Discover + Heal + Grow🔭❤️‍🩹🌱 : A Taproot Therapy Collective Podcast cover art

Discover + Heal + Grow🔭❤️‍🩹🌱 : A Taproot Therapy Collective Podcast

Discover + Heal + Grow🔭❤️‍🩹🌱 : A Taproot Therapy Collective Podcast

Written by: https://www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com
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About this listen

 We felt the world had enough whispery mental wellness podcasts asking you to eat healthy and breathe deeply. We aim to be more honest and sometimes irreverent and funny about the forces that affect us all. Some episodes feel like hanging out with professional therapists at the bar after work, while others might feel like you’re listening in on a university class with professional thought leaders. We discuss creativity, intuition, trauma, and the overlap between the three in the spectrum of consciousness and the psyche. Approaching topics from a depth psychology and brain-based medicine perspective, we explore the archetypes inherent in arts, design, and mass media. We delve into neuroscience, cutting-edge trauma neurobiology, Jungian psychology, relationships, political psychology, and feature interviews with both amateurs and experts. Discover + Heal + Grow is the podcast of Taproot Therapy Collective, a complex PTSD and trauma-focused therapy practice in Birmingham, Alabama. Hosted by Joel Blackstock and the other therapists at Taproot, it focuses on consciousness and all the cool and messy parts of being human. Subscribe for new episodes where we unpack topics like: The neurobiology behind new age and eastern medicine concepts Psychology of artists and design Cutting-edge trauma therapy approaches Brain-based medicine Archetypes in culture and media Psychology of true crime Therapy representation in entertainment Burnout in helping professions And much more! Whether you’re a fellow trauma therapist or just a fellow seeker, we offer authentic conversations that challenge conventional thinking and explore the depths of consciousness and healing. Based in Birmingham, Alabama, Taproot Therapy Collective is the premier provider of therapy for severe and complex trauma, PTSD, anxiety, and depression. We provide EMDR, Brainspotting, ETT, somatic and Jungian therapy, as well as QEEG brain mapping and neurostimulation. Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ #TraumaHealing #DepthPsychology #ConsciousnessExploration #MentalHealthPodcast #TherapyCollective #PTSD #EMDR #Neuroscience #JungianPsychology #BirminghamTherapy The resources, videos, and podcasts on our site and social media are no substitute for mental health treatment. Please find a qualified mental health provider and contact emergency services in your area in the event of an emergency. Our number and email at Taproot Therapy Collective are only for scheduling, are not monitored consistently, and are not a reliable resource for emergency services.Copyright 2022 All rights reserved - Taproot Therapy Collective - GetTherapyBirmingham.com Alternative & Complementary Medicine Art Hygiene & Healthy Living Psychology Psychology & Mental Health
Episodes
  • Revisiting The Trap: How a Paranoid Mathematician Broke American Therapy

    Revisiting The Trap: How a Paranoid Mathematician Broke American Therapy
    Jan 19 2026

    https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-dark-reflection-adam-curtiss-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/

    Why is the most therapy-literate generation in history also the most depressed?

    This episode traces the hidden history connecting Cold War game theory, a 1964 pop psychology bestseller, and the mental health crisis devastating Gen Z.

    The thread starts with John Nash—the schizophrenic mathematician who built models assuming all humans are paranoid, self-interested calculators. It runs through Eric Berne's "Games People Play," which taught millions that relationships are just strategic transactions. It continues through Reagan, Thatcher, and the rise of CBT—a therapy model that treats your mind like buggy software. And it ends with a generation drowning in optimization, starving for meaning, and wondering why all their self-knowledge isn't helping.

    Featuring the tragic story of George Price, the scientist who slit his own throat trying to disprove his equation proving love is just calculation. Plus: why therapists can't legally unionize, how a secret committee of surgeons sets the price of your mental healthcare, and why the "just do it yourself" wellness movement is the final victory of the worldview that broke us.

    This isn't self-help. This is an autopsy of the assumptions we've been living inside.

    Topics covered: Game theory and psychology, Eric Berne transactional analysis, Adam Curtis The Trap, John Nash Beautiful Mind, CBT criticism, Gen Z mental health crisis, Theodore Porter Trust in Numbers, neoliberalism and therapy, Rosenhan experiment, C. Thi Nguyen gamification, purpose vs point, George Price equation, Wilhelm Reich, depth psychology, mental health policy
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    1 hr and 18 mins
  • Why Can't Psychotherapists Form a Union (Spoiler Alert:They Can't) What is the RUC in Healthcare

    Why Can't Psychotherapists Form a Union (Spoiler Alert:They Can't) What is the RUC in Healthcare
    Jan 17 2026
    Can Therapists Start a Union? The Antitrust Trap, the Shadow Committee, and the Economic Strangulation of American Psychotherapy Analyzing America’s Healthcare Regulations and Their Effect on Us: Why the Law Prevents Therapists from Organizing While Allowing a Private Committee to Fix Prices for the Entire Medical System https://gettherapybirmingham.com/can-therapists-start-a-union-spoiler-alert-they-cant/ The Monthly Rage Thread If you hang around therapist forums long enough, you will see it happen. It operates with the regularity of the tides. Someone posts a thread, usually after receiving a contract from an insurance company offering 1998 rates for 2025 work, and asks the obvious question: “We are the ones providing the care. The system collapses without us. Why don’t we just all go on strike? Why don’t we form a union and demand fair pay?” It is a logical question. In almost every other sector of the economy, workers who feel exploited band together to negotiate better terms. Screenwriters shut down Hollywood to get paid for streaming residuals. Auto workers walk off the line. Teachers fill the state capitol. Nurses at major hospital systems have successfully unionized and won significant concessions. So why, in the midst of a national mental health crisis, does the mental health workforce remain so politically impotent? The answer is not that we lack will. It is not that we lack organization. The answer is that for private practice therapists, forming a union is a federal crime. This is not a political manifesto. It is an analysis of the bizarre regulatory environment that governs American healthcare, a system of antitrust laws, shadow committees, and bureaucratic classifications that effectively strips clinicians of their bargaining power while empowering the corporations that pay them. If you want to understand why corporate tech monopolies are ruining therapy, or why the corporatization of healthcare feels so suffocating, you have to understand the legal straitjacket we are all wearing. And you have to understand the one group that is allowed to set prices, the one group exempt from the rules that bind the rest of us. Part I: You Are Not a Worker, You Are a Standard Oil Tycoon The primary reason therapists cannot unionize dates back to the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was designed to prevent massive corporations like Standard Oil from colluding to fix prices and destroy the free market. It prohibits “every contract, combination… or conspiracy, in restraint of trade.” The law was a response to genuine abuses: companies buying up competitors, dividing territories, and coordinating prices to gouge consumers who had no alternatives. Here is the catch: In the eyes of the federal government, a private practice therapist is not a “worker.” You are a business entity. Even if you are a solo practitioner struggling to pay rent in a subleased office, seeing clients between crying in your car and eating lunch at your desk, the law views you as the CEO of a micro-corporation. You are classified as a 1099 independent contractor, not a W-2 employee, and that distinction makes all the difference in the world. If two workers at Starbucks talk about their wages and agree to ask for a raise, that is “collective bargaining,” which is protected by the National Labor Relations Act. But if two private practice therapists talk about their reimbursement rates and agree to ask Blue Cross for a raise, that is “price-fixing.” It is legally indistinguishable, in the eyes of the Federal Trade Commission, from gas stations conspiring to raise the price of unleaded. It sounds absurd, but the FTC takes it deadly seriously. When independent contractors organize to demand higher rates, when they share information about what they are being paid and coordinate their responses, they are engaging in horizontal price-fixing, one of the most serious violations of antitrust law. The Sherman Act provides for criminal penalties, including fines and imprisonment. The law that was meant to break up monopolies is now used to prevent social workers from asking for a cost-of-living adjustment. The irony is crushing. The same regulatory framework that prevents two therapists from discussing their rates allows massive insurance conglomerates to merge repeatedly, concentrating buyer power in fewer and fewer hands. UnitedHealth Group, for example, has acquired dozens of companies over the past two decades, becoming the largest healthcare company in the United States. When they offer a “take it or leave it” contract to providers, they do so with the full knowledge that fragmented, legally prohibited from organizing therapists have no counter-leverage. The antitrust laws, designed to prevent monopoly power, have created a system where sellers are atomized and buyers are consolidated. Economists call this “monopsony,” and it is precisely the market distortion the ...
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Is The DSM Dying Part 2: What is a Diagnosis Anyway?

    Is The DSM Dying Part 2: What is a Diagnosis Anyway?
    Jan 15 2026

    https://gettherapybirmingham.com/what-is-a-diagnosis-anyway-is-the-dsm-dying-part-2/

    The Archaeology of a Label: What We Forgot About Diagnosis and Why It Matters Now

    The book that decides if you're sane was written by the military to process soldiers. The committees that define your mental illness hold "typewriter parties" where they shout symptoms until someone wins. And the federal government declared the whole thing scientifically invalid—two weeks before the latest edition dropped.

    In this episode, Joel Blackstock, LICSW-S, takes you inside the bizarre, hidden history of the DSM—the document that shapes every therapy session, every prescription, every insurance claim in American mental health. You'll learn:

    • Why the DSM started as an Army logistics manual, not a medical document
    • How a single awkward psychiatrist named Robert Spitzer staged a coup against Freud using checklists and political horse-trading
    • The "dopamine miracle" that saved psychiatry from total collapse—and the price we're still paying
    • Why the biggest research agency in mental health publicly divorced the DSM and nobody noticed
    • What Joseph Campbell and Star Wars have to do with the therapy your insurance won't cover

    This isn't anti-psychiatry. This is pro-understanding. Because the system isn't broken by accident—it was built this way. And if we want to fix it, we have to see how we got here.

    "The DSM was never a description of nature. It was a set of administrative protocols created by the military, adapted by the bureaucracy, defended by a profession fighting for legitimacy, and captured by industries seeking profit."

    Subscribe. Share. And maybe question that diagnosis.
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    1 hr and 23 mins
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