BASKET
CASE
Where do you go when your own thoughts are unsafe? Basket Case is an immersive, narrative series from iHeart Radio & Molten Heart. With a mix of intimate conversations and original reporting, NK and guests reveal how our brains distort reality.
“beautiful and lyrical” - Maria Garcia, Futuro Studios
“...unlike any mental health podcast I’ve listened to before…accomplished partially through an amazing soundscape, which NK uses to recreate other ways of experiencing the world.” - Lauren Passell, Lifehacker
“an art house podcast” - Danielle Firoozi, visual artist
EPISODES
Rachel tells NK about the pain of her perfectionism, then NK talks to somatics practitioner B. Stepp and artist Yumi Sakugawa about rewriting internal narratives of shame and punishment.
After Tina’s dad died, she was devastated. But was her grief “disordered”?
Samara puts her trust in psychiatry to fix her.
If depression isn't caused by a chemical imbalance, why does everyone think it is?
Bertranna’s autism makes her obsessed with finding the Truth about neurodiversity.
Masking is a coping strategy, a way that neurodivergent people (especially autistic people) learn to fit into neurotypical society, with uneven success. But like many coping strategies, masking can do more harm than good in the long run – and the act of unmasking is a small act of resistance against conformity. In this episode NK talks with Dr. Devon Price, author of Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity.
For Maryam, anorexia was a way to disappear. But outside the institutions meant to cure eating disorders, she learns to resist the binary of recovery or death.
In the stories about Borderline Personality Disorder that Mala was familiar with, a borderline woman was always toxic – intense, erratic, angry, manipulative. And she was almost always the villain in someone else’s story. But no one ever talked about the *source* of the intense emotion – what was at the heart of it.
When Sal moved from California to a small town in the Pacific Northwest, they didn't know anyone. The solitude didn’t bother them…at first. But after their attempts at making new friends left them feeling confused, then rejected, then frustrated, their solitude turned into loneliness.
NK attends a workshop on divesting from people pleasing & begins to unravel a lifetime of grief and rage.
Western science gives us names for the things that we know – the things that we can see and feel and touch. But it’s always been skeptical of the things we can’t measure. This skepticism dates back to Europeans’ first contact with indigenous cultures in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and the unfamiliar medicine that they found there. Today in the west, those healing modalities are often still characterized as “alternative.” Dr. Carmen Amezcua says western psychiatry doesn’t get to the root of our issues. And that ceremony is how we connect with ourselves, with nature, with our pasts, and with each other.