Mental health, patiently made human.
Unravelling treats mental health as a lens for ordinary life, art, family, memory, and collective pain. Its conversations move patiently between professional explanation, personal story, and the emotional meanings beneath public events or private struggles.
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Unravelling is built around the idea that mental health changes how people see nearly everything. That gives it a wide field. One episode may explain the differences among therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, social workers, and the informal confidants people lean on. Another may sit with grief as something visible in one person and almost hidden in another. The show’s rhythm is careful and spacious, with questions that set a frame before asking for emotional truth. It is not afraid of clinical terms. It also takes time to translate them back into everyday life, which keeps the conversations grounded rather than sealed inside professional language. Recent episodes show a strong interest in the meeting point between illness and creativity. Betsy Lerner speaks about bipolar disorder, psychiatric hospitalization, shame, family therapy, medication, and the wish to destigmatize what families often hide. Peter Mendelssohn’s work opens another route into depression, using journals and painting as material for thinking about severe alienation. The show also returns to grief and mourning, including personal loss, remembered music, and the ways people hold each other through absence. Its social reach is broader than individual treatment. Angela Harrelson’s conversation about George Floyd brings public mourning, police violence, memory, justice, and healing into a mental health frame. Unravelling can be playful, too. A run of episodes on collaborative role-play and Dungeons and Dragons treats fantasy characters as practice space for responsibility, self-forgiveness, fear, harm, and repair. That looseness matters because the show is not only explaining distress; it is interested in how people rehearse new ways of being. Its best moments happen when a story, a diagnosis, and a feeling are all allowed to exist together. The show suits listeners who want serious mental health discussion with warmth, clarity, and enough patience to follow the complicated parts.
Made for: For listeners drawn to reflective mental health conversations that connect therapy, grief, creativity, diagnosis, and lived experience. It suits people who prefer careful explanation and human stories over quick advice.
What sets it apart: Unravelling stands apart by moving between clinical framing, literature, family memory, public grief, and even tabletop role-play. It makes abstract psychological ideas legible through lived scenes rather than reducing them to tips.
How can a deeper understanding of mental health help us see our world, and ourselves, differently? Hosted by therapist Kurt White and journalist Mary Wilson, each episode of Unravelling explores a complex mental health topic with insights from both professionals and people with lived experience. Whether you're trying to make sense of the world or just the slice of it inside of your head, Unravelling is here to foster a more compassionate and informed perspective on life.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Clinical detail, lived experience and creative practice meet in a mental-health show that makes difficult subjects easier to name.
Unravelling moves between psychiatric diagnosis, lived experience, literature and group therapy without flattening them into one kind of mental-health conversation.
Dungeons & Dragons becomes rehearsal for your inner critic, complete with the occasional nat-one disaster.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A tabletop adventure that treats role-play as a route into mental health while keeping the tone playful.
Unravelling uses a tabletop Dungeons and Dragons adventure to get at a core idea about mental health: role-playing can help people try on parts of themselves and talk through what surfaces.
Tabletop play becomes a way to talk about responsibility, self-blame, and self-talk.
Unravelling uses collaborative role-play to open up a conversation about responsibility, self-blame, and the stories people build around mistakes.
A grounded look at bipolar disorder, from mania and depression to diagnosis and overlap with ADHD.
The episode takes on bipolar disorder with a careful eye on how easily the condition can be flattened. Mary Wilson and Kurt White move through mania, hypomania, and depression while also pointing to the way media coverage can turn a complex illness into something more…
A careful conversation about mental health, shame, and the work of naming what families hide.
Betsy Lerner's conversation about mental health and family dynamics moves from shame to hospitalization, and then to the harder work of naming what a family would rather keep hidden.
Crosswords become a lens for language, identity, and difficult personal histories.
The conversation centers on Anna Schechtman's work on The Riddle of the Sphinx, crosswords, and the way language can shape identity and conflict, with the hosts framing her as both a noted crossword creator and a Cornell literature professor.
Jonquilyn Hill chases one listener question per episode to the experts who can answer it.
Hard conversations, patiently held, with room to laugh.
Care, culture, and the choices shaping Black women's lives.
Root-cause health, explained plainly.
Hope, tested in real conversation.
Tom Bodett connects his 34 years of sobriety with returning to woodworking after he stopped drinking.
The episode begins with a warning.
Mary Wilson and Kurt White open by asking how people learn through stories.
Unravelling turns to bipolar disorder.
This episode features an interview with Angela Harrelson, the aunt of George Floyd, discussing his legacy, collective healing, and the mental health impacts of his death and the subsequent protests.
This episode explores the universal human experience of grief and loss, discussing how people process it differently and the role of support systems in coping.
This episode introduces psychotherapy by having the hosts interview their own psychotherapist co-host to explain what psychotherapy is, how it works, and the differences between various mental health professionals.
This episode features an interview with author Peter Mendelsund about his book 'Exhibitionist', which combines his personal journal from a period of severe depression with paintings he created as a coping mechanism.
Betsy Lerner joins Kurt White and Mary Wilson for a conversation about mental health, literature, and family life.
This episode explores the complex personal and social relationships people have with alcohol, particularly reflecting on experiences like dry January and discussing how alcohol is woven into everyday life.
The Brattleboro Literary Festival interview turns to Anna Schechtman's book, The Riddle of the Sphinx.
This episode explores the limitations of mainstream mental health systems and introduces the Open Dialogue approach through a conversation between a journalist and a psychotherapist who shares early career experiences in a challenging long-term care facility.
This episode explores the importance of discussing suicide openly, featuring insights from a psychotherapist who has both professional and personal experience with the topic.
This episode features an interview with Dallas Ducar, a trans woman and psychiatric nurse practitioner, discussing gender-affirming care as a critical mental health intervention for the transgender community.