Bipolar She with Janine Noel

At age thirty-two, Tara Cousineau, PhD, had it all. But when a mysterious illness disrupted her life, her doctors blamed it on stress. Knowing something else was at play she searched until she discovered a pinched nerve that was indeed a physical ailment, but also exacerbated by stress. Looking inward and discovering her own perfectionistic tendencies, Tara knew she wanted to help high achievers p...

Kris Rice, founder of The ChillPod , joins me to share her transformative journey with deliberate cold exposure. Growing up with a grandmother who battled bipolar disorder and later supporting her daughter through mental health challenges, Kris developed a deep appreciation for wellness practices. While meditation and yoga provided benefits, they demanded significant time commitments she couldn&ap...

What happens when you receive a life-changing mental health diagnosis at 50 years old? For Matty Staudt--broadcast veteran, podcast pioneer, and current co-host of Alice Radio’s Sarah & Vinnie Show--it explained a lifetime of highs and lows.    Matty was an anxious kid, but he assumed everyone experienced anxiety to the same extent. As an adult, he was treated for ADHD and also for depression...

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month (existing since 1949!!), I sit down with Ava to talk about how to talk to friends and relatives about mental illness. Ava has had her own mental health journey, particularly with her father who witnessed a genocide at age six. With signs of a soul in agony, she has yet to engage him in a conversation about his mental health and deep pain. When it comes to...

Today I sat down with Amy Vincze of Soar With Tapping and had an enlightening and somewhat controversial conversation. Amy, a certified Emotional Freedom Release (EFT) practitioner or "tapping coach," holds a strong belief that depression doesn't just appear out of nowhere—it's often the result of our earliest experiences and the vital emotions we've pushed away to survive...

Today I continue my conversation with Dr. Susan Swick. Dr. Swick explains the dialogic method of therapy, developed in Finland for schizophrenia patients, which brings family and community into treatment sessions to improve outcomes through enhanced connection and understanding. Finland's application of this approach led to lower hospitalization rates and better medication compliance. Now the...

Today I sit down for a two-part episode with Dr. Susan Swick. Dr. Swick, a psychiatrist specializing in child and adolescent health, first shares her personal connection to mental illness through her mother's late-onset psychotic illness. For Dr. Swick, getting her mother good care shaped her approach to youth mental health and her development of programs at the Ohana Center in Monterey, Cali...

Today I sit down with Kathleen Adams, a pioneer in therapeutic writing since 1985, who has transformed our understanding of how putting pen to paper can change our brains and improve our mental and physical health. As founder of both the Therapeutic Writing Institute and the Center for Journal Therapy, Kay shares her expertise and innovative journaling techniques. Kay provides an alternate to what...

Have you ever thought about your mental health journey and wondered if it needed to get as bad as it did? As Bipolar She celebrates its 1-year anniversary, I sit down with writer/actor JD to reflect on the podcast. We chat about how I am often reminded I have bipolar illness because I get little glimmers of mania and psychosis and how the world can just feel “off.” Even a strict regimen of medicat...

Have you tried meditation, and it really wasn’t your thing? Are you ever overwhelmed with negative or depressing thoughts? Or maybe you can’t see your life changing for the better because you have old perceptions of yourself stuck in your head? With story as your superpower, you can learn to positively project new futures, and perhaps this future even includes less medication for those with depres...

As an actor who started out on Broadway and now calls LA home, JD has survived the sting of rejection. But it was real life that recently delivered the sharpest of blows when his infatuation for a woman in a Zoom class led to unrequited love. When she wanted to "just be friends," JD's heart was broken, he was wounded, and even his neighbors would hear him in the throws of despair. B...

Dan wasn’t just a grumpy teenager who refused to get out of bed—by his early teens (and even younger) he was severely depressed with suicidal ideation at times. Today, at age forty, he can sum up his chronic depression as a constant battle in his life. The other constant has been his music. A singer-songwriter, now with the artist-persona, Conner Eko, he was accepted to Berklee College of Music at...

Ava and I continue our conversation on the now infamous healer, John of God. In 2008, in a small Brazilian town, I stood before him waiting to know if I would have surgery. He did not perform his crude practices on me (eyeball scraping--with a butter knife, forceps up the nose, slicing open bodies to remove tumors), but he did grant me the title of "medium," suggesting I had the gift of...

Today we take a detour from our examination of mental illness, and instead look at the impact of chronic physical illness on our lives. I've had Crohn's disease for more than twenty years. Physical illness is so often intertwined with one's mental health. And my severe case of Crohn's left me running scared and desperate to avoid a disfiguring surgery. Dr. Ava, a physician and...

Her first binge felt like a trance. Normally uninterested in her family’s boring snack drawer, Dr. Regina Lazarovich had been restricting her food and her body took over while she ate everything in sight. Then Regina’s shame set in. Although she was desperate and sought help for her eating disorder during her twenties, she white-knuckled her way through more restriction and binging for a decade. R...

After enduring a childhood overshadowed by emotional absence and the need to constantly please others, Amy Vincze felt like she no longer knew who she was. From panic attacks to perceived failures in her life, Amy needed to do something fast. Already using tapping for therapy, Amy discovered if she looked at the root cause of her emotions, she made transformative progress, and, in just a few weeks...

In our first episode of Bipolar She Raw, we hear Madelynn's story about her psychiatrist who made sexual advances towards her. She was confused because she knew he cared for her, and perhaps he was just getting old, with a few screws coming loose. But as his behavior became increasingly predatory, she found help through her therapist to remove herself from harm's way. But Madelynn's...

Today I sit down with Deirdre, my first guest whose parent had mental illness. Her mom, Minnie, managed bipolar disorder and Deirdre grew up fast. By age 6 she had been exposed to her mother’s suicide attempt. Later, when Deirdre asked her mom why she would want to leave her daughter, Minnie told her she was in a deep, dark hole with no visible way out. Life became chaotic for Deirdre as she was s...

Today, I sit down with Susan. After a near-death experience at age thirteen, Susan had a new view on life and death. Death was no longer something to fear, and Susan wasn't afraid to push life to its limits. In her teenage years, she learned the ritual of binging and purging and by college she was stuck in a pattern of bulimia and indulgent sexual encounters. The more food and sex, the more a...

It's 2004. An election year. Republican incumbent George W. Bush vs. John Kerry, Democratic nominee. I'm in a psych ward on November 2, with the right to vote. But when all I can think about is good vs. evil, casting a ballot turns into despair.      In this episode, I chat with guest host, Sephe, about delusion and cognitive distortion, as well as the redemptive power of human connectio...

Today, I sit down with Madelynn to talk about major depression, which she's battled since high school--nearly 40 years. Madelynn doesn't hold back when discussing suicidal ideation during the pandemic and how difficult it is to live through ideation in an anxious body or to handle a body that just feels flat and void of any emotions. But Madelynn's now equipped with a plan to catch...

Today I sit down with Tracy to learn about her struggle with anxiety and how it seemed to crop up at milestone birthdays. A self-described nervous child and lifelong "nervous wreck," Tracy didn't know what anxiety was until she turned thirty--a birthday that forced her to take a look at where her life was headed. Tracy made it through until age forty when her anxiety intensified. Sh...

Today is an unexpected, full-circle, episode and I am thrilled. We didn't plan on this, but when Sarah learned her sister Ava had shared her journey as Sarah's caregiver, Sarah, decided to share her side  of the experience as a recipient of Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT). Sarah, now advocate of ECT, came on this week's podcast to let us know first-hand about ECT being a lifesaving...

Today I speak with Ava about her sister, Sarah, and her struggle to find the right treatment for Sarah's bipolar disorder. Ava and Sarah are both successful physicians, and Sarah's behavior did not present with any symptoms of illness her entire life. But when Sarah is diagnosed in her mid-forties, her impressive life and career is disrupted by treatment resistant bipolar illness and she...

Today I talk with Graham Wiseman, as he shares the story of his son Colin, who lost his battle with anxiety, ADHD, and depression at age fifteen when he died by suicide. Graham speaks about grief and the different ways he and his wife have moved through the grieving process. Together, they have focused on a singular purpose--to advocate for change in youth mental health in schools and beyond. Thro...