72 - Why do we cry?

We’re back after an unexpected break with a classic Two Shrinks question, why do we cry?

Why is it that something painful, emotional or even joyful makes us tear up? How does it help us communicate, share with others, process how we feel? We’ll talk through why music makes us cry, what babies expect to happen when they cry, who cries in therapy and when it helps. To wrap up, we finish with the all important play behaviours of octopuses/octopi/octopodes and some research into whether little Albert actually became scared of white rabbits.

Join us next time for an episode on laughter.

If you need to take the time for a good cryve (cry while driving), let us set the mood we have a Cryving playlist up on Spotify.

Songs to Cryve to (Spotify playlist) :https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2qBqylXVS9QddK5gDR1wwF?si=75bdb78ec9c74dcc

Crying Research:

• Feeling Like Crying When Listening to Music: Exploring Musical and Contextual Features

• Young Infants Expect an Unfamiliar Adult to Comfort a Crying Baby: Evidence from a Standard Violation-of-Expectation Task and a Novel Infant-Triggered-Video Task

• Patient Crying in Psychotherapy: Who Cries and Why?

• Patients’ Crying Experiences in Psychotherapy and Relationship with Working Alliance, Therapeutic Change and Attachment Styles

• When and for Whom does Crying Improve Mood? A Daily Diary Study of 1004 Crying Episodes

TWCA:

• When Do Octopuses Play? Effects of Repeated Testing, Object Type, Age, and Food Deprivation on Object Play in Octopus Vulgaris

• Did Little Albert Actually Acquire a Conditioned Fear of Furry Animals? What the Film Evidence Tells us

Music featured in the episode:

Ave Maria - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_5bYNqpEFU
Beethoven’s 9th symphony - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdWyYn0E4Ys
Skinny love - Bon Iver
On my own - Samantha Banks
O children - Nick Cave
It’s quiet uptown from Hamilton
Someone great - LCD Soundsystem
Somewhere over the rainbow - Israel Kamakawiwo’ole

Thanks to listeners for contributing their songs - the playlist above includes all of our favourites.

70 - Therapy with the Breakfast Club

The Breakfast club - five teenagers in detention, each struggling and assuming everyone else has their life together. But what would happen if they were referred for therapy instead?

Join us for a Two Shrinks look at Claire, Bender, Principal Vernon, Allison, Andy & Brian as we talk through how we’d make sense of these characters and what they’d need in the therapy room.

The Molly Ringwald article we reference can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/what-about-the-breakfast-club-molly-ringwald-metoo-john-hughes-pretty-in-pink

58 - Mental health issues during COVID-19: ADHD, OCD, PTSD, Depression, Eating Disorders, Substance Use, Family Issues

Feeling like your mental health is suffering during COVID-19? Finding that your attention is worse, you’ve started restricting your eating again or are having more compulsions? Then this episode is for you.

We chat about first steps to getting back on track when symptoms flare up during COVID including: ADHD, OCD, depression, eating disorders and PTSD/trauma. We also brainstorm ways of dealing with family conflict, drug and alcohol use, and parental guilt.

To wrap things up, we finish with what we’ll miss about lockdown and when we knew we’d been in lockdown a little too long.

Resources mentioned in the show:

• Two shrinks pod COVID page: www.twoshrinkspod.com/coping-with-covid

• Bessel van der Kolk & trauma during COVID: https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/blog/how-we-can-nurture-our-mental-health-during-the-covid-19-pandemic

• Dr Karen Treisman resource page (for people of all ages, links to ways to manage your mental health & trauma responses to COVID): http://www.safehandsthinkingminds.co.uk/covid-anxiety-stress-resources-links/

• Free online CBT programs:

  • https://moodgym.com.au/

  • https://mindspot.org.au/

  • https://thiswayup.org.au/how-we-can-help/courses/
    (free during COVID-19)

03 - Identity & How it Changes in Relation to a Psychological Disorder (Schizophrenia, PTSD)

03 - On this pod we discuss identity and how it changes when someone develops schizophrenia or when they are traumatised and develops Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. We talk about the ways identity can change and how this can be related to symptoms/outcome. We have a pretty in-depth discussion that should be of interest to anyone who knows someone with schizophrenia or who has been traumatised, or if you have worked with anyone experiencing these problems. We finish up with our segment 'things we came across'. 

The sound levels are a little off in this one - we got a second mic and in the excitement of setting it up we didn't adjust the levels properly. 

Article Links:

Trauma and identity

Schizophrenia and identity

Amputee envy

Espionage and psychopathology