So excited to share this new interview with me and Jaimi about ITIM, and our hopes for a non-psychiatric understanding of human experience and trauma. 

Tell me what you think 🙂 

The link over to the interview is below. 

Some of my favourite extracts from this interview are below too: 

An interview with Dr Jess Taylor and Jaimi Shrive, in which they talk about a new way of viewing trauma, why they are sceptical about ADHD and NPD, how normal trauma is pathologised and why there is a pill for everything, why governments are more successful when they use fear rather than positive messages, plus ‘the way the entire population were subjected to red death counters on their TVs’ during Covid.

Laura (Interviewer): I found several parts explained behaviours in people I know, as well as myself. It was helpful to see certain traits as responses to situations which were painful, if not traumatic. The recognition of imposter syndrome and self-sabotage in myself makes me want to work on resolving them. I’ve thought of these as traits that I almost have to live with, rather than thinking of them as responses that I ‘learnt’ and can also learn to let go of. I also recognised traits in other people that I will feel more sympathetic towards. What have you learnt about yourselves?

Jess: This is a great reflection and question.

Jaimi: There are certainly things I have considered in more detail whilst writing the book. One of the most important things I learned in this journey is how desperate we are as a society to organise and categorise things we don’t understand, as our only accepted method of understanding it. In science, much of what we do is about categorisation and definition of something. In chemistry for example, we test an element or a chemical and then we group it together with others that we deem to have similar characteristics, reactions, properties, and behaviours. It feels that we have applied this approach of categorisation incorrectly to mental health and human trauma, as an attempt to understand it – and much of the time, we have gotten that very wrong. We currently work from the position that the mind is the brain, and the brain is the mind. Human behaviour and psychological responses are so much more complex than other concepts we are trying to explore in science and in society, and yet we have predominantly employed the same method of categorisation with very little success.

Jess: ITIM for me, is the result of the process of years of learning about myself and my own trauma responses. It is also the result of over a decade of working in trauma and psychology, and listening to thousands of people disclose thousands of different responses to death, fear, violence, illness, rape, abuse, control, oppression, isolation, poverty and hundreds of other traumas. I have always thought in this way about myself and others. I have always wondered what the root of a thought, behaviour or response is. When a person hears voices for example, I don’t think, ‘They must be psychotic. They must be abnormal. They need to be treated until it goes away’, I think, ‘I wonder when that started. I wonder why. I wonder what the voice says. I wonder what purpose it is serving. I wonder why the mind or the brain has created this response for this person. What is it for? Why have we evolved to do this? How common is this? How could I help? How can I explain this? How could I understand this more?’

We have lost our curiosity and our humanity in psychology and psychiatry. We have decided that whatever we deem to be ‘abnormal’ (which is socially constructed, historically and culturally situated), must be a mental disorder. There’s a pill for every ill. We have stunted our own human development by stopping at the concept of mental disorder. Writing ITIM and delving into months of endless conversation has impacted me greatly. I am even more sure that anti-pathology is the way forward.

Anddd… 

Go and read the rest over with Laura!

Click for the full interview: Interview