Episodes

  • Writing Through It: Indigenous Voices, Trauma, and the Art of Telling Without Breaking

    Writing Through It: Indigenous Voices, Trauma, and the Art of Telling Without Breaking
    Jul 20 2026
    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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    1 hr
  • Title: Pulling the Canoe to Shore: Healing, Mad Movements, and the Stories That Set Us Free

    Title: Pulling the Canoe to Shore: Healing, Mad Movements, and the Stories That Set Us Free
    Jul 20 2026
    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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    1 hr
  • Leaving the Faith, Finding Yourself: Life After Mormonism with Audra Phelps

    Leaving the Faith, Finding Yourself: Life After Mormonism with Audra Phelps
    Jun 25 2026
    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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    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 hr
  • Intersectionality Mental Health, MAID, and Suicidality with Rebecca Deutsch

    Intersectionality Mental Health, MAID, and Suicidality with Rebecca Deutsch
    Jun 18 2026
    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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    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 hr
  • People, Place and Purpose: Jim Gottstein on Dismantling a Mental Health System That Harms the People It Claims to Help

    People, Place and Purpose: Jim Gottstein on Dismantling a Mental Health System That Harms the People It Claims to Help
    Jun 9 2026
    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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    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 hr
  • David Roche on Reclaiming Humanity Beyond Appearance

    David Roche on Reclaiming Humanity Beyond Appearance
    Jun 2 2026
    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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    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 hr
  • Standing Up in a World That Tried to Break You

    Standing Up in a World That Tried to Break You
    May 27 2026
    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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    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 hr
  • A Conversation with Jonathan Rogers at 89 on Getting Old and Dying

    A Conversation with Jonathan Rogers at 89 on Getting Old and Dying
    Apr 23 2026
    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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    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 hr