The Taproot Podcast

Grammy-winning songwriter and artist Sebastian Kole (aka Pynk Beard) joins Joel Blackstock on the Discover Heal Grow podcast to unpack the intersections of Southern heritage, creative deconstruction, and finding authentic human connection in a digital world. From the pews of his parents' church in Birmingham, Alabama, to the national stage, Pynk Beard's journey is a masterclass in artistic evoluti...

Listen to the music featured on the podcast here. American psychiatry has built a sociological armor around itself that protects it from reform. The armor has two parts. Reverence and complexity. Together they form the most effective institutional defense system in American professional life. And the apparatus, in 2026, has evolved its most refined defensive move yet, the DSM-6 roadmap, which abso...

Episode 8: The AI Therapist, the Generational Wound, and the Real Medicine Listen to the music featured on the podcast here. The American mental health workforce is on track to be displaced by AI within ten years—and the psychiatric establishment isn't fighting it. They are welcoming it. Backed by venture capital and smoothed by insurance endorsements, AI therapy platforms are the ultimate fulfill...

If you have ever felt like a failure because the "evidence-based" protocol didn't fix you, or if you are a clinician feeling the crushing weight of a system that rewards compliance over competence—this episode is your validation. The wall is hollow. The science has become science-flavored capitalism. But the real work is still happening in the cracks of the system, in the rooms where two human bei...

  Listen to the music featured on the podcast here. In July 1979, Jimmy Carter went to Camp David for ten days and came back with the strangest speech a sitting American president has ever given. Officially it was about energy. Functionally it was about the soul. Eighteen months later, Ronald Reagan won forty-four states by promising the opposite, and American psychology received its marching orde...

Listen to the music featured on the podcast here.   In Episode 5 of Psychotherapy on the Couch, the host explores a profound and unsettling premise: psychosis, paranoia, and conspiracy theories are not random malfunctions of the brain. Rather, they are the language our culture uses to express its unprocessed, collective trauma. From the animistic voices of the early 1900s to the algorithmic parano...

  Listen to the music featured on the podcast here. In 1960, two Harvard professors took psilocybin and accidentally broke the boundaries of American psychology. What happened next is the story of a road not taken. In Episode 4 of Psychotherapy on the Couch, Joel Blackstock explores the wild, lost era of the 1960s and 70s—a brief window when the psychological establishment dared to investigate the...

Listen to the music featured on the podcast here.   In Part 3, we look at the strange psychological reality of post-World War II America. The new suburban "American Dream" offered unprecedented material wealth, but it also delivered crushing isolation, atomization, and the constant, buzzing terror of nuclear annihilation. Instead of addressing the structural failures of this new lifestyle, the med...

Listen to the music featured on the podcast here. When the Great Depression wiped out the myth of the rugged, self-made American hero, the country was left with a massive psychological void. Right on cue, Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis arrived in the U.S. with refugees fleeing Europe. Freud famously warned that he was bringing America a "plague," but America didn't catch it. Instead, we domesticat...

Listen to the music featured on the podcast here. Why do we treat our minds like broken machines? In The Psychohistory of American Psychology traces the birth of modern American psychology back to its dark, industrial roots. Before therapy, Americans processed suffering through community, religion, and the union hall. Then came the stopwatch and the assembly line. This isn't a story about healing;...

In this episode, I’m thrilled to share a very special preview with you all! I recently had a short story published in The Running Wild Anthology Number One, a fantastic collection of unique and captivating tales. Tune in as I read an exclusive excerpt from my story. If you enjoy this sneak peek and want to find out what happens next—as well as discover a whole bunch of other amazing short stories...

How do you know the blue you see is the same blue I see? We use the same word, but do we share the same experience? This ancient philosophical puzzle has become the defining crisis of our time. We're living through a moment where people use identical words and mean completely different things—where the same sentence can be a factual claim, a tribal signal, a joke, and a weapon simultaneously. In t...

"We built institutions that were supposed to reflect reality. But the windows became mirrors." In the second century, the Gnostics believed our world was a false reality created by a confused lesser god known as the Demiurge. Today, we are trapped in a modern equivalent: a labyrinth of metrics, models, and algorithms that dictate our lives while entirely missing our humanity. In Part 7 of The Mirr...

Are we navigating reality, or just a highly optimized map of the past? In this episode, we dive into the architecture of our modern ghost story. We explore how the digital systems built to reflect our world have instead consumed it, replacing human experience with statistical prediction, algorithmic herding, and mechanical objectivity. Drawing on a wide synthesis of philosophy, media theory, and h...

Tania's advanced training program which is starting on February 25th:   https://deepmindpt.com/deep-mind-mastery   In this episode, I’m joined by Tania Kalkidis for a deep, evidence-based conversation on the growing gap between research, academic psychology, and real-world clinical practice — with a sharp focus on the DSM and its role in modern mental health care. Together, we unpack the challenge...

More @ https://gettherapybirmingham.com/   Why does modern mental health care often feel like a bureaucratic ritual rather than a healing encounter? In Part 5 of The Absence of Idols, we explore how psychiatry emptied the temple of meaning and replaced it with a checklist. We begin with the ancient dream of Addudûri and the terror of an empty temple, using it as a map to understand our current cri...

https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-dark-reflection-adam-curtiss-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/   Why is the most therapy-literate generation in history also the most depressed? This episode traces the hidden history connecting Cold War game theory, a 1964 pop psychology bestseller, and the mental health crisis devastating Gen Z. The thread starts with John Nash—the schizophrenic m...

Can Therapists Start a Union? The Antitrust Trap, the Shadow Committee, and the Economic Strangulation of American Psychotherapy Analyzing America’s Healthcare Regulations and Their Effect on Us: Why the Law Prevents Therapists from Organizing While Allowing a Private Committee to Fix Prices for the Entire Medical System https://gettherapybirmingham.com/can-therapists-start-a-union-spoiler-alert-t...

https://gettherapybirmingham.com/what-is-a-diagnosis-anyway-is-the-dsm-dying-part-2/ The Archaeology of a Label: What We Forgot About Diagnosis and Why It Matters Now The book that decides if you're sane was written by the military to process soldiers. The committees that define your mental illness hold "typewriter parties" where they shout symptoms until someone wins. And the federal government d...

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Is the DSM Dead? The "Bible" of Psychiatry, The Thud Experiment, and The Crisis of Diagnosis Episode Description: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/is-the-dsm-dying-rethinking-suffering/ It dictates every diagnosis you receive, every medication you’re prescribed, and every insurance dollar spent on your mental health. But what if the "Bible of Psychiatry" isn’t actually scientific? Pull back the cu...

The Story Science Forgot: Why Psychotherapy Needs Narrative More Than Ever by  Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S  | Dec 15, 2025 |  0 comments Joseph Campbell is arguably one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. If you have watched a Marvel movie or read a modern fantasy novel or sat in a screenwriter’s workshop you have encountered his fingerprints. George Luc...

Join Joel Blackstock for an extraordinary conversation with Dr. Steven Vazquez, the inventor of Emotional Transformation Therapy (ETT), as he reveals the 25-year scientific journey that led to one of the most innovative breakthroughs in trauma treatment. From skeptical experimentation to treating cancer with eye movements, discover how specific wavelengths of light directly impact the brain's emot...

https://mjdenis.com/whoismjdenis Join Joel Blackstock as he sits down with MJ Denis, LPC, LMFT, and certified ETT trainer from Austin, Texas, for an eye-opening conversation about Emotional Transformation Therapy (ETT) - a groundbreaking approach that integrates light, color, and neuroscience to transform emotional healing. Read the blog article: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/from-skepticism-to...

In this eye-opening episode of the Discover Heal Grow podcast, host Joel Blackstock sits down with healthcare policy expert Timothy Faust to demystify America's complex healthcare system. They explore how Medicaid expansion actually saves states money, why cutting healthcare funding costs more in the long run, and the real economics behind healthcare policy. Key topics covered: The business case f...