Suffering Is Collective, and So Is Healing: Belonging, Ritual, and Meaning in Uncertain Times - An Interview with Suzan Song, MD

Suffering Is Collective, and So Is Healing: Belonging, Ritual, and Meaning in Uncertain Times - An Interview with Suzan Song, MD

Suzan Song, MD, psychiatrist and medical anthropologist, on why suffering is collective and healing comes through belonging, ritual, and meaning.

Curt and Katie talk with Suzan Song, MD about why the exhaustion so many therapists and clients are carrying right now is not only personal. Drawing on more than two decades of global mental health work with survivors of war, trafficking, and mass violence, Suzan makes the case that distress is often collective, shaped by culture and unstable systems, and that healing happens through belonging, narrative, ritual, meaning, and agency, not symptom elimination alone.

She names what American mental health training often misses when it treats suffering as something bounded inside a single person, and offers concrete, low-cost rituals therapists can use to stay grounded. The conversation moves from collective grief and moral exhaustion to the difference between functioning and healing, and to grounding in relationship: who you matter to, and who matters to you.

This is a grounding conversation for therapists feeling stretched by the current moment, and for anyone drawn to a global mental health lens on collective trauma, ritual, and sustainable healing.

In this episode, we discuss:

- Why the distress therapists and clients carry right now is collective, not only individual

- What American mental health training misses when it locates suffering inside a bounded self

- How belonging, narrative, ritual, and meaning function as healing

- Why functioning is not the same as healing

- Grounding in relationship as an alternative to purely individual nervous-system regulation

- How small acts of agency protect against demoralization