Beneath the Noise
Beneath the Noise is a podcast about mental illness—the raw, disorienting, and sometimes darkly funny reality of living with a brain that doesn’t always cooperate. Hosted by Emily Jatcko, it’s part memoir, part cultural analysis, and entirely uninterested in the sanitized, feel-good version of mental health.
This isn’t a self-help podcast. There are no five-step plans or platitudes about positive thinking—just an honest look at psychosis, medication, work, relationships, and the ways neurodivergence shapes our lives. It’s about the contradictions: wanting to succeed in a system you fundamentally resent, feeling like both too much and not enough, learning to live with a diagnosis that rewrites everything you thought you knew about yourself.
Mental illness is absurd. It’s heavy. It’s frustratingly difficult to explain. But it’s also deeply human.
So if you’ve ever stared at a hospital showerhead having an existential crisis or tried to convince yourself you were fine while clearly unraveling—well, you’re in good company.
Let’s talk about it.
Beneath the Noise
Into the Fog of Psychosis, a Trailer
I was 25 the first time I had a psychotic break—standing in a hospital shower, staring at my own reflection in an anti-suicide showerhead, trying to make sense of the person looking back at me. It wasn’t the beginning of my story, and it definitely wasn’t the end.
Beneath the Noise is a podcast about mental illness—the raw, disorienting, sometimes absurd reality of living with a brain that refuses to play by the rules. It’s part memoir, part cultural analysis, and entirely uninterested in neat, easy narratives.
This isn’t about self-improvement. It’s about survival, diagnosis, misdiagnosis, the long road of recovery, and all the ways mental illness collides with work, relationships, pop culture, and identity.
If you’ve ever found yourself spiraling at 3 AM, side-eyeing your own brain like it’s an unreliable narrator—well, you’re not alone.
This is Beneath the Noise
Music by @fernandoallgaue on Fiverr
There was a face in front of me in the mirrored curvature of the anti suicide shower head, but i couldn’t tell you who she is. Her face is wild, shining with mania. Her eyes were wide and full of fear. Her hair is dry and frizzy, her face picked at and full of scabs and acne. As I look back at this moment, I feel the sting of pity. Then it dawns on me—the bloodshot eyes and bitten lips are mine. The distorted reflection belongs to me, standing beneath the showerhead in my local mental hospital. There I was, standing in a psych ward shower, having an existential crisis with a showerhead designed specifically so I couldn’t die. That’s not quite irony but damn. I begin to smell the ward in the back of my nose and the familiarity weighs heavy in my chest. I feel this brief moment of clarity wash over me like a wave in a shallow sea. It takes my feet from underneath me and the salt of it stings in my nose. I can’t breathe for a moment.
I am in a psych ward, I am sick, I need help. There is no way but through.
Then my brain flipped back into my delusional state and everything was fuzzy from then on for a while. Flashes of meds, various roommates, and group therapy sessions begin to flicker in and out. I don’t remember for sure a lot of the details of this time and anyone who does is bound by HIPAA. Bless that law.
It was December of 2018 and I had stopped sleeping. At night I would lie in bed and my eyelids would flutter uncontrollably in front of my eyes for hours until I gave up on trying. I couldn't sleep. I would instead spend time writing and conspiring with myself in the dead of night just me and my phone. I wrote endless notes about nothing even remotely coherent. I would think up ciphers and puzzles for myself that only made sense to me. I thought I was solving the mysteries of the universe. Turns out, I was just writing delusional manifestos about being hunted by the government and oligarchical elite. I stopped showering and eating. I was manic for the first time in my life. At the peak of my mania, I was convinced I had cracked a secret code that tied all David Fincher movies together. And you know what? I still think I might be onto something. I was 25 years old, and I was completely unraveling.
