Back from the Abyss: Psychiatry in Stories | Psychotherapy, Trauma, and Psychedelics
Back from the Abyss will change the way you think about psychiatric illness. Instead of dwelling on diagnoses and treatment theories, you hear patients tell their stories of how they fell into darkness-- and how they found their way back. It's intimate, psychologically rich, medically interesting, sometimes heartbreaking, often irreverent, and ultimately hopeful. Join psychiatrist Dr. Craig Heacock as he hosts this deep dive into powerfully moving stories of hope and healing, as well as topical explorations of psychopharmacology, psychotherapy, and psychedelics.
Episodes
In this season 8 opener Rosy shares both her experience recovering from bipolar disorder and the heartbreak of watching her beloved son begin to show signs of an even more extreme form of bipolar disorder called schizoaffective disorder. This is a story in parallel, two lives deeply intertwined, yet also slowly tearing apart as her son’s illness became increasingly severe.
Elemental Psychedelics
In this second of two parts, Laura Mae Northrup shares stories of how she found a healing path through connection, therapy, and psychedelics.
Laura Mae Northrup
https://www.lauramaenorthrup.com/
Elemental Psychedelics
https://www.elementalpsychedelics.com/
Explore every episode through themes, domains, formats, and speakers.
The BFTA CODEX is a listener-built and curated field guide to the podcast.
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This is the first of a two part summer special with Laura Mae Northrup, who was first featured in the original BFTA summer special back in 2022. In this first episode, in an excerpt from her wonderful podcast called Inside Eyes, we hear Laura describe her long and grueling battle with suicidality, which emerged as a result of childhood sexual abuse. In the second episode in two weeks, Laura and Dr. H dive deep into her personal hea...
After seven years and so many powerful stories, Craig announces a tectonic shift in the BFTA plates.
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Closing song-- "Come and go" by Timber Choir
Bringing Therapy into Med Management-- An intensive workshop for psych NPs and PAs, June 3-6 2026 in Ft Collins
https://www.craigheacockmd.com/bringing-therapy-into-med-management/
"I Love You, I Hate You, Are You My Mom?" ...
Amidst a long catalog of previous BFTA stories featuring complex or developmental PTSD, today’s story is one of classic DSM-style PTSD, it’s a story of both medical and parenting trauma, of facing the fear of annihilation and death.
In this three part story, first we hear Tracy tell of the increasingly severe medical challenges of her children, then Tracy flashes back to describe her own terrifying emergency ...
In this solo episode Dr. H shares his thoughts on the unexpected risks of feeling too much positive energy and/or identification with a patient. This talk is also a sneak preview into the workshop that Dr. H teaches with Dr. Hillary McBride called "I Love You I Hate You...Are You My Mom?'
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Bringing Therapy into Med Management-- An intensive workshop for psych NPs a...
Today’s story is one of genetic predisposition, environmental triggers, and finally a psychiatric flame thrower. Whitney’s uncle had a particularly severe form of bipolar disorder and she too began to develop mood instability and depression as an adolescent. When we think of environmental triggers for mania, we tend to think of sleep deprivation, substances, and the postpartum period. And through her 20s and 30s, ...
The US has a major suicide problem, around 50,000 people every year, and 60% of these suicides are gun suicides. The number one risk factor for completed suicide is not depression or anxiety or addiction….it’s access to means, and it turns out that it’s actually not that easy to impulsively kill yourself, unless you have ready access to a gun.
We are finally starting to talk about ways to keep guns out of th...
Today’s story explores how we love, how we grieve, and how we eventually find some sort of equilibrium thereafter. This episode is a heartbreaking, yet beautiful story by Colorado-based somatic therapist Darci Meyers about her journey through multiple losses, grief, and ongoing recovery.
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Darci Meyers
Bringing Therapy into Med Management--...
Kari reconnected with her birth mother in her 40s and finally began to understand the suffering for which she had no words. This is a story of adoption and reunification, of forgetting and remembering, of finding a truth without words in the wisdom of the body. Kari’s birth mother was able to see something deep in Kari that she had never had words for….and thus began her path toward healing.
Support the show! ...
Kate started her addiction journey at a young age, using substances as a salve for her terrible grief. Later, drugs and alcohol helped her to cope with the transition to nursing and the unending demands of a hospital setting. But as with all addicts, this strategy worked until it didn’t….Kate eventually had to find a new way to cope if she was going to survive past her 30s.
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Dr. H dives deep into a patient's scary, confusing, and ill-advised list of psych meds to illustrate some deeper truths and lessons about psychopharmacology and the med management model of psychiatry.
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Bringing Therapy into Med Management-- An intensive workshop for psych NPs and PAs, June 3-6 2026 in Ft Collins
https://www.craigheacockmd.com/bringing-therapy-into-med-man...
Dr. H sits down with Dr. Elizabeth Fenstermacher, Medical Director of the TMS Clinic at the University of Colorado- Anschutz to explore the growing role of TMS and neuromodulation in psychiatry. They explore questions such as:
•How should we think about TMS vs ketamine in the treatment of depression? Trauma? OCD?
•Who are the best candidates for TMS?
•What are the relative merits of intensive TMS (SAINT) vs standard protoc...
There is a growing awareness in psychiatry that not all psychiatric illness is psychiatric— some percentage of what presents in psychiatric settings is actually triggered by autoimmune responses to various pathogens and insults. In the late '90s a syndrome called PANDAS (pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with strep) came on the scene with cases of sudden onset OCD and tics that appeared in conju...
Psychotherapy can often get stuck in a there and then storytelling mode....how do we shift the therapeutic encounter into the immediacy of the Here and Now? Here Dr. H shares 10 questions which shine a spotlight on what's happening (and not happening!) between therapist and patient.
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Bringing Therapy into Med Management-- An intensive workshop for psych NPs a...
Dr. H sits down with Jade Miller, a peer support specialist and advocate for public education about DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). In the first part of this episode, Jade shares her story and how she came to understand that the puzzling gaps and often frightening incongruities in her life were caused by her rotating through a number of dissociated identities or alters, initially protecting her… but eventually leaving ...
BFTA storyteller Frank shares the joy, confusion, chaos, utter fear, and deepest gratitude when he and his partner Brad adopted and raised two boys, ages 4 and 2, from the foster care system. Twenty years ago, when Frank adopted the boys, trauma was not in the public awareness as it is today, and he was told that these little boys, who had spent some time in a meth house, might well have some challenges…..but he never could ...
Rachael, a trauma therapist and today's storyteller, describes how her early childhood abuse was buried by the protective mechanism of dissociative amnesia. As Rachael wrote to Dr. H, “The only way I could continue to live, with no way out, with no one to tell, with no words even to describe what was happening to me, was to forget what was happening to me….when our minds forget, our bodies remember.”
Rachael...
This story is a mirror to Elizabeth’s story from season 1 episode 1. Today’s storyteller Sarah was so moved by Elizabeth’s story that it helped her to trust Dr. H's recommendation to take a pretty scary medication, the extremely powerful antipsychotic and mood stabilizer called clozapine.
So why tell this story again? As they say, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does often rhyme, and Sarah’s...
In today’s story we explore what it’s like to be on the autistic spectrum, and more specifically, how a later life diagnosis can totally change the way you view the world and yourself. Aurelie, our storyteller today, was an autism expert, a clinical psychologist who had trained with some of the premier autism experts in the country…yet she didn’t discover her own autism until she was 40 years old.&nbs...
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