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Is madness breakdown or initiation into a spiritual calling? Crazywise is a new documentary film that explores the meaning of psychosis from the perspective of traditional cultures and shamanism, following the stories of people struggling with extreme ...

Do bipolar and psychosis have a healing potential blocked by suppression, medications, and avoidance? What if we could help people safely and intentionally explore, express, and understand these frightening states? Can breathwork ceremonies open the doors of perception like psychedelics — but without the drugs or risks?

After taking the psychedelic drug ayahuasca, Elisabeth went into an extended altered state diagnosed as psychotic. Her terrifying ordeal ignited a spiritual initiation that eventually brought gifts of awakening, insight, and compassion.

What does healthcare become when science is limited by a mechanistic, machine view of reality? How does a mechanistic view shape concepts of mental health and illness – and deny the fundamental aliveness of human beings? What does the study of living systems teach us for creating a different, more holistic vision?

How can seeing visions and hearing voices be transformed into a spiritual gift for healing? What does the initiation ordeal into becoming a shaman involve? Gogo Ekhaya Esima was diagnosed with psychosis and confined in psychiatric hospitals before she became an initiated Sangoma healer in the Zulu tradition of South Africa.

How a ski accident gave a practical philosopher the insight to liberate his own self worth from the judgments of others and to discover his own career path.

I recap the major themes that arise in  the guest interviews and share my perspective on how these themes can help us solve personal, professional, and broader collective challenges.

How can people come off psychiatric medications in the safest way? What are the key lessons and vital ingredients for leaving psychiatric care? Is there life after meds? Laura Delano spent 14 years as a psychiatric patient before she left behind her psychiatric diagnoses and reclaimed herself. Today she is Director of the Inner Compass Initiative and The Withdrawal Project, working to support drug withdrawal and build community beyond the mental health system.

What’s it like to be a teenager in a psychiatric hospital? What is it like to be a queer pregnant teenager? Is it true that friends do make the best medicine? Nina Packebush explores these questions and more in her groundbreaking debut young adult novel: Girls Like Me.

In this episode, we explore how the tendency to attach our personal value to our businesses or professions can push us to overwork ourselves, the body's incredible creative ways to bring itself back into a state of balance and safety, and how trauma works itself both through the body and through our relationships.

Does a diet without animal products improve mental health? Why can changing to plant based nutrition be so hard to sustain? And are people's food ethics a symptom of an eating disorder and neglected self-care?

Joshua Haynes - How growing up in a world of constant change inspired an innovative business and commitment to equality. 

How a mysterious debilitating illness created a human foundation for breakthrough conversations in research and innovation.

Breaking the cycle of secrecy and shame: How his own mental health recovery process helped a consulting firm partner understand his past and bring his whole self to work.

Olga Runciman, voice hearer, psychiatric nurse in locked wards, and survivor of a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, brings her experience with recovery to her work as a psychotherapist in private practice.

Has modern psychiatry lost its soul? How can dreams, storytelling, and imagination help people in emotional crisis – including psychosis and madness? What lessons can we learn from shamanism, the placebo effect, and the importance of the doctor’s “bedside manner’? George Mecouch MD, psychiatrist, Jungian therapist, and author of While Psychiatry Slept: Reawakening the Imagination in Therapy, discusses how to recover the lost art of healing in an era dominated by technology.

Based on more than 10 years work in the peer support movement,The Icarus Project and Freedom Center’s 52-page guide is used internationally by individuals, families, professionals, and organizations to support reducing and coming off psychiatric drugs.

Voice hearers, mystics, visionaries, and mad people are found throughout the scriptures of Judaism. What does Jewish theology have to teach us about madness and psychiatric diagnosis?

Do early psychosis programs serve healing – or function as surveillance and control? Are treatments for paranoia actually themselves forms of paranoia, based on scientific racism and white supremacy?

An interview with Michael Guy Thompson, a psychoanalyst and founder of the Gnosis Retreat Center, who worked with R.D. Laing in London and has created hospital alternative sanctuaries for people struggling with experiences called psychosis.

What do depression, loss, frustration, and conflict have to do with global transformation? You can find the answers in this introduction episode to the Break Down. Wake Up podcast

How experiencing both an abortion and motherhood inspired an approach to activism that transcends ideological divisions.

How a period of chaos and blackouts brought an international trainer to his own vulnerability and nudged him to stop doing everything on his own.

How his own madness inspired Matt Ball, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, to cultivate human connection, community and meaning in the mental healthcare system.

How a surprising solution to surgical complications helped a business director process her grief and embrace a new calling to help others heal themselves.