People First Radio – April 11, 2024People First Radio – April 11, 2024
People First Radio
Poet Nisha Patel reflects on turning her medical and psychiatric records into poetry, questioning how systems record pain, disability and anger. Education professor Sachin Maharaj discusses how social media and smartphones are affecting students’ learning and mental health, arguing that collective solutions are needed for a systemic problem.
0:00•12 Apr 2024
Poems, Phones and Power: How Systems Shape Our Minds
Episode Overview
- Medical records can feel dehumanising, reducing deeply personal crises to brief, clinical notes that overlook lived experience.
- Using tools like blackout poetry can turn medical files into art, giving patients a way to reclaim narrative control and express anger, humour and grief.
- Building literacy about one’s own body and health is crucial, so medical expertise and personal knowledge can meet on more equal ground.
- Evidence from schools worldwide links heavy phone and social media use to declining academic performance and challenges with focus.
- Systemic issues such as compulsive app design and unequal access to alternatives mean collective action, not just individual willpower, is needed to protect children’s wellbeing.
“You have the best opinion on your body sometimes. You know your body, and you have to nurture that relationship.”
What drives someone to seek a life without blind trust in authority, especially around health and wellbeing? This episode of People First Radio brings together two very different conversations that share one big thread: how systems shape our inner lives and mental health. First up, poet and educator Nisha Patel talks about turning a decade of her medical records into her collection *A Fate Worse Than Death*.
After requesting everything from lung scans to psychiatric notes, she describes the shock of seeing her most vulnerable moments reduced to phrases like “nightmares return” and “feels tired.” That mismatch between “this huge moment of clarity and epiphany” in her memory and “one of 150 pages” on paper fuels poems that play with blackout text, medical jargon and dark humour.
Nisha shares pieces about Diet Coke, cancer scares and even the Incredible Hulk, all used to question how disability, pain and anger are recorded, judged and controlled. Her reminder lands sharply: “you have the best opinion on your body sometimes,” and nurturing that relationship is key when working with any medical system.
The tone shifts but the systemic focus stays put as education professor Sachin Maharaj joins to talk about a massive lawsuit from Ontario school boards against major social media platforms. He challenges the idea that phone addiction is a “kid problem” to fix one child at a time, calling it a “collective problem” backed by global data on falling test scores and rising distress.
He points to phones being used for learning less than 2% of the time during school, and raises equity concerns as lower‑income kids log the highest screen hours. While courts and governments sort out responsibility, he urges parents and communities to rethink how much of children’s development is being handed over to apps.
If you’ve ever felt like a file number, or watched a child vanish behind a screen, this episode might get you asking: what systems are quietly shaping your story, and what could change if you claimed more say?
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