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 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 immense value 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