Embedded

Misty Pratt, author of All In Her Head: How Gender Bias Harms Women’s Mental Health, joins Jennifer St John for a layered conversation about women’s mental health, systemic bias, emotional inheritance, and the stories that become embedded in our bodies, relationships, and nervous systems over time.

Together, they explore how women’s distress has historically been misunderstood, medicalized, and dismissed — from the legacy of hysteria to modern conversations around burnout, anxiety, mental load, and nervous system overwhelm.

Misty reflects on her grandmother’s late-life psychotic break, her own experiences with panic attacks and anxiety, and the long process of understanding what her body had been trying to say before she had language for it. Jennifer shares reflections from her own family’s journey as the two discuss intergenerational trauma, invisible labor, somatic healing, and the pressure many women feel to “hold it all together.”

This conversation explores:
• Gender bias in medicine and mental health care
• The history and lasting legacy of hysteria
• Burnout, mental load, and invisible labor
• Anxiety, panic attacks, and nervous system dysregulation
• Somatic therapy and body-based healing
• Intergenerational trauma and emotional inheritance
• Rest, boundaries, and adaptive coping
• Why healing is both personal and systemic

This episode is thoughtful, honest, and deeply validating — especially for listeners who have ever felt like their exhaustion, anxiety, or overwhelm was something they simply needed to “fix” within themselves.

Connect with Misty Pratt:
Website: Misty Pratt Official Website
Instagram & Threads: @mistyprattwriter
LinkedIn: mistypratt
Substack: Misty Pratt Substack

Host/Producer/Writer/Director: Jenn St John

Editor: Andrew Schiller
Website: www.jennstjohn.ca
Follow along:
Instagram: @jenn_stjohn
LinkedIn: Jenn St John

If this episode spoke to you, share it with someone who might need to hear it too.

Subscribe, leave a review, or just send a little love—your support helps these conversations reach the people who need them most.

Transcript

Podcast:                The Shadows We Cast

Episode:                Season 2, Episode 7

Title:                       Embedded

Host:                       Jenn St John

Guests:                   Misty Pratt

Length:                   53:00:00

TRANSCRIPT

Misty Pratt  00:01

I had a lot of anxiety as a child. I was just an anxious kid, but it didn't become an issue until my teen years. But at some point, something happened, and I became experiencing panic attacks every day. But I didn't know what they were, and so all I knew was I thought I was dying at times. So I think it was that smoke alarm was going off, and it was like something's wrong, something's wrong, but I couldn't figure it out, and I didn't identify in myself that it was mental illness, and of course we know mental illness has to do with both mind and body, it's not just a psychological thing.

Jenn St John  00:38

Hello, and welcome to The Shadows We Cast, a podcast about what we carry, the impact we leave, and the messy, beautiful reality of mental health. I'm Jen St. John, a writer, business owner, and a mental health advocate who grew up in a family shaped by mental illness. Some of it was heartbreaking, some of it darkly funny, and all of it shaped who I am today. Here, we share honest conversations, stories from me, from you, and from those who have walked this road in different ways through journal entries, letters from my mom, and real conversations. We're going to pull back the layer on mental health, the tough parts, the moments that shaped us, and how we move forward together. So, grab a coffee, settle in, and let's talk

Jenn St John  01:28

before we begin. Just a quick note. This episode includes adult themes, including addiction, mental illness, trauma, and suicidal ideation. Please take care in choosing when and where you listen, especially if you're in a sensitive place or you have little ones around. I also want to gently remind you that I am not a mental health professional. The conversations you hear on this podcast are grounded in lived experience, mine and the stories generously shared by others. My reflections, questions, and opinions come from that place and not from clinical training. Our goal here is connection, not diagnosis, and this is a space for real stories, honest conversations, and the hope that in hearing them you might feel a little less alone. Today's episode is called Embedded, because sometimes what we're carrying didn't begin with us. Sometimes the anxiety, the burnout, the self-doubt, the feeling that something must be wrong isn't a personal failure. It's something woven into family stories, into cultural expectations, and into the very systems that are meant to care for us. In this conversation, I'm joined by author and science communicator Misty Pratt. Her work explores how gender biases have shaped the way women's mental health is understood and often misunderstood in medicine, in research, and in everyday life. But this isn't just a conversation about data and diagnosis, it's about inheritance, it's about the stories that we absorb long before we have language for them, and it's about what becomes embedded in our bodies, in our nervous systems, and in the structures that we move through every day. We talk about the history of hysteria, how its echoes still show up in the modern exam rooms. We talk about mental load, burnout, in the invisible labor that many women carry, and we explore what shifts when we stop asking what's wrong with me, and we start asking what have I been living inside of. This episode is thoughtful, it's layered, and it may ask you to zoom out a little bit from your own story to a larger one that we're all part of. Before we move into this conversation, I want to begin with a journal entry from my mom. She wrote this during a time when she was in consistent treatment for the first time in her adult life, beginning to slow down and to look inward and to peel back layers that she hadn't yet had the language for. What you're about to hear isn't resolution, it's a moment in process, and I share her words to honor the honesty of her voice and the complexity and the healing that it unfolds. This is one of her journal entries. My marriage was broken and unfixable, as far as I was concerned. I was increasingly restless, irritable, and I craved excitement. I found myself rebelling against the very things that I loved about my partner, his kindness, his stability, his warmth, and his love. I impulsively reached out for a new life, in spite of no post-secondary education, no financial skills, no financial means to leave the marriage, and I did this with children in tow, never thinking in any way that this was a bad move, that I couldn't or wouldn't succeed. It never crossed my mind that the word to describe my thinking, and in acting on this thinking, was grandiosity. Unbeknownst to me was not just the danger of these thoughts and actions, but the incredible harm done to others as well as to myself. When I read entries like this for my mom, I'm always struck by how. Much was happening under the surface. How her restlessness, her impulsivity, and her sense of urgency all made perfect sense to her in the moment, but long before anybody around her had any language for what she was experiencing. It's the kind of moment that you only understand in hindsight, when you can finally see through the overwhelm, through the pressure, and the untreated mental illness and addictions, and the harm that she never intended. So, right now, I would like to welcome Misty. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you for having me. So, Misty, in your book, all in her head, this entry reminded me so much of how you open and how you talk about your grandmother's story, and the night that everything in your family shifted, you described those snapshots of the details that you remembered, like the wooden door in your grandfather's chair, and the confusion in the air, and that holds that same mix of fear and love, and that not yet understood distress. So, I'd love to start there with your grandmother's story, because I know that that was a very personal reason why you wrote this book. Could you take us back to that night, and what that night meant to you as an adult?

Misty Pratt  06:06

It's hard to go back, because I often question myself if it's my memories or my parents, and what they told me, because this was a story that often came up at, you know, holiday dinners, like we would just be rehashing things that had happened, and people would say the night that you know, and because part of the lore, right, exactly, but I think what I remember for sure is the emotion, I remember the fear, I'm pretty sure I remember the door, and I remember standing there and waiting for my dad to come get me, and I wanted to start there because that was the night that everything kind of blew apart a little bit in our family, where up until that point there had been some drama, you know, my grandfather was an alcoholic, obviously that caused issues in the family, but this was the first time my grandmother had shown any sort of signs of mental illness, rather than just of difficulties in dealing with a partner who was an alcoholic, so your description of what your mom wrote there just sounded so familiar, of the grandiosity, you know, at the time she was imagining that she had met somebody that she was going to leave her husband for this man, and when they eventually, I think it was my dad who tracked this man down, he didn't know what they were talking about, like he had just known her as an acquaintance at the bar where they hung out, and there was nothing in his mind that suggested that it was a relationship, but for her she invented this relationship, and then another, you know, symptom for her that started then was the loss of speech, so she became very confused and agitated, and she would say things, but then eventually she would go silent, and so it was for sure scary for me, because I remember it, I feel it now, I feel shaky now, thinking about it, and that impacted my relationship with her going forward, because before that time we had been like bonded through music and ballet, and she took me to the shows in Toronto, and it was like this exciting life together, right? And I loved all those things, I loved art, and I appreciated all the things she loved. And after that point, I'm ashamed to say it, but I became afraid to be with her. I became afraid to spend time together in case it happened again.

Misty Pratt  08:18

Yeah, it makes sense, though. It makes sense, for

Misty Pratt  08:21

sure,

Misty Pratt  08:21

like, yeah,

Jenn St John  08:22

you didn't feel safe all of a sudden, right? Exactly, didn't know what was going on, that would be the big thing, was happening to my grandmother, yeah.

Misty Pratt  08:29

So it's so vivid for me, and I think that's why it helps others understand the toll of mental illness on not only her and her life, but also on all of us in facing that with her. So it was kind of a good place to start,

Jenn St John  08:42

yeah. And then also, I loved this line when you wrote it, and it's in your first chapter. I might even be into your introduction, actually. I underlined it right away. You wrote, "My body's internal smoke alarm was beeping, but I couldn't find the source of the fire. I was just like, "Wow, it just nails the description, I'm sure, of what you were going through. Can you take us back to that moment and just kind of tell us a little bit more of your personal story as well with this?

Misty Pratt  09:11

Yeah, so I mean, I had a lot of anxiety as a child, I was just an anxious kid, you know, I followed my mom everywhere, always scared to do new things, but it didn't become an issue until my teen years, and then I'm not sure, I still can't find a trigger for what happened, but at some point something happened, and I became experiencing panic attacks every day, but I didn't know what they were, because there was no language, we hadn't really talked about it, I knew my grandmother had mental illness, but that was something that wasn't really spoken of much, and so all I knew was I thought I was dying at times, you know, like heart palpitations, sweating, feeling like I was going to vomit, and then also all the physical symptoms of mental illness, of migraines, headaches, stomach problems, so gastrointestinal issues, so. So I think it was that smoke alarm was going off, and it was like something's wrong, something's wrong, but I couldn't figure it out, and I didn't identify in myself that it was mental illness, and of course we know mental illness has to do with both mind and body, it's not just a psychological thing, so

Jenn St John  10:15

we do now, so that was obviously when you first started to realize, like, okay, something is not right here, like, something.

Misty Pratt  10:25

It was a while, it was about a year, but even then I still didn't really reach out for help until we went on vacation, and my parents got to then see up close what was happening, because I couldn't hide it from them anymore before I was able to kind of be in my room and just hide it, and when they saw, they were like, "Oh, okay, something is really not right. So, as soon as we got home, it was like off to the doctor's office, and I thank my parents for that, because they didn't ignore it, they didn't try to push it away, they were like, "no, no, no, something is wrong here. So, yeah,

Jenn St John  10:54

and you described that appointment with the doctor as well, almost by accident, that you finally realized that you weren't alone, actually other girls were going through this

Misty Pratt  11:05

right, because he made some passing comment of why, why are all these young girls dealing with this right now? As he's sitting there scribbling, right, it's just this throwaway comment, and at the time I don't think I really registered it and thought about it much. It was only later, it was when I was full on adult thinking back and going, yeah, why did he say that? Why is it a lot of girls and women? Like, what is that about? And that's kind of what started me on the journey of reading more about this, about how gender impacts mental illness,

Jenn St John  11:34

and it's interesting, like when you think about that now. When I read that, I was just, wow, you would think he would be wondering, as a medical professional, why is this all happening? Why am I seeing so many young girls going through this?

Misty Pratt  11:49

Yeah, and I think as a GP, as a general practitioner, they don't have time, they're not trained to dig deeper, and so it's more just dealing with the influx of all these patients coming in, and I know now it's even worse, right? So,

Jenn St John  12:03

yeah, absolutely. My son had panic attacks in grade five. We've been on the whole journey since then, and I mean, our nurse practitioner has been fantastic. It's a totally different situation now, I think, for most people. Yeah, not perfect, but it's different. Yes, different.

Misty Pratt  12:21

Yes.

Jenn St John  12:21

When you set out to write all in her head, I know that you weren't just telling your story, you really took on a lot, like the whole system. So, what question were you most desperately trying to answer by writing this book?

Misty Pratt  12:34

I think it actually started with wanting to write about my grandmother and wanting to know what happened, like what would cause a woman to go through her whole life until she's in her early 50s, and then have this complete psychotic breakdown. But when I started down that path, it was hard. My family didn't really want to talk about it, which I understand it was done. It was over. They didn't want to think about it anymore. And when I started to pull the threads at kind of what was happening, I realized, oh, okay, this is kind of my story too, about what I went through, and then, as the more I read, the more I realized, oh, this is a story about so many people, not just me, and I wanted to tell that story from many different perspectives, so that someone could read the book and see themselves somewhere, they may not see themselves everywhere, but somewhere in there those stories would represent different perspectives on it, and to show it's a global issue. I mean, I had the people in there from Australia and the UK and the states, and it's not something confined to one country. So,

Jenn St John  13:36

oh my gosh, no. I loved the personal stories in the book, I really did. I can't imagine how many you had to choose from, but it really seemed that you were really able to find the right story to highlight each chapter, which I really loved, because I love reading books that they're so research-based and they have so much great information in the history part, but then you always want to have that personal human element as well,

Misty Pratt  14:00

right? That's the hybrid memoir. Some people do want to do just strictly memoir, and some people do want to do just strictly science writing, but for me, I always knew no, I want a bit of both. I want to have those stories so that people feel seen and carried through to the next dense part.

Jenn St John  14:18

Well, and I know whenever I speak or I'm open about all of the mental health advocacy. The biggest thing that people feel that they come up to me and tell me about is that they feel alone, and so, as you said, with this style of writing and showing all of these people and all of their experiences, I'm sure somebody sees themselves somewhere in there and they don't feel as alone anymore, which is great

Misty Pratt  14:40

to

Jenn St John  14:42

start in the book, you trace women's mental distress all the way back to ancient Greek and the term hysteria. What parts of that legacy do you still feel that are alive today in the system?

Misty Pratt  14:55

Yeah, that's where I kind of went down a rabbit hole a little bit with the hysteria, because the. History is so big, and we only see in popular media kind of a little fraction of it, where we talk mainly about the 1800s and this rumor that women were being treated with vibrators for their mental distress, and that's been debunked, but when I started reading, I realized it went way back, and it never disappeared, so it wasn't something that was just an ancient Greek thing, it wasn't something that was just a 19th century thing, it was there all along, and it's still here now. So, when we look back at those Greeks, it was a physical problem, it was that the uterus was wandering around the body, causing all these issues. Then, of course, we get into Middle Ages, and it becomes much more of a spiritual problem. People felt that women were evil in some way, and so these spirits needed to be cast out. But then, somewhere in the 1600s it comes back to the body again. So, we get early physicians saying, "No, I don't think that this is a spiritual problem. I think there's something going on in the body. So, they try to point to different areas to say it's the ovaries, it's the uterus again, it's the clitoris, it's all these things that are part of being female, the only we have. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then it kind of leads right up into our age, right now, where hysteria was only removed from the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Am I saying that correctly? The Bible, let's call it the Own This Bible.

Jenn St John  16:24

Yeah, people know DSM. It

Misty Pratt  16:27

was 1980 that was the year I was born. Wow, that old.. I mean, I'm getting there, but.. and so that's not that long ago. And because even though it's been removed from that manual, we still are speaking in ways that relate to hysteria, we still say some, you know, these days the big thing is women are imbalanced, so we have imbalanced hormones, that's the number one, or we have imbalanced brain chemicals, which is something I think was a little more popular a few decades ago, to me that's just hysteria, just in new fancy clothes, I'm not saying that hormones don't play a role, and I have a whole chapter on hormones. I talk about it. It's important. We need to study those, but when you say it's all about hormones, when you say it's all about something physical in that person's body, you are forgetting the many other things that happen around that person to create the pressure that may lead to depression, anxiety, whatever it

Jenn St John  17:20

is. Absolutely, and because you're also telling your story through this book as well, did you have a period in your own personal experience where you were finding that biology only kind of treatment was happening?

Misty Pratt  17:33

Yes, absolutely. I think for many, many years, so medication was pushed on me very early on, so the first time I went to a psychologist, I had to meet with a psychiatrist as part of my treatment plan, and in that meeting he took 45 minutes. He wrote this whole report that, you know, described me and said all these things, and then basically said, "Here are two drugs that you should be on. And at the time, because my anxiety revolved around nausea, and I was so scared of feeling sick or vomiting and embarrassing myself in public. I didn't want to take meds because of that, and so I held out, and I held out, but people continued to push it, and I finally kind of caved in my mid 20s and said, fine, I'll try it. And absolutely, medication helped for sure, but I think the problem was when it was just that, when it was just a prescription,

Misty Pratt  18:21

and

Misty Pratt  18:21

then I had all sorts of side effects, and that was challenging. I didn't get the other support I needed as much as I did kind of get this prescription, and being told to basically stay on it for the rest of my life, which I wasn't too happy about.

Jenn St John  18:34

No, no, and I mean, especially, of course, we know now not everybody needs medication, and medication isn't the only solution, but part of the solution, but yeah, I would imagine that that would also feel lonely as well,

Misty Pratt  18:46

yeah,

Jenn St John  18:46

because it's basically like, here's some pills, and now off you go,

Misty Pratt  18:51

and the pills, they would work for a short time, and then they would stop working, so then I'd say, well, what's the solution, and it would be, oh, try a higher dose, or go on to a different one, and I do have to say that I was also influenced by watching my grandmother get way over medicated to the point of they almost killed her, so at one point she got lithium poisoning because they had screwed up her dose and she went into a coma and we thought it was the end, we went to go say goodbye and then

Misty Pratt  19:17

she

Misty Pratt  19:18

just pulled through, so I do have to say, like, yes, my view of medication is a little bit skewed, because, of course, seeing what she went through, I was very wary, but I would say now, at the place of life I'm in, I'm very open to different options. Now, I use a sleeping pill very occasionally when anxiety gets the best of me, and I can't sleep, I will try that, you know. Pharmaceuticals, I think, are a great tool. It's just when that's the only thing there was, it fell short. It's a tool, it's a tool,

Jenn St John  19:49

not the tool.

Misty Pratt  19:50

Yes,

Jenn St John  19:52

so you know that, obviously, just because the way our world is set up, that men have historically held power in the scientific inquiries. When we are talking about biology and medication in all of your research in your book, how does this shape the diagnosis and the protocols and the assumptions that women still face?

Misty Pratt  20:10

I think the main problem is we just don't know enough about female bodies versus the male body, because the male body has been the default even until now. Research is growing, and it's great, and I love to see that, but we're still not anywhere near where we need to be to understand the similarities. We're all similar when it comes to sex and gender, but then there are clear differences that people are starting to notice, and so I think the main issue is that we just don't have enough of that data yet to be able to clearly say, like, studies have come out that show that certain medications are not as effective in females when it comes to things like heart disease or dementia or things like that, and so in the realm of mental illness, where we really haven't had a lot of great scientific research being done, it can lead to the issue I pointed out before of over medicating side effects, adverse events, which are just bad things happening to you when you're being treated with something, and so it's something that I think is slowly shifting, but now we see, of course, in the States, there's this rollback and funding and support, so you know, here in Canada, I think we have a big job to do of continuing the work.

Misty Pratt  21:24

Yeah, absolutely.

Misty Pratt  21:26

There was a recent study that came out that showed, I think, it was less than 10% it was like 7% of CIHR funded grants, so that's the Canadian Institutes for Health Research funded female-specific issues, less than 10% So we are still not anywhere where we need to be for some of the kind of key issues and the big ones that get treated right now or that get more attention are important but what about the brain stuff for me that's kind of yeah what's lacking well

Jenn St John  21:55

because the other part to that too is also just symptoms that women have versus men, right? Like, I had a whole plethora of things that I had to deal with from the childhood that I experienced, you know, physically, and for sure, for me, it went right to my digestive system. And I'm a firm believer in mental health. I don't have a problem going on medication or seeking therapy or doing all the things that I do to maintain my mental health, but I found so many times that when I was at the end of my rope, where I tried everything, I was still really sick, I couldn't figure it out, I'd been sent a specialist, then it was always, well, you must be depressed, and I'm just like,

Misty Pratt  22:40

again,

Jenn St John  22:41

if I am okay, I'll deal with it, but you're only saying that because you can't, you

Misty Pratt  22:46

can't figure out what the other thing is exactly, and you know what the answer is to that, hormonal birth control or an antidepressant, right? Those are what we get offered, and Hemi, I even just had this experience, I don't want to share too much detail, because it's about a family member, but with one of my family members, who's female, she got very, very sick, and we were in and out of doctors and hospitals and things like that, and over and over again it was, is this anxiety, is this an eating disorder? Both me and her knew that this was not anything related to mental illness, and yet we could have said that a million times, and they still wouldn't have really believed us. It only took our family doctor actually pushing for further tests to better support us. So, yeah, it's has not gone away. It's still, uh, still a problem.

Jenn St John  23:32

I still feel that it's based on your practitioner. So,

Misty Pratt  23:36

yes,

Jenn St John  23:37

obviously, I'd love to go into each chapter, but I don't have enough time. No, do that. So I picked a chapter that I thought would be very on point for women, and that was the mentally ill or mentally overloaded chapter, which I found fascinating. You describe, you know, the worry work that women do, and people use different terms, but you know, being the one who's always anticipating the needs of everybody, managing all of the emotional regulation of everybody, carrying that invisible labor load. How do you feel that this plays a role in today's definition of mental overload for women?

Misty Pratt  24:15

I think it is even worse than it maybe was before the pandemic. I think we are still in a place where not only are people crying out for help to say this is such a problem for me, and I don't know how to fix it, but we don't even know how to measure it, because in all the research that I did, what I found was these surveys where they could tell you, okay, fill out everything you do in a day when it comes to household tasks, and so we can clearly see that in a relationship where there's a man and a woman, the woman is going to be doing a lot more hours than the man for all these tasks, but those are the tasks I can see, that's like the laundry and the cleaning of the toilets and all that kind of stuff. What are the tasks that we don't see, and how do we measure those? And right now, there's really nothing, there's nothing that measures that. And so it remains very much invisible and I think women, though, are demanding that we start to pay better attention to it and value it as something that we do for free and try to figure out a way to better balance that part, because even in very equal societies like Iceland, there's still some studies over the pandemic that came out to show that there was an imbalance there between men and women in relationship, so yeah, it's not something that's going away anytime soon.

Jenn St John  25:31

No, I agree, I think that it's getting worse, and I try to describe it, because I mean, I've been with my partner for 30 years, we know each other very well, and we waited to have kids until I was 33 and 36 when I had my two children, but we've both been business owners for a long time, so you're always dealing and managing with your day, and every day isn't the same. But I say to him, like, for example, okay, you go drive our daughter to the barn because she takes her horse riding lessons, but that's all you're doing. I'm the one who's in touch with the coach. I'm the one who's organizing the time. I'm the one who's dealing with the car pulling, like even if I have a question for the coach, it never gets answered, because it's like he's just driving her to the park.

Misty Pratt  26:13

Right, right, exactly. And on top of this, there's this whole other realm of we must be super successful women, right? And so

Jenn St John  26:23

somehow do it all.

Misty Pratt  26:24

Yes, yes. And that's why you've seen this proliferation of all these books meant to help you try to figure this out. How do you find the balance? You know, there's even books trying to address the mental load. Eve Rod Ski is one, I think, that has done a bit of work in this, trying to address that, but I'm not sure it's really made a dent in how we approach it, both socially and then also in our individual relationships, because I hear what you're saying, and it's very much the same for me. I do all the background stuff that needs to be done, but I question, okay, well, what got me here

Misty Pratt  27:00

then?

Misty Pratt  27:01

How did I get here?

Jenn St John  27:03

Yeah, and what I question too is, I think I'm pretty aware of who I am and what I'm good at when I'm not good at, and I'm aware with my partner the same thing. And so what I always get caught up on is he isn't good at multitasking, he isn't good at organizing. It's like I have to help him manage him managing things, which is then personality, and but I also wonder, like I didn't have a choice,

Misty Pratt  27:33

right? I

Jenn St John  27:33

had to just figure it out.

Misty Pratt  27:35

Yeah, yes,

Jenn St John  27:36

like nobody gave me that choice, and I think that's what happens, is that predominantly the women aren't given the choice, they just do it and they figure it out and they maintain it, and it's not balanced.

Misty Pratt  27:47

No, exactly.

Jenn St John  27:49

Yeah,

Misty Pratt  27:49

yeah, you know, I could give a whole bunch of advice on, well, how do you then survive that, but I really don't think it's overly helpful, because every situation is unique, and at different points in your life, it's going to be not as burdensome as my children are now older, they're in their teens, and so I do feel a little bit of easing of the pressure. I mean, I'm still doing all the dentist and doctor visits, and I'm still doing all the parent-teacher interviews, and all of the school communication, and everything else.

Jenn St John  28:17

So, what do you want women to understand about the difference between being unwell and being overwhelmed,

Misty Pratt  28:23

so I mean, in our definition of burnout, so if you look at burnout, it's very much an occupational diagnosis. So this is related to your workplace, you have too much work, not enough time, and you have become physically unwell from that. The problem is that that definition doesn't include mental load, and it doesn't include what's happening in the home as well as at work, and yet all the research shows women are facing both of those, they're facing burnout in both areas, and whatever's happening in the home does translate into the work, and so you could tackle this in a couple different ways, you could tackle it as a burnout problem in which you might go to a doctor and get a leave of absence from work. You might sit down with your director, manager, and say, I need to figure something out, because this is not working. And then you come up with some kind of solution for yourself, and all these techniques can help. But what does seem to be occurring for women in particular is that we're being told that we are stressed, depressed, anxious, and it becomes a medical problem, and not an occupational one. And so then the way we treat that is what we've been talking about so far, right, is medication therapy, but we can talk ourselves blue in the face, and that's not going to change the situation where we are in trying to balance these two worlds, and so the argument is that mental load and burnout are defined differently, but they are kind of for women intertwined, and so to be able to treat that properly is to have to bring in both sides of those, your workplace and making the workplace much more friendly for. Women and mothers, in particular, and then the at-home stuff. How do we tackle the mental load and making that a little bit more equal?

Jenn St John  30:07

Yeah, as you say in your book, which I completely agree with, it's not looking like it can't be tunnel vision to look at a little bit more going on in order to properly understand what the issue is.

Misty Pratt  30:19

Right, exactly. Yeah,

Jenn St John  30:20

yeah, you write, what if the reason you can't get out of bed is more about the world you live in than about you, which I loved that line as well. I think that a lot of women right away go to there's something wrong with me. So, how do you see this playing out in today's world with women, right now.

Misty Pratt  30:42

Yeah, it's just that it becomes a problem that you have to fix. And so I worked really hard, and I really tried to fix that problem. I did all the things that the wellness influencers told me to do. I did my exercise schedule, and I took the vitamins, and I, I spent a lot of money trying to fix myself, and then when it broke apart, and I realized it wasn't a me problem. I think it was like, I just, am I allowed to swear on this podcast?

Jenn St John  31:12

Go for it, it's explicit because of the material.

Misty Pratt  31:15

I just gave no more fucks anymore, right? It was kind of like, well, this is a problem with all of you. Why am I killing myself here to try to feel better? I'm actually just gonna feel bad. And then that opened up sort of this sense of, okay, what truly does make me feel that I can survive this day, this week, this month? What are those smaller things for me that are going to truly help me to rest rather than all this noise that I'm hearing in the background of what I kind of need to do, so yeah, that was my way through, and I don't want to say that I'm somehow on the other side and everything's perfect. I still have the days where I think I just want everyone to disappear and want to live alone in a cave, right?

Jenn St John  31:55

Yeah,

Misty Pratt  31:56

but I've gotten way better at telling, saying what I need, right? I've gotten way better at saying this is what I need today to feel okay.

Jenn St John  32:05

Well, I think that shift, like I say noise all the time, I use that term for it as well. We are bombarded with noise, and I think for us as women, which you talk about very well in your book, is we're talking about noise from a very young age that we're bombarded with, so by the time you're getting to your adulthood, at whatever stage that you're at, and you're at this point where there is a big shift that can happen if you can say, okay, enough, and pull yourself out of that, look at it, you know, kind of from a different perspective as you got to, in order to start to turn things around and ask yourself, as you said, what is going to work for me, and not just what is going to work for me that I'm being told from, say, your medical practitioner, but what other things - there's so much that goes into how you're feeling about yourself and how you're going to be able to help yourself, and really figuring that out for yourself, and as you said, being able to start to tell people this is what I'm doing, this is what I need, versus everyone telling you what,

Misty Pratt  33:09

right, and that's just amplified now with social media, whereas we still had it, as you said, from the time we grew up, it was around, but we had to seek it out a bit more, so it was me going somewhere to the library to find the books on what I was going to do to fix myself, whereas now it's I open up Instagram and I'm immediately flooded with all those things of what I should be doing to feel better.

Jenn St John  33:34

Yep, so my daughter's 13 and just got a phone and just try to educate her in the marketing side of things, so that she can bring that with her as she's consuming this content.

Misty Pratt  33:47

Yeah, the new big thing is the menopause influencers, so the supposed doctors, which a lot of them do have credentials, but they're coming on and they're saying you need this and you need that and the other thing, and a lot of it is based on pretty flimsy science, so even my age group is getting that side, and then the younger age group is getting a whole other.

Jenn St John  34:09

I'm four years older than you, so I'm in the same boat.

Misty Pratt  34:13

There's a lot

Jenn St John  34:14

I know. I'm always weary of people who are trying to sell something. I'm like, yeah, here we go.

Misty Pratt  34:18

Yeah, if there's supplements attached to it, you just have to immediately go to a different account. Yup, yup.

Jenn St John  34:26

So you talk about that huge gap between the resource and the under-resourced women, so you know even in what we're talking about, like how many people could access private care versus public care, et cetera. So in all the research that you did, how does privilege shape who gets to kind of quote unquote heal or who's even believed? If you came across that as well,

Misty Pratt  34:51

well, I mean, self-care used to be a very radical act, if we go back to the 70s and the 80s and Audre Lorde and all kinds of. Black writers who were talking about what they felt was necessary to survive in a world where they were not valued in any way, from that forked out this other self-care movement, which was very white, very privileged, and we still see it today with Gwyneth Paltrow and many other white women who are kind of leading the charge on all these things, and so what happens is you have this very privileged group of people that have the money to spend that can invest in these things, and yet it doesn't make them well. It certainly could lead to burnout and anxiety, and all that kind of stuff in their lives as well. And then you have people that are not so privileged that continue to face that pressure too, because they're seeing the same messages, so it leads to this very imbalanced, weird world that we live in, where all of these things are supposedly available to everyone to feel well, and yet it's really just a select few that could access them, and are they even effective in the first place, right, and another thing, too, in the book is I interviewed a psychologist from Toronto who talked a lot about the fact that many racialized folks, they're also caring not just for themselves but for an entire community, everything that they do and say, they feel it represents a community, and so there's this added pressure and this added sort of burnout that they're facing in relation to what they feel they should be doing for their culture or their community. Yeah, it's a heavy weight, very, very heavy weight that someone like me is not experiencing, and so it comes down again to this individual and social solution where there's not one size fits all, so we have different aspects of ourself, we're spiritual, we're emotional, we have sensory needs, we have physical needs, and so it's looking at all those different buckets to say, what do I need to fill, which bucket is empty for me today, and so maybe for you it's your social bucket is empty, and self care might actually be doing something for other people, it might be going to see your mother, visiting her, and bringing her a meal, or something like that, right? Whereas the wellness industry would tell you, no, the self-care is the fancy stuff, it's the bubble baths and the spas, and all those kinds of things, but that's really not what it's about for most people.

Jenn St John  37:20

No, that's not the true definition.

Misty Pratt  37:22

Yes,

Jenn St John  37:23

and where do you see, because this is another big one that's tied into all of this mindset culture, is that doing more harm than good right now, in your opinion?

Misty Pratt  37:33

I think mindset culture, I mean, okay, this is an opinion, because I don't know if this is shown in the research, but I feel like mindset culture comes out of the focus on cognitive behavioral therapy. The focus on thoughts will change behavior, so if you change your thoughts, you're going to change your behavior, you're going to change how you feel. But what is shown is that a lot of people don't think their way through challenges, they don't think their way through mental illness, that it is very much a bottom-up process of feeling, and all the physical stuff happening to the thoughts. I think mindset is this idea that if you just change your thoughts, if you make them a certain way, if you spend your time journaling and gratitude journaling, and all that kind of stuff, you are going to shift something in yourself that will then change everything else that's going on, but science would suggest that's just not how it works, and the fact that we put so much money and time into cognitive behavioral therapy is because it is easy to teach, it's manualized, it is easy to study and compare compared to therapies that start with the body, like somatic therapies, where you're working on bodily sensations and feelings, those just don't have the research backing them yet to show that they're effective, and yet more and more people are saying, I don't know if this thinking thing is working for me, I don't know if this is exactly the what's going to change, because I've tried it and it's not making much of a difference. So, for me, mindset really is tied up into all of that.

Jenn St John  39:09

To me, that somatic therapy, or everything that's under the somatic umbrella, my take on it was that it was more about the nervous system than it was about the brain, and I loved how your descriptions, the way you were kind of explaining it, was that you can do CBT till the cows come home, but my nervous system is still being triggered by something. It doesn't matter how much my brain is telling me this, my body is telling me something else, and if I don't deal with that, this isn't going to help, and I was really connecting the dots there in your book about that. It makes so much sense. I think it might offer some really interesting things when it comes to mental health.

Misty Pratt  39:51

Makes sense when you talk about your stomach problems and my stomach problems, that that's how things showed up first, so we didn't have thoughts telling us what was how. Happening, it was the body that was saying, whoa, something's wrong, and we tried to use our head to figure it out, but we couldn't, right? So, yes, it's that nervous system, which includes the brain, also includes everything that goes down into the gut, which they say is your second brain. So, yeah, we're on the cusp of some pretty exciting discoveries, and I'm hopeful that we'll just continue down this path, and eventually these therapies can be offered to people, because right now, if you try to access publicly funded therapy, you're just going to be given CBT, and it could be helpful for you. It was for me at the time, I was having panic attacks, it certainly helped, but then I kind of hit a wall where it was like, why am I getting worse again, why is it changing, why is it different now? And so, for me, somatic has been the only thing that has made any progress, where I can actually sit with my therapist and say, "Remember two years ago when I couldn't even do this thing, like, look at me now, right? So, there is a shift that I can see.

Jenn St John  40:57

What I'm excited about, too, is that, you know, maybe in 10 or 20 years my 20 year old self would be offered more options that I might actually be able to get to a better place faster in adulthood than I've been able to on my own, because, like you, it's just been trying to figure it out on my own. Yes, using the resources, but I'm the one who's putting it all together, and I'm the one who's figuring out what is the best for my body, what is the best for my brain, what is the best for my nervous system, and so now I've got that little tool kit that I'm using, but somebody else didn't put it together for me. We've put it together ourselves based on all of these different experiences that we've had in these different treatments,

Misty Pratt  41:36

right? And wouldn't it be amazing to offer that to somebody earlier on?

Jenn St John  41:40

It would be life changing.

Misty Pratt  41:42

Yes, save us a lot of suffering.

Jenn St John  41:46

So one of the things we were talking about, you know, burnouts, is that you quoted Tricia Hersey's book, The Nat Ministry, and you touched on this a little bit earlier, but speaking about rest and that we are the grind culture right now, and that rest can be a liberation, really. So, for you, can you describe this connection, and then also maybe just tell us about, for yourself, how rest has become something that you're using as well?

Misty Pratt  42:14

I think the realization after I read Trisha Hersey's book was that I'm contributing to the problem, so in my culture white women are very much perfectionists, people pleasers. That's how we were raised. We were raised to kind of perform at some crazy impossible standard, and my actions and what I do perpetuate that system, and that didn't mean I was going to be like "boo hoo, woe is me, and be upset about that. It just meant, oh, okay. So all of my little decision points, and what I do in my daily life, what I show my girls, my two children, has an impact on whether this continues. So I had a kind of choice to make, of okay, if I want to not continue this, if I want to break this and be more radical about it. Well, then, what are the little radical acts in my own life that I could be doing? Where do I say no to things? Where do I pull back from the people pleasing, which I still struggle with so much. If anyone has any suggestions, please email me, because that's the number one I think that I still struggle with is the people pleasing of wanting to do everything so that people like me, because if people don't like me, it stresses me right out, and I just want to fix that. But the resting side and the boundaries have gotten easier to do as time goes on. I wouldn't say they're pleasant, I mean, setting a boundary feels very unpleasant to me. I don't like it. I feel yucky after, but over the long term, I see the benefits. I do, I do understand why I need to put a boundary in place, but it just doesn't feel great. And going back to that bucket idea, I've started to think of the different buckets of, you know, set my sensory needs. Maybe I just have to turn off the bright lights. I have to cancel some online meetings. I have to get into my cozy bed, and I've noticed my children even do this now, where they're like, I'm overloaded, I can't handle it. So then we'll turn down the music, we'll take a deep breath, because you know you have that specific need in you that you have to be able to then take time to refill that bucket and rest, and so I'm looking at the different areas in my life now and saying, what today is important for me, is it lying down for a little short nap or is it doing something a lot bigger, like setting a boundary with someone because I'm overworking myself?

Jenn St John  44:38

Yeah, and that modeling, like you say, to the next generation in the grand scheme of things, hopefully they just are able to set boundaries earlier in their life and prioritize their own care.

Misty Pratt  44:49

Yes,

Jenn St John  44:50

then it took us the decades to get.

Misty Pratt  44:52

Yes, I hope it's faster for them.

Jenn St John  44:56

I think it is. I mean, even like I know, even education wise in school. I think that they're being taught a very different way of, you know, mental health and mental wellness and emotional regulation and emotional health. I don't even think I knew the term emotional regulation. No, last 10 years

Misty Pratt  45:11

we did not have workshops on anxiety, and now they get workshops on anxiety. So, I mean, it's, it's pretty great.

Jenn St John  45:17

So, there's hope. There's hope.

Misty Pratt  45:18

Yes,

Jenn St John  45:20

you write in the epilog about holding your grandmother's joy and despair, and almost as if her story lives inside you. At what point did you realize that her story wasn't just family history, it was also part of your own emotional inheritance?

Misty Pratt  45:36

When did I realize that? Honestly, I think it was writing that epilog that it hit very hard, like I wrote that thing, so the whole book took about four years of research, and most of it was a slog, but that epilog came out of me in literally 1015, minutes, and I felt like, okay, this is something that I've written that truly is just like coming from some other place of understanding what this is all about, and it was in that moment where I was like, oh, like generationally I am holding all these things, it's in my DNA, right? It's physical, but it's also.. I don't want to go too like crazy spiritual, but it is.. it is.. there is a spiritual aspect to it, for sure, that is something that I recognize that I can't explain, but yeah, I think it was in that moment that it really hit me, even though I'd been intellectually thinking about that up until that point of finishing the book. I knew all these things, I knew how intergenerational trauma was passed on, and all that kind of stuff, but now it was like it really sunk in.

Jenn St John  46:38

Yeah, I get that. I get that, especially like it's a four year journey of a lot of hard work, and there's the science side of it, it's very well researched, but then the epilog is just, you know, you being able to sit with your own story and going back to how it all started for you too,

Misty Pratt  46:55

and I

Misty Pratt  46:55

think it made me way less anxious about it all, like when I was a kid, and I mentioned it being afraid of her, or I'm feeling shame for her now. I just feel so much love, like I just feel I really wish she was here to see this. Right? I don't know if she'd be happy if I was telling her story, but I think she would be proud.

Jenn St John  47:17

Yeah, I know I've lost both my parents already, so I definitely feel you go through different stages in processing everything, but yeah, I mean, everything only comes from a place of love, for

Misty Pratt  47:28

sure.

Jenn St John  47:28

Now, and you also ended your book with that beautiful moment of pondering on John O'Donoghue's question, what if I told you that you are not broken, so you wonder who you might have been if you understood the system sooner in that moment in the book. What do you wish that your younger self could have

Misty Pratt  47:48

known? My gosh, so many things. Yeah, I wish she could have known that it was more than just some brain problem, that it was more than just I had this imbalance in my brain, that it was my grandmother and my great grandmother, all the family history that I'd looked at before, that which indicated that other women in my family had experienced these things. It was growing up in the culture I grew up in the 90s and 2000s which weren't the greatest of times for girls and women. I mean, is there any generation that is, but I was gonna say I I feel like if she had known that, she would have been kinder to herself. I was really hard on myself. I was really like, what is wrong with you? Like, I would even just feel that urge of like hurting myself, because I thought, what is wrong with you? And I think I would have been so much gentler, I would have been able to, and I do that now with my little, like, mini self I carry around in me. I'm very gentle with her, and I say, "Wasn't your fault, unfortunately, your responsibility. So, what are we going to do about it? Yeah,

Jenn St John  48:50

and I agree with that as well. The awareness of there to be kind and gentle to yourself, but then you also have to deal with

Misty Pratt  48:58

it. Yep, yep, can't ignore it.

Jenn St John  49:01

No, if someone's listening right now and they feel that the problem is them, so similar to how you felt when you were younger, what would you want them to hear or to know?

Misty Pratt  49:11

I was reflecting on this earlier, what would I want people to know? Because I think there's this urge to give advice, to say this is what you need to do, but instead I think I would say, can you sit with that for a little while? Can you sit with the question of what if this is not about you? What comes up for you? Do you feel that that fits? Are there little moments in your life where you suddenly go, oh yeah. And then I would say, once you start pulling those threads, try to explore those and try to see where it takes you, because for me it took me to a place of way more freedom, kindness, love for myself. I think it changed everything, but I mean it didn't make me any less anxious. I'm still my same self, but I can handle her a lot. Better, and I can walk with her a lot better,

Jenn St John  50:03

and that's the only place we all want to get to, isn't

Misty Pratt  50:06

it? Yeah, don't we all just want to just hold ourselves in a much more gentler way and be like, I got you, this is hard, but we're, you know, we're in this together.

Jenn St John  50:15

I totally agree, and what's the piece in this work that you hope we remember long after we finish your book, or this conversation is listened to.

Misty Pratt  50:27

For me, I think the biggest piece, and I've said this many times as I've promoted the book, is like I want people to know that mental illness does not reside all in our heads, it is very much living within our culture, our society, our politics, everything we do, and so healing is not an individual act, it's going to be a social one. Thank you so much for writing the book, Missy. Thank you for reading it.

Jenn St John  50:53

Everywhere I went that I was reading it, people took pictures of it, really.

Misty Pratt  50:57

Oh, that's so lovely. Oh, that's so lovely to hear.

Jenn St John  51:02

Hopefully, more people can be part of that fight. So,

Misty Pratt  51:05

I hope so. I really do.

Jenn St John  51:09

As we come to the end of this conversation, I just wanted to take a moment, because this is one that asks us to look beyond ourselves. What stays with me is the idea that so much of women's mental distress has been framed as personal weakness, as chemical imbalance, or as individual frailty, when in reality so much of it has been shaped by systems that were never designed with women fully in mind, from the legacy of hysteria to research gaps in medicine, from burnout being medicalized instead of contextualized to the invisible labor that quietly erodes nervous systems over time, this is a pattern here. And when something is embedded in diagnostic language, in research finding, and cultural expectations, it can start to feel like truth, like this is just how it is. This is just who we are, but maybe part of the work in learning to separate what is truly ours from what we've been living inside of. Maybe anxiety isn't always a personal flaw, maybe exhaustion isn't always poor time management, and maybe burnout isn't always a resilience problem. This conversation doesn't let us off the hook, but it does invite us to widen the lens to hold ourselves with compassion. Yes, but also to question the systems that shaped the stories that we've been told about our bodies and about our minds. That to me feels hopeful, because if something was built, it can be rebuilt, and if something was embedded, it can be examined, and if healing is social as well as personal, well, then none of us are meant to do it alone. Before we go, if this conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. You can connect with me through the show notes on social media or through my website, Jen St john.ca Supporting the podcast by subscribing or sharing an episode or leaving a review is obviously one of the best ways to help these conversations reach more people. If something difficult did come up for you while listening, please remember you don't have to sit with it alone. In Canada, you can call or text 988 anytime for free confidential mental health support. Also, the CMHA has crisis lines across Canada. In my region, it's 1888938333 and you can also text 686868 In the US, the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline is available 24/7 You can call or text, whether you're in emotional distress or in crisis, and for listeners in Australia, you can call Lifeline at 13 1114 day or night for free and confidential crisis support. Thank you for listening, and thank you for holding space for stories like this, and for being a part of this community. We'll be back next week with another conversation, and until then, take good care of yourselves and each other, and we'll keep finding our way forward.