Therapy Tuesday

Healing from trauma is a difficult journey. The awareness that it's possible to feel better and reduce the pain is crucial. Yet most people who are suddenly plunged into trauma do not know this. Some of us are acutely aware that recovery can be excruciating if we don't know what is happening to our bodies. Once we know, we still need constant reminders of what we need to do to feel better. You're Going To Be Okay is the title of our guest Madeline Popelka's book, in which she writes about all that she needed to know but didn't when she was in pain. The messages she relays on social media through her handle @Healingfromptsd have brought relief to many and have tremendous healing potential. She hopes her book will do the same.

In this episode, we look at the psychological health concerns among people who have recovered from mild, asymptomatic, or severe COVID. The virus has impacted our bodies and our immune systems have worked very hard for recovery. From emotional lulls and breathlessness to sleeplessness and memory issues—we’re still learning about the long-term biological impact of COVID. Ruchita talks about how best we can cope with what we know or don't know.

How can we redefine resilience from an empathetic lens? Is it solely the ability to bounce back and be strong in the face of adversity? Why is holding systems and power structures accountable for their violence integral to community resilience? How can we move away from looking at pain and distress as something that needs to be "fixed" and acknowledge what it needs to heal? Behavioural health researcher and trauma therapist Ruchita answers these questions in this episode of Therapy Tuesday.

What are healthy and unhealthy boundaries in a relationship? How do we recognize them? Why does every relationship need healthy boundaries? Setting boundaries can be uncomfortable and confusing, so, how do we go about establishing them? Behavioural health researcher and trauma therapist Ruchita answers these questions on this episode of Therapy Tuesday.

In this episode, we look at the relationship between social media and mental health. While social media can be valuable for networking and enhancing connections with loved ones, it can also worsen loneliness and isolation. Dependency on social media can lead to mental health issues, poor sleep quality, diminished attention spans, and increased exposure to triggers. Detaching oneself from social media can be difficult—it takes discipline, consistency, and treating ourselves with empathy and compassion. While there is no perfect way to do this, it’s important to keep working to build a healthy relationship with our screens. Ruchita tells us how that can be done.

This episode debunks some myths about bipolar disorder and looks at why it becomes difficult for people to accept and own the diagnosis. Host Ruchita Chandrashekar also talks about how bipolar disorder is often depicted within frames of violence and aggression in culture and media. The opposing kind of stereotype is the assumption that people with bipolar disorder can't be stable within relationships or they can't hold a job. While bipolar disorder is a complex and chronic condition, it is possible to cope, manage, and live well with it. It is important that we humanise people living with bipolar disorder rather than stigmatise or romanticise mental illness.

Addiction- that's our focus for this episode- the stigma attached to substance use and how we need to approach it with increased sensitivity. Substance use is often considered as a disordered behavior and the medical model has gone as far to describe it as an illness of the brain. There are multiple factors that cause vulnerability to addiction, like a family history of substance use, trauma, social environments that encourage peer drug use, and physical illness that involves the consumption of prescription drugs with addictive properties. Substance dependency also exists because the substances become accessible coping tools for the person struggling, with some substances carrying more stigma and shame than others. In collectivistic societies and cultures, the familial shame associated with anyone struggling to battle mental illness or addiction is big. Given how there can be very serious consequences for loved ones of those with addiction, unlearning shame and stigma is difficult, which is why language is important in how we communicate to and about someone struggling with addiction. Substance use is a complex, systemic issue and the more we stop demonizing those suffering, the more collaborative we can be in combating the problem.

In this episode, we discuss men's depression- what the symptoms can look like, and how men need to develop safer spaces for themselves and unlearn the violence they have internalized towards themselves and the people around them. Conditioned to perform to societal standards of masculinity, men are rarely taught to get in touch with their feelings with authenticity. Feelings are framed as a "feminine" burden and anything feminine is associated with vulnerability which is perceived as a threat to masculinity. Reaching out for support, ranting about their day, admitting that something is upsetting them are not normalised. This lifetime of emotional stuntedness worsens isolation and increases shame around their mental health concerns. As a result, the burden of the emotional labour is placed on those around them, most often women. While it is important to hold men accountable for their actions, we also need to address the larger sociological systems that have caused these symptoms in the first place.

Losing a loved on to the pandemic, job loss, leaving your home, the breaking of a relationship—any of these could cause grief to a person. Grief is a very natural response to loss. It is complicated and sees varied feeling responses and looks different for everyone. There is profound sadness, debilitating anger, shock, guilt and a myriad of unexpected emotions. But we often police and filter our emotional experience with 'shoulds' and 'musts' when the truth is that there is no linear process to grief. It's an individual experience and can look different for the same person with each loss. Demonizing and labeling emotions under the binary of positive and negative emotions increases the risk of internalized shame and rarely helps with processing the emotion itself. In this episode, we unpack the complexities of grief- its cyclical nature, the myths around it, the grieving process, and the importance of prioritizing ourselves in the face of loss.

Welcome to Therapy Tuesday, Smashboard's fortnightly podcast for people looking to have conversations about mental health from a feminist perspective. I am Noopur, founder, Smashboard and joining me today is Dr. Debbi Kutner. We are going to be talking about trauma and triggers, about c-PTSD and about how to support loved ones who live with the condition or also the kind of support we can expect from our won entourage when we are living with c-PTSD.

Question 1: Firstly, I want to acknowledge that this is a difficult time for mental health care workers, as well. In fact, this is show is generally hosted by Ruchita who has also been working very hard and it's primarily to give her a break that you and I are doing this together, Deb. So, thank you for doing what you do because it is very important work. Secondly, tell me how are you doing and whether the worst is really over in terms of what the pandemic has done to people's mental health?

Dr Debbi Kutner: You are VERY kind to ask, Noopur. To be honest, some days I feel like I’m taking a cortisol bath with anxiety bubbles! I’m in the human condition with my clients. We are having a shared feeling of trauma, a shared emotion of feeling uncertainty, and though we might each experience various shades of stress, I think it’s important to say to ourselves: I am not alone in this.

And here’s the truth, none of us are experts on how to make sense of this pandemic EXCEPT to follow a path of self-compassion; to allow ourselves to bear witness to what’s happening in the world; and to know that our only control is in our moment-to-moment responses,