In this episode, I catch up with Rahim Thawer about envy and its impacts in our social and sexual lives.

Rahim is a racialized, queer social worker who works as an instructor, psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, consultant, public speaker, podcast host, and writer. He calls Toronto home and currently teaches at The University of Alabama. His work explores the intersection of mental health and systemic oppression. He has a particular interest in examining innovation in queer relationships and exploring how anti-racist, queer-affirming psychoanalytic frameworks can support social workers, training therapists, and organizational leaders.

Episode content
0:00 - Introduction
1:16 - Rahim's background and focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)

6:21 - How Rahim got interested in envy

11:48 - The difference between envy and jealousy

17:09 - Queer experiences of envy

20:07 - Envy and systemic oppression

20:53 - How to manage envy

25:49 - Has social media made envy worse?

29:46 - Online content creators and envy

31:22 - Can envy be managed through CBT?

34:39 - Why are some people not impacted by envy?

40:19 - How to keep up to date with Rahim’s work

Works mentioned in this episode

Thawer, R. (2022, June 9). The Matrix of Envy in Our Social and Sexual Lives. Medium.

Thawer, R. (2025). The Mental Health Guide for Cis and Trans Queer Guys: Skills to Cope and Thrive as Your Authentic Self. Publisher: New Harbinger Publications. [Pre-Order]

To see more of Rahim's work, check out ladyativan.com

Cite this episode

MacDonald, J. B. & Thawer, R. (2025, Jan 15). Envy in our social and sexual lives (No. 24) [Audio podcast episode]. In Psych Attack. www.psychattack.com

Transcript
The transcript for this episode was developed using transcription software. There may be some errors in the content as I do not have capacity to review for accuracy.

Acknowledgements

Psych Attack is created and hosted by Dr Jasmine B. MacDonald. The video and audio for this episode was edited by Morgan McRae. Special thanks to Rahim Thawer for sharing your time and expertise.

To round out 2024, I have created this highlights episode.

This year, the 6 guests (from Australia, Finland and the U.S.) and I have covered:

• investigative interviewing for disclosures of maltreatment (Episode 17)
• what sex therapy is, kink and paraphilias (Episode 18)
• academic mental health (Episode 19)
• self-advocacy and professional development and relationships (Episode 20)
• human-dog relationships (Episode 21)
• adolescent mental health and the use of digital phenotyping (Episode 22).

Cite this episode
MacDonald, J. B. (2024, December 20). Psych Attack highlights 2024 (No. 23) [Audio podcast episode]. In Psych Attack. www.psychattack.com

Transcript
The transcript for this episode was developed using transcription software. There may be some errors in the content as I do not have capacity to review for accuracy.

In this episode, I catch up with Dr Taylor A. Braund to hear about his research into digital phenotyping. In particular, we discuss the link between mental health symptoms and keystroke metadata from smartphones.

Dr Taylor A. Braund is a Research Fellow at Black Dog Institute and UNSW School of Clinical Medicine, Australia. To see more of Taylor’s work, you can reach out on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Research mentioned in this episode

Braund, T.A. (2024). The continued hype and hope of digital phenotyping. Nature Reviews Psychology, 3(448).

Braund, T. A., O’Dea, B., Bal, D., Maston, K., Larsen, M., Werner-Seidler, A., Tillman, G., & Christensen, H. (2023). Associations between smartphone keystroke metadata and mental health symptoms in adolescents: Findings from the Future Proofing Study. JMIR Mental Health, 10(e44986).

Braund, T. A., Zin, M. T., Boonstra, T. W., Wong, Q. J. J., Larsen, M. E., Christensen, H., Tillman, G., O’Dea, B. (2022). Smartphone sensor data for identifying and monitoring symptoms of mood disorders: A longitudinal observational study. JMIR Mental Health, 9(5):e35549

O’Dea, B., Braund, T. A., Batterham, P. J., Larsen, M. E., Glozier, N., & Whitton, A. E. (2024). Reading between the lines: Identifying the linguistic markers of Anhedonia for the stratification of depression. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (Paper)

Seminal digital phenotyping papers

Huckvale, K., Venkatesh, S., & Christensen, H. (2019). Toward clinical digital phenotyping: A timely opportunity to consider purpose, quality, and safety. npj Digital Medicine, 2(88).

Insel, T. R. (2017). Digital phenotyping: Technology for a new science of behavior. JAMA, 318(13):1215–1216.

Torous, J., Kiang, M. V., Lorme, J., & Onnela, J. P. (2016). New tools for new research in psychiatry: A scalable and customizable platform to empower data driven smartphone research. JMIR Mental Health, 3(2):e16.

Some available digital phenotyping platforms

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/onnela-lab/beiwe-research-platform/

https://www.digitalpsych.org/lamp.html

https://www.biaffect.com/

Cite this episode

MacDonald, J. B. & Braund, T. A. (2024, Oct 1). Digital phenotyping: Using smartphone metadata to predict mental health symptoms (No. 22) [Audio podcast episode]. In Psych Attack. www.psychattack.com

Transcript
The transcript for this episode was developed using transcription software. There may be some errors in the content as I do not have capacity to review for accuracy.

Acknowledgements

Psych Attack is created and hosted by Dr Jasmine B. MacDonald. The video and audio for this episode was edited by Morgan McRae. Special thanks to Dr Taylor A. Braund for sharing your time and expertise. Please note that the views and opinions expressed by Taylor in this episode are his own and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policy of his employer.