Episode 6: Broken Systems, Impossible Choices, and the Social Workers In Between

Episode 7: Addiction, the Treatment Industry, and Living Out Loud

Michael Lynch will tell you exactly what addiction is: using despite negative consequences. And he'll tell you what it isn't: a choice, a moral failing, or something prison can fix. He knows because he lived it. Foster care to gangs to prison to building a multimillion-dollar brand while destroying himself from the inside. The outside looked good. The inside was not. Police saved him without meaning to. That was 18 years ago. Since then: Stairway Recovery. 170 beds. Thousands of lives. Court advocacy fighting a system that punishes disease. And some of the rawest, most honest truth about what recovery actually takes.

Episode 6: Broken Systems, Impossible Choices, and the Social Workers In Between

What happens when someone is medically ready to leave the hospital but has nowhere safe to go? Nick D'Agostino is a licensed social worker in New York City. Every day, he stands in that impossible space: between a system that says patients are ready to discharge and a reality that has no room for them. He's worked with nine-year-olds in foster care, unhoused people navigating the court system, and patients in psychiatric units whose families can't take them back. He's the person making the calls no one else wants to make. When a 22-year-old in Queens was shot by police during a mental health crisis, it raised the question Nick's entire career has been building toward: when someone is in crisis, who do we send? This is a conversation about broken systems, impossible choices, and the social workers trying to hold it together.

Episode 5: The Surgeon Who Walked Away and the Fight to Heal our Healers

She walked out of the operating room mid-case thinking, If I can’t be a surgeon, I want to die Dr. Frances Mei Hardin was medicine’s ideal success story—until it nearly destroyed her. In this episode, she exposes the reality of malignant medical training, the moment she left clinical medicine, and why she’s now fighting to change the culture through the Hippocratic Collective. A raw conversation about physician suicide, burnout, shame, survival, and rebuilding an identity after medicine takes everything. Check out: [https://linktr.ee/francesmei.md?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMjU2MjgxMDQwNTU4AAGnMH09bYxqHCrVjFsnwQUV6fPLttIbyTUwaOH8vk_S5pHELnIH9-DXQxn3gfc_aem_XRVS9_sF17XjUDHvKYOb8w] * Her podcast Surgeon, Interrupted [https://linktr.ee/francesmei.md?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMjU2MjgxMDQwNTU4AAGnMH09bYxqHCrVjFsnwQUV6fPLttIbyTUwaOH8vk_S5pHELnIH9-DXQxn3gfc_aem_XRVS9_sF17XjUDHvKYOb8w] * Her new book coming out soon [https://linktr.ee/francesmei.md?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMjU2MjgxMDQwNTU4AAGnMH09bYxqHCrVjFsnwQUV6fPLttIbyTUwaOH8vk_S5pHELnIH9-DXQxn3gfc_aem_XRVS9_sF17XjUDHvKYOb8w] * The Hippocratic Collective [https://linktr.ee/francesmei.md?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMjU2MjgxMDQwNTU4AAGnMH09bYxqHCrVjFsnwQUV6fPLttIbyTUwaOH8vk_S5pHELnIH9-DXQxn3gfc_aem_XRVS9_sF17XjUDHvKYOb8w]

Episode 4: Male Loneliness, Online Communities, and the Search for Connection

One in four American men under 35 report feeling lonely. When they go online seeking answers, some find communities that can turn pain into ideology. We speak anonymously with a 27-year-old man caught in that tension: he identifies as a feminist, struggles with social cues, and has spent years in incel-exit and incel-reform communities. A conversation about how autism intersects with the male loneliness epidemic and why some men find these digital spaces so appealing.

Episode 3: Muslim Civil Rights, ICE Detention, and the Fight for Free Speech in America

2024 marked the highest number of Muslim civil rights complaints in CAIR's 30-year history. Zahra Billoo leads the Council on American-Islamic Relations' San Francisco Bay Area chapter—the nation's oldest—fighting battles from detention centers to the courts. When speaking up becomes dangerous, what happens to freedom of speech in America? We discuss in this weeks episode of storychaser.