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Nafisa

Platform for exploring mental health research, one paper at a time. This is a space where we learn and grow together, critically analysing research in a clear, digestible way. The goal is to help people better recognise, understand, and support mental health through evidence-based knowledge, while building a thoughtful community equipped to navigate emotional experiences with more clarity and care.

Episodes

  1. 4 DAYS AGO

    ADHD: Adulthood

    Send us Fan Mail Most conversations about ADHD start and end with children. But for a significant number of people, ADHD doesn't stop at eighteen. It follows them into adulthood, quietly reshaping relationships, careers, and the story they tell about who they are, usually without a name for what they're experiencing. In this episode, we break down Wender, Wolf, and Wasserstein's foundational 2001 overview of ADHD in adults, published in the Annuals of the New York Academy of Sciences. We cover what ADHD actually looks like across a lifetime, including the seven core features that show up in adults specifically, why it went undiagnosed in so many people for so long, what the research says is happening in the brain, and what treatment approaches actually have evidence behind them. This one is for anyone who spent years being told their struggles were personality, or attitude, or potential that never quite arrived. The research has a different explanation.

    24 min

  2. 17 MAY

    Masking

    Send us Fan Mail Most people do some version of masking. Most people call it "Reading the room." But for many people, particularly those with autism, masking isn't a social skill. It's a survival strategy that starts in childhood, runs on autopilot for decades, and costs far more than anyone on the outside can see. In this episode, we break down Miller et al.'s 2021 paper from Autism in Adulthood, which is a qualitative study of 461 participants across three groups: people with autism, neurotypical adults, and neurodivergent adults without an autism diagnosis. We get into what masking actually involves, what it does to your sense of identity over time, why it gets harder the longer it runs, and why the people who are best at it are often the least believed when they say they're struggling. This one is for anyone who has ever held themselves together in public and fallen apart in private, and wondered why nobody ever noticed.

    24 min

  3. 10 MAY

    Maladaptive Daydreaming: Interview

    Send us Fan Mail Last episode, we covered the research on maladaptive daydreaming, the cycle, and the mechanics. This week, we bring in someone who has been living it for 32 years. Our interviewee has a background in psychology and a lived experience of maladaptive daydreaming that started at age two. In this conversation, we talk about what it actually looks like from the inside, why "just stop" is not an answer, and what it means to navigate this from within a collectivistic culture where privacy, access to therapy, and even the concept of mental health support look completely different. Our interviewee also talks about the day she spent hours in it and skipped both lunch and dinner without noticing, how a therapist dismissed her experience as a tic, how she found validation in an online community before any clinician gave her a name for it, and why she thinks the biggest gap in the research right now is biological: fMRI scans, brain waves, physiological data that simply doesn't exist yet for MD, and why that needs to change This is the first of what I hope will be a recurring format on Brick by Brick, because the research gives us the map. But the person who has lived experience will always know things the map doesn't show.

    52 min

  4. 3 MAY

    Maladaptive Daydreaming: The Current

    Send us Fan Mail Have you ever spent hours somewhere that doesn't exist, with people who aren't real, feeling things that are completely genuine? And then come back, and had no idea how to explain any of it to anyone? This episode is about maladaptive daydreaming. Not regular mind-wandering. The kind where people spend four or more hours a day in a vivid internal world, hide it from everyone around them, and spend years being misdiagnosed with depression, anxiety, or ADHD because clinicians don't have a name for what they're actually describing. We're looking at Soffer-Dudek and Somer's daily diary study, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in 2018. The study tracked 77 people over 14 days and measured not just whether maladaptive daydreaming correlated with other symptoms, but which direction the relationship actually runs. What pushes someone toward the daydream? What gets worse the day after they come back? The findings point to a specific cycle, and they change how you think about why this is so hard to walk away from. We also get into why this condition has lived without a clinical home for so long, what the treatment research actually says, and what the communities that formed around this knew before researchers found them. This episode is for anyone who has felt the pull. And for anyone who loves someone who has.

    23 min

  5. 26 APR

    Autism Spectrum Disorder: The Engine Room

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we go deeper than behavior and deeper than brain structure. We're heading into the engine room, the cellular and chemical systems that researchers believe are central to understanding why the brain in autism develops and functions the way it does. We look at three systems. The brain's primary chemical messenger and what happens when its calibration is off. The cellular structures responsible for energy production and why the brain feels their dysfunction most acutely. And the signaling pathway that controls how the brain builds and maintains its own connections, and what goes wrong when it runs in the wrong direction. We also connect all three back to what we covered in Episodes 1 and 2, because none of these systems operate in isolation. They interact. They feed into each other. And together they start to explain something the Lord et al. Lancet review pointed at but couldn't yet answer, why we can see patterns in autism across large groups, but still can't make reliable predictions for any individual person. Based on Shuid et al., Update on Atypicalities of Central Nervous System in Autism Spectrum Disorder. Brain Sciences, 2020. Cross-referenced with Lord et al., Autism Spectrum Disorder. The Lancet, 2018.

    23 min

  6. 19 APR

    Autism Spectrum Disorder: Behind the Scenes

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we go inside the brain itself, using a building as our guide. We talk about what early altered brain development actually means at the cellular level, and why the blueprint gets drawn differently before anyone notices.  Why the structures most responsible for threat detection and emotional memory are built larger in childhood, and what happens to them after that.  What the amygdala and hippocampus are actually doing in a crowded, unpredictable environment, and why that costs so much.  Why there are still no reliable biomarkers for autism, and what the structural findings tell us about why that's not a simple problem to solve.  What neuroinflammation looks like inside donated brain tissue, and why the maintenance crew never stood down.  And what happens when you put these two papers side by side, because they don't just describe the same condition from different angles. They answer each other's questions. All of it from one paper.  Shuid, A.N. et al., Update on Atypicalities of Central Nervous System in Autism Spectrum Disorder. Brain Sciences, 2020.

    27 min

  7. 12 APR

    Autism Spectrum Disorder

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we walk through autism research one stop at a time, using an airport as our guide.  We talk about what autism actually is and why it looks so different in every person. Why we diagnose something biological by watching behavior, and what that process gets wrong. What the genetics actually tell us and what they don't. Everything that travels alongside autism that most conversations completely miss. What the research says actually helps. And what adult life looks like for autistic people, including the hard numbers most people choose to skip over. All of it from one paper. Lord et al., Autism Spectrum Disorder. The Lancet, 2018.

    32 min
  • 7 Episodes

About

Platform for exploring mental health research, one paper at a time. This is a space where we learn and grow together, critically analysing research in a clear, digestible way. The goal is to help people better recognise, understand, and support mental health through evidence-based knowledge, while building a thoughtful community equipped to navigate emotional experiences with more clarity and care.

Information

  • Creator
    Nafisa
  • Years Active
    2k
  • Episodes
    7
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Brick by Brick
  • Show Website
    Brick by Brick