You can listen to every mental health podcast going and still find yourself losing it about shoes on a Tuesday morning. Knowing the information and actually doing something with it turn out to be two very different skills. Therapist Marie Vakakis sits down with Sana Qadar, host of the ABC’s All in the Mind, to talk about what actually sticks after five years of interviewing some of the best minds in psychology and neuroscience. Sana isn’t a therapist or a psychologist. She’s a journalist who has absorbed more mental health content than most of us ever will, and she’s honest about the bits that changed how she lives and the bits that went in one ear and out the other. They talk about the parenting advice that reshaped her mornings within a week, the therapy language that’s become so common it’s lost its meaning, and why nearly every story about the brain ends up being a story about relationships. This episode covers: How mental health language has shifted over the last five years, and where words like trauma and ADHD get stretched past what they actually mean The one parenting change Sana made the same week she recorded an interview, and why it worked when nothing else had The difference between relying on willpower and changing the system around you How to be discerning about who you take advice from online, and what qualifications really tell you Why relationships sit underneath almost every mental health story, even the ones that look like they’re about the brain What Sana says makes her hard to live with, and the bid for connection she’d been missing Why knowing the information and doing something with it are two very different things marievakakis.com.au askmarie@marievakakis.com.au
