There's a particular kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. A particular kind of struggle that therapy helps but doesn't solve. A particular kind of life that doesn't follow the recovery arc.
Not Fixed, Still Here is a podcast about mental health—all of it grounded in science, shaped by lived experience, and honest about the gaps in between.
Hosted by someone who has navigated depression, emotional and physical abuse, and over two decades of asking challenging questions about the mind, this show brings together psychology, neuroscience, and the therapeutic frameworks that actually helped—CBT, DBT, EFT, and NLP—not to tell you what to do, but to help you understand what's happening and why.
Every episode moves between the research and the reality. The science is real. The uncertainty is named. And nothing gets wrapped up too cleanly.
This is not a wellness show. It is not therapy. It is not a recovery story with a tidy ending.
This conversation is for those who are intellectually curious, emotionally exhausted, and tired of receiving easy answers.
Not Fixed, Still Here. The science of mental health, without the performance. If this show means something to you, you can support it here: Toren "TY" Ylfa (https://buymeacoffee.com/notfixedstillhere)
If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available 24/7. Call or text 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) or text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line).
Send us Fan Mail "The body keeps the score." That phrase — from Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's 2014 book — has become shorthand for something millions of trauma survivors already knew. That what happened to them didn't just live in their memories. It lived somewhere else too. In the tension that arrived before the mind caught up. In the physical responses that made no sense in the present but made complete sense in the past. The phrase resonated because it named something real. This episode asks —...
9 Oct 2026
The Silence That Kills
Send us Fan Mail In England and Wales in 2024, three quarters of all suicide deaths were male. The highest proportion in twenty-five years. Suicide is the leading cause of death for men under fifty. Not cancer. Not heart disease. Suicide. And yet men account for only 36% of referrals to psychological therapy in the UK. 40% of men don't talk about their mental health at all. Those two things — the highest death rate and the lowest help-seeking — are not a coincidence. They are a system failing...
25 Sept 2026
The Grief That Has No Grave
Send us Fan Mail There is a kind of sadness that doesn't have a name in ordinary conversation. Not the sadness after a death. Not the sadness that comes with a clear before and after that other people can recognise and acknowledge. It is the sadness of something that was never there. The childhood that should have been safe and wasn't. The parents who should have been present and couldn't be. The version of yourself you might have been if things had been different. This kind of sadness has no...
11 Sept 2026
The Wound That Didn't Happen Once
Send us Fan Mail There is a particular experience that many survivors of complex trauma share. Not a flashback. Not a crisis. Just the ordinary experience of being in a room with people who feel safe — and feeling completely unable to trust it. Not because anything is wrong. But because your nervous system learned something very early about what safety means. And what it can turn into. This is not PTSD in the way most people understand it. It is something more pervasive. Something that touche...
28 Aug 2026
The Tool That Doesn't Know When to Stop
Send us Fan Mail It is Tuesday at 11pm. The anxiety won't let you sleep. Your therapist's next available slot is three weeks away. And there, immediately available, is an AI chatbot. Over 40 million people worldwide are now using AI-powered mental health tools every month. 1.2 million people per week are using ChatGPT specifically to discuss suicide. AI is already doing some genuinely useful things in mental health. The Thera bot randomised controlled trial published in NEJM AI showed a 51% r...
14 Aug 2026
Your Gut Knows Something Your Doctor Doesn't
Send us Fan Mail Your gut and your mood move together. You've probably noticed. The stomach that doesn't feel right when you're anxious. The appetite that disappears when the depression is heavy. The physical dimension of something that's supposed to live entirely in the mind. You were noticing something real. Approximately 95% of the body's serotonin is produced in the gut — not the brain. The gut communicates with the brain through the vagus nerve, the immune system, and microbial metabolit...
31 Jul 2026
The Pattern Behind the Promise
Send us Fan Mail Last episode we looked at one device. One company. One gap between promise and proof. This episode is the pattern behind it. The mental wellness industry is now worth $166 billion globally — and growing. It is extraordinarily sophisticated at finding people in a specific psychological state: exhausted from trying, let down by systems that were supposed to help, and still, despite everything, looking for something that might work. That state has a name in psychology. It's call...
17 Jul 2026
Nurosym — When the Promise Outpaces the Proof
Send us Fan Mail The vagus nerve is real. The research is promising. And neither of those things is the problem. Nurosym is a wearable device that stimulates the vagus nerve through the ear. The science underlying it has genuine potential. Early-stage research is showing signals worth watching. The problem is the distance between "worth watching" and "trusted, proven, easy" — which is how Nurosym markets itself, at up to £449, to people who have already tried most things. This episode look...
3 Jul 2026
Do Therapeutic Models Need Improvement?
Send us Fan Mail Sources: Treatment Resistance & Diagnostic Critique McIntyre et al. — Treatment-resistant depression: definition, prevalence, detection, management — World Psychiatry (2023) Karabulut & Düzgün — Treatment-Resistant Depression Rates: Pilot data from Türkiye — PMC (2025) Treatment-resistant depression: a problematic illness or a problem in our approach? — British Journal of Psychiatry, Cambridge Core. Paganin — Treatment-resistant depression: time to rethink current def...
19 Jun 2026
Was I Always Going To Be Like This
Send us Fan Mail Was I always going to be like this? It's the question that shows up at 3am. When nothing else is working. Somewhere between despair and accusation. This episode goes looking for a real answer — not reassurance, not false hope, but what the science actually says. We go into genetics and what heritability really means for depression and anxiety. We go into epigenetics—the genuinely significant discovery that chronic stress and early experience can change how genes are expressed...
5 Jun 2026
CBT Origins, Evidence, and limits as NHS default for Complex Trauma
Send us Fan Mail The origins of CBT through Aaron Beck’s challenge to psychoanalysis summarize where CBT’s evidence base is strongest and examine how CBT became a system default in the UK—sometimes mismatched to complex trauma presentations. The episode closes by distinguishing PTSD vs. complex PTSD evidence, raising concerns about “unthinking” default application, and pointing listeners toward alternative/adjunct approaches and the next episode’s focus on biology/genetics/epigenetics/neuropl...
22 May 2026
You Are Not as Alone as It Has Felt
Send us Fan Mail You are not as alone as it has felt. Nearly one in three adults in England and Wales experienced some form of childhood abuse before the age of eighteen. That is 13.6 million people—according to the most recent Crime Survey for England and Wales. But statistics can count people. They cannot hold them. In this episode we look at what the data actually shows about the lifetime prevalence of childhood abuse — and more importantly, what it doesn't and can't capture about what it ...
8 May 2026
What is Not Fixed,Still Here — Who I Am, Why I'm Here, and What This Show Is
Send us Fan Mail What does it mean to spend twenty years trying to understand your own mind — not just cope with it, but actually understand it? This is Episode 1 of Not Fixed, Still Here. Before the science, before the frameworks, before anything else—this episode is about why this show exists, who it's for, and what you can expect from it. We cover what mental health actually looks like in the numbers — and what the numbers don't capture. We go into the neuroscience of what chronic stress a...
11 Apr 2026
Episode 0
Send us Fan Mail A 41-second introduction to Not Fixed, Still Here — what this show is, why it exists, and who it's for. Not Fixed, Still Here launches [8th of May]. A podcast about mental health, all of it grounded in science and shaped by lived experience. Episode 1 drops fortnightly. If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available 24/7. Call or text 988 or text HOME to 741741. Support the show: https://buymeacoffee.com/notfixedstillhere Support the show
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