Episodes

  • The Lens Changes: Two Poets on Identity, Trauma, and Reinvention Through Art

    The Lens Changes: Two Poets on Identity, Trauma, and Reinvention Through Art
    Sep 22 2026

    The Lens Changes: Two Poets on Identity, Trauma, and Reinvention Through Art

    Two BC artists. Two very different entry points into the relationship between making things and surviving your own life.

    Sherry Duggal is a Vancouver-based multidisciplinary artist, actor, writer, poet, and dancer whose work moves through identity, culture, belonging, and intergenerational memory. She performed at the Mad Arts Coffeehouse, part of the Connection Salon's Mad Pride events in Vancouver, and brought a sequence of poems that traced her own arc: from Indian mythology through her ancestors, through the comedy of her current family dynamics, through who she is becoming, and finally into who she has become. She reads live from her poem Chapati, recently accepted for publication by Hungry Zine, a piece about food, silence, and the weight of what gets passed down through generations without ever being named. She talks about art not as hobby but as way of life, about depression and the neuroscience of redirecting thought, about teaching AP Psychology and watching her students medicated in numbers that trouble her. Art, she says plainly, is the only thing that healed her.

    Nate Nainers is a peer support worker, writer, and what he calls a multidimensional clown. His debut poetry collection Smoke and Holy Spirits, published with Galleon Books, is a surrealist journey through leaving evangelical Christianity, the destabilization that followed, psychosis, substance misuse, and the long process of finding ground again. He grew up Mennonite Brethren, K to 12 in Christian school, summer Bible camps, worship team, youth group, the whole architecture of it, and he traces a direct line from being five years old and terrified of hellfire to his OCD diagnosis decades later. The connection between evangelical indoctrination and religiously themed OCD is something he did not have language for until four years ago, and the conversation he has with Bernadine about where that line falls, about Prophet Bob in his van prophesying at prayer retreats, about the psychiatric ward and the psych ward and who ends up in which, is one of the more quietly explosive exchanges RTM has aired. He reads his poem Spam live, and it is worth hearing twice.

    Both guests came up through the Connection Salon, a low-barrier exhibition space committed to underrepresented artists and artists with lived experience. Both are making work that does what RTM exists to do: put the human being back in front of the diagnosis and let them speak for themselves.

    Music Shari Ulrich, Fearless Soul, Omar Rudberg


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    1 hr
  • Loosening the Lock: A window into Borderline; A Door into Psychedelic Therapy

    Loosening the Lock: A window into Borderline; A Door into Psychedelic Therapy
    Sep 17 2026
    Loosening the Lock: A window into Borderline; A Door into Psychedelic Therapy

    Two conversations. Two very different entry points into the same territory: what happens when your nervous system, your brain chemistry, or your relationship to your own thoughts puts you outside the frame of what the world considers manageable.

    Stefan Kirby, co-founder of the Mindscape Psychedelic Institute and a marriage and family therapist in training, walks through what psychedelic therapy actually is, how it works, and what it is good for. He is precise about the landscape: psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA, ibogaine, DMT, and cannabis, each with its own pharmacology, its own dose range, its own research base, and its own risks. What connects them is the mechanism he describes as loosening the programming, the unconscious loops of thought, emotion, and memory that most people are living inside without knowing it. He explains metacognition, cognitive diffusion, set and setting, and the difference between a psycholytic session where the client can still talk and a larger dose journey that is primarily internal. He also does not soften the risks: unqualified practitioners, boundary violations, sexual misconduct, financial exploitation, destabilization in people vulnerable to psychosis or mania. He names the wild west quality of a field that is still largely unregulated and lays out what someone should be asking before they sit with anyone.

    Pippa Scott is a writer, singer, and award-winning photographer who grew up between Vancouver and the UK, spent a decade in the film industry, and did not receive a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder until she was 35. Her book, Paper Girls Burn, traces what those decades actually felt like from the inside: the dial permanently turned to maximum, the abandonment terror, the attachment wounds from a childhood of constant movement, the misdiagnoses that explained some things but missed the full picture. She reads from the book live, a passage about being eight years old, screaming through the night, and grieving a broken crayon thrown in the bin because it was alone and she could not bear that. It is one of the most quietly devastating pieces of writing about a child's interior life you will hear on this program.

    She also takes apart the misogyny embedded in the BPD diagnosis itself: its roots in the idea that women are hysterical, overemotional, and too much, the way men get missed entirely and funneled into anger or sex addiction diagnoses instead, and the cost of that for everyone. Her book launch is at the Vancity Culture Lab in Vancouver on September 25th, with proceeds going to the Canadian Mental Health Association.

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    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 hr
  • They Sent Her Home Five Times: Aaisha Alvi on Postpartum Psychosis and the Lindsay Clancy Case

    They Sent Her Home Five Times: Aaisha Alvi on Postpartum Psychosis and the Lindsay Clancy Case
    Sep 1 2026
    They Sent Her Home Five Times: Aaisha Alvi on Postpartum Psychosis and the Lindsay Clancy Case

    This episode was recorded on August 30, 2026, the day the jury was still deliberating in the Lindsay Clancy trial. Clancy is the Massachusetts mother whose defense argues she was experiencing postpartum psychosis when she killed her three young children in 2023. That case is the backdrop for this conversation. Aaisha Alvi's story is very similar to Clancy’s except in her case, after many attempts to get help, a psychiatrists finally heard her desperate pleas.

    Aaisha is a postpartum psychosis survivor, awareness advocate, and author of A Mom Like That: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis. She experienced postpartum psychosis twice: once after the birth of her daughter, and once after a miscarriage at fourteen weeks. Both times she sought help. Both times, repeatedly, she was dismissed. Both of these occurrences are not included in the statistics gathered to determine the prevalence of PPP.

    The first episode resolved on its own after four months, during which Aaisha believed her family intended to harm her daughter, that her daughter was an adult pretending to be a baby, and that her husband had plans to abuse the child. She was taken to the doctor twice during this time and sent home both times with no screening and no diagnosis. She only understood what had happened to her years later, after writing her book.

    The second episode was worse. She returned to her doctor five times as her symptoms escalated from depression through intrusive thoughts to command hallucinations directing her to harm strangers on the street and to throw herself into traffic. She told doctors she was hearing voices. She told them she was being compelled to do evil things. She asked to be hospitalized. She was sent home each time, told she was grieving, told she appeared to be coping well, told she was having a panic attack. It was only when a perinatal psychiatrist spent ninety minutes with her, took a full case history, and involved her husband that she was finally recognized as psychotic and given the right medication. She stabilized within a week and a half.

    The conversation covers the full picture: what postpartum psychosis actually is, how it differs from postpartum depression, why the hallucinations and delusions feel completely real to the person experiencing them, why calling it rare is inaccurate and dangerous, why being disturbed by your thoughts does not mean you are safe, and what the Lindsay Clancy case reveals about how thoroughly the medical system fails women in psychotic crisis. Aaisha is precise, generous, and unflinching. This is essential listening for anyone who has given birth, loves someone who has, or works anywhere near perinatal care.

    Find Aaisha at @AaishaAlviWrites on social media and her memoir A Mom Like That at most book retailers and libraries.

    Music by Shari Ulrich and Edith Wallace



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    1 hr
  • Language Lives in My Wounds: the Politics of Vulnerability

    Language Lives in My Wounds: the Politics of Vulnerability
    Aug 23 2026
    Language Lives in My Wounds: Personality Disorders, Structural Violence, and the Politics of Vulnerability

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

    Find Ahana at tenderlyborderline.substack.com and on Instagram and Bluesky at @antisanitygirl.

    Music by Shari Ulrich ad Omar Rudberg

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    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 hr
  • You Are Not Broken: Reclaiming Yourself After Trauma with Jenna Rae McWatters

    You Are Not Broken: Reclaiming Yourself After Trauma with Jenna Rae McWatters
    Aug 12 2026
    You Are Not Broken: Reclaiming Yourself After Trauma with Jenna Rae McWatters

    Trigger warning: this episode talks about experiences around human trafficking and child exploitation

    What happens when a child grows up surrounded by violence, sexual abuse and instability—and later has to untangle what survival taught her about love, sex, relationships and herself? In this deeply personal conversation, Australian survivor and advocate Jenna Rae McWatters speaks openly about being trafficked as a teenager, the grooming that made exploitation feel normal, and the complicated ways childhood trauma continued to shape her life. She talks about hypersexuality, shame, dissociation and the difficulty of recognizing yourself as a victim when you have spent years believing you were simply making your own choices.

    But this conversation isn't simply about what happened to Jenna. It is about what happened after and the process of reclaiming the parts of herself that had been pushed into the shadows. Jenna describes learning to reconnect with her body through somatic work, developing self-compassion, and refusing the expectation that survivors must become perfectly “healed” before they are allowed to live fully. She challenges the shame attached to the word victim, speaks about the hostility she encounters online when she tells her story, and explores why survivors need permission to be complicated, imperfect and fully human.

    Jenna is also developing Inner World Mechanics, a framework designed to explore the relationship between mind and body and help people understand their own inner processes with greater compassion. At the heart of her work is a simple but powerful idea: we don't have to spend our lives chasing some imagined state of perfect healing. We can learn to meet ourselves where we are and discover that the parts of us we once considered shameful may have something important to teach us.

    Music by Shari Ulrich and Tom Odell


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    1 hr
  • Unmasked: Autism, Burnout, and the Daughter the System Failed

    Unmasked: Autism, Burnout, and the Daughter the System Failed
    Aug 4 2026
    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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    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 hr
  • 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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    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 hr