THE LATEST CRAZE: A Forensic Analysis of Pop Culture

Beauty can be a dangerous thing. That’s the message coming through loud and clear in Ryan Murphy’s recent series “The Beauty,” streaming on FX. Never one to be subtle, Mr. Murphy’s story takes a twisted look at how people’s pursuit of physical perfection can be taken to the extreme. Even as a rollicking work of fiction, “The Beauty” tackles many relevant cultural issues and certainly encourages so...

Good science fiction has always been a reflection of the cultural moment we live in, depicting the fantasies and possibilities of our collective future. Recently, we’ve witnessed the birth of a new sci-fi microgenre, in which the future is directed inward, hewing much closer to our current world, but with much more psychological and philosophical questions at it’s core. In this episode, we’ll disc...

Blame is tricky. It can be a tool of justice. It can be a weapon. All too often, blame transforms victims into perpetrators, further exacerbating tragedies and increasing the blast radius of damage. In this episode, Dr. Karen and Josh analyze Peacock’s 2025 episodic series All Her Fault , a child abduction thriller that effectively uses blame as a vehicle to develop the story and it’s characters,...

Therapy gets intimate. It has to be, in order to work. Therefore, the doctor-patient relationship is uniquely dependent on trust, honesty, and discretion. There are rules and guidelines therapists must follow to ensure a professional relationship, and to protect both parties from harm. But, as we all know, those rules are sometime broken, and sometimes harmful consequences come as a result. In thi...

Pop culture is full of psychopaths. Countless stories have featured (sometimes) real, (often) fictional, (mostly) men or (the occasional) women who do the unthinkable to their victims… and we eat it up. The third installment of Ryan Murphy’s Monster series, now out on Netflix, Monster: The Ed Gein Story , is a biopic (with some creative license) of the O.G. American psychotic murderer Ed Gein , wh...

The Amanda Knox story is one for the ages. Charged with murder while studying abroad in Italy, she fought for years in Italian courts to prove her innocence while locked up in prison after being found guilty on circumstantial and contrived evidence. Her story illustrates an extreme example of bias, both in the media and in the courts, which played an outsized role in her court proceedings and subs...

According to the burgeoning field of relationship science, every individual behaves in one of three ways when in a relationship. Which category you fall into is a reflection of your attachment style. In this episode, we’ll talk about adult attachment styles as illustrated in “Too Much,” Lena Dunham’s latest Netflix series. It’s a quality show, with rich characterizations of each type served in a s...

ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, has become a very treatable condition thanks to medications like Adderall. Adderall has been widely prescribed and available for several years, until the pandemic triggered a series of conditions that led to a shortage of the drug’s availability, which remains the case even today. In the HBO Max series “And Just Like That,” our favorite Sex and th...

In the early 2000’s, innovations in DNA sequencing technology enabled “shotgun metagenomics,” which involves sequencing random DNA fragments from environmental samples. The result was a new, powerful set of tools for exploring the granular and highly complex world of the gut microbiome. This relatively new science is providing deep insights into how the foods we eat can have major effects on our m...

To be human is to need attention. But in 2025, attention itself has become a commodity, a cultural force, and a valuable resource driving capitalism and shaping our lives. In this episode of The Latest Craze, we’ll unpack what attention means today, how it affects our everyday lives, and question if it’s something we need to become more aware of in order to mitigate it’s possible effects on societ...

The new series we will be discussing shares the name of our topic of conversation today. And what a series it is! This one gets a three thumbs up! Adolescence is an incredibly acted and directed short series on Netflix that demonstrates the complexities of social media influences surrounding young people. It’s a gripping take on an all-too-real scenario, and we highly recommend watching. And we ha...

Change can be tough, and these days, we’re all dealing with a hefty dose of it. In this episode, we’ll talk about the challenges of living through change, and get into some of the particulars around what kind of changes are happening in the media and information landscape. People often turn to trusted sources of truth to help avoid and assuage the anxieties that often come with the unknown, but wh...

Formerly known as "Munchhausen Syndrome,” Factitious Disorder is the name of a particularly tricky condition in which people believe they are sick, and use their fictitious illness for personal benefit. In the case of the two real-world characters featured in “Apple Cider Vinegar” (Netflix) and “Scamanda,” (ABC/Hulu) we’ll see how sometimes those suffering from this condition leverage it with mali...

The meaning, understanding, and power of creativity is vast. As humans we all share the capability to be creative, and we’ve learned that practicing creativity can be therapeutic. In this episode we’ll discuss a fascinating story depicted in the Greg Kwedar’s film Sing Sing (2024, Apple TV) which demonstrates the power of creativity as a transformative process for a group of inmates at a maximum s...

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a condition all too many people are familiar with. In this first episode of Season 2, we'll learn more about how severe traumatic events, like the real-life tragic wildfires being experienced in California as we speak, can have lasting psychological effects on different people. No Good Deed is a new series on Netflix which does a good job of demonstrating P...

To wrap up our first season of The Latest Craze (how exciting!) we're finishing up with an in-depth discussion about dissociation. There's much to unravel here, and plenty of films and characters going back generations demonstrate the evolution of what was once called "split personality," now formally referred to as "Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)." Dr. Karen will get technical on this one,...

In life, and especially in the times we now live in, it's clear there can be two (or more!) sides to every story. How different people percieve the same experience can be similar, or wildly different. In everyday life, relationships, or a court of law, this seems to be a universal truth - and perhaps one of the most compelling reasons we enjoy storytelling. When applied to storytelling, this devic...

Forensic analysis isn't limited to psychology. To demonstrate that, we're going to change it up in this episode and talk more deeply about how filmakers, directors and cinematographers can leverage their craft to bring characters and stories to life.  Leaning on decades of experience as a filmmaker, Josh will walk us through a deep dive into the outstanding cinematography of the new series Ripley...

Psychopathy is the fancy word for all things psychopath-related! In this fun episode, we'll discuss a few psychopathic characters from the recent series YOU (Netflix) , Tell Me Lies (Hulu) , and a little from the classic series Dexter (Netflix) . Always fun to dig into the worst of the worst when it comes to characters and try and understand what makes them tick, and why we sometimes love to hate...

In this episode we're going to take a moment to talk spooky stuff! It's Halloween, so Dr. Karen is going to introduce a couple concepts and tropes that are common in the Horror genre, and tell us a little more about some of the research she's been working on for her Forensic Psychiatry practice, as well as some nifty extra-curricular pursuits. Links of interest: American Academy of Psychiatry and...

In Part 2 of our Addiction episodes we'll focus in on the tragedy of Matthew Perry's journey with addiction, which recently ended with his unfortunate passing from an overdose after decades of grappling with substance abuse. Dr. Karen and Josh will discuss many aspects of his battle as depicted in his recent memoir, "Friends, Lover, and the Big Terrible Thing" which he wrote shortly before his dea...

In our first episode discussing addiction, we start big. Like, really big. Dr. Karen and Josh will talk about the opioid epidemic that's victimized our country and so many communities and individuals across the US.  It all started with a diabolical effort by the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma to launch and push their "timed release" opioid drug OxyContin. As depicted in the Hulu series  Dopesick...

Gaslighting has become part of the cultural lexicon in recent years. But what does it mean, and where does the term come from? Dr. Karen and Josh will unpack this insidious behavior and lean on the Starz series "Gaslit" to help illustrate how destructive and harmful gaslighting can be.   Music by ROSSER This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get acces...

It's a David and Goliath dynamic when organizations, institutions, even industries deny victims their rights. Whether through bias, gaslighting, or outright deception, victims of institutional betrayal can suffer repeated traumas beyond the incident in which they were first victimized. In this episode, we'll discuss several aspects of institutional betrayal, and use the Netflix docuseries "Simon B...

Of course, there's so much narcissism to talk about we needed two episodes to do it! In this chapter, Dr. Karen and Josh continue discussing narcissism but focus this time on how it's expressed and experienced through female characters. Using the characters of Anna Delvey (Sorokin) and Elizabeth Holmes , from the hit shows "Inventing Anna" on Netflix and "The Dropout" on Hulu , we'll take a deep d...