Brick by Brick

Send us Fan Mail You tell someone what's happening to you. And somewhere in that process, the way you're telling it becomes the problem. This episode is about borderline personality disorder. Not the neuroscience side of things, we're doing something different this time. We're looking at a critical discourse analysis, basically a deep dive into how the language of this diagnosi...

Send us Fan Mail Anxiety doesn’t always look the same.  This episode is a direct follow-up to our last anxiety episode. The paper is from Ohi, Fujikane, Takai, Kuramitsu, Muto, Sugiyama, and Shioiri, Clinical Features and Genetic Mechanisms of Anxiety, Fear, and Avoidance, published in Molecular Psychiatry in 2025. This episode covers how the five recognised anxiety disorders can be regrouped into...

Send us Fan Mail Your heart starts racing before anything has actually happened. No fire. No threat. But your body is already responding like something is. This episode is about anxiety disorders, the most common category of mental illness in the world. We're working from Penninx, Pine, Holmes, and Reif, Anxiety Disorders, published in The Lancet in 2021. This episode covers what actually sep...

Send us Fan Mail Most people hear the word ADHD and picture one thing. A kid who can't sit still. That picture is true, bu it's also about a tenth of what this condition actually is. This episode goes into the neurobiology, what's actually happening in the brain when someone has ADHD. The chemistry, the structures, the networks, and what the research says we can do about it. We&apos...

Send us Fan Mail I'm not a clinician.  I'm someone who believes good research deserves a wider audience.  Here's my story.  New episode out now!!! Link in bio.

Send us Fan Mail Most conversations about ADHD start and end with children. But for a significant number of people, ADHD doesn't stop at eighteen. It follows them into adulthood, quietly reshaping relationships, careers, and the story they tell about who they are, usually without a name for what they're experiencing. In this episode, we break down Wender, Wolf, and Wasserstein's fou...

Send us Fan Mail Most people do some version of masking. Most people call it "Reading the room." But for many people, particularly those with autism, masking isn't a social skill. It's a survival strategy that starts in childhood, runs on autopilot for decades, and costs far more than anyone on the outside can see. In this episode, we break down Miller et al.'s 2021 paper...

Send us Fan Mail Last episode, we covered the research on maladaptive daydreaming, the cycle, and the mechanics. This week, we bring in someone who has been living it for 32 years. Our interviewee has a background in psychology and a lived experience of maladaptive daydreaming that started at age two. In this conversation, we talk about what it actually looks like from the inside, why "just s...

Send us Fan Mail Have you ever spent hours somewhere that doesn't exist, with people who aren't real, feeling things that are completely genuine? And then come back, and had no idea how to explain any of it to anyone? This episode is about maladaptive daydreaming. Not regular mind-wandering. The kind where people spend four or more hours a day in a vivid internal world, hide it from ever...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we go deeper than behavior and deeper than brain structure. We're heading into the engine room, the cellular and chemical systems that researchers believe are central to understanding why the brain in autism develops and functions the way it does. We look at three systems. The brain's primary chemical messenger and what happens when its calibration is of...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we go inside the brain itself, using a building as our guide. We talk about what early altered brain development actually means at the cellular level, and why the blueprint gets drawn differently before anyone notices.  Why the structures most responsible for threat detection and emotional memory are built larger in childhood, and what happens to them after that. ...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we walk through autism research one stop at a time, using an airport as our guide.  We talk about what autism actually is and why it looks so different in every person. Why we diagnose something biological by watching behavior, and what that process gets wrong. What the genetics actually tell us and what they don't. Everything that travels alongside autism th...