Shrinking America

Send us Fan Mail  In this episode we finally broach religion, new age spirituality, and what we affectionately came to call woo-woo. This title actually encapsulates the difficulty in defining the spectrum of spirituality well, and may also indicate the discomfort around whether it’s okay for medical doctors to be talking about crystals and astrology. We then explore the long and varied history of...

Send us Fan Mail We’re here to talk about death guys. It’s a concept we often shy away from — except this time of year when we commodify it for play (and profit). We take it to the extreme (and here in Florida we literally buy tickets at amusement parks to expose ourselves to the most gruesome aspects of it) but usually without genuine full contemplation of it — so this theme-parkification is also...

Send us Fan Mail When you hear the word shadow, what comes to mind? Darkness, perhaps. Mystery, hiding, or even fear.  For Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and one of the most influential minds in the history of our field, shadow meant something like this, but it was personal. He saw the shadow as the parts of ourselves we try to hide away and refuse to accept, often because we've been told to...

Send us Fan Mail Narcissism seems to be having quite a moment in American culture these days, although one might argue it's always been a part of our so-called "rugged individualism." And yet, it seems you can't even attend a Sunday brunch without hearing the term smeared on almost every dating story. And then there's everything from movies like Mean Girls and You're...

Send us Fan Mail Several influences seemed to coalesce to lead us to creating this episode on the Hero’s Journey. There was the release of The Odyssey, which has grossed $1.4 billion worldwide, arguing there’s something in our collective psyche still drawing us to this original blueprint for the Epic. It also seemed like a natural follow-on from our last episode on Aggression, where we recognized...

Send us Fan Mail Aggression rose to the top of our early episode list without us fully knowing why — maybe because, as psychiatrists, we see it almost everywhere. In its many forms, it's something we humans tend to deny, push aside, or bury deep — until it explodes, or quietly controls us. So why does aggression matter, in America, in 2026? Most of us can point to reasons — from school shooti...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome, Shrinking America community, to the community episode! We had a running joke that we would just keep mentioning the community episode without ever actually recording it. And then we quickly realized this was a bit of a metaphor. It's much easier to talk about wanting more community, but the real work of building it can be just that…work. In this episode we try to use...

Send us Fan Mail For our first real "topic" episode, we decided to start with the American Dream. Maybe we chose it because we thought it’d be a hopeful topic and we want this podcast to be hopeful. But we also quickly got to the dark underbelly of the subject and that also just feels real for our times. But let’s back up and begin with a question.  What is the American Dream? It’s a phr...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to episode 2 of Shrinking America. This episode is a continuation of our first episode — where we really asked ourselves what we’re doing here. Now that we’ve asked some important defining questions we’re trying to figure out how to walk our talk. Literally.  We talked a lot last time about how we’re using our training to ask important questions to deepen understanding. We...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Shrinking America…this time, for real. This episode, recorded in January before any of our other content, dives into a conversation about what got us going on a podcast, who we are as individuals, friends, psychiatrists and as Americans, and demonstrates a bit of how conversation flows so often in long-term therapy. The distillation? Kyle captures it with “seeking to un...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Episode 0.125. It’s an impromptu addition to our prequel series, where we decided to turn the psychiatric lens on ourselves. We noticed in our text thread we were all having interesting reactions about finally putting our work out into the world, and the only logical next step was to put ourselves on the couch and let the shrinking begin. This process brought up some in...

Send us Fan Mail We've been chipping away at this podcast for a while — balancing our collective perfectionism with a "good enough" energy, finding time in chaotic millennial midlife to meet, laugh, and record together on an almost weekly basis. When Artemis II launched, we couldn't help ourselves. Turns out when your co-hosts include a former military pilot, a Navy flight surg...

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