Episodes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Cecilia's Story
2m 34s
Cecilia McGough has struggled with hallucinations since she was a little kid. Growing up in a religious community she hid what she was going through, fearing it was some kind of punishment. Even as a young adult, while making a name for herself in astrophysics, she couldn't escape the stigma of her illness, even in mental health settings.
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A PTSD Diagnosis
3m 29s
Until recently, very little was known about PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). With new technologies, such as brain imaging, scientists have begun to search for trauma's biological fingerprints, and it's become clear that experience can produce physical changes in us. Advances in the biology of the disease, and in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, are helping many patients to cope with their PTSD.
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My OCD World
2m 25s
Ginny Fuchs discovered boxing in college. She is now an Olympic boxer and rates in the top three in the world. Though she has the self-control to spar eight rounds, hit the bag for six rounds, and do a 30-minute run, she can't clean a countertop and wash her hands in less than two hours, due to her OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). She is working to understand why.
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Who's Normal?
1m 30s
What is mental illness and who is normal? Definitions of these have been defined differently over the centuries, but the boundary between illness and sickness remains very fluid. There are no biological tests to diagnose mental illness, so societies decide what constitutes behavioral and social norms, and where the lines of deviance exist.
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Ginny Fuchs & OCD
4m 15s
Watch a clip in which Olympic boxer Ginny Fuchs shares a bit of what it's like to live with OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) an illness characterized by anxiety, repetitive unwanted thoughts and compulsive behaviors. Diagnosed with the illness as a sixth-grader, Ginny hid her OCD for years in fear of being judged. Her OCD, unfortunately, has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Psychiatry and Homosexuality
4m 13s
In the U.S., as recently as the early 1970's, homosexuals were considered mentally ill. Watch this clip, in which a board-certified psychiatrist, 'Dr. Anonymous', at a 1972 American Psychiatric Association conference, announces "I'm a homosexual, I am a psychiatrist." See how, over the decades, and as defined by the APA, the boundaries shifted between the so-called ill and the so-called healthy.
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Hysteria
3m 59s
How do the beliefs of the day shape the understanding of mental illness? This clip explores how biases, have formed the basis of many mental health diagnoses. Until late into the 20th century, for example, hysteria was a diagnosis given to any woman who didn't fit the archetypal female stereotype.
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Episode 2 Preview: Who's Normal?
31s
Episode 2 traces the dramatic fight in the second half of the 20th century to develop mental illness standards rooted in empirical science rather than dogma, including the evolution of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Meet Ryan Mains, who struggles with PTSD, Mia Yamamoto, California’s first openly transgender lawyer, and Michael Walrond who lives with his own depressive disorder.
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Schizophrenia and Stigma
3m 14s
Treating Schizophrenia early in a person's illness can increase the chances of success. Like many suffering from hallucinations, however, Cecilia McGough found that the stigma around her illness made it very difficult to talk about. After an incident put her in a psych ward for ten days, Cecilia gathered up the courage to open up about her illness using social media as a platform.
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Episode 1 Preview: Evil Or Illness
2m 25s
For much of history, people living with schizophrenia, or many other illnesses, would have been seen as either a prophet or a devil. Episode 1 explores ancient conceptions of mental illness and the establishment of psychiatry with the rise of Sigmund Freud. This preview shows an Olympic boxer struggling with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
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Ryan Mains & PTSD
2m 29s
Army Veteran Ryan Mains has struggled to accept his diagnosis of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), because of the stereotypes and the stigma that he saw as being associated with mental illness. But having been a medic on the front lines in Iraq, he had seen things that haunted him, and his every life became increasingly difficult as intrusive thoughts began to alter his behavior.
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