ADHD, PTSD, and Autism with Randi-Lee Bowslaugh   

Randi-Lee Bowslaugh is a fellow warrior out there around the issue of mental health awareness fighting the inappropriate stigma we face as folks who live with mental health challenges.  Randi-Lee is an author and outspoken advocate for mental health.  She has lived with depression from the age of 14 years and was eventually diagnosed with autism and PTSD as an adult.  She is the host of the Write or Die Show a podcast that you can find on You tube.  And of course, like so many of us, as a well-rounded person she has other sides to her.  One of them is kickboxing in 2015 she was a Canadian National Champion and in 2016 she won silver in Pan-Am games.  Randi-Lee is also a mother and grandmother.

Music by Shari Ulrich and Brandi Carlisle

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Connection Salon & Gathering Place, Crisis Centre of BC & Kagan Goh  

In today’s program we speak with Pierre Leichner from the Connection Salon here in Vancouver BC and Carrie Campbell from the Gathering Place about their collaboration to ensure that art comes to those who live with mental health challenges. 

We also speak with Mark Sheehan, Program Director, and Paul Vincent, Volunteer, about the Youth Education projects bringing mental health information to youth through the Crisis Centre of BC. 

And then Kagan Goh joins us to talk about his upcoming documentary on mental health entitled Common Law.  

Music by Shari Ulrich

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What does Mental Health, Psychiatry, and the Ouija Board have in Common? 

Dan Nelson, is the author of Ouija Board and the Skeptic (Mad In America) and holds a BA in Philosophy, MA in Human Resources and Industrial Relations. Through twenty years of working in management systems, he knows that systems are designed to output a particular product or service and that the system was the cause of any and all undesirable results the system outputs. In this article, he states that the mental health systems are responsible for their lack of ability to assist some who live with mental health challenges.

Dan writes, “Psychiatry's practices are so entrenched, its methods so accepted, that skeptics and outsiders are often dismissed as uninformed or unqualified simply because they haven’t undergone the same training that instills confidence in its frameworks. But skepticism, especially from those with lived experience, isn’t just valid—it’s necessary. It forces us to question whether our tools and methods truly serve those they claim to help.”

We respond to our lives, our challenges, our struggles. Too often mental health issues are a normal and nature response to trauma. As Dan points out if the psych industry isn’t looking at the systems around their clients and changing those systems, and instead they medicate and work with the client to be able to tolerate the difficulties they are dealing with – they aren’t solving the morning. They are applying a band aid.

A good example of this is how our systems are designed to pathologize the victim is schoolyard bullying. Too often the victim is expected to learn to develop new skills to deal with the bully. Often they must be extricated from the school to be protected. The bully, too often, is not confronted or restricted in ways that would prevent the bullying. Dan demonstrates how we can take that same example and apply it to the mental health system where victims come forward with mental health challenges caused by environmental factors and yet the industry will medicate the victim instead of looking at how to change the environment. The DSM and psychiatry is accepted to often without including the possibility (like with a Ouija Board) that perhaps it is not truth.    

Music by Shari Ulrich and Jelly Roll

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Spotting a Coaching Scam with youtube creator Danielle Ryan

Danielle Ryan describes herself as a youtube channel creator and “just a troll on the internet covering topics related to the business & life coaching industry.”  As she says, part of the problem is lack of regulation and then what happens when coaches coaches to become coaches.  She spends a lot of time sharing “my silly little opinions as I deep dive into *allegedly* problematic people, organizations, and techniques used to manipulate people in the space while also sprinkling in the occasional small business video.” 

Her channel is a mix of educational & commentary content. 
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@itsdanielleryan
Website: https://danielleryan.me 

Music by Shari Ulrich, David Laronde, and Elizabeth Wallace

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Past Lives, Spiritual Experience, and Mental Health with Kerie Logan

What happens when experiences that feel profoundly real to someone are dismissed outright by the mental health system?

In this episode of ReThreading Madness, Bernadine Fox speaks with hypnotherapist Keri Logan about past lives, spiritual experiences, intuition, generational trauma, and the growing intersection between spirituality and mental health.Together they explore why some people find healing, meaning, or emotional resolution through past life regression and spiritual frameworks even in the absence of scientific consensus around reincarnation itself. 

The conversation moves beyond sensational ideas about “who someone was in a past life” and instead focuses on how unresolved emotional experiences, recurring fears, relationship patterns, nightmares, physical symptoms, and generational trauma may be interpreted and worked through within spiritual or regression-based approaches. The discussion also touches on inner child work, epigenetics, intuition, ancestors, and the role of forgiveness, self-awareness, and emotional healing.

At the same time, the episode asks difficult questions about how Western mental health systems respond to experiences involving spirits, visions, ancestors, or reincarnation. In many communities and cultures, including numerous Indigenous cultures, ancestors, spiritual connection, and reincarnation are integrated parts of life and identity. Yet within mainstream psychiatry, similar experiences are often pathologized, medicalized, or dismissed entirely. 

This episode does not ask listeners to accept any particular belief system as fact. Rather, it examines the tension between lived experience, spirituality, culture, and institutional understandings of mental health and asks what happens when people are denied language or space to explore experiences that feel deeply meaningful to them. 

Because whether one believes in past lives or not, the emotional and psychological impact of these experiences on people’s lives is undeniably real.

Music by Shari Ulrich and Born
More information about Kerie Logan at:

Website: https://mastertheupperrooms.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mastertheupperrooms
Podcast: On all platforms
Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/mastertheupperrooms/

https://www.empoweredwithin.com/



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With Matt Sandoval from FreeArts AZ and Kagan Goh producer/director of Common Law


Matt Sandoval, is the new Executive Director for FreeArts in Arizona. FreeArts AZ provides traumatized children and their families with a means of creative expression and as means of establishing resilience and offering mentorship.  

And Kagan Goh talks with ReThreading Madness about his new film, Common Law, a biographical account of his experience of learning he had BiPolar and how this impacted on his relationships with his long-time girlfriend and family.  Through this we learn how individuals who receive Persons With Disability in BC, are unable to keep this benefit if they enter into a common-law relationship and how that changes the relationship and their own sense of self.  Kagan also talks about his preference for the term manic/depressive instead of BiPolar.


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Trigger Warnng:  This episode includes information about therapy abuse and may be triggering for some folks.

I Married my Therapist:  

Ken Schultz is an advocate for mental health reform and a survivor of therapy abuse and exploitation.  He is using his personal experience of harm to raise awareness about unethical therapeutic relationships and their lasting impact. Through his story, Ken aims to inspire change in laws and practices to protect others from similar experiences. 

If we want to examine the power and authority mental health professionals have over their clients – Ken’s story is a prime example.  He saw this therapist for 3 months and in that time frame, he went from someone who had zero attraction to being sexually exploited by her all the while believing how she defined it as ok.  

If we want to examine how the institutions should be assisting us after we have experienced therapy abuse and exploitation, Ken is another prime example.  The therapist he was seeing reported her, then left him to deal with the fallout on his own.  The Texan state licensing board narrowed his complaint down to violating one aspect of the statutes:  the timeline.  His “therapist” dragged out leaving the ‘marriage’ to prevent a complaint based on the allotted time.  But the licensing board ignored another statute that their social workers are not allowed to have sexual contact with a current or former client – of which she clearly had violated and of which had done so within the statute of limitations.   And his church and police believed her statements without any corroboration and victimized him again.  
 
Things must change.  We all need to wake up to harm perpetrated against those who have experienced therapy abuse and exploitation so that we are not inadvertently exacerbating that harm that is already catastrophic in too many cases.  

Music by Shari Ulrich and Shawn Mendes


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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, Peter Morin, 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. 

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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. 

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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

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