About

Hey. This is Kate… 

This is a podcast about how we become who we are — about making just about anything sound normal, from PTSD to podcasting to serial murder. It’s about people’s stories. Are you sure you really want to know?

I spent my entire professional life in the fields of mental health and criminal justice. My favorite, hardest and most important work was specifically in the fields of correctional psych, forensic psych, and crisis assessment.

I grew up in upstate New York, and went to college near the Canadian border; my first psych internship was actually immediately next to the bridge between Ogdensburg, NY and Johnstown, ON. After that, I studied criminal justice and mental health counseling in Boston, then spent several years in New Hampshire. I’ve worked in the NH State Prison system, a couple of different locked psychiatric facilities, and then several emergency rooms and eventually all manner of community settings.

I broke my back in 2014, and while I can move around a whole lot better than I could then, I’m still often stuck, as an acquaintance once pointed out, sitting on my couch listening to true crime podcasts all day. One thing I’ve noticed is that, quite often, I would hear someone ask, “But why would he do that?” or, “How could that happen?” or, my personal favorite, “Well, that’s crazy. That could never happen to me.” After a while of talking back, alone, long after they had moved on to new things, I decided to give this podcasting thing a try, myself. 

I do give some background, of course, but I’m not trying to create a deep-dive, detailed, narrative style podcast. That has already been done, brilliantly, by so many people I admire. I can’t see any reason to try and compete with them, or even just add to the noise, when I already cannot find enough hours in the day to listen to everything I’d like to hear. My goal, instead, is to try and answer some of those questions, at least from my own perspective. I don’t pretend to have all, or even most, of the answers… but I can usually come up with one or two.

Over time, the focus of my show has widened to include the normal, the average, the ordinary, that all of us can understand… but we continue to think of ourselves as somehow screwed up, weird, wrong. We’re not. You’re not. Honest.

Just make sure you really want to know. Because the most important certainty I carry, from all my time working with inmates and patients and onlookers, is that the only real difference between “us” and “them” is a key. And that everything we experience, from crippling anxiety to serial murder, is maybe not rational, but there is a logic to it. I can make things understandable.

And once you learn just how easy it can be to fall into the darker parts of life, you might think,”…I felt better before I knew that.”

Because sometimes… Ignorance Was Bliss.