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ReThreading Madness

ReThreading Madness

By: Bernadine Fox
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Bernadine Fox brings a rare and powerful combination of lived experience, long-term disability rights advocacy, and creative insight to her role as host and producer of ReThreading Madness, the award-winning radio show and podcast that dares to shift how we think about mental health.

A recipient of the 2022 Courage to Come Back Award, Bernadine is a white settler of Scottish, Irish, and French heritage with a familial connection to the Tsuut'ina nation. She has spent over 30 years advocating for those with lived experience of mental health challenges including survivors of trauma and therapy harm. She is an intersectional feminist, artist, and author of Coming to Voice: Surviving an Abusive Therapist—a memoir that confronts the devastating misuse of power in therapeutic relationships.

Bernadine is not a clinician, but she is a deeply informed mental health advocate with firsthand knowledge of trauma, CPTSD, and disability. Her background includes decades of work as a support worker for survivors of severe childhood trauma, a trauma consultant, and public speaker. She has led expressive arts groups in collaboration with Richmond Mental Health and Gallery Gachet, where she also served on the board and helped publish The Ear magazine. She has served on the board of such organizations as Kickstart (Disability Arts and Culture) which focused on breaking down barriers to creative access for people with disabilities.

What sets Bernadine apart as a radio host is her unwavering commitment to telling the truth—even when it's uncomfortable. She doesn't shy away from difficult conversations; she invites them. With compassion and clarity, she brings forward voices that are often silenced, challenges harmful narratives, and explores the messy realities of mental health, trauma, and recovery.

ReThreading Madness is more than a show. Under Bernadine's guidance, it's a platform for unfiltered, survivor-centered dialogue—one that refuses to pathologize trauma and instead builds community through shared truth. RTM won the Breaking Barriers CRABO award through the NCRA.

Bernadine currently lives in the forest with two cats, raises her grandchild, and continues to create, speak, and advocate for a world where mental health care is ethical, accessible, and just.
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ReThreading Madness is produced with the support of Vancouver Coop Radio CFRO 100.FM on the ancestral and unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. We extend our gratitude and appreciation to the Indigenous people who have been living and working on this land from time immemorial.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support.Bernadine Fox Hygiene & Healthy Living Psychology Psychology & Mental Health
Episodes
  • They Sent Her Home Five Times: Aaisha Alvi on Postpartum Psychosis and the Lindsay Clancy Case

    They Sent Her Home Five Times: Aaisha Alvi on Postpartum Psychosis and the Lindsay Clancy Case
    Sep 1 2026
    They Sent Her Home Five Times: Aaisha Alvi on Postpartum Psychosis and the Lindsay Clancy Case

    This episode was recorded on August 30, 2026, the day the jury was still deliberating in the Lindsay Clancy trial. Clancy is the Massachusetts mother whose defense argues she was experiencing postpartum psychosis when she killed her three young children in 2023. That case is the backdrop for this conversation. Aaisha Alvi's story is very similar to Clancy’s except in her case, after many attempts to get help, a psychiatrists finally heard her desperate pleas.

    Aaisha is a postpartum psychosis survivor, awareness advocate, and author of A Mom Like That: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis. She experienced postpartum psychosis twice: once after the birth of her daughter, and once after a miscarriage at fourteen weeks. Both times she sought help. Both times, repeatedly, she was dismissed. Both of these occurrences are not included in the statistics gathered to determine the prevalence of PPP.

    The first episode resolved on its own after four months, during which Aaisha believed her family intended to harm her daughter, that her daughter was an adult pretending to be a baby, and that her husband had plans to abuse the child. She was taken to the doctor twice during this time and sent home both times with no screening and no diagnosis. She only understood what had happened to her years later, after writing her book.

    The second episode was worse. She returned to her doctor five times as her symptoms escalated from depression through intrusive thoughts to command hallucinations directing her to harm strangers on the street and to throw herself into traffic. She told doctors she was hearing voices. She told them she was being compelled to do evil things. She asked to be hospitalized. She was sent home each time, told she was grieving, told she appeared to be coping well, told she was having a panic attack. It was only when a perinatal psychiatrist spent ninety minutes with her, took a full case history, and involved her husband that she was finally recognized as psychotic and given the right medication. She stabilized within a week and a half.

    The conversation covers the full picture: what postpartum psychosis actually is, how it differs from postpartum depression, why the hallucinations and delusions feel completely real to the person experiencing them, why calling it rare is inaccurate and dangerous, why being disturbed by your thoughts does not mean you are safe, and what the Lindsay Clancy case reveals about how thoroughly the medical system fails women in psychotic crisis. Aaisha is precise, generous, and unflinching. This is essential listening for anyone who has given birth, loves someone who has, or works anywhere near perinatal care.

    Find Aaisha at @AaishaAlviWrites on social media and her memoir A Mom Like That at most book retailers and libraries.

    Music by Shari Ulrich and Edith Wallace



    Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support.

    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 hr
  • Language Lives in My Wounds: the Politics of Vulnerability

    Language Lives in My Wounds: the Politics of Vulnerability
    Aug 23 2026
    Language Lives in My Wounds: Personality Disorders, Structural Violence, and the Politics of Vulnerability

    Ahana Mulgaonker is an independent scholar and writer based in Austin, Texas, who writes outside the margins of academia on a blog called Tenderly Borderline. This is the first time she has spoken publicly about her work, and it is a conversation worth hearing closely. Her essay, The Politics of Vulnerability, argues that borderline personality “disorder” and other personality “disorder” diagnoses are not descriptions of individual pathology but political acts. They function, she argues, to absorb and erase the evidence of structural violence, redirecting attention from the systems that wound people toward the people who carry those wounds. She calls this PD phobia: not simply discrimination against people with these diagnoses, but a broader social fear and disgust directed at visible woundedness itself, a way of absolving society of ethical responsibility by blaming those it has harmed. Ahana traces this through her own experience: immigrant displacement, upper caste Indian family dynamics, childhood abuse, heterosexism, and ableism. The diagnosis did not explain what happened to her but instead covered the tracks of it. The conversation moves through several ideas that RTM listeners will want to sit with. Reification, borrowed from Marxist theory, describes how the complex histories and power relations that produce a person's distress get erased and displaced onto individual personality traits, just as the sweatshop disappears into the price tag of an iPhone. ‘Childism’, an emerging framework, names the oppression of children as the foundation of all other oppressions, with PD phobia functioning as its continuation into adulthood, protecting adult authority by diagnosing away the evidence of what that authority does to children. And emotional regulation, the clinical standard used to measure whether someone is managing their distress appropriately, she reframes as a demand that the hurt conform to the same system that caused it. She also introduces what she is developing as anti-sanity theory: an extension of anti-psychiatry that interrogates not just psychiatry but the broader social norms of sanity itself, and the ways sanity naturalizes the status quo while casting resistance to it as disorder. Bernadine connects all of this to the lived reality RTM listeners know: that society's response to distress is to silence it, medicate it, and seclude it, and that asking someone to behave as if they have not been harmed is its own form of harm. This is a conversation that keeps opening up the more you sit with it.

    Find Ahana at tenderlyborderline.substack.com and on Instagram and Bluesky at @antisanitygirl.

    Music by Shari Ulrich ad Omar Rudberg

    Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support.

    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 hr
  • You Are Not Broken: Reclaiming Yourself After Trauma with Jenna Rae McWatters

    You Are Not Broken: Reclaiming Yourself After Trauma with Jenna Rae McWatters
    Aug 12 2026
    You Are Not Broken: Reclaiming Yourself After Trauma with Jenna Rae McWatters

    Trigger warning: this episode talks about experiences around human trafficking and child exploitation

    What happens when a child grows up surrounded by violence, sexual abuse and instability—and later has to untangle what survival taught her about love, sex, relationships and herself? In this deeply personal conversation, Australian survivor and advocate Jenna Rae McWatters speaks openly about being trafficked as a teenager, the grooming that made exploitation feel normal, and the complicated ways childhood trauma continued to shape her life. She talks about hypersexuality, shame, dissociation and the difficulty of recognizing yourself as a victim when you have spent years believing you were simply making your own choices.

    But this conversation isn't simply about what happened to Jenna. It is about what happened after and the process of reclaiming the parts of herself that had been pushed into the shadows. Jenna describes learning to reconnect with her body through somatic work, developing self-compassion, and refusing the expectation that survivors must become perfectly “healed” before they are allowed to live fully. She challenges the shame attached to the word victim, speaks about the hostility she encounters online when she tells her story, and explores why survivors need permission to be complicated, imperfect and fully human.

    Jenna is also developing Inner World Mechanics, a framework designed to explore the relationship between mind and body and help people understand their own inner processes with greater compassion. At the heart of her work is a simple but powerful idea: we don't have to spend our lives chasing some imagined state of perfect healing. We can learn to meet ourselves where we are and discover that the parts of us we once considered shameful may have something important to teach us.

    Music by Shari Ulrich and Tom Odell


    Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/rethreading-madness--5675300/support.

    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr
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