Science and Nature

Mysteries of Mental Illness

Mysteries of Mental Illness explores the story of mental illness in science and society. The four-part series traces the evolution of this complex topic from its earliest days to present times. It explores dramatic attempts across generations to unravel the mysteries of mental illness and gives voice to contemporary Americans across a spectrum of experiences.

Dr. Igda Martinez | Decolonizing Mental Health

3m 24s

Deconstructing stereotypes around homelessness lies at the core of Dr. Igda Martinez’s work at the Floating Hospital. For 150 years, the New York hospital has made psychiatric care available to unhoused populations who are among society’s most neglected. Shannette Champman, a mother of two, shares her experience of seeking care when she was in need of accessible mental health care.

Episodes

  • Dr. Hooman Keshavarzi | Decolonizing Mental Health: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Dr. Hooman Keshavarzi | Decolonizing Mental Health

    4m 3s

    Muslims don’t often seek mental healthcare because of the dearth of services that integrate faith-based concepts into treatment practices. Instead, they seek help from family members, clergymen - people who don’t have the formal training to provide them with adequate care. Dr Hooman Keshavarzi’s Khalil Center provides that much-needed oasis that is a confluence of psychiatry and the Islamic faith.

  • Dr. Igda Martinez  | Decolonizing Mental Health: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Dr. Igda Martinez | Decolonizing Mental Health

    3m 24s

    Deconstructing stereotypes around homelessness lies at the core of Dr. Igda Martinez’s work at the Floating Hospital. For 150 years, the New York hospital has made psychiatric care available to unhoused populations who are among society’s most neglected. Shannette Champman, a mother of two, shares her experience of seeking care when she was in need of accessible mental health care.

  • Rosalba Calleros & Alan Alfaro | Decolonizing Mental Health: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Rosalba Calleros & Alan Alfaro | Decolonizing Mental Health

    5m 22s

    When a mental healthcare facility failed to approach Alan’s bipolar disorder within the context of his cerebral palsy, his mother Rosalba knew the lack lay in the under-resourced, ill-informed discriminatory system. Her resolve to find resources to treat Alan rightly, patiently, and creatively, is an example of hope for other families like theirs. But it requires tenacious and persistent advocacy.

  • Adriana Alejandre | Decolonizing Mental Health: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Adriana Alejandre | Decolonizing Mental Health

    4m 17s

    “We fix problems inside the family” is what Adriana Alejandre grew up hearing. Determined to change the way the Latinx community approached mental healthcare, she started her practice as a bilingual therapist in LA. Overwhelmed by the number of patients she had to turn down, Alejandre started the Latinx Therapy podcast, which has become an important mental healthcare resource for the community.

  • Drs. Fosters-Circle of Life | Decolonizing Mental Health: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Drs. Fosters-Circle of Life | Decolonizing Mental Health

    3m 24s

    Drs. Dan and Rebecca Crawford Foster’s psychology practice doesn’t revolve around an individualistic idea of human beings. They believe that no identity of self can exist without a social context. Discarding the Western psychology, they embrace Native belief in the relational circle to help people heal so they can continue to be part of a joyful community bond that transcends generations.

  • Shelby Rowe | Decolonizing Mental Health: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Shelby Rowe | Decolonizing Mental Health

    4m 55s

    Shelby Rowe was five when her grandmother asked her to hide her Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. Like her, many Native youth grow up trying to pass as white which, as Rowe knows as a suicide prevention advocate, has adverse effects on their mental health. For trauma-informed mental healthcare to be effective, there has to be justice - something Native Americans have been denied systemically.

  • Drs. Fosters-Modern Warrior | Decolonizing Mental Health: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Drs. Fosters-Modern Warrior | Decolonizing Mental Health

    4m 11s

    Dr. Rebecca Crawford Foster was concerned about what she would lose if she left her reservation to pursue higher education. In fact, her elders encouraged her to go and seek that different wisdom, and bring it back to the reservation. She now stands in both worlds and is a bridge for healing. She and Dr. Dan Foster are modern warriors equipped with tools to protect their community.

  • Linh An | Decolonizing Mental Health: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Linh An | Decolonizing Mental Health

    4m

    The language of the American mental healthcare system is English and jargon-heavy, which automatically casts away people who don’t speak the language. This is a violent act of racism which denies immigrant communities the healthcare they deserve. When examining its inherent racism, a culturally competent health care system needs to grow beyond the binaries of Black and white, and serve everyone.

  • Linh An and Sharyn Luo | Decolonizing Mental Health: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Linh An and Sharyn Luo | Decolonizing Mental Health

    5m 14s

    Why does a medical emergency allow family members to enter the ER while a mental health emergency singles out the patient? In Asian communities, where the family is the core of all societal relations, a completely avoidable stigma pits the family against the healthcare system. A collective mental health pandemic can only be addressed through solutions that are social and familial.

  • Kelvin Nguyen | Decolonizing Mental Health: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Kelvin Nguyen | Decolonizing Mental Health

    4m

    When Kelvin Nguyen was dealing with a mental health crisis, his family called the police for help. Mental health isn’t a crime and he wasn’t a criminal. Today, through VietCare, Nguyen educates and counsels others like him to overcome social taboos, discard shame, and seek mental healthcare. With the help of therapy, he is happy to be on this journey of self-realization while helping others.

  • Paul Hoang | Decolonizing Mental Health: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Paul Hoang | Decolonizing Mental Health

    5m 43s

    Paul Hoang runs Moving Forward Psychological Institute and is a clinical social worker. A survivor of PTSD and depression, he was the only Vietnamese speaking clinician in Illinois. Now in California, he creates public TV programming around mental health in Vietnamese. Within a culture that has very little empathy for mental health survivors, Hoang is building a vocabulary of care and empathy.

  • Natasha Stovall | Decolonizing Mental Health: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Natasha Stovall | Decolonizing Mental Health

    5m 51s

    For Natasha Stovall, whiteness is the real elephant in the room. Through her practice, she intends to address the colorblindness and race-agnostic nature of therapy, especially when it comes to white clients. She makes race the touchstone for effective and just therapy which consequently deconstructs the whiteness=greatness fallacy in white psyches.

Extras + Features

  • The Asylum Hill Project: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    The Asylum Hill Project

    5m 21s

    Some 30,000 patients came through the Mississippi State Hospital for the Insane, and many never left. The asylum cemetery was recently discovered by construction workers, and approximately 7,000 burials were discovered. Not a single one has been identified, but records in the State archives reveal why many were admitted and how they died.

  • Cynthia Piltch and Electroconvulsive Therapy: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Cynthia Piltch and Electroconvulsive Therapy

    3m 54s

    Fear and misunderstanding have created a stigma around ECT or Electroconvulsive Therapy, but today it’s done with targeted current, anesthesia, and muscle relaxants, making it much safer with fewer side effects. Cynthia has been hospitalized for depression five times and tried many treatments, with little success, before turning to ECT.

  • Psychedelics and Mental Illness: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Psychedelics and Mental Illness

    3m 18s

    As psychedelic drugs became synonymous with the counter-culture of the 1960s, they were labeled as more dangerous than they actually are, delaying research into them. Recently we've learned more about the chemical makeup of these substances and how they can be helpful in alleviating addiction, anxiety, and depression.

  • The Lobotomy: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    The Lobotomy

    5m 28s

    In 1936, neurologist Walter Freeman performed the first lobotomy in the U.S. It was widely seen as a miraculous intervention and a solution to saving some of the half-million mentally ill patients languishing in asylum 'hell holes'. The procedure soon became widespread and was even used for a member of the Kennedy family. But many lobotomies were performed on patients against their will.

  • Experimental Treatments and the Rise of Eugenics: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Experimental Treatments and the Rise of Eugenics

    5m 47s

    By the early 20th century, mental asylums had become extremely overcrowded, and very little was known about how to treat these patients. Out of view from the public eye, desperate doctors experimented with new treatments. When treatments failed, patients were labeled biologically defective, fueling the Eugenics program, and the involuntary sterilization of thousands of patients.

  • New Frontiers in Mental Health Care Access: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    New Frontiers in Mental Health Care Access

    4m 1s

    For many of the million-plus people with mental illness in the U.S., access to treatment and insurance is limited. Psychiatrist Sidney Hankerson is working to combat this by bringing healthcare to culturally relevant settings. In the black community, this might mean forming partnerships with trusted community establishments, like barbershops and churches, and developing interventions from there.

  • Episode 3 Preview: The Rise and Fall of the Asylum: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Episode 3 Preview: The RIse and Fall of the Asylum

    32s

    Mass confinement in mental asylums and extreme treatments – from lobotomy to coma therapy – were the standard for treating mental illness in the United States until a few decades ago. Today, one of the largest de-facto mental health facilities in the United States is Cook County Jail in Chicago, where more than one-third of inmates have a mental health diagnosis.

  • The Kirkbride Asylum: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    The Kirkbride Asylum

    3m 8s

    Thomas Kirkbride's 'hospitals for the insane' were built for people who had nowhere else to go. They were intended to be a retreat from the world; a place to be cured. Kirkbride believed that the restorative atmosphere of his institutions would be therapeutic. The goal was to rehabilitate patients and send them back to society as productive citizens.

  • The Mass Incarceration of the Mentally Ill: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    The Mass Incarceration of the Mentally Ill

    2m 55s

    As asylums were deemed inhumane and closed down, the social commitment to community care disappeared, and monies were allocated elsewhere. So began the mass incarceration of the mentally ill as, with nowhere to go, they wound up homeless, or in nursing homes or jails. The irony is that they have not been deinstitutionalized, and their treatment resembles the punitive systems of the past.

  • Deep Brain Stimulation Surgery: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Deep Brain Stimulation Surgery

    2m 55s

    Matthew Rosenberg is having deep brain stimulation surgery to help his debilitating OCD condition. In three weeks he'll have another electrode implanted in the other side of his brain, followed by a separate surgery to put batteries in his chest to power the device. Will the groundbreaking surgery help him to manage his severe OCD? Initial signs are promising.

  • A Debilitating Condition: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    A Debilitating Condition

    2m 13s

    For 8 years, Matthew Rosenberg has dealt with a debilitating form of OCD. He hyperventilates throughout the day and is in near-constant pain. having tried numerous therapies and medicines with no results, his last hope is the high-tech surgery he’s waiting for, where electrodes will be transplanted into his brain.

  • Episode 4 Preview: New Frontiers: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Episode 4 Preview: New Frontiers

    32s

    A look at today’s most cutting-edge treatments, based on the latest scientific understanding of the biological underpinnings of mental illness, with profiles of patients undergoing a variety of vanguard treatments. These include Deep Brain Stimulation surgery, modern electro-convulsive therapy, and MDMA-assisted therapy, also known as ecstasy or molly to treat PTSD.

Schedule

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