324. Ignorance Was Bliss: Unraveling the Psychiatric Puzzle: Kate Wallinga

Welcome back to another episode of Better Call Daddy! Today, we have a powerful and deeply personal story that explores themes of obsession, trauma, mental health, and the complexities of family dynamics. In this episode with Kate Wallinga, our speaker takes us on a journey through her experience as a psychologist, a parent, and a grieving individual. We delve into her encounters with a patient who stalked their professor, the challenges of diagnosing and dealing with manipulative behavior, and the weighty decision to cut off ties with their own mother. We also explore the importance of support systems, the impact of negative experiences on personal growth, and the difficult process of grieving a loved one who died by suicide. Get ready for a raw and thought-provoking conversation as we dive deep into the complexities of human relationships, personal struggles, and finding strength in the face of adversity. So, grab your headphones and get ready for Better Call Daddy: The Safe Space for Controversy.

Kate Wallinga is the host of Ignorance Was Bliss podcast. This is a podcast about how we become who we are — about making just about anything sound normal, from PTSD to podcasting to serial murder. It’s about people’s stories. Are you sure you really want to know?

Kate spent her entire professional life in the fields of mental health and criminal justice. Her favorite, hardest and most important work was specifically in the fields of correctional psych, forensic psych, and crisis assessment.

She grew up in upstate New York, and went to college near the Canadian border; her first psych internship was actually immediately next to the bridge between Ogdensburg, NY and Johnstown, ON. After that, she studied criminal justice and mental health counseling in Boston, then spent several years in New Hampshire. She’s worked in the NH State Prison system, a couple of different locked psychiatric facilities, and then several emergency rooms and eventually all manner of community settings.

Kate broke her back in 2014, and while she can move around a whole lot better than she could then, she still often feels stuck, as an acquaintance once pointed out, sitting on her couch listening to true crime podcasts all day. One thing I’ve noticed is that, quite often, she would hear someone ask, “But why would he do that?” or, “How could that happen?” or, her personal favorite, “Well, that’s crazy. That could never happen to me.” After a while of talking back, alone, long after they had moved on to new things, she decided to give the podcasting thing a try. She does give some background, of course, but she’s not trying to create a deep-dive, detailed, narrative style podcast. That has already been done, brilliantly, by so many people she admires. She can’t see any reason to try and compete with them, or even just add to the noise, when she already cannot find enough hours in the day to listen to everything she’d like to hear. Her goal, instead, is to try and answer some of those questions, at least from her own perspective. She doesn’t pretend to have all, or even most, of the answers… but she can usually come up with one or two.

Over time, the focus of her show has widened to include the normal, the average, the ordinary, that all of us can understand… but we continue to think of ourselves as somehow screwed up, weird, wrong. We’re not. You’re not. Honest.

Just make sure you really want to know. Because the most important certainty I carry, from all my time working with inmates and patients and onlookers, is that the only real difference between “us” and “them” is a key. And that everything we experience, from crippling anxiety to serial murder, is maybe not rational, but there is a logic to it. Kate can make things understandable.

And once you learn just how easy it can be to fall into the darker parts of life, you might think,”…I felt better before I knew that.”

Because sometimes… Ignorance Was Bliss.

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