mental health awareness fighting the inappropriate stigma we face as folks who live with mental health challenges. Randi-Lee is an author and outspoken advocate for mental health. She has lived with depression from the age of 14 years and was eventually diagnosed with autism and PTSD as an adult. She is the host of the Write or Die Show a podcast that you can find on You tube. And of course, like so many of us, as a well-rounded person she has other sides to her. One of them is kickboxing in 2015 she was a Canadian National Champion and in 2016 she won silver in Pan-Am games. Randi-Lee is also a mother and grandmother.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Brandi Carlisle
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Connection Salon & Gathering Place, Crisis Centre of BC & Kagan Goh
In today’s program we speak with Pierre Leichner from the Connection Salon here in Vancouver BC and Carrie Campbell from the Gathering Place about their collaboration to ensure that art comes to those who live with mental health challenges.
We also speak with Mark Sheehan, Program Director, and Paul Vincent, Volunteer, about the Youth Education projects bringing mental health information to youth through the Crisis Centre of BC.
And then Kagan Goh joins us to talk about his upcoming documentary on mental health entitled Common Law.
Music by Shari Ulrich
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support.
What does Mental Health, Psychiatry, and the Ouija Board have in Common?
Dan Nelson, is the author of Ouija Board and the Skeptic (Mad In America) and holds a BA in Philosophy, MA in Human Resources and Industrial Relations. Through twenty years of working in management systems, he knows that systems are designed to output a particular product or service and that the system was the cause of any and all undesirable results the system outputs. In this article, he states that the mental health systems are responsible for their lack of ability to assist some who live with mental health challenges.
Dan writes, “Psychiatry's practices are so entrenched, its methods so accepted, that skeptics and outsiders are often dismissed as uninformed or unqualified simply because they haven’t undergone the same training that instills confidence in its frameworks. But skepticism, especially from those with lived experience, isn’t just valid—it’s necessary. It forces us to question whether our tools and methods truly serve those they claim to help.”
We respond to our lives, our challenges, our struggles. Too often mental health issues are a normal and nature response to trauma. As Dan points out if the psych industry isn’t looking at the systems around their clients and changing those systems, and instead they medicate and work with the client to be able to tolerate the difficulties they are dealing with – they aren’t solving the morning. They are applying a band aid.
A good example of this is how our systems are designed to pathologize the victim is schoolyard bullying. Too often the victim is expected to learn to develop new skills to deal with the bully. Often they must be extricated from the school to be protected. The bully, too often, is not confronted or restricted in ways that would prevent the bullying. Dan demonstrates how we can take that same example and apply it to the mental health system where victims come forward with mental health challenges caused by environmental factors and yet the industry will medicate the victim instead of looking at how to change the environment. The DSM and psychiatry is accepted to often without including the possibility (like with a Ouija Board) that perhaps it is not truth.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Jelly Roll
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Spotting a Coaching Scam with youtube creator Danielle Ryan
Danielle Ryan describes herself as a youtube channel creator and “just a troll on the internet covering topics related to the business & life coaching industry.” As she says, part of the problem is lack of regulation and then what happens when coaches coaches to become coaches. She spends a lot of time sharing “my silly little opinions as I deep dive into allegedly problematic people, organizations, and techniques used to manipulate people in the space while also sprinkling in the occasional small business video.”
Her channel is a mix of educational & commentary content.
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@itsdanielleryan
Website: https://danielleryan.me
Music by Shari Ulrich, David Laronde, and Elizabeth Wallace
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support.
How Past Lives and Spiritual Experiences Impact our Mental Health with Kerie Logan
While there doesn’t seem to be any scientific consensus of past lives, the correlation between them, present-day conflicts, and/or emotional baggage is significant. And the anecdotal stories include resolving problematic patterns that one has around behaviors, phobias, relationship, relationship difficulties among others. In addition, we have individuals who when they have spoken about past lives or spiritual experiences are dismissed with labels of being crazy by people around them and professionals in the mental health industry and some are simply shipped off to the psych ward. So we decided it was time to take a look at what this was and how it manifests in people's lives.
Here in Western culture where so much is based on Christianity and white culture, we experience a pronounced dissonance. On one hand we are taught to believe in the bible and that Jesus rose from the dead. The Holy Ghost is recognized as a witness of God and Jesus and confirms the truth. And yet, we are told that ghosts are not real and reincarnation is the stuff of snake oil salesmen. We are taught that according to the bible angels exist, but if someone sees them, a psychiatrist will likely define that as delusions. There is nothing offered that explains those two opposites beliefs.
The other truth here is that not everyone is situated in white culture and we have the benefit of learning from others where reincarnation, ancestors, and ghosts are integral to their lives.
Award-winning hypnotherapist, Kerie Logan joins Bernadine to explain how our past lives or spiritual experiences may impact on our mental health. Logan has spent the last 40+ years working with people using meditation, NLP, creative visualization, relaxation, inner child work and hypnosis. She has won awards for her hypnotherapy work. ReThreading Madness talks with her about the impact past lives and spiritual experiences has on our mental health and how we might be able to resolve them. So if you have experienced past lives or angels in ways that have impacted your mental health this program is for you.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Born
More information about Kerie Logan at:
Website: https://mastertheupperrooms.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mastertheupperrooms
Podcast: On all platforms
Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/mastertheupperrooms/
https://www.empoweredwithin.com/
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support.
With Matt Sandoval from FreeArts AZ and Kagan Goh producer/director of Common Law
Matt Sandoval, is the new Executive Director for FreeArts in Arizona. FreeArts AZ provides traumatized children and their families with a means of creative expression and as means of establishing resilience and offering mentorship.
And Kagan Goh talks with ReThreading Madness about his new film, Common Law, a biographical account of his experience of learning he had BiPolar and how this impacted on his relationships with his long-time girlfriend and family. Through this we learn how individuals who receive Persons With Disability in BC, are unable to keep this benefit if they enter into a common-law relationship and how that changes the relationship and their own sense of self. Kagan also talks about his preference for the term manic/depressive instead of BiPolar.
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Trigger Warnng: This episode includes information about therapy abuse and may be triggering for some folks.
I Married my Therapist:
Ken Schultz is an advocate for mental health reform and a survivor of therapy abuse and exploitation. He is using his personal experience of harm to raise awareness about unethical therapeutic relationships and their lasting impact. Through his story, Ken aims to inspire change in laws and practices to protect others from similar experiences.
If we want to examine the power and authority mental health professionals have over their clients – Ken’s story is a prime example. He saw this therapist for 3 months and in that time frame, he went from someone who had zero attraction to being sexually exploited by her all the while believing how she defined it as ok.
If we want to examine how the institutions should be assisting us after we have experienced therapy abuse and exploitation, Ken is another prime example. The therapist he was seeing reported her, then left him to deal with the fallout on his own. The Texan state licensing board narrowed his complaint down to violating one aspect of the statutes: the timeline. His “therapist” dragged out leaving the ‘marriage’ to prevent a complaint based on the allotted time. But the licensing board ignored another statute that their social workers are not allowed to have sexual contact with a current or former client – of which she clearly had violated and of which had done so within the statute of limitations. And his church and police believed her statements without any corroboration and victimized him again.
Things must change. We all need to wake up to harm perpetrated against those who have experienced therapy abuse and exploitation so that we are not inadvertently exacerbating that harm that is already catastrophic in too many cases.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Shawn Mendes
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It’s a New Year
Today’s program is a slightly different structure. As we walk into the next year, several people came to share their hopes for themselves, their family and friends - with all of you. It is an uplifting show that demonstrates the amount of care and generosity that exists all around us. The program is our personal thank you to all who have been a part of the ReThreading Madness family whether as a guest or behind the scenes making sure the show goes out each week. This has been a hell of a year – monumental even. A big part of that was being able to chat with some of the most incredible people from around the world. As the host of ReThreading Madness, I consider myself blessed because of it. But also because of you, our listeners, who join us each week.
Today we are joined by Jodi Grey, Charlene Hellson, Kayle Ackerman, Jackie Crowchild, Michelle Oucharek Deo, Peter Morin, Kagan Goh, Alex Sangha and Amy Avalon.
Our inspirational music today was by the Animals, Sara Barielles, Anna Glendening, Rachel Platten, Josh Groban, Kelly Clarkson, Zach Williams, Scott Callum, Peter Morin, and as always Shari Ulrich sings us into and out of each program each week.
Bernadine’s personal message to our listeners: So here is wishing you a year full of caring, compassionate and supportive people, safe and gentle havens, along with personal growth, brave new insights, spontaneous, joyful fun and a trust in yourself that grows every day. But most of all she wishes for you a peace which settles into your heart as though it has always belonged there.
Importance of Lived Experience in Mental Health Issues: A Conversation with Matthew Jackman
Matthew Jackman has an intense conversation with Bernadine about the importance of the recognizing the immensevalue of those with lived experience as we examine mental health challenges. Matthew Jackman is a mental health advocate promoting human rights, social justice … he is activist from an academic science from a public health and mad studies knowledge base. He trained as social worker and has partnered with different marginalized and disadvantaged communities which focus on mental health. Matthew is a representative, ambassador or advisor with the Global Mental Health Peer Network, the World Economic Forum, the Australian Association of Social Workers, Generation Mental Health, and the World Health Organisation on key global mental health documents requiring lived experience perspective. He is a certified peer specialist and a visiting scholar in Psychiatry at Yale and Harvard University. He focuses on alternatives to psychiatry. Most recently he has accepted the role of Commissioner on Lived Experience in Mental Health Research for the Lancet Psychiatry. For those of who do not know the Lancet is one of the oldest peer-reviewed medical journals.
Sean Bridges, award-winning screenwriter and author, had never been married until at the age of 55, he found, what he described as, the love of his life. He was about to be married. He was her fourth husband (to-be). Then something in his gut started shaking him awake to the realization that his life and his own personage had morphed into something he didn’t recognize; didn’t feel comfortable in. He packed his bags and left the million-dollar home he and his fiancé lived in. Traded it for a bartending job in a small town. And slowly found himself again. He talks with us about what happened and what he did to put the pieces back together.
Sean Bridges is a Stephen King Dollar Baby with his festival winning audio production of One for the Road. His latest screenplay, Beginner's Luck, is a 2024 award-winner at the San Antonio and Austin Film Festivals. His new novel, Gunbarrel Highway, will be released as a paperback, e-book and audio book on November 20th. He lives and works in the Texas Hill Country, in central Texas USA
Music by Fearless Soul and Shari Ulrich
A Chat about Grief… that Morphs into one about Death
Rebecca Coleman joins Bernadine to chat about grief. Layers of grief the represent what she is experiencing currently in her life. However, as these things go, one conversation morphs into another and by the end of this program they are looking at the issue of death: facing it, planning for it. It is a frank, easygoing, and important conversation.
Music by Shari Ulrich
Theatre for Living with David Diamond
David Diamond joins Bernadine on ReThreading Madness to discuss his Theatre for Living Workshops. TFL, as the website states, is about empowerment. Taking the living organism, which is a community, and providing a platform for its expression to create “creative, community-based dialogue.” It sounds esoteric until you are inside the dialogue and then, as you will hear David describe, it becomes a natural process for learning, listening, healing, and recovering. As Gina Beltran commented, “The Theatre for Living workshop was a wonderful and profound experience for me. It allowed me to realize the potential of people coming together and connecting in genuine and honest ways that build meaningful and lasting relationships. In other words, it allowed me to see what a strong community can look like.” David facilitates these workshops for all sorts of groups including indigenous, recovery,
Post Traumatic Growth: Joanne Green Style Joanne R. Green joins Bernadine on ReThreading Madness to talk about what inspired her book: By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go. Joanne shares her journey through a variety of personal losses: mom, sister, father, brother and struggles like anorexia and cancer. In the midst of all that it was a car sliding into her, a pedestrian, at an ungodly speed that brought her to the place where she embraced stillness and learned to let go. Joanne talks about transforming the negative self-take we all experience, how to use gratitude in the moment, and how to turn adversity into an opportunity and that into strength.
Tools for Change and Employing Forgiveness
Rhonda Parker Taylor talks about how she learned how to support herself and cultivate meaning in the relationship she had with herself after the murder of her son. In that she used writing as a tool for change. Rhonda tells us about her journey and her fictional book Crossroads and her workbook coming out in December of 2024. Then Katharine Giovanni talks about her book, “The Ultimate Path to Forgiveness: Unlocking Your Power “giving us insight into the process of forgiveness and why it might be important for some of us to look at it.
Art and Peer Support at the Coast Mental Health Resource Centre. Bernadine heads down to Coast Mental Health Resource Centre on Seymour St in downtown Vancouver and speaks with folks about the Art Studio which is open to anyone with a mental health challenge. Betty Yan tells us about the Peer SupportTraining Program that Coast Mental Health has developed and runs. Shahal Bozorgzadeh was trained here as a Peer Support Worker and she describes why this job is so vital to her and those she works with. Shawna Butterwick is a volunteer at the Art Studio and fills us in on the day to day activities there and then artist, Leef Evans, talks a bit about his process, his depression and Margaret, the “spider” inside him (represents his depression) and how he has come to resolve that Margaret needs to get out every once and a while.
Music by Shari Ulrich, Jack Harris, and Milanda
Pathologizing Trauma
Trigger Warning: Description of sexual assaults.
Andrea takes us on a journey through what her childhood, in the 60s and 70s, was like coping with sexual assaults from several males around her from a very young age both in and outside her family. Like other women growing up in this era, she was assaulted, blamed for it, and then punished for making men do this to her. Andrea fought back. Sexual assaults happened and her family along with the social constructs and institutions, of that time, enabled abusers and covered up their crimes while victims who were disclosing, like Andrea, were made into the problem.
Her drive to survive made her doggedly save her money so she could escape her family. After graduation, she moved away to college. But physical ailments, again rooted in the sexual abuse she experienced, made her so ill the College sent her home: back to the abusive environment she had worked so hard to break free.
She always knew that her difficulties were rooted in those assaults but instead of recognizing this truth the mental health industry, from whom she sought help for being unable to eat and being underweight, pathologized what were her normal reactions to trauma. Her disclosures of sexual abuse were dismissed as schizophrenic delusions. It was a diagnosis that gave everyone carte blanche to harm her with impunity. Ultimately, Andrea was put on 58 different forms of psychiatric medications including large doses of anti-psychotic meds and given ECT. Several times, doctors were shocked by the large doses she had been prescribed but didn't change it.
She received no assistance, no therapy. She wasn’t regularly seen by a psychiatrist or therapist. No one talked to her. No one mentioned the abuse she had endured.
Andrea broke free. This time from the mental health industry. On her own, over ten years, she weaned herself off of all the psych meds she had been prescribed. She has been med-free now for a year and is focusing her time on working to ensure other people don't go through what she did.
Music by Shari Ulrich
Coping with Mental Health Challenges with JaneA Kelley
JaneA Kelley has throughout her life gathered mental health diagnoses. She has Bipolar 2, PTSD, and ADHD. JaneA candidly talks about these diagnoses; what they mean to her; how they complicate or add to her life; and how she copes with them. She talks about finding herself at rock bottom and the things (mostly her cats) who have brought her back forward. She talks of betrayals and of stigma that originate out of misunderstandings and the impact of her challenges. As a writer, it is no wonder she uses writing to work through these issues and find herself again.
Music by Shari Ulrich, Jann Arden, Brandi Carisle
Can't Eat Love with Leslie Davis
Leslie Davis’ life moved through a haze that didn’t include her own feelings. After what she has deemed an Emotional Tsuunami, she developed a means of accessing her feelings, sorting through them, and then accepting them. For decades now, this process has proven to be a powerful healing tool. Join us as Leslie describes what this process is and how you can do it as well.
music by Shari Ulrich
Door knobber Diagnosis: Misdiagnosed Borderline Personality
When a client drops a therapeutic bombshell as they are leaving a session, counselors call this a “door knobber”. Lynn came to talk with Bernadine about her experience with the Borderline Personality and the door knobber that her therapist laid on her at the tail end of a phone conversation to terminate therapy. Just before she hung up, Lynn was shocked to hear the therapist say she should consider getting a therapist who works with borderline personality. After working together for 2-years where this was never mentioned, it was a casual, quick comment at the end of therapy. This is a door knobber done by the therapist.
My ex-therapist told me at one point that she didn’t believe borderline existed and that therapists only give it to the clients they don’t like. And certainly, in therapy abuse it has become cliche. One after another, survivors are describing being labelled borderline after confronting an abusive therapist. Why would therapists employ borderline so often? Because one of the things people believe about those who are borderline is that they lie and make up things: ergo, victims won’t be believed that the abusive therapist did harm or sexual assault them.
And once you have that label it is a sticky thing – even if it is wrong. Worse, professionals make assumptions about folks with that label – even when it is a misdiagnosis. Like Lynn’s experience, people have described being told they are borderline after the first 15- to 20-minute session. Given the level of stigma that is attached to diagnoses like this, applying them should be done with the utmost care. In fact, according to the DSM, a BPD diagnosis must be based on assessing the functioning and behaviour of the patient over a length of time AND after other diagnoses have been ruled out. What they mandate for this diagnosis is a “thorough evaluation” that provides a “comprehensive assessment” which “considers multiple sources of information, including personal history, collateral information, and a mental status examination.” Clearly this is not possible in an initial 20-min session or during a first consultation. But nonetheless, we hear of it over and over where this diagnosis is being applied all too quickly. And those who have been misdiagnosed with BPD, in particular, suffer even more from the stigma the medical and mental health community. We all need to be more careful about our professional work and our attitudes.
Lynn wrote an article on this issue. It is on Medium.com and entitled “Dear Therapists: This is what BPD Stigma looks like”.
Music by Shari Ulrich, Anna Clendening, Brandi, Carisle
Dispelling Myths about the BC Mental Health Act with Rob Wipond
It is so very often that we hear misinformation about the BC Mental Health Act. It is so widely held and believed in some of our BC communities, that if you check yourself into a psych ward voluntarily you can leave when you want and you can refused any treatment that you feel won’t work. Rob Wipond, author of Your Consent is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships joins Bernadine Fox to discuss the BC Mental Health Act and how what we have been led to believe or told is true and what actually plays out in the psych ward are not the same. Voluntary can become involuntary just because you refuse the treatment they tell you to take. And once you are committed, here in BC, you essentially lose all human rights to advocate for your own welfare. And while you can appeal a commitment, you can be forced to take treatments for the 3 weeks it takes to actually have that hearing. And, by then whatever you were forced to take may in fact leave you unable to fully comprehend what is occurring in that hearing leaving the judge to perceive you as incompetent. After finding a pamphlet that repeated the myths to a vulnerable population, it was important to dispel these myths most likely being produced in other places across the province by well-meaning individuals. In comparison to the rest of Canada and many places in the world, BC has what many consider to be the harshest mental health system: one that eliminates the human rights of the patient. If not living in BC, we suggest that If you are someone who accesses or relies on the mental health system, it is advisable to research what is true about your mental health system when it comes to commitments (voluntary or involuntary), forced treatments, and the appeal processes so that you can better advocate for yourself or your loved ones where you live.
Mad Pride Cabaret Vancouver 2024
Have you ever stepped into a room and had a bunch of mad people celebrating the chance to freely be who they are? Well that is what Mad Pride is. In 2024, Vancouver celebrated Mad Pride through the Connection Salon at the Gathering Place downtown. And this program not only talks with three of the performers at Mad Pride it showcases their work. Kagan Goh, curator and artist, brings us his spoken work, Nothing is Forged without Fire. Sandra Yuen, artisit, and David Xhediku, musician, form the band Beautiful Lizards talk about what they see Mad Pride as and then share a piece of their rock/surf music, Psychopath. And last but not least, iveno, who is a multi-media artist, counselor, and theARTist chats with us about his work in the community and then shares his piece of music, Wala20, and what he calls sound bathing.
Other music by Shari Ulrich, Henry Moodie, and Fearless Soul
Randy Tait on Recovery and Ceremony
If you had gone to the 33rd Annual Women’s March it would have been hard for you to miss Randy Tait in his red jacket with matching red John Fluevog shoes. He circled the crowd bestowing eagle down on the heads of elders, guardians, and organizers. Randy is from the Nisga’a / Gitksan Nation. He has made Vancouver his home with few interruptions for many decades. He talks with us about his childhood, his addiction to alcohol, how his family and community stepped in and helped get him into recovery and how he hasn’t really looked back. He uses his recovery to help those who are continuing to struggle.
Music by Shari Ulrich
When it is a Therapist who Experiences Therapy Abuse and Exploitation
She came on RTM to talk about her own experience of therapy abuse and exploitation at the hands of her psychologist. But she is unable yet to do so using her name. Why? Because she is also a psychologist who fears retribution for speaking out. She chats with Bernadine about her experience of therapy abuse, how her husband sought retribution for the 'affair', how she was treated by the tribunal that processed the complaint against her abuser, and how they put her and her child's safety with their actions.
In the penalty imposed on her psychologist the board stated " Dr. X, you are here today in front of this panel of the (redacted) Discipline Committee to be reprimanded on your conduct as a Psychologist with respect to the allegations to which you have pleaded guilty today. We trust that you understand the severity of your behaviours. You failed to maintain the standards of the profession and engaged in a romantic and sexual relationship with a former client. Dr. X, we hope that you understand the impact that your behaviour has had on the trust and respect placed in our profession by members of the public. In working with a vulnerable person who had not had time to separate from the therapeutic relationship, your actions crossed the boundary between the personal and professional. Your behaviour was disgraceful, dishonourable and unprofessional." He lost his license to practice for 12 months, had to take two ethics programs and write essays to prove that he understood what he did was wrong, and pay a penalty.
After the interview, the woman said that "I think the findings would have looked different had I been more capable of seeing what he did to me. Instead I was in full self-blame mode and didn’t want to ruin his life. I defended him and told the (redacted) I was in love with him and we had a relationship. I tried to claim that as I psychologist I knew what I was doing…I did not. I was unaware at that time of all the havoc his actions created and continued to create in my life. Very sad."
music by Shari Ulrich
Decolonizing mental health: What is it?
Norman Leech, is currently the Executive Director for the Frog Hollow Neighbourhood House, and was the Executive Director for Vancouver Aboriginal Community Policing Centre from 2016-2023. He still works to change the fact that Indigenous people are “over-represented in most negative social health indicators, whether homelessness, incarceration, crime victims, children-in-care, poverty, missing, murdered, income, suicide, life expectancy, and on and on.” (Conference Board of Canada)
Norman is from the T’it’q’et community of the St’at’imc nation but was born and raised in East Vancouver. “He draws on his experiences as a recovering alcoholic/ addict, computer nerd, inter-generational survivor, and spiritual explorer to inform his current work.” (Conference Board of Canada).
Norman chats with Bernadine about what it is and why it is important today to look at mental health from a decolonized perspective. He also delves into its origins, who can benefit from it, and where you can find it.
Music by Shari Ulrich
Retirement with Jake
Jake is 64 years old. He is retiring in one month. As he is reaching what is what some called the golden age, his life blows up. He is evicted from an affordable residences so that his landlord’s parents can move in. He is in the middle of moving from a disability pension to a regular pension and is not really sure what his income will be. He is drowning in paperwork and he learns that one of his daughters is about to get married and give birth to his first grandchild. Consequently, on top of everything, he must move. Because of the absorbent rents in Vancouver BC he chooses to move to be closer to his daughter in Ontario. Jake’s whole life is about to change. He talks with us about what that looks like and how it is impacting on him.
It’s Alright, Shari Ulrich,
These Lines, Shari Ulrich,
Something to Live For, Barney Bentall,
I Gotta Go , Bary Bentall,
Jason Fareas on Addiction and Recovery
From his website, Jason describes himself as having an unstable childhood although he is very clear that he was a loved child by the adults in his life. He talks about the development of his addiction and then his involvement in the drug trade. Here and on his podcast, he shares his "journey from addiction to recovery".
Jason has his own podcast, My Madness METHod, where he provides a "weekly autobiography of a young man from Northern California’s Central Valley, and a look back on his participation and influence over the 1990s methamphetamine epidemic. He sorts through decades of descent into addiction and mental illness and how self-realization, acceptance, and unconditional love eventually saw him to recovery."
Bernadine and Jason engage in an intimate discussion about where he came from to where he is now. Just a quick look at his photo will tell you just how heartwarming was this discussion. Join us.
Music by Shari Ulrich
Forced Committals with Barbara Phillips
Barbara has had several forced commitals and a long history of taking psychiatric meds. She opens up with Bernadine about those commitals what worked, what didn't, what left lasting scars and physical impairments.
The Correlation between Weight and Child Sexual Abuse with Patty Cabot
Patty Cabot joins us to talk about her experience of weight loss via coming to terms with the sexual abuse in her childhood. She is the author of "Not That Girl".
Music by DG Adams, Robbie Robertson, Meaghan Trainer, and Shari Ulrich
Coping with Grief during the Holidays and Anniversaries
Jennifer O’Brien is grief-experienced. What does that mean? For starters, she has experienced several of her immediate family, including parents, siblings, and husband dying. In working through her grief she created a journal. That journal was published: The Hospice Drs Widow and won numerous prestigious awards. She speaks with Bernadine about grief. Especially grief around holidays and anniversary dates. And she shares what her tools for getting through those dates.
Music by David Laronde, Edith Wallace, and Shari Ulrich
Gifts of Madness with Kagan Goh, Stand Up for Mental Health with David Granirer, and Forgiveness with Katharine Giovanni
Today’s program includes interviews with Kagan Goh about a multi-media exhibition he is curating called the Gifts of Madness. As the Penticton Art Gallery states, "Gifts of Madness" is an upcoming mental-health themed exhibition at the gallery run by Ignite the Arts, part of a powerful collaboration with Tempest Theatre & Film Society, Voices with Impact, Connection Salon, Gallery Cachet, the Community Arts Council of Vancouver and Workman Arts' "Rendezvous with Madness" Festival. The exhibit's goal is to celebrate "Mad Pride," a movement that embraces the challenges and experiences of mental health and its multifaceted natures, from negative to positive.
David Granirer talks about his upcoming performance at the Lightness of Being on Jan 24th and his program Stand Up For Mental Health™ gives programs and classes throughout North America and Australia, everywhere but the Vancouver, B.C. area. And as he says “Our shows look at the stand up comedy side of mental health, mental illness, recovery, and surviving the mental health system.”
Katharine Giovanni talks about her new book, “The Ultimate Path to Forgiveness: Unlocking Your Power “ giving us insight into the process of forgiveness and why it might be important for some of us to look at it.
Haida Storytelling with Giihlgiigaa.
Todd DeVries, Giihlgiigaa, invites us in to hear about indigenous storytelling: how and where it is told, how it is learned and passed on, and its importance in the Haida culture. He tells us about the Raven, in the beginning and gives us a Haida Prayer. He explains the Haida concept of time and the seven time periods that are referenced that reach from the present time to the past that goes back thousands upon thousands of years.
Consent: Its Misuse as a Weapon and a Shield in Therapy Abuse
TRIGGER WARNING: Talk about Therapy Abuse, Sexual assault, and what is consent. Some of this material may be very difficult and we ask that you do what you need to take care of yourself in this hours.
RTM discusses consent between adults around therapy abuse where and, in particular, when is a “yes” not a “yes”? It feels like we just got it settled that “no means no”. In this program we ask that you to stretch your cognitive thinking to consider when a yes is not a yes. It may seem too much to ask – but it will make sense by the end of this program why it is important for us to do this. We also discuss BCs new Health Professional and Occupation act regulating our Drs and other health professionals and it’s last revision which seems to provide some protection for victims of therapy abuse but still is questionable along with the problems that can occur with the 2-3 year interval between termination and initiating an intimate relationship with a former client that has been adopted by several association and societies offering professional memberships to therapists.
Rape Culture and the Long Road to Healing
Trigger Warning: This hour includes descriptions of sexual assault, rape, and victim-blaming.
Lenny Gagnon’s whole world turned up-side-down when her father died in a mill accident when she was 6 years old. At 7 she was groomed and then sexually assaulted by the neighborhood pedophile. And she was raped again at 15. When she reported the last one, the cop who interviewed her also assaulted her. At the hearing, she was grilled and shredded about her character (swearing and sexual history [ie rape]) and based on that the judge refused to go ahead with charging her rapist because he didn’t believe she was of chaste character. Second wave feminists had yet to fight to ensure that victims of sexual assault were treated with care and dignity at police stations and in courtrooms. The trauma Lenny experienced caused depression which ultimately led to her being given anti-depressants and then eventually one that caused her to experience mania. Because of the mania, she was put on neuroleptics or anti-psychotics which caused other debilitating side effects. After decades of being on these medications she finally found a psychiatrist who would wean her off these drugs and help her as she transitioned to CBD oil with THC. Today, Lenny is healthy, living her best life with her loving partner Tom. Lenny is a story of survival and victory.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Lyndsey Ell
988, Forced Committals, and Suicide assessments
With the new 988 suicide hotline being launched, Rob Wipond cautions us on some of the pitfalls that can occur with traumatizing impacts on people. Barbara Phillips talks with us about her experience of being forceably committed and then Bernadine Fox walks us through the usual type of Suicide Assessment Questions that mental health professionals and crisis lines use to assess whether or not someone is suicidal and in need to being detained.
Music by Shari Ulrich
Charlene Hellson/Unpacking the Backpack, Stacy Ashton from Crisis Intervention, and Fraser McKenzie from Coast Mental Health.
Bernadine brings you information on several opportunities for education and support. Grandmother, performer, writer, and Indigenous Mental Health Advocate, Charlene Hellson from the Siksika Nation (Blackfoot Confederacy) talks about her one-woman performance “Unpacking the Backpack” which is an educational and experiential monologue that comes from the heart talking about the intergenerational and historical impact of systemic racism on indigenous.
Then Stacy Ashton comes to tell us about a new service available in Canada around Suicide Prevention, 988. She outlines how they are working to “ensure a 24/7 access to a crisis continuum that meets people where they are in suicidal crisis, provide culturally-safe socioeconomic and mental health support without over-relying on police and coercive psychiatric interventions, and continues care until the person in crisis in back in control of their lives.” She gave us crisis lines to reach out to in BC Canada: Mental Health Support Line is 30-6789 (no area code required) and 1-800-SUICIDE (784-2433).
And then Fraser McKenzie from Coast Mental Health chats with Bernadine about the services that Coast Mental Health can offer folks in Vancouver BC who are coping with mental health challenges, being unhoused, etc.
Music by Shari Ulrich, Scott Callum, and Edith Wallace
Peter, Cathleen, and Janell Morin, from the Tahltan nation, join Bernadine to chat about what happens when Alzheimers grabs hold of a family generation after generation, but mostly to describe their loving care of their mother as she makes this journey. So often we hear of older people with Alzheimers unable to care for themselves and/or plagued with a failing memory being left in care homes to wait out their lives. It is a tragic ending to a full life. But with Peter and Cathleen (their sister Nalaine and Dad who couldn’t join us), what is described is an daily act of enveloping their mother in care and loving. Ensuring she is included in family and family is included in her life. It is touching. And sweet. And what we all should be doing. But these siblings have taken it further. Recognizing the legacy of Alzheimer in their family history, they have planned to ensure that they all take care of each other if this is their future too.
Music by Robbie Robertson and Shari Ulrich
Weetigo on Intergenerational Trauma, Epigenetic Memory, and Superpowers
Weetigo is a brilliant 60s Scoop Survivor and band member of the Poundmaker Cree Nation. Bernadine met him through TikTok where he talks about intergenerational trauma and epigenetic memory from the perspective of indigeneity. His intriguing ideas are based on what we know about trauma that weaves its way through families and is passed on through our DNA and creates within us superpowers. But Weetigo goes further, he brings into that how autism, ADHD, CPTSD, and being gifted fits into intergenerational trauma and epigenetic memory. Join us – then tell us what you think. Is this aligning with your experiences?
Outsider Arts Festival and Haida Storytelling with Giihlgiigaa Todd DeVries
On ReThreading Madness we chat with the organizers and one of the performers of the Outsider Arts Festival here in Vancouver BC. Kristin Cheung, Executive Director, and Rocky Riobo of Rocky and the Gems give us the inside goods on the what, where, how, and who of this years annual VOAF from art, to performances and films and then workshops. Then Giihlgiigaa Todd DeVries, a Haida Cedar Weaver and storyteller who learned under Woody Morrison,c comes and tells us a story about the importance of the Mask, Mirror, and the Raven.
music by Rocky and the Gems and Shari Ulrich
TRIGGER WARNING: Explicit descriptions of child sexual abuse
More Than One: Dr. Colin Ross on Dissociative Identities
Dr. Colin Ross, world renown expert of Dissociation, and Bernadine chat about Dissociative Identities: what is it, how to look at it, how the world copes with it, and how you can cope with it. In amongst there they compare DID to schizophrenia and chat about treatment options including medication and ECT.
Dr Colin Ross’ biography is so extensive that to do it justice I would be talking for a long time. So let me give you some key points: He is an internationally renowned clinician, researcher, author and lecturer in the field of dissociation and trauma-related disorders. He is the founder and President of The Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma in Texas and the Past President of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. He is Canadian. He provides treatment, consultation, educational and supervision services and has done so for over 30 years in Texas. He has written 36 books and over 260 papers mostly dealing with trauma and dissociation. And if anyone can talk about Dissociative Identities – it is Dr. Colin Ross. Bernadine and Colin have known each other professionally for – several decades. Dr. Ross wrote the foreword to Fox’s memoir – Coming To Voice: Surviving an Abusive Therapist.
Music by Shari Ulrich
A Glimmer of Hope around Recovery wieth Susi Milne
TRIGGER warning Talk about alcoholism and substance abuse along with sexual trauma as a young child. Some profanity during spoken word recital.
Bernadine chats with the effervescent Susi Milne about their recovery from alcoholism and substance abuse (Oxycodone and Ativan). There is literally no one who tells a story like Susi can and while taking you through her journey to rock bottom she is able to keep us laughing and entranced as she brings us to her their recovery.
Beyond recovery, Milne is a sober Canadian artist, philosopher and poet residing on the traditional unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsweilatuth Nations. Known for her drawings, watercolours, and mixed media art pieces, Milne's works range from paintings, paper and textile sculptures and video/photo-based art to poetry/performance art. Milne's eclectic practice is informed through life and work as "Living Art". Her twenty-something year career in the public service, lastly as a senior manager of emergency services is an achievement that she has documented as performance art. A dedicated and picturesque history with several founding artists run centres including a seminal performance curating Sniffy the Rat in the eighties (see same title under CBC Archives) Milne's on-going engagement with the robust Vancouver art community carries into the present day and informs her multi-media practice.
Milne has exhibited and performed her artwork and performance/poetry nationally and internationally over the years. Recently her multi-media video presentation QUANTUM SMACK has been included in https://digitalstories.ca/. Milne's work was featured in the IMAPON exhibition SPACE at McBride Park, Vancouver. An on line exhibition PERSONA through IMAPON LOCO MOTO Arts (https://imapon.org/Co-Vid-EO/); features eighteen watercolour/pen and ink paintings that were all sold into private collections during covid.. Daily creative media content is published on her Instagram #tibbedragon777, and on her dedicated Instagram art page #susimilne777artwork.
Milne lives gratefully and in the heavenly bliss of her handmade art abode overlooking the seaside of the Pacific Northwest coastal mountain range as she recovers outloud.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Tears for Fears
Are We Old Yet? Women talking about Aging.
Today on RTM, I talk with three different women all of whom are over 60 years of age and all of whom would agree that our mental health as we age has nothing to do with fashion, interior design, beauty, cooking, or the health and wellbeing of our spouses or children. So, what does it have to do with? It is about their political actions, entrepreneurship, adventures and a future that is as exciting as what they have done so far.
Ellen Woodsworth, 75, was born into activism. In 1971 she chained herself in the House of Commons for women’s right to choose and went off to cofound the Wages for Housework movement and got unpaid work in the Canadian census. Later elected the first lesbian city councillor in Canada, she and Clr Anne Roberts chaired the first Canadian Gender Equity Strategy for the City of Vancouver. She is now Co President WILPF, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Canada, speaker and intersectional consultant on cities and Matriarch Women Transforming Cities.
Maggie Andrew, 64, is a child of divorce and foster care, by the age 17 she was on her own. She worked up until her early 50s when a corporate takeover had her laid off. Its hard as an older woman to get hired, so instead she bought her favourite craft store essentially creating her own rewarding and challenging job. She has managed to weather COVID but as she nears retirement age she is hoping to sell in the next year or so. Maggie has never married and has no children of her own.
Eileen Hoeter, 64, has been many things over the course of her life and throughout it all she consistently shows a fierce passion for life itself. She has worked in the Vancouver Film Industry while simultaneously buying property. Not always easy for a woman even in 1990 – just 30 years ago. She owns several properties here but also has a BnB in Mexico and we are talking to her in the midst of a very busy day for her.
Far from being the retired rocking chair woman drinking tea in the sun, these women demonstrate the dynamic contributions women continue to make well into the senior years.
Music by Shari Ulrich
Alex Sangha from Sher Vancouver and Isabella Mori on her book Believe Me about mental health and addiction
Bernadine chats with Alex Sangha about Sher Vancouver Gala, Emergence, and IMigrant and then she talks with Isabella Mori about her third upcoming book, Believe Me, out in the Spring of 2024.
music by Shari Ulrich
Bernadine chats with David Oaks and Debra Nunez about his work as a civil rights activist, co-founder and from ED of MindFreedom International based in Eugene Oregon. Mind Freedom is an independently funded nonprofit that actively fights for the human rights of those with lived experience of mental health challenges. It is accredited by the United Nations as a non governmental organization, essentially an NGO with CRS status, which means they are consulted on matters important to mental health. As they say, “MindFreedom International is where democracy is finally getting hands on with the mental health system. They challenge abuse by the psychiatric and drug industry, support psychiatric survivors and mental health consumers and promote safe and humane and effective options in mental health.” And they have been doing it since the Mad Pride Revolution started in the 1970s as they say on their website in a spirit of mutual cooperation, mind freedom leads a nonviolent revolution of freedom, equality, truth and human rights that unites people affected by the mental health system with movements for justice everywhere.
Up until 2012, Oaks was their Executive Director and then he fell from a ladder of fall which broke his neck and left him paralyzed. And I say this, not because it is important to the work he continues to do, but as a segue into understanding that David currently is unable to speak in the manner he once did. However, rather than suppress or silence his very powerful voice, we are interviewing him. His partner Deborah Nunes, will be a part of this interview and you may hear her every once in a while help make clear what he is saying. It is difficult at times to hear him clearly and it may be helpful while listening to close your eyes. However, we have also included a transcript of his interview on our website. If you would like to listen to the interview while reading the transcript, you can do so at www.rethreading madness.ca.
Includes a Trigger Warning
Bernadine speaks with Linda Peavack (also known as Emma Stevens) who spoke with us recently about the experience of being an adopted child. Today we are talking about her experience of being exploited by her therapist and her memoir which describes this experience A Fire Is Coming.
Therapy Abuse is an under-acknowledged traumatic issue in our society. There may be folks listening to this program who are not aware that they themselves are in an exploitive relationship with their therapist. And while that may sound extreme and wholly impossible – it is unfortunately not. You see therapists have been given the power in our society to define what is true for their clients… and exploitative therapist will ensure that they are reframing their actions always as good and right and any negative reactions a client has to them as neurotic and crazy. You see clients are all told to go see a therapist and trust that they have their best interest at heart and do what they say. Bernadine also went through a checklist of types of therapist transgressions not to see if this was true for her – but to prove to herself that her relationship with her therapist was the unique and special one that she had been led to believe. To this day, she vividly recalls sitting in front of that computer screen trying to cope with the cognitive dissonance having marked off nearly every one of the 100 or so types of transgressions that were there. So we ask any of you who have seen or are seeing a therapist, to consider that this program may be triggering and to do what you need to do to take care of yourself during this hour.
Music by Shari Ulrich
Lani Elliott is a 60s Scoop Survivor who grew up in foster care in the small town of Abernethy, Saskatchewan. As a child, she dreamed of working in law enforcement, and at the age of 19, joined the RCMP as a special constable, hoping to one day become a regular member of the police force. Unfortunately, Lani’s dreams were shattered when her marriage ended in an unspeakable act of violence that left her with broken legs, homeless, and with two small children to raise on her own.
Although starting over was not easy, Lani managed to rebuild her life for the sake of her
sons. With the help of various shelters and organizations, Lani was determined to end
the cycle of violence so that she and her children could live happy, fulfilling lives. Today,
Lani is an accomplished motivational speaker and travels all over North America,
sharing her message of hope and inspiring positive change in those who may be
struggling with the many issues related to domestic violence and sexual violence,
including self-worth, and positive mental health. Lani is passionate about giving back to
her community, and is involved with several different charities throughout the city of
Regina. Her past accomplishments include working as the Co-Director of International
Indigenous Fashion Week Inc., as well as a freelance photographer, a writer and copy
editor for RezX Multimedia Inc., and Co-Producer/Director and Lead Actress for the
Regina production of The Vagina Monologues®, the internationally acclaimed play that
not only raises awareness regarding violence against women, but also empowers
women who are affected by violence. Lani’s own, personal story and poetry have been
featured in Maclean’s Magazine, and has also been featured in three separate
documentaries, including “The War at Home” by award winning film maker, Shelley
Saywell.
Currently, Lani’s passion involves giving presentations to young people in schools
regarding healthy vs. unhealthy relationships, because she strongly believes in the idea
that prevention is better than having to deal with the alternative, and lives with the
philosophy that we need to be whom we needed when we were younger, and hopes
that through her work, one less person will experience violence in their life.
Mad Pride/Connection Salon July 2023
Mad Pride is a global movement of those with lived experiences of the mental health system. It is an opportunity for folks to demonstrate their pride in their mad identity and a reclamation of the terms that have been used to hurt them: mad, nutter, psycho. Mad Pride is celebrated across the globe including Canada, the USA, UK and Ireland. Mad Pride cabarets often include music, poetry, film and theatre created and performed by mad people. The hope has been that this will raise awareness of the poor treatment of those with lived experience, reduce the level of stigma and prejudice they live with daily, and highlight the increasing and widespread use of involuntary commitments and forced treatments.
Vancouver’s Mad Pride Cabaret this July was put on by the Connection Salon. Bernadine invites Pierre Leichner from the CS and two of the performers, The Human Girl and 88Wayy, in to chat about Vancouver’s event. Pierre is an academic psychiatrist of 35 years who walked away to become an artist receiving his MFA in 2011. He has been a part of the Connection Salon (a break away group from Gallery Gachet) since its inception. The Human Girl discovered herself during being locked down during COVID and is now happily participating in and producing drag shows and is enrolled in fashion school designing outfits for performances. 88Wayy was born in raised in Lagos Nigeria. He came to Canada at 16 years to go to school and is now employed as a civil engineer. Making rap speaks to his soul and he fills his days with the logic of civil engineering and his nights with music. One of 88Wayy’s songs “One Shot” is included in the programming along with another song by GOLDbard who performed at the event, “Want to Be”.
Music by Shari Ulrich, GOLDbard, and 88Wayy
Peer Connections/Jamie Smallboy/Madness Canada
In this program, Bernadine interviews Adam Milne from Peer Connections in Winnipeg and Cindy Jiang from Madness Canada in Toronto about their programming and resources that are made available to people who live with mental health challenges. Madness Canada has also become a hub of archival material regarding the history of the Mad Movement. Jamie Smallboy joins us reading her poem about missing and murdered indigenous women.
music by Shari Ulrich
In 1895, the Canadian government banned the Sundance. Intent on destroying the first nation’s way of life and spiritual practices, the colonizers banned various ceremonies and certain practices (like piercing) along withholding sacred objects required for those ceremonies. While this was legally reversed in 1951, it took many years before all First Nation Communities were aware of this change, many more for the fear of retribution and arrest to lift, and even more to feel empowered to engage again in activities such as piercing. Overall, as Keith Chiefmoon describes, the damage to this important ceremony, based on oral traditions, has had long lasting repercussions to their sense of self, community, and mental health that stretch into our present day. In this podcast, Keith Chiefmoon of the Kainai Nation and Blackfoot Confederacy, generously describes how several decades ago, an elder told him – and sternly so - that the spirits had identified that he was to bring back the traditional Sundance. During several days of praying and fasting on Chief Mountain those spirits outlined this Sundance: the location, the arbor, dancing, drumming, singing, praying, dry fasting (no food or water for 4 days), and piercing (a very sacred offering) – “The old way,” Keith says. And the Spirits were clear: he was to accept any person who wanted to Sundance regardless of their colour: First Nation, black, white, or Asian. This Sundance is currently the only one which does so.
“Natosi Okhan is the only Sun Dance society in the region that accepts pledges from non-Indigenous people who do not have long-standing connections with the community and this is highly controversial within the community itself and beyond. This Sun The Sun Dance as a Space for Experiential Learning 49 Dance started around 20 years ago when Keith Chiefmoon, who was a Sun Dancer with another community, decided to give life to a sacred dream where people from the four directions arrived on his family land to dance. In the dream the dancers were very clueless, even to the point of asking inappropriate questions. Keith was told to treat them with utmost respect because their spirits had been called by the land and by all our ancestors to be there to dance in order to heal all relations. Keith was told, and tells us often, that the sun shines the same on everyone—from the tallest mountain to the thistle on the Sun Dance grounds (which are abundant); the sun does not differentiate, and neither should he/we.” From Towards Scarring Our Collective Soul Wound by Cash Ahenakew
music by Shari Ulrich
Photo of Keith Chiefmoon by Colin Bolin
Lack of services makes Rose Finlay’s liveable disability life-threatening.
Rose Finlay has been a quadriplegic since a swimming accident at 17 yrs broke her neck. She has been a powerhouse working for change as a published author, keynote speaker, model, disability advocate, accessibility consultant, certified holistic health coach and reiki master. Up until recently, she has been able to cobble together the services she needs to maintain her daily needs. However, that has changed, and she is now in a life-threatening situation that could easily be solved with support services attending her home twice a day. But the waiting list for these support services is 6-8 months long. In the meantime, she faces dying – a wretched death in front of her three children OR exercising MAID (an option where the waiting time is only 91 days). It is as she says a heinous choice made more outrageous by the simplicity of what fixes it.
Music by Shari Ulrich
“I am a Transwoman” Jodi Gray, winner of the 2023 Courage To Come Back award in Mental Health, speaks with Bernadine about being a transwoman. Jodi came from a childhood filled with severe abuse and poverty. This lead to anxiety and depression that plaqued her for decades and cost her jobs and relationships. The hardest relationship for her to lose was the one with her son, James. Jodi transitioned 8 years ago and now advocates for others. She has been a peer support worker and is the head of a housing project for transgender, two-spirited, and gender-diverse people. The primary message Jodi wants to get out there is that her mental health challenges do not originate in being transgendered. But don’t take my word for it. Come listen for yourself to this amazing woman
Music by Shari Ulrich
What is it Like to be an Adopted Child?
Emma Stevens, author (The Gathering Place and A Fire is Coming) and US domestic adoptee from birth during the Baby Scoop Era, has survived layers of trauma throughout her life. She visits ReThreading Madness and delves into the reality that adoptees face struggling between being the good, adopted child in fear of being sent back and finding their own true selves whether it is around identity, biological family and background, or medical history. Whether you are an Adoptee, a Late-Discovery Adoptee, a Donor-Conceived child, or someone who has discovered that one of your presumed bio parents is in fact not through DNA or disclosure you will find this program of interest.
music by Shari Ulrich
Bernadine chats with two women, Jane Bouey and Isabella Mori, who live with Long COVID after a relatively short and mild form of COVID itself. They describe how COVID impacted on their brains and what they experience because of it: brain fog, exhaustion, strange emotional reactions, etc. They discuss whether this is a mental health issue from the impact of the debilitating aspect of the physical disability or an injury to one’s brain from COVID. Then Fraser MacKenzie from Coast Mental Health here in Vancouver talks with us about the services available for those who live with mental health challenges.
music by Shari Ulrich
Insanity explores the disappearance of Bruce Hill-Tout disappeared during an episode of paranoia generated from schizophrenia in 1998. “Through interviews with her father and siblings, family photos and dramatizations, Hill-Tout tells her brother’s story. But it’s not a mystery. The family doesn’t spend much time in the film unravelling clues. Instead, they share their feelings of guilt, loss and confusion, which leads to a broader story about the gaps that allow people such as Bruce to fall through the cracks. “ Wendy Hill-Tout documents the human side of mental health challenges and uses the film to tell the story of her brother missing for 25 years and to push for change. She asks that people write to their MLA, MP, Ministers of Health, etc and demand change to ensure that no one else’s family member falls through the cracks this way.
Music by Shari Ulrich
Rodney DeCroo’s newly released book “Fishing for Leviathan” (Anvil Press) takes us into his journey through his childhood. “At theatre school they tried to correct my posture and make my diction soft. But I was a razor wrapped in black velvet soaked in possum’s blood.” Anvil writes “these poems are from a writer who has crawled through a mile of broken glass and come out the other side more or less intact.” Rodney and Bernadine talk about childhood trauma, recovery, obstacles, and challenges.
But mostly we talk about surviving sh*t and having a good life.
music by Shari Ulrich
What is Structural Violence with Heather Tunold: How it impacts on the residents the DTES
The question of Structural Violence came up for me as I listened to Heather Anita Tunold talk about it on a recent panel. She sat down with me to chat about how structural violence impacts on the residents of the DTES here in Vancouver BC. What she described is a unworkable situation where those who need the help are not getting the help they need.
music by Shari Ulrich & Edith Wallace
Grandparents (and other relatives) raise the children of other family members at a rate that far surpasses the number of children in our current foster cares system here in BC. In fact, even the government recognizes that they are a largely hidden and unrecognized social service system. On ReThreading Madness Bernadine, a grandparent who raises a grandchild herself, speaks with three other grandmothers Donna, Gail and Shari. So often we are focused on caring for our children and advocating for their rights and needs. But today, Bernadine shines the light on the grandparents asking what did you/do you need and where are you getting it from. Out of this the importance of Parent Support Services in BC and Fairness for Children Raised by Relatives comes into focus.
Music by Shari Ulrich
This is Part 2 of Bernadine’s chat’s with Irit Shimrat, author, editor, advocate and agitator around her experience of being psychiatrized. Irit has a long history being involved in and critiquing the mental health field - although she would label that differently: health being the misnomer. We address the problems of language, the shadow reports she is a part of writing for the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and why she feels she is the luckiest person in the world.
music by Shari Ulrich
“Bullseye The Clown™ is on a mission to empower those who have lost their hope and belief due to bullying to stand up, speak out and reclaim their authority!” He comes and chats with Bernadine about bullying and what we can do about it.
music Shari Ulrich
Bernadine chats with Irit Shimrat, author, editor, advocate and agitator around her experience of being psychiatrized. Irit has a long history being involved in and critiquing the mental health field - although she would label that differently: health being the misnomer. We talk language, consequences to people's lives from being psychiatrized, and the danger of psychiatry in our lives. Even if you don't agree with anti-psychiatry, this is a conversation to listen to just to educate yourself on what you are really supporting or fighting against. Irit also offers her invaluable advice on how to protect yourself if you find police at your door on a wellness check or if you have been involuntarily detained in a psych ward. Interesting conversation.
music by Shari Ulrich
Keith Chiefmoon is from the Kainai Nation, part of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which is just south of Calgary in Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta. He holds a BA, a BEd in Native American Studies and an MA in Education. Keith is a Residential School Survivor who is currently working as an Indian Residential School and Community Engagement Worker.
We are going to chat about racism, residential schools and healing.
image: CBC Brandi Morin
music: Shari Ulrich
Trigger Warning:
This program deals with the issue of therapy abuse and as such it may have material that folks find triggering of abuse.
Bernadine chats with past guest, Carolyn Clement (award-winning photographer and survivor of sibling, child, and therapy abuse) on her experience of making a complaint with her State Licensing Board around the abuse experienced at the hands of her predatory therapist. She was successful in ensuring this therapist had to relinquish his license to practice. We also discuss the type of harassment she experienced after placing the complaint from him and, shockingly, his wife.
Afterwards, Bernadine outlines some of the ways predatory therapists harass their victims but also what to do about it and how to preserve that harassment as evidence.
Therapy abuse is financial, physical, emotional, and sexual exploitation of a client by a therapist.
music by Shari Ulrich
Trigger Warning: talks about therapy abuse
Amy Nordhues, author of Prayed Upon: Breaking Free from Therapist Abuse, chats with Bernadine about her experience of abuse at the hands of a clergy/therapist in her church. Therapy abuse is getting more and more attention as professionals are beginning to understand the dramatic and profoundly damaging consequences to a client with their therapist transgresses boundaries and exploits them either financially, emotionally, physically, or sexually.
music by Shari Ulrich
A White Settler and a South Asian Immigrant talk about Reconciliation in Canada.
Ninu Kang, Executive Director of EVA, an immigrant from South Asia returns to Rethreading Madness to have a conversation about Reconciliation with Bernadine, a white settler: what it is, what it means for us, what we have done, where we make mistakes, what more we need to do – all with a view and agreement that we aren’t going to do perfectly and we may embarrass ourselves. It was purposefully off the cuff, without rehearsal - willing to call each other out or be called out. Willing to learn, to be humble & vulnerable.
You will not hear this type of conversation anywhere else.
Peer Support with MadCamp, Connection Salon, and Coast Mental Health: RTM explores three options for finding peer support for folks with mental health challenges. Dina Tyler talk to us about MadCamp - a camping event happening in Northern California in July 2023 for folks who identify as living with mental health challenges. Connection Salon is showcasing an art exhibition (Mar 3 to April 4) with low barriers for 16 artists here in Vancouver BC. Organizer, Pierre Leichner, and artist, Leef Evans, invite us to join them on March 10th for a meet and greet at The Gathering Place. Fraser McKenzie from Coast Mental Health talks about how it rose out of the psychiatric survivor movement of the 1970s, continues to provide peer support opportunities (including training) from the ground up to a wide-range of individuals who live with mental health challenges. It is combo program full of helpful information.
Bernadine speaks with Rebecca, a visual arts painter of beautiful images. Her day job is as a caregiver in a senior's living home. Rebecca struggles to heal from childhood abuse and has engaged in an alternative form of healing that includes plant medicine to assist her in opening up to traumatic experience. Rebecca describes her process of healing and how her childhood has impacted on her current life giving us a bird's eye view.
music by Shari Ulrich
On ReThreading Madness Bernadine and Rob Wipond continue their discussion of his latest book, "Your Consent Is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment and Abusive Guardianships". In this part, they discuss how the psychiatric industry is being used to punish whistleblowers, political advocates, and within our daily lives with disgruntled employers and unhappy spouses. A mental health wellness call can too easily result in involuntary commitments and being drugged even for the sanist among us. And, then that commitment however wrong becomes a stain on the person's record and can impact him long after.
From press release: "There's a common misconception that, due to asylum closures, only 'dangerous' people get committed now. But forced psychiatric interventions today occur in thousands of public and priviate hospitals and also in group and long-term care facilities, troubled-teen and residential treatment centres, and even in people's own homes under outpatient commitment order. Intended to 'help', for many people the experiences are terrifying, traumatizing, and permanently damaging."
Rob's research demonstrates not only the ways in which these forced detentions are the equivalent to torture, that there is no research demonstrating that they are helpful, and that they are indeed on the rise.
Bernadine and Rob list the ways in which you can protect yourself from a forced detention and, if it happens, how to help yourself get discharged.
Part 1
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Rob talks with Bernadine about the fallible nature of diagnoses, psychiatric medications and treatment along with the inherent problems that occur in the mental health industry that leave psychiatric survivors victimized and trapped for a long time.
music by Shari Ulrich
Rethreading Madness brings back one of the professionals who cohosted this program when it was called Both Sides Now. Glen Grigg PhD has provided clinical counselling in the Lower Mainland of Vancouver for 25 years. He teaches in the Master of Counselling program at UBC and Adler University. We sat down with him to ask the question that is almost never asked or really answered: What is Mental Health? It was an interesting conversation. Even after a good conversation with Glen about mental health and what it is, it still felt like what defines mental health is vague. We can clearly identify mental health problems. We have defined what Is called abnormal psychology to the hilt most especially over the last couple decades in the DSM, described to me by professionals as a necessary tool so that doctors could bill for seeing their clients (which means every client had to have a diagnosis for them to be paid). Consequently, the DSM basically covers everything it means to be human. It is no uncommon for me to talk with folks who have various diagnosis from paranoid schizophrenia, to bipolar II, to borderline to… you name it. Given how major diagnoses can morph into something else depending on the clinician, it makes it hard to take it seriously. And yet while not clearly identifying what is mental health we clearly are able to name every human emotion as a disease.
That said Glen offered up the following definition of mental health: being able to function without becoming rigid, erratic or chaotic and that one is able to flow with social functions and is available to experience that flow.
What do you think?
music by Shari Ulrich
Ann Bemrose and Bernadine talk about how Toxic Positivity impacts on our mental health for those who live with physical and mental health challenges. Toxic Positivity is a means of denial by overlaying of positive ideas onto a reality that has some inherently negative aspects. It’s excessive and overgeneralized happiness results in invalidating authentic emotions in oneself and others that are deemed not ok. This then alienates many who feel they must hide emotions and reactions to real circumstances. Ann and Bernadine enjoy a frank conversation their experience of others who display toxic positivity.
Bernadine then talks with Rebel Fayola Rose and Olumoroti George about their upcoming Disability Justice Dreaming Sessions. DJ Dreaming sessions provide participants with an opportunity to imagine an optimistic and visionary world while questioning narrow definitions for those who may experience ableism. Come here about this novel approach to looking at the future.
On ReThreading Madness today, Bernadine and Jessica Garner have a frank conversation about sex and its impact on mental health. While sex is not necessarily a topic that one should make note of as triggering - In the spirit of ensuring everyone is ok with today’s topic – we would like to say that some of what we talk about may be problematic for some folks. Sex is a primary human need along with food, shelter, and water. However, somewhere along the line, here in our society, sex was dropped off the list. Perhaps, since we don’t die from lack of sex – as we might food or water or shelter - it was perceived as not a need but more so a desire. Death comes in many forms and the emotional impact of not having sex or having healthy sex can dramatically impact on your emotional wellbeing. A little death may not always come in the form of an orgasm.
Narcissism is a psychological term categorized in the DSM as a psychiatric disorder: The DSM clinically outlines it as a mental condition where people have an inflated sense of their importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, has troubled relationships, lacks empathy for others and while displaying extreme confidence they have a fragile self-esteem that overreacts to even the slightest criticism. Only a licensed diagnostician can legitimately apply a label of narcissism.
Out here in the world of laypeople, it is a word that has been bantered about to refer to someone who is self-centered and demanding that all focus be on themselves to the exclusion of the needs of others which leaves people emotionally demolished in their wake. Why is it important for us to understand if we are dealing with a – even – undiagnosed narcissist? Because a) like the sociopath, the narcissist with their specific sense that they can do no wrong is more than not unlikely to attend therapy and, therefore, be diagnosed. And b), the impact of living with or being in a relationship with a narcissist leaves one bewildered, confused, and in emotional agony. To find our way out of that quagmire, we need a framework to be able to pull the pieces apart and then put our lives back together.
In this podcast, Rebecca talks about her first-hand experience of a narcissist. Rebecca is a Vancouver native, who lives just steps from the seawall and Stanley Park. She splits her time between working as a college instructor, running her own business, cooking up a storm in the kitchen, and tracking down the best baked goods the city has to offer. We are going to be chatting about her first-hand experience of a narcissist.
In 2019, Bernadine Fox with cohost, Glen Grigg, sat down with Bethany Lindsay, a CBC reporter, to discuss the Cayton Report & the ways which Regulatory Colleges in BC are letting mental health consumers down. The question asked & left unanswered: “Who is protecting the mental health consumer?” One might think that the state of registering therapists and counsellors in BC to protect clients from unethical ones would have happened here already. It has not. In Oct 2022, BC did introduce the Health Professions and Occupations Act based on the Cayton Report. And while it appears to be comprehensive it continues to leave out the thousands of professionals who work in our mental health field and call themselves therapists or counsellors. Here in BC Canada, anyone, trained or not, can still hang up a shingle call themselves a counsellor and start working with clients.
The BC Government has assured us that now that Bill 36 - the Health Professions and Occupations Act - is complete they will turn their attention to regulating the 1000s of others who operate as therapists in this field. However, this is not the first time this has been promised. In the meantime, BC clients continue to be hurt by untrained and unethical therapists with no recourse and no means of holding them accountable here in BC.
Currently, associations and societies in BC provide professional memberships for counsellors. All have something like a Code of Conduct to which their membership must make a commitment. The Colleges that regulate our Drs, psychiatrists, and psychologists are both now covered under Bill 36. While the Act, in my opinion, has vague descriptions around the issue of exploitation, the Colleges have their own Standards of Practice – they have a zero tolerance for any type of sexual contact or behaviour with clients. Why? Because the dramatic imbalance of power in therapy resembles that which is found in a parent and child relationship. With the vulnerable client is in the “child” position - making full and informed consent is impossible. However, some of these other associations allow therapists to enter into a sexual relationship with their client IF 2 years has passed AND other criteria around the depth and scope of the therapy is not present in the relationship. If they are eventually included under Bill 36, will they be allowed to maintain this different standard of practice? Or will they be required to provide further assurances for client safety?
In my opinion, and I must say I am not sure if my co-host agrees with this or not, there is no means by which any association or society can filter out the unethical therapist on their roster and unfortunately, those unethical therapists have easily manipulated around those variables in the code to make it appear as if they are doing no wrong. In addition, the bylaws of the association give control around any enquiry into a therapist’s inappropriate behaviour to the unethical therapist themselves! After a complaint is lodged, simply resigning their membership closes any investigation into their inappropriate and at times criminal behaviour - leaving the client with no recourse and allowing the unethical counsellor to remain unaccountable. Of note, resigning a membership does not disallow the unethical counsellor from continuing their therapy practice. As mentioned, any person with or without training can hang up a shingle, call themselves a therapist in BC and begin seeing clients. All in all, it is a system that fraught with pitfalls for clients.
Trigger Warning: Discuss Domestic Violence
Here on ReThreading Madness we talk about all manner of things that impact on our mental health. Today we are going to talk with Ninu Kang Executive Director of Ending Violence Association – also known as EVA. It is a follow up show to one we did at the onset of COVID looking at commonly known variants that increased the amount and intensity of violence against women. In this program, we look back with Ms Kang to find out if COVID did indeed increase the numbers and intensity of violence against intimate partners? Please know that while we do not go into the details of violence against women, this program may be triggering to some folks. Please do what you need to to take care of yourself in this hour. At the end of the program we will provide some information on where you can get assistance if these stories are resonating with you. If you are experiencng violence in an intimate partnership, you can reach out to 211 in BC Canada. If you are listening to this program from another part of the world, find a women’s organization in your community, to help you connect with support. You can also email us here at rethreadingmadness@coopradio.org and we will work our network to find you assistance.
Analie Shepherd, author of the Mending the Shattered Mirror: A Journey of Recovery from Abusive Therapy, talks with Bernadine about how an abusive therapist may use finances to further their exploitation. While we most often think of therapist abuse in terms of sexual contact, it is not uncommon to have it include other forms of exploitation one of which is financial. What does that look like? It could be increasing numbers of sessions not because the client needs it but because they can afford it. It could be entering into business arrangements with their clients utilizing their victim's money. It could be allowing a bill to accumulate until it is overwhelming leaving the client vulnerable to other forms of exploitation.
Listeners can get access to further resources at
TELL @ therapyabuse.org
Coming to Voice @ comingtovoice.weebly.com
David Roche, 2022 Order of Canada Recipient, dives into a conversation about living with a facial difference. His bio reads, “David's face distinguishes him from all other presenters and speakers. What really makes David unique, however, is his remarkable spirit, warmth, wit and authenticity. David has transformed the challenges and gifts of living with a facial difference into a compelling message that uplifts and delights audiences around the world. The story of his heroic journey from shame to strength has inspired standing ovations from the White House and Kennedy Center to Olympics Arts Festivals, from New Zealand to Moscow, London to Sydney, and across Canada and the USA.” As always, a candid conversation about Disfigurement and Facial Difference and how one man overcame what could have been debilitating stigma and discrimination.
ReThreading Madness chats with long-time friend of the show, Jake, along with Victoria Spooner and Don Wright about strategies for surviving the upcoming holiday season. December holds a difficult holiday. For those who live with mental health challenges or those who were traumatized within their family of origin – this holiday season is a hard one. Jake, Victoria, Don and Bernadine chat about this and offer some suggestions about how to make it through
Paint is polygendered, disabled, autistic, and mad. He uses his work to craft a future where we are free to be and thrive as our unique selves. His art is also part of a broader quest for healing and regaining lost abilities. Today, we talk about what happens when you are abusively used as an internet meme and how being his uniqueness meant he fell through cracks within the mental health system. Its an odd contrarian position to be in.
And then William MacPherson shares with us his poem about living with mental health challenges.
Learn more about ReThreading Madness at www.rethreadingmadness.ca
Scapegoating is unfortunately an all too common occurrence around us. We see it. Sometimes we unwittingly participate in it. AJ and Bernadine talk about the history of and mechanisms in scapegoating especially as it pertains to those who live with mental health and physical challenges.
Andrea is a Policy and Technical Assistance Coordinator working on tobacco policy with a health authority and university in the Midwestern area of the United States. Andrea recently moved back to the States after living abroad for fifteen years in New Zealand and Canada. She has an undergraduate degree (honours, distinction) in Health Sciences from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia and is currently finishing a Master of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia. Before beginning her career in public health, Andrea worked for a decade in social justice organizing with a primary focus on climate justice, Indigenous solidarity, racial justice, and intersectional equity movements and issues.
We all dissociate. However, some of us use dissociation as a primary coping skill and create a complex system to deal with what are usually difficult lives. Misinformation about Dissociative Identities (multiple personalities) including stereotypes has been promoted in popular culture complicating the issue even further. Suzanne and Bernadine sit down to unpack what is Dissociative Identities. Every wanted to be a fly on the wall to hear the real goods on dissociation? This is the conversation to hear. Join us for an interview with award winning, recent TEDx speaker, Suzanne Venuta who lives with dissociative identities. (Photo Dan Toulgoet)
Eugene LeBlanc has been the director of the Moncton New Brunswick based self-help center, Groupe de Support Emotionnel inc, the publisher and Editor of Our Voice / Notre Voix and has advocated for the rights of the consumer/survivor and pyschiatric survivor community since 1987. Because of this work he was awarded the New Brunswick Human Rights Award in 2003.
We talk about his work and the current state of human rights for mental health consumers.
Bernadine chats with Amy Lyn Johnson, private practice therapist and TELL Responder, about ethical boundaries in therapy and in this short episode we talk about what are the rules around running into your therapist in a social situation like an AA meeting. Amy provides a good framework about how an ethical therapist would handle this.
Bernadine chats with Amy Lyn Johnson, private practice therapist and TELL Responder, about therapy abuse: what it looks like, boundary transgressions, impact on client. In this podcast, the listener will gain a good preliminary understanding of therapy abuse.
Counselor and mother, Helen Thomas sits down and talks with us about the death of her son, Malachy, at the age of 18 to a fentanyl overdose. We examine our role as parents, the impact on us when we lose our children to an overdose and what could we be doing to change these fatal overdoses.
Charlotte Watson is an AAMET accredited, certified Advanced Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) practitioner. But here on ReThreading Madness, Charlotte describes why and how she estranged from her entire family as a young adult and how this has impacted her life. It is an provocative story of emotional trauma, betrayal, and an eventual visit with her ailing, elderly father which offered both the recognition of loss but the surprising gift of resolution despite his advanced Alzheimers.
Trigger Warning: child sexual assault and child trafficking discussed.
Bernadine engages with Kassandra, a former foster child, about the ongoing and severe child sexual abuse. The importance of Kassandra's story is not in the details of her trauma - it is in how she emerged from it a strong, resilient young woman.
WARNING: Talking about Abuse of Clients by Therapist. Some of this material may be triggering to folks who have experienced this.”
Three Consequences of Therapy Abuse: Unhealthy Dependence, Betrayal, and Extreme Ambivalence. Amy Avalon, a retired private practice therapist and a passionate advocate for suvivor of sexual and emotional abuse by their therapist and Carolyn Clement, an award winning family photographer, mother of two, and a survivor of therapy, child, and sibling abuse, join Bernadine again to discuss the ways in which unethical therapists develop a profound dependence in their client, followed by a deep all-encompassing betrayal which leaves the client in an ambivalent place of Love vs Hate. If you are struggling to frame what happened to you in an unhealthy therapeutic relationship, this series of podcast will offer some insight and guidance.
The incredible JD Derbyshire who is a writer, comedian, mad activist, performer, playwright, theatre maker, director, inclusive educator and innovator joins Bernadine in RTM. We talk about being mad and the need for individuals who live with mental health challenges to have agency in their lives and to consider coming out. And we laughed… we laughed a lot.
In 1895, the Canadian government banned the Sundance. Intent on destroying the first nation’s way of life and spiritual practices, the colonizers banned various ceremonies and certain practices (like piercing) along withholding sacred objects required for those ceremonies. While this was legally reversed in 1951, it took many years before all First Nation Communities were aware of this change, many more for the fear of retribution and arrest to lift, and even more to feel empowered to engage again in activities such as piercing. Overall, as Keith Chiefmoon describes, the damage to this important ceremony, based on oral traditions, has had long lasting repercussions to their sense of self, community, and mental health that stretch into our present day.
In this podcast, Keith Chiefmoon of the Kainai Nation and Blackfoot Confederacy, generously describes how several decades ago, an elder told him – and sternly so - that the spirits had identified that he was to bring back the traditional Sundance. During several days of praying and fasting on Chief Mountain those spirits outlined this Sundance: the location, the arbor, dancing, drumming, singing, praying, dry fasting (no food or water for 4 days), and piercing (a very sacred offering) – “The old way,” Keith says. And the Spirits were clear: he was to accept any person who wanted to Sundance regardless of their colour: First Nation, black, white, or Asian. This Sundance is currently the only one which does so.
Photo of Keith Chiefmoon by Colin Bolin
WARNING: Talking about Abuse of Clients by Therapist. Some of this material may be triggering to folks who have experienced this.”
Therapist Abuse is emerging from the shadows and with it recognition of the profound ways it impacts on clients. Bernadine, who has survived therapist abuse with Amy Avalon, a retired private practice therapist and a passionate advocate for survivor of sexual and emotional abuse by therapists and Carolyn Clement, is an award winning family photographer, mother of two, and a survivor of therapy, child, and sibling abuse, offer a candid conversation of their experiences and coping strategies. These conversations are important because as Amy said, “There is wide-spread unethical conduct happening in the psychotherapy field that leaves clients in a worse place than when they started.”
Do you know what ethical boundaries your therapist must adhere to? Are you aware of the damages to you if a therapist transgresses those boundaries? This podcast is a part of a series that examines this area. If you are interested more, follow this podcast so you are informed when the others are published.
Bernadine Fox interviews the indominable Kagan Goh. Originally from Singapore, Kagan Goh is a Vancouver-based multidisciplinary Mad Artist: award-wining filmmaker, published author, spoken word poet, playwright, actor, mental health advocate and activist. He was diagnosed with manic depression at the age of twenty-three, in 1993. Kagan is a well-known spoken word artist, essayist and poet, a respected and established voice in Vancouver’s literary community for over two decades. In 2012, Select Books in Singapore published his poetic memoir, focused upon his relationship with his esteemed father, Who Let in the Sky? In Kagan Goh’s follow-up memoir, Surviving Samsara, he recounts his struggles with manic depression, breaking the silence around mental illness. From an honest and personal perspective, Surviving Samsara traces Goh’s experiences as he wanders through the highs of mania, the terrors of psychosis, and the lows of depression. From the welfare office to the hospital ward and many places in between, Goh struggles to discern the difference between mental health breakdowns and spiritual breakthroughs. Facing his experiences with courage and authenticity, Goh shares memories of family altercations, pushed to the brink of living on the street, and psychiatrist visits. He explores his diagnosis of bipolar mood disorder not only as a medical condition but as a spiritual emergence—a vehicle for personal growth, healing and transcendence.
Kagan Goh “transformed from victim to survivor to activist.”
Bio from http://www.kagangoh.com/
www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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