Basket Case

For this bonus episode, NK and Imani talk about navigating conflict, accountability, and grace for ourselves and the people we’re in community with.

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Western science gives us names for the things that we know – the things that we can see and feel and touch. But it’s always been skeptical of the things we can’t measure. This skepticism dates back to Europeans’ first contact with indigenous cultures in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and the unfamiliar medicine that they found there. Today in the west, those healing modalities are often still characterized as “alternative.” 

Mexico City-based integrative psychiatrist Dr. Carmen Amezcua is passionate about psychedelic plant medicine – treatments that are still stigmatized and misunderstood, even though they’ve been shown to be effective at treating depression, anxiety, and PTSD. But she prefers to describe her treatments as complementary, not “alternative.” 

In this episode, somatics coach Holiday Simmons says somatics can help us reconnect to our intuition – the knowledge of our ancestors. Dr. Carmen Amezcua says western psychiatry doesn’t get to the root of our issues. And both say that ceremony is how we connect with ourselves, with nature, with our pasts, and with each other. 

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LINKS

• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Southern Soul Wellness: https://southernsoulwellness.com/ 
• Dr. Carmen Amezcua: https://carmenamezcua.com/
• This Is What Ayahuasca Does To Your Brain 
• Psychedelics, the Law and Politics - UC Berkeley BCSP 
• Psychedelics and Neural Plasticity: Therapeutic Implications - PMC) 
• ‘Authentic’ ayahuasca rituals sought by tourists often ignore Indigenous practices and spiritual grounding 
• Magic Mushrooms Are Most-Used Psychedelic Drug; As States Change Laws, Federal Policymakers Face Urgent Questions | RAND

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Even though NK doesn’t live with the voice of constant criticism anymore, there’s still a lingering feeling that stands between her and her authentic self…or selves. In this episode she talks to social anxiety expert Dr. Aziz Gazipura about disrupting that pattern of social anxiety and learning to do something else. 

Dr. Aziz Gazipura is the author of the books The Solution To Social Anxiety and Not Nice, and the founder of the Center For Social Confidence.

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NK attends a workshop on divesting from people pleasing & begins to unravel a lifetime of grief and rage.

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When Sal moved from California to a small town in the Pacific Northwest, they didn't know anyone. The solitude didn’t bother them…at first. But after their attempts at making new friends left them feeling confused, then rejected, then frustrated, their solitude turned into loneliness.

In this episode, Dr. Ellen Lee explains how loneliness is a social condition. Dr. Marisa G. Franco talks about the science of making friends (and the romance of queer friendship), and Jasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez shows us what we can learn from fungi about building community in times of crisis.

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Links: 

The Professional-Managerial Class w/ Catherine Liu | Jacobin Show 

White Supremacy Culture Worksheet from White Supremacy Culture  

Platonic: How The Science of Attachment Can Help You Make – and Keep – Friends by Dr. Marisa G. Franco

Let’s Become Fungal! by Jasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez

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Does being *too online* make it increasingly hard to hang on to an inherent sense of identity?

Between the algorithm, the content creators, and the very online therapists, maybe it makes sense that more and more people are self diagnosing from online content  – and are telling their IRL therapists about it.

But what if the sense of belonging we get from claiming a diagnosis is just a stand in for what’s actually needed?

With Nadira Goff (Slate), P.E. Moscowitz (MentalHellth), and Marcus Brittain Fleming (LCSW, Bandwidth Care).

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Links:

On TikTok, mental health creators are confused for therapists. That's a serious problem. (2021)

How mental health became a social media minefield

 The BuzzFeedification of Mental Health | Mental Hellth (Feb 2021)

From pee tapes to Pulitzers: The rise and fall of Buzzfeed News | The Independent

Why "TikTok Diagnoses" Are on the Rise | Psychology Today

Women Are Discovering They May Have ADHD Or Be On The Autism Spectrum From Trending TikTok Videos

The fight over what’s real (and what’s not) on dissociative identity disorder TikTok - The Verge

https://neuroqueer.com/throw-away-the-masters-tools/

Mad World: Politics of Mental Health by Micha Frazer-Carroll

Girls Self-Diagnosing on TikTok Aren't Why Ableism Happens - Dr. Devon Price

Changing the Framework: Disability Justice | Leaving Evidence

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Instead of feeling happy when she learns that her cancer therapy is working, Jasmin is confronted with grief. In an effort to understand her own situation, she tries to find people who can relate. And in a collaborative art piece, Jazmine (JT) Green gives us a snapshot of what it feels like to finally learn to inhabit a body that could feel like home.

“Embodied” is episode three of Little Devils – a show about the flaws that shape us. Little Devils is a TRZ Media Original and an independent production hosted by Jasmin Bauomy.

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In the stories about Borderline Personality Disorder that Mala was familiar with, a borderline woman was always toxic – intense, erratic, angry, manipulative. And she was almost always the villain in someone else’s story. But no one ever talked about the *source* of the intense emotion – what was at the heart of it.

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More to read about borderline:

I'm A Black Woman with Borderline Personality Disorder | Business Insider 

Why I'm Distancing Myself From My Borderline Personality Disorder Diagnosis 

Diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder Is Often Flawed | Scientific American 

(Re)Valuing Borderline Personality Disorder as (Counter) Knowledge | Word & Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 

Transcendent Luminescence, Ravaging Flames: On Alexander Kriss’s “Borderline” | Los Angeles Review of Books 

How Infinite Jest tethered me to life when I almost let it go | Aeon Essays  

Borderline Personality and Self-Understanding of Psychopathology | Psychiatry At the Margins 

Either all psychopathology is personality psychopathology or there is no such thing | Psychiatry at the Margins 

Transgender and Gender Diverse Patients Are Diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder More Frequently Than Cisgender Patients Regardless of Personality Pathology | Transgender Health 

I Have Forgiven Myself for My Pre-Diagnosis Recklessness | by Zuva Seven | An Injustice! 

Skill Issues​ | Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Its Discontents 

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For Maryam, anorexia was a way to disappear. But outside the institutions meant to cure eating disorders, she learns to resist the binary of recovery or death.

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This episode was produced by Maryam Gunja and Phoebe Unter. 

And informed by…

Studying Hunger Journals by Bernadette Mayer

Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire by Janam Mukherjee

Saving our own lives: a liberatory practice of harm reduction by Shira Hassan 

Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body by Susan Bordo

We need to reject the false narratives around anorexia by Katy Waldman

Strangers Among Us by Rachel Aviv

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Dr. Devon Price talks with NK about 2022’s Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity. Masking is a coping strategy, a way that neurodivergent people (especially autistic people) learn to fit into neurotypical society, with uneven success. But like many coping strategies, masking can do more harm than good in the long run – and the act of unmasking is a small act of resistance against conformity.

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This episode also includes some clips from Autistic Masking & Unmasking, The 4 Types of Autistic Masking, Twice as Hard: Masking Neurodiversity as Black Women, Discover your neurodivergent masks, and Black and Autistic! The Struggle is Real… 

Plus Devon Price recommends Amythest Schaber’s Ask An Autistic series, The Secret Life of a Black Aspie: A Memoir by Anand Prahlad, and Uncomfortable Labels: My Life as a Gay Autistic Trans Woman by Laura Kate Dale.

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