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ReThreading Madness

ReThreading Madness

Auteur(s): 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 Hygiène et mode de vie sain Psychologie Psychologie et santé mentale
Épisodes
  • Unmasked: Autism, Burnout, and the Daughter the System Failed

    Unmasked: Autism, Burnout, and the Daughter the System Failed
    Aug 4 2026
    Unmasked: Autism, Burnout, and the Daughter the System Failed

    Samia McCall came to advocacy the hard way. A former attorney and law professor, she spent thirty years cycling through mental health diagnoses, medications, and therapists, none of which helped, because none of them were looking for the right thing. She is autistic. So was her daughter Masa. Masa died by suicide in November 2023, six months after a suicide attempt that the system met with judgment, a prison-like inpatient stay, and Prozac, a medication with known suicide risk in young people.

    This conversation does not stay at the level of grief, though grief is present throughout. Samia is precise and methodical about what went wrong and why. She walks through how autism presents differently in girls and women, how masking from an early age leads to autistic burnout that gets misread as depression, and why the treatments prescribed for depression can actively make autistic burnout worse. She explains the well-documented link between autism and suicide that her own therapist dismissed when Samia brought her the peer-reviewed research, suggesting instead that the researchers needed to do a better job of disseminating their findings.

    The systemic failures she names are specific. Twice-exceptional children, gifted and disabled, fall through the gap between gifted programming and special education with neither side catching them. CBT does not work for autistic people and can cause harm. SSRIs are contraindicated for many autistic people, a fact handed out like routine information nowhere. Autistic burnout requires the removal of demands, deep rest, and sensory reduction, not more engagement, not more exposure, not a safety plan on a clipboard.

    Masa was brilliant, empathetic, and deeply connected to the natural world. She was also an undiagnosed autistic girl in a system that never once looked for autism in her, and when Samia found the research herself and brought it forward, she was told she was wrong. By the time a diagnosis came, Masa had had years of masking, years of shame, and a nervous system that had been in chronic overload for most of her life. What the medical model offered her was inadequate, punishing, and in at least one case actively harmful.

    Samia is clear that Masa did not make a choice. Her brain shut down from pain. This is a conversation about what that means, and about what needs to change so other children do not fall through the same gaps.

    Samia McCall is a writer, advocate, and spiritual guide who lost her daughter Mesa to suicide after years of misdiagnosis and failed mental health interventions. A late-diagnosed autistic woman herself, she co-founded SEEN, a visibility movement of mothers whose children died by suicide while actively seeking help from the mental health system. She brings a former attorney's precision and a mother's grief to the fight for a world that accommodates autistic people rather than trying to fix them.

    Music by Shari Ulrich

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    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 h
  • Writing Through It: Indigenous Voices, Trauma, and the Art of Telling Without Breaking

    Writing Through It: Indigenous Voices, Trauma, and the Art of Telling Without Breaking
    Jul 20 2026
    Writing Through It: Indigenous Voices, Trauma, and the Art of Telling Without Breaking

    This episode brings together two writers whose work does something precise and difficult: it tells the truth about trauma without weaponizing it, reaches into the hardest parts of lived experience and finds a way to hand something back to the reader.Wanda John-Kehewin, Cree writer and poet from Kehewin Cree Nation, talks about what drove her from the edge of the world in northern Alberta to the coast of BC, a pregnant woman running toward the only future she could imagine for her child. She traces the arc of her writing through depression, through grief, through a master of fine arts at UBC, through the moment she learned what intergenerational trauma actually was and finally had words for what her family had been carrying. She talks about the matrilineal line with precision and depth: the biological reality that daughters carry their grandmothers' eggs, that trauma travels not only through behavior and coping but through the body itself. Her poetry, she explains, was never a direct confession. It was a way to tell the story sideways, to infer what she was not yet ready to say aloud, to let readers in only as far as they were willing to go. Her children's book Mia Wears Orange came out of a moment she was carrying privately, her daughter terrified she was about to be sent to residential school, and a chance conversation with an editor who recognized that the story needed to exist in the world. The residential schools did not end, Wanda and Bernadine agree. They became the Sixties Scoop. They became Child and Family Services. The fear that the system can take your children is not historical. It is present tense.Sandra Yuen, artist, advocate, and writer, is releasing her first prose poetry collection, I Want to be Buried Standing Up, written on a friend's old Remington typewriter during a period of profound transition. She reads from the collection live, a poem called Shaving Cream that starts with a man lathering his torso and ends somewhere near God and oysters. She talks about what it means to write into the neurodivergent mind, to follow the poem where it insists on going, and to find out who you are in the process of making something. This is her fourth book. Her first was a memoir about her experience with schizophrenia.Two writers. Two very different paths into language. One conversation about what it costs and what it gives back to tell the truth.

    Music by Shari Ulrich


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    1 h
  • Title: Pulling the Canoe to Shore: Healing, Mad Movements, and the Stories That Set Us Free

    Title: Pulling the Canoe to Shore: Healing, Mad Movements, and the Stories That Set Us Free
    Jul 20 2026
    Title: Pulling the Canoe to Shore: Healing, Mad Movements, and the Stories That Set Us Free
    This episode brings together two very different voices connected by a single thread: what it means to reclaim your own story when the world has tried to define you.Randy Tate, Indigenous artist and healer from the Nisga'a and Gitxsan territories, shares the storytelling he offered at a Connection Salon Mad Pride event. At the centre of it is a teaching he carries everywhere: the canoe metaphor. When the river fills with debris and your canoe fills with tears, the elder's instruction is not to fight harder but to pull to shore, make a fire, eat, drink water, talk about your pain, and rest for however long it takes. Randy traces that teaching through 22 years of sobriety, through the intergenerational trauma of residential school that shaped his father, through the scars he saw on his father's back as a child without yet having words for what they meant, and through the ceremonies, cold showers, morning prayers, and art practice that make up his daily healing life. He talks about the inner child, the safety pin he carries to remind him of his grandmother's hands, the daughter he lost, and the life he did not expect to have but is grateful for.Matthew Jackman, international mad activist and doctoral researcher at the University of Sydney, is mapping something larger: the global mad movements, plural, that have grown from lived experience of psychiatric harm and collective resistance to it. His research interviews 44 people across a wide range of cultural and structural contexts, centering the global majority and global south, where the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is a primary tool for fighting institutionalization, forced treatment, and the dehumanization that follows the label of madness. He walks through what the movements share across their differences: Sanism, rights violations, and the permission that dehumanization grants to do harm in the name of treatment. He also names what divides them, the tension between reform and abolition, between consumer identity and survivor identity and mad identity, each carrying different relationships to the system and different visions of what change looks like.Bernadine connects both conversations to why Rethreading Madness exists at all: to break the gatekeeping that kept mental health consumers from talking to each other, from accessing information that wasn't filtered through the industry that was supposed to be serving them.

    Music by Sherry Ulrich, Tom O'Dell, and Fearless Soul


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    www.rethreadingmadness.ca
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    1 h
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