I'm with Crazy: A Love Story

Award-winning filmmaker Julie DellaRipa discusses  Another Saturday , growing up with a mother battling depression, becoming a caregiver far too young, and how storytelling helps us heal the children we once were. 

Madness To Magic ⁠⁠ brings to listeners stories of real world encounters with what we all experience and yet feel shamed to keep silent. Embracing ALL of us is key to tapping into our own power to make all things possible. This episode of my podcast is with Diane Bell who is probably best known for her work in film as a Sundance award-winning screenwriter + director as well as the author of the be...

Madness To Magic ⁠ brings to listeners stories of real world encounters with what we all experience and yet feel shamed to keep silent. Embracing ALL of us is key to tapping into our own power to make all things possible. This episode of my podcast is with transformational entrepreneur of The Support System and The Prosper Network Sheri Salata. As the last Executive Producer of The Oprah Show, She...

World Mental Health Day on October 10 with its theme of "Make mental health for all a global priority" couldn't be more appropriate during these times when mental health in the family and mental health as a society is suffering more than ever. Having been raised by a mom diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and then having a younger sister also diagnosed with the same mental illness gave me first...

On Friday, October 8, 2021, multi-award winning filmmaker Uga Carlini's fiction feature "Angeliena" premieres on Netflix. It's a story about self-love and being 'good enough' and having dreams and caring for one another. It has characters you'll hiss at and the ones you'll cheer on. THIS is the kind of story - the madness to magic - that I love. It was an honor and such great fun to chat with Uga...

On Thursday, September 1, 2021, the book, "Blueprint for a Book: Build Your Novel from the Inside Out" by Jennie Nash publishes. What a treat it was to chat with Jennie who has been my book coach and mentor for years and who has been instrumental in my own books getting written and published. Jennie Nash is the founder and CEO of Author Accelerator, a company that's "on a mission to raise the bar...

On Tuesday, April 6, 2021, I joined in as a guest on one of SiriusXM’s radio programs. DOCTOR RADIO included a segment on caregiving for mental illness, and its host Dr. Michael Aronoff interviewed me. Dr. Aronoff MD is Attending Psychiatrist on the Senior Staff of Lenox Hill Hospital and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Medical Center. He's served the American Psychiatric Association for o...

Warning: This episode is a bit of a RANT. It’s my own melting pot of everything from feeling enraged, sadness, disgust, hysterical: So many feelings swirling within me – Madness within due to the madness of our circumstances. . We’ve always been a screwed up society. Humans are flawed. But we seem to have come to a point that we’ve embraced a notion that we can only change ourselves – which I beli...

This podcast is with someone I'm blessed to call my friend: Thom Brodeur. He's a self-made man, he's a caregiver, he's an entrepreneur who has risen to the ranks of corporate CEO and now is head of his own beauty and fashion empire. He is both "Beauty Boss" and "Mister Congeniality" and he is a prime example of someone who has always gotten it done and taken care of everyone else in the process, e...

The very thing I preach about in this podcast - CAREGIVING - is the very thing I wasn’t doing -- for myself. It's why I said "fuck it" to posting a Christmas episode: I just needed a time out. Something's been a bit "off" for a while with me. I only just realized what it was; hence, the reason for this episode. With all that's going on in the world, this time I find myself talking about dealing wi...

This episode of my podcast is so fitting for Thanksgiving week. My crazy soul sister Sylvia, one of my dearest firends, shares her story of having grown up in a dysfunctional family, surrounded by madness, and the syncronicities and commonalitles and plain old divine intervention that has come into play throughout her life. This really is about loving crazy and giving thanks for both the madness a...

This episode so speaks to Mental Illness Awareness Week. I interview Patty, a soul sister, who, like me, has experienced three different versions of mental illness: Her mom, her sister, and herself. Patty and I talk about mental illness stigma and shame and family dysfunction. We also get very personal with stories of our own bunny holes and what it really means to be resilient and selfish. We sha...

Wow. This podcast – with me interviewing my beloved shrink (licensed professional clinical counselor Lynn Drost) whom I had seen for well over a decade – had me BOTH tongue-tied and unable to stop talking! This woman saved my life. The fear I had in spilling my secrets to her were two-fold: To do so meant to me that I, too, was “nuts” or had the mental illness genes; and I thought I was supposed t...

Today's podcast is with "Wonder Woman" Joanna Westerholm Linkchorst. Joanna is the spirit behind the effort toward saving Rockhaven Sanitarium. Rockhaven is a place that was built in 1923 by a woman RN named Agnes Richards who found a better way to care for women with mild mental & nervous issues. Joanna, as founding member and president of the Friends of Rockhaven, has embodied the legends from t...

“Sometimes people with the issue don’t know they have the issue, so how are you supposed to get somebody help who doesn’t think they need it?” - Great insight from Jeanne, the daughter in this mother-daughter special episode of my podcast. Jenny, her mom, is one of my first friends in life. We met back in grammar school. We've seen one another at our best and at our worst. This single mom and rece...

This one’s all about a caregiver of crazy who is for me the single greatest male influence in my life - my Papà – Antonino Milana. Today’s the anniversary of his death - 29 years ago. I can’t believe he’s been gone that long. I was only 24 when he died unexpectedly. Not a day goes by that I don't think of him and all the life lessons he gave to me. Who has been your greatest influence? -----------...

Hello again! Thanks for joining me. With this being Mother’s Day, today’s podcast is all about moms. Or at least my mom. Mother’s Day is hard for me. The fact that it falls in the very same time frame as Mental Health Awareness month makes it even harder. Anne Lamott one of my favorite authors said it best in an article she once wrote, sharing her reasons on why she hates Mother’s Day. She wrote:...

Yup. Today is, indeed, National Siblings Day. We're supposed to be honoring our brothers and sisters on this day. I'm paying homage to mine with this podcast. Sort of. Those of you who have siblings might understand why. Thanks for listening! And let me know if you have a story to tell and would like to share here. A storyteller at heart who built a career in writing, media & marketing, Paolina Mi...

Thanks for coming back to hear part 2 of my conversation with my brother Ross. Today’s podcast is a continuation of the last episode. It’s been enlightening for me – and it’s dawned on me that this is really the first time my brother and I – NOT being in the thick of madness with our mom or our little sister – have actually sat down as siblings to chat about our experiences – those shared and thos...

"...It’s a whole different world…." My brother Rosario is definitely right. I listen back to some of these stories and think WOW what we were going thru and hiding from the world…? And then I think WOW what must you listeners be thinking? LOL While there’s much more to this podcast – so much more than I thought I’d break it up into two episodes – I’m pausing this first part to comment on a few thi...

I hadn’t planned on doing a podcast on this particular topic – that of sexual predators and sex abuse -- and for some of you, you may wonder what this has to do with mental illness and caregiving, and to that I’ll give a simple answer – A LOT. Having just watched for the second time the HBO Documentary “LEAVING NEVERLAND” - something I encourage everyone to do - it brought back for me the very sam...

Funny how things change…sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. And whether or not we see that change as “better” or “worse” has everything to do with whether or not we’re even aware of the change AND how much we ourselves have actually changed – for better or worse. A storyteller at heart who built a career in writing, media & marketing, Paolina Milana is grateful for the magic AND the madness...

A phone call came 5 years ago today announcing the unexpected end of my little sister’s life and of my own life as I had known it to be up until that point… A phone call with a childhood friend I hadn’t spoken to, let alone thought about in at least a decade, connected the past with the present… A phone call from some wrong number or from nobody at all – or so it would seem – opened my eyes to som...

New Year's Revelations. Remembering the day my human GPS lost his way home...and realizing: We all lose our way. We all feel worthless. We all feel guilty. We all fall apart. We all are surrounded at times by madness. Finding the magic in those moments…embracing them…realizing that they are exactly what we need, exactly when we need them IS how we learn to love the journey and to stop being focuse...

Every Christmas, I can’t help but think of the irony. After all, both schizophrenia and the holidays involve retreat into a world of bizarre delusions: Santa Claus, flying reindeer, little elves, a virgin birth, angelic voices, Christmas miracles, peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men, and on and on. During this time of year, millions of people suspend logic and, in part, believe in the unbelievable. It...