Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 3 Episode 3 | Written Reflection

A few weeks ago marked twenty one years since my dad passed away. Twenty one years sounds like enough time that people quietly assume the grief must be finished by now, that after two decades life has surely settled into something that doesn’t hurt anymore. But here’s the thing about grief that took me a long time to actually understand. Time changes our lives. It doesn’t erase our love. This particular anniversary had me thinking not only about my dad, but about the way we talk about loss altogether, because I’ve started to wonder whether we’ve been having the wrong conversation about it for a very long time.

For years, most of us were handed one specific picture of grief, a beginning, a middle, an end, stages you move through in order until you land somewhere called acceptance, a finish line you eventually cross. If you’ve ever lived through real loss, I want to ask honestly, has that ever actually matched your experience. Mine never has. I’ve experienced grief in the middle of ordinary Tuesdays, while laughing with friends, standing in a supermarket, hearing a song I hadn’t heard in years, celebrating a milestone I desperately wished my dad could have seen. And then there are days I don’t think about him at all. All of that is true simultaneously, and none of it cancels the rest out.

So rather than talk about getting over grief, I want to talk about what loss actually does, how it moves, how it shows up in the most ordinary moments, and what modern psychology has come to understand about all of it that I genuinely wish someone had told me twenty one years ago.

Start with the model most of us grew up on, the five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It gave a great many people a language for feelings they didn’t previously know how to name, and I don’t want to dismiss that entirely. But my honest problem with it is that it quietly taught us grief has an order, this feeling first, then that one, and eventually you arrive somewhere final. When your own grief refuses to cooperate with that order, it becomes very easy to start believing something is wrong with you specifically. Imagine it’s been eight months since you lost someone. You wake up one Saturday completely at peace, go about your morning, feel almost normal, maybe even genuinely good. Then that afternoon you drive past a place the two of you used to stop at together, and out of nowhere you’re crying in the car. That evening you’re at a friend’s gathering, laughing properly, and then on the drive home the missing hits so hard you have to pull over. Measured against the stage model, that looks like chaos, like you’ve gone backwards, like you’re somehow doing it wrong. I don’t think you have. I think you’ve simply experienced what it actually means to be human, and this is roughly where modern psychology has quietly shifted its thinking, away from grief as a straight road with mile markers, and toward something considerably more fluid, something that moves with us rather than in front of us.

The first framework worth properly unpacking is what psychologists call the dual process model, a fairly recent idea, only really formalised in the late nineteen nineties, which tells you something on its own about how long the older picture held sway. The theory describes us moving back and forth between two kinds of coping. One is loss oriented, the crying, the yearning, looking through old photos, feeling the full weight of what’s gone. The other is restoration oriented, getting on with things, paying the bills, going to work, making decisions about a life that now looks different than it used to. Both of those are grief. Not one followed by the other in sequence, but both running in the background of the same day, sometimes the same hour. Picture someone who’s just lost a spouse. In loss oriented mode, they might spend an evening going through old photographs, calling family to talk about the person, sitting in the quiet missing them terribly. The next morning, in restoration mode, that same person is on the phone to the bank sorting out a joint account, working out the washing machine because it was never their job before, planning dinner because the children still need to eat. Researchers have found that oscillating between the two, rather than getting permanently stuck in either, is actually the healthier pattern. It’s also why grief can blindside you in the most ordinary places. You’re at work, fully in restoration mode, functioning completely normally, and then a smell or a song or a stranger’s laugh flips you straight back into loss mode without warning. That isn’t a setback. That’s the system doing precisely what it’s designed to do.

The second shift is one I find genuinely moving. For most of the last century, the dominant idea in psychology was that healthy grieving meant withdrawing your emotional attachment from the person who’d died so that energy could eventually be reinvested elsewhere, essentially let go, move on, find closure. It wasn’t until the nineteen nineties that this got properly challenged, when a body of research pushed back hard, proposing something called continuing bonds, the idea that maintaining an ongoing inner relationship with someone who’s died is often not only normal but genuinely healthy. You start seeing it everywhere once you know to look for it. Someone setting a place at the table on the anniversary of a parent’s death. A person talking out loud to a lost partner while making a difficult decision, wondering what they’d say. A woman cooking her late grandmother’s recipe exactly the way she was taught, right down to the specific pot. A father who still asks his late son’s old friends how they’re doing, because staying connected to them keeps a thread of the relationship alive. It’s someone finding a new way to carry a relationship that changed shape but never actually ended. I think about my own dad differently now than I did as a little girl. Back then, grief was mostly the raw missing of him. Now it’s wondering what he’d say about a decision I’m making, recognising a mannerism of mine that’s actually entirely his. Those were never signs that I hadn’t moved on. They’re the relationship still going, simply in a different form than it used to take.

The third framework only really gained traction from the late nineties onward, called meaning reconstruction. Its core idea is that loss doesn’t only remove someone or something from our lives, it disrupts the story we were telling about who we are and where our life was headed. So the real work of grief was never finding a tidy reason for what happened, it’s rebuilding a sense of self and a story afterward. In practice that might look like someone who built their entire identity around being a parent now having to work out who she is once her youngest leaves home, or after a child dies, the loss reaching far beyond the person themselves into the entire architecture of daily life and self image. It might look like someone who defined themselves by a career being retrenched at fifty five, losing not only the salary but the answer to who am I when someone asks what you do. It might be someone whose marriage ends after twenty years having to rebuild an identity that isn’t simply half of a couple anymore. What researchers kept finding is that two people can go through what looks like an identical loss and come out completely differently, because the reconstruction work is so intensely personal. One person becomes withdrawn and cautious for a season. Another throws themselves into something new entirely, a cause, a skill, a way of helping others walk through the same thing, almost as though the loss demanded a new purpose to make sense of the space it left behind. Neither response is more correct than the other. They’re simply different answers to the same underlying question of who am I now that this has happened. Healing, I’ve come to think, was never really about returning to who we were before. Sometimes that person genuinely doesn’t exist anymore. What we’re actually doing, slowly and imperfectly, is becoming who we are because of what happened, not instead of it, but alongside it.

Something worth saying clearly, because it gets missed constantly, is that loss doesn’t only happen when someone dies. We grieve the end of relationships, the family we’d hoped to have, a career that never became what we’d pictured, our health, our sense of safety, the version of ourselves that existed before everything changed. If you’ve ever had to let go of something that genuinely shaped who you are, everything described above, the oscillation, the continuing bond, the rebuilding of identity, applies to you too, even if no funeral was ever held for it.

This is really where grief stops feeling like its own separate category of experience and starts looking a great deal more like life itself, because none of us actually live in straight lines. Our lives are constantly swinging between opposites, joy and disappointment, certainty and uncertainty, connection and loneliness. Someone gets engaged the same week another couple signs divorce papers. A baby is born while a family gathers for a funeral across town. We laugh through tears, we make five year plans while quietly carrying disappointment about the last five. Life has never asked us to feel only one thing at a time, so perhaps grief isn’t the exception to how life works. Perhaps it’s simply the clearest, loudest example of what life has always been asking of us, to hold two truths at once and keep going anyway.

This conversation also lands differently depending on where you live, and here in South Africa I think a lot of us become fluent in loss earlier than we’d like. For some families it’s death directly. For others it’s watching a parent lose a job and feeling uncertainty settle over an entire household. It’s addiction slowly changing someone you used to recognise. It’s a friend emigrating because opportunity got harder to find here, grieving them almost as though they’d died, except they’re only ever a video call away, which somehow becomes its own particular ache. It’s communities carrying the weight of violence, road accidents, illness, sometimes not one dramatic moment but many smaller losses quietly stacking on top of each other across years. There’s a term psychologists use for this, cumulative loss, the idea that our losses rarely arrive in isolation, one sharpening our awareness of another, a new goodbye quietly waking an older one we’d thought was long settled. This is partly why grief can sometimes land far harder than the immediate event alone seems to justify. A colleague resigning might trigger something that has very little to do with the colleague at all, and everything to do with every other goodbye already stacked up underneath it. It isn’t always about what happened today specifically. Sometimes today’s loss simply brushes directly against every loss that came before it. I think a lot of South Africans understand this instinctively, even without the terminology attached to it, a nation of people who’ve, in different ways, learned to keep living while carrying something genuinely heavy, not because we’re extraordinary, but because life required it of us.

Alongside that, though, there’s something genuinely beautiful in how we tend to grieve together here. When someone dies, people arrive. Neighbours cook meals, churches open their doors, someone makes tea, someone quietly washes the dishes that have piled up because nobody’s had the energy, someone simply sits with you long after everyone else has gone home. There’s an instinctive understanding that grief was never something one person should have to carry alone, and I think modern psychology, for all its research and frameworks, is only now properly catching up to that. Healing doesn’t only happen inside one person’s head. It happens between people, in shared stories, in being remembered out loud, in someone simply saying tell me about them.

What’s taken me the better part of twenty one years to really notice is that loss doesn’t only change how we feel internally. Over time it changes how we move through the world and how we treat other people. You can usually tell when someone has been humbled by life, not broken, humbled, a particular quality to them, a slower temper, less certainty about how other people’s lives should go, more curiosity about what someone might actually be carrying beneath the version of them you’re currently seeing. It’s a small, interesting detail that the word human shares its roots with humility and humus, the Latin word for soil, ground that gets broken open and still somehow manages to grow things. I don’t think that’s the whole story of grief, but it’s a decent reminder that being shaped and worked by loss isn’t the same thing as being ruined by it. I don’t mean loss makes anyone wiser overnight, or somehow better than someone who’s been through less. I think it simply softens some of our certainty. It reminds us that we genuinely never know what someone else has walked through. The person serving your coffee might be grieving a marriage that ended last month. The colleague who seems distracted may have spent last night in a hospital waiting room. The teacher standing in front of a classroom may have lost a parent this year and still shown up anyway, because life doesn’t stop for any of us, no matter what’s been taken. We rarely see the whole story, and maybe that’s especially true here, where we live so closely alongside one another, each carrying histories and losses that aren’t always visible on the surface.

So if there’s one thing worth taking from all of this, it’s that there’s no correct order to grieve in, and no deadline attached to it either. You can oscillate between missing someone and functioning perfectly well within the space of a single afternoon, and that isn’t failure, that’s the dual process model doing exactly what it’s meant to do. You can keep talking to someone who’s gone, keep cooking their recipes, keep asking what they’d think, and that isn’t denial, that’s a continuing bond, and it’s healthy. You can spend years working out who you are now that this has happened to you, and that isn’t being stuck, that’s meaning reconstruction, and it’s real work. Healing was never about becoming who you were before the loss. It’s about slowly becoming who you are because of it.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 3 Episode 2 | Written Reflection

There’s a particular phrase that kept circling back to me over the past few months, through postgraduate deadlines, research, work and all the ordinary demands of trying to keep several parts of a life moving forward at once. The season of doing too much. Not because anything I was doing was extraordinary, but because every area of life seemed to be asking something of me at the same time. Perhaps a season like that comes to mind for you too, reading this. Maybe you’re in the middle of one right now, or just coming out of one, or you can feel yourself drifting toward one without quite being able to name it yet. Whatever that looks like, I think most of us know what it feels like when life starts asking for more than we feel ready to give, whether that’s working toward a qualification, building a career, supporting other people while trying to hold yourself together too, or simply carrying more privately than anyone around you realises. There are seasons where life stops feeling like living and starts feeling like managing, and I’ve spent a good stretch of this year managing schedules, managing deadlines, managing expectations, managing the next thing and the thing after that.

So it’s worth pausing here and actually asking, not the version of the question you’d give someone in passing, not the version you’d type into an email, but the honest one. How are you really doing. I think it’s a question a lot of us quietly forget to ask ourselves.

Part of what makes these seasons so difficult is that they rarely announce themselves. There’s usually no single dramatic turning point, no particular morning you wake up and suddenly feel overwhelmed. It happens gradually instead, one responsibility becoming two, two becoming five, five becoming ten, and because we’re capable people we simply adapt, we figure it out, we meet the deadline and answer the email and keep moving. Because we’re still functioning, we tend to assume we’re coping, and I’ve been sitting with that distinction quite a lot recently. Functioning and coping aren’t automatically the same thing. Getting things done doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing well.

There’s real psychology behind why this happens. Research on cognitive load reminds us that attention, concentration, decision making and mental energy are finite resources rather than bottomless ones, and that’s not a weakness, it’s simply what it means to be human. Every decision draws on that energy, every responsibility asks something of our attention, and over time those demands accumulate quietly enough that we barely notice at first. Then we become a little more forgetful, a little more irritable, a little more tired, concentration harder to hold onto, patience shorter than it used to be, and things that once felt entirely manageable start to feel surprisingly heavy. The trouble is that a lot of high functioning people become genuinely skilled at pushing through anyway, experts at appearing fine, continuing to show up, continuing to achieve, continuing to meet expectations, and because the world tends to reward exactly that behaviour, nobody questions it, sometimes not even us. And yet internally something feels different, stretched, depleted. That’s worth naming plainly, because if you’re tired despite doing everything right, that doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing something wrong. It may simply mean you’ve been carrying a great deal for a long time.

Which brings me to a concept that, once you understand it, explains an enormous amount: mental load. Mental load isn’t only what you’re physically doing, it’s what your mind is carrying underneath that, remembering appointments, planning ahead, thinking about finances, preparing for meetings, worrying about the future, making decisions, trying not to forget something important in between everything else. It’s the invisible work happening behind the scenes, and what makes it so exhausting is that it doesn’t necessarily stop when you do. Have you ever sat down at the end of the day and noticed your body has finally stopped moving, but your mind hasn’t, still planning tomorrow, still replaying conversations, still carrying responsibilities that haven’t even happened yet. That’s the exhausting part, psychologically speaking, because our minds were never designed to hold endless competing demands without some kind of consequence eventually surfacing. Overwhelm tends to emerge quietly rather than announce itself, which is part of why many people don’t immediately recognise it for what it is. They simply notice they feel tired all the time, or disconnected, or mentally full, or unable to switch off. I know that feeling well, particularly over the last few months, sitting down after a long day only to realise my mind was still running through sections of my thesis and tomorrow’s list. Body resting, mind still working. When the mind never gets a real chance to put things down, it eventually starts to feel heavy in a way that catches up with you.

Carrying that much for long enough starts to quietly reshape how we see ourselves, too. At some point productivity stops being something we do and starts becoming something we feel we are. A productive day starts to feel like a successful one, a slower day like a wasted one, achievement quietly fusing with self worth, and one of the clearest signs this has happened is guilt, not exhaustion, not stress, but guilt specifically, guilt when resting, guilt when sitting still, guilt when simply doing nothing. Rest shouldn’t feel like failure, and yet for a lot of people, myself included at times, it does, partly because we live inside a culture that celebrates constant productivity, admires busyness, praises achievement, rewards working harder, while very few people talk openly about the psychological cost of always being switched on. I’ve caught myself doing exactly this, feeling like I should always be moving forward, always producing something, as though rest needed justifying before I was allowed to take it. But rest isn’t the opposite of productivity. It’s part of it. Recovery isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity, and our minds need recovery in much the same way our bodies do. Without it, we eventually start running on empty, and when that pattern continues long enough, something else tends to emerge.

Burnout is, I think, one of the most misunderstood psychological experiences there is. We tend to imagine it arriving dramatically, a full breakdown, a crisis, a single moment where everything stops. More often it arrives quietly instead. It sounds like I’ll rest after this week, I’ll slow down after this deadline, I’ll take care of myself once things calm down, except things rarely calm down on their own, the finish line keeps shifting, there’s always another project, another responsibility, another demand waiting. Gradually what started as simple tiredness becomes something considerably more, emotional exhaustion, a loss of motivation, real difficulty concentrating, things that used to feel enjoyable starting to feel like obligations instead. And one of the harder parts is that plenty of people continue functioning through all of it, still showing up, still working, still studying, still supporting other people, still meeting expectations, while running on very little underneath. Burnout doesn’t always look like falling apart. Sometimes it looks exactly like carrying on despite being genuinely depleted, which is precisely why it can be so difficult to catch in time.

Something that’s helped me make sense of my own version of this recently is purpose. When we’re constantly doing, it becomes remarkably easy to lose sight of why we’re doing it in the first place, and I don’t mean purpose in some grand, life-defining sense, but something closer to meaningful direction, values, connection, a sense that what we’re doing matters beyond simply crossing another task off a list. There were stretches during my thesis and postgraduate work where I could feel the early signs of exhaustion creeping in, hours spent editing and formatting and reviewing, wanting everything to feel perfect. Looking back, that was the real issue for me, pouring so much into the work itself that I’d quietly neglected to pour anything into myself, so focused on getting through the next task that I’d stopped thinking about why I was doing any of it. Somewhere in the middle of submission dates and the next deadline, I needed to reconnect with the actual reason, why psychology matters to me, why education matters to me, why helping people understand themselves better matters to me at all. Sometimes the issue isn’t that we’re working hard. Sometimes it’s that we’ve become disconnected from why we’re working hard, still busy, still achieving, but genuinely unmoored from the meaning underneath it, and effort disconnected from purpose starts to feel considerably heavier than effort tied to something that matters. Purpose doesn’t remove stress or eliminate deadlines, and it doesn’t make a difficult season easy. But it can change your relationship to that season, remind you why the effort is worth making, and sometimes that’s enough to help you keep moving in a healthier way rather than simply pushing through on fumes.

Which leads to a different question worth asking yourself than the usual one. Instead of what else do I need to do, perhaps the more useful question is what am I actually carrying right now, and why am I carrying it. What values does it connect to. What future is it working toward. What matters enough to justify the effort it’s costing. Awareness creates space, and that space is usually where clarity actually begins. Sometimes the answer isn’t doing more. Sometimes the answer is reconnecting with what mattered in the first place. If you’ve been moving through a season that feels like one long list of responsibilities, it’s worth remembering that your value was never determined by your productivity, your worth was never measured by your output, and rest was never something that needed to be earned before you were allowed to have it. Sometimes the healthiest thing available to us is simply pausing long enough to reconnect with what actually matters, and remember why we started in the first place.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 3 Episode 1 | Written Reflection

There’s a particular kind of unease that comes from learning something uncomfortable about a product you’ve trusted since puberty. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of the Free State published findings that did exactly that for a lot of South African women, myself included. Their study, which tested sanitary pads and pantyliners sold across South African retailers, found that every single product tested contained at least two chemicals known to interfere with the body’s hormone system. Not just the cheaper, less known brands either. Products marketed as organic or free from harmful chemicals turned up the same result. The chemicals in question, phthalates, bisphenols and parabens, are already associated in existing research with reproductive harm, hormonal disruption and increased cancer risk.

Before going further, it’s worth being precise about what the study actually says, because precision matters more than alarm here. Researchers didn’t claim a single pad poses a defined danger, and they didn’t set out a strict threshold for how many years of exposure counts as risky. What they described instead was cumulative, real-world exposure. Most women use menstrual products for several days a month, repeated for decades, often adding up to somewhere in the region of four hundred and fifty periods across a lifetime. That’s not a single data point being tested. It’s small, repeated amounts of these chemicals, in direct contact with some of the most absorbent tissue in the body, month after month, for the better part of thirty or more years. That accumulation, rather than any single exposure, is what the researchers flagged as the genuine concern.

It’s tempting, when news like this breaks, to shrug and say everything causes cancer these days, so why worry about this specifically. There’s a grain of truth buried in that response. We are surrounded by low-level chemical exposure constantly, in packaging, in cosmetics, in the air itself. But not all exposures carry equal weight, and treating them as interchangeable actually does harm, because it shuts down exactly the kind of scrutiny that improves safety over time. Public health doesn’t advance by assuming the worst about everything equally. It advances by asking specific, evidence-based questions about specific products, and holding manufacturers and regulators accountable for the answers.

There’s a psychological dimension to this news that’s easy to overlook if you only think about it as a chemistry story. Learning that something this personal, this intimate, might carry a hidden health cost tends to do more than inform. It unsettles. It can spark real anxiety about fertility or long-term health, a quiet erosion of trust in companies and regulators that were simply assumed to have this handled, and sometimes a low hum of shame or discomfort that’s hard to name precisely because periods already carry so much unspoken stigma. When people learn that their bodies weren’t as protected as they believed, it doesn’t just register as a fact. It shakes something more fundamental, a basic sense of safety in the ordinary products of daily life. That reaction isn’t an overreaction. It’s a reasonable psychological response to a genuine breach of trust, and it deserves to be treated as such rather than dismissed as panic.

Layered on top of the chemical exposure question is a much older, harder problem, period poverty, which remains widespread across South Africa despite real progress like the removal of tax on sanitary products. Period poverty means not having reliable access to safe, clean menstrual products, and its consequences are concrete rather than abstract. Girls miss school. Women use substitutes that were never designed for the purpose, often out of necessity rather than ignorance. And here’s the part that makes the chemical findings even harder to sit with: the cheapest, most accessible products tend to be the least tested and, going by this research, not necessarily the safest either. Meanwhile, products that carry independent safety certification or are made with organic materials tend to cost more, putting them out of reach for exactly the women who might have the least room to absorb any additional health risk.

That gap raises a genuinely uncomfortable ethical question, one worth sitting with rather than rushing past. Should feeling safe and comfortable during a period depend on income. When safer options are effectively reserved for whoever can afford them, the system is communicating something about whose comfort and whose health are treated as a genuine priority, whether anyone intends that message or not. It also exposes a deeper pattern that goes well beyond sanitary products specifically. Women’s health research has historically been underfunded and under-prioritised across the board, often only receiving serious attention once public pressure forces the issue. Menstrual health in particular has long been treated as a niche or faintly embarrassing topic rather than a mainstream public health concern, which helps explain why ingredient disclosure on period products has, until studies like this one, remained largely optional in a way it simply isn’t for food or medicine.

None of this is meant to induce panic, and it’s worth saying clearly that fear isn’t a particularly useful response here either. What actually helps is information, because information restores something that a finding like this can otherwise quietly take away, a sense of agency. Looking for independent safety certifications on menstrual products, understanding that reusable options like menstrual cups, period underwear or certified cloth pads reduce repeated chemical contact over time, and treating ingredient transparency as something worth expecting rather than a bonus, all of that shifts a person from passive consumer back into informed decision maker. Psychologically, that shift matters more than it might seem. Agency, the felt sense that you have real choices and real information to make them with, is one of the more consistently protective factors for wellbeing that exists, particularly in situations where trust has just taken a hit.

Menstrual health, in the end, isn’t a niche topic and it was never only a woman’s issue. It’s a public health matter, a human rights matter tied directly to school attendance and economic participation, and yes, a genuine mental health matter too, because feeling safe in your own body is not a small thing to have quietly called into question. Conversations like this one exist to push back against decades of menstrual health being treated as too minor, too private, or too awkward to warrant serious scrutiny. Asking the uncomfortable question, what’s actually in this, and why wasn’t I told, is not paranoia. It’s exactly the kind of asking that eventually changes what gets tested, what gets disclosed, and whose comfort gets taken seriously in the first place.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. This article draws on peer-reviewed research published by the University of the Free State, alongside general reporting on menstrual health and period poverty in South Africa.

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 2 Episode 11 | Guest Conversation

Join us for a meaningful conversation with Celeste Louw, General Operations Manager at the TEARS Foundation, as we explore mental health, trauma, and healing in the context of gender-based violence in South Africa.

We discuss the experiences survivors may face when reaching out for help, how trauma can show up in different ways, what meaningful support looks like beyond moments of crisis, and the importance of caring for those who work in trauma-focused spaces. We also explore prevention, social change, and the role communities can play in creating safer, more supportive environments.

Mind Over Matter.

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 2 Episode 10 | Guest Conversation

In this conversation, we are joined by Mallary Tenore Tarpley, author of Slip, as she shares her personal experience of eating disorder recovery and the complexities that can come with it. Mallary explores the idea of the “middle place” — the space between recovery and relapse where many people may find themselves. Through her story and insights, we explore the importance of compassion, understanding, and recognising that recovery is not always a straightforward journey

Mind Over Matter

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 2 Episode 9 | Guest Conversation

We are thrilled to welcome Ashley Pena, National Executive Director for Mission Connection and Vice President of Outpatient Services, to the conversation. Ashley shares her expertise on holistic, personalised care, the importance of making mental health services more accessible, and how technology, including telehealth, is helping to expand and improve mental health support.

Mind Over Matter.

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 2 Episode 8 | Guest Conversation

Nestled in the serene landscape of Ixopo, KwaZulu-Natal, the Buddhist Retreat Centre is a Natural Heritage Site and renowned meditation centre dedicated to inner peace and wellbeing. In this conversation, we speak to resident volunteer William Parker about the centre’s history, mission, and its longstanding commitment to creating a space for reflection, mindfulness, and personal growth.

Mind Over Matter.

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 2 Episode 7 | Guest Conversation

Join us as we speak to Kate Saxton, Counselling Psychologist and Group Practice Director at Changes Rehab in Johannesburg, for an insightful conversation about the complex nature of addiction. We explore common myths and misconceptions surrounding addiction and discuss Changes Rehab’s multifaceted approach to recovery and support.

Mind Over Matter.

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 2 Episode 6 | Guest Conversation

Listen to Jade Percival of Brother In Arms Drug Recovery Centre as he shares his personal journey of transformation and recovery, and how his own experiences led him to a life of purpose, meaning, and helping others.

Mind Over Matter.

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 2 Episode 5 | Guest Conversation

In our latest conversation, we are joined by Eric Roets, Clinic Manager at Cherrywood House Rehabilitation Centre. Nestled in the tranquil semi-rural landscape of Constantia, Cape Town, we explore their world-class approach to addiction treatment and the holistic care that supports individuals on their journey towards recovery.

Mind Over Matter.