“No Feeling is Final:” New Mental Health Podcast Explores Suicide and Reasons for Living
“Just ask for help,” is a refrain we often hear in mental health awareness and anti-stigma campaigns.
But when mental health advocate Honor Eastly found herself in a mental health crisis and sought support, she found herself falling down a rabbit hole of navigating systemic barriers and challenges. She found available appointments that were three months away and prohibitively costly, dehumanizing treatment by mental health professionals when she did access inpatient care, and a lack of support in the community. “You’re on your own, left to fend for yourself. And at a time when, you know, maybe you shouldn’t be left alone to fend for yourself,” noted Eastly in a profile about her experience.
While Eastly’s experience took place in Australia, many Americans will recognize her experience as familiar. Eastly does not wish to discourage people from seeking help, just the opposite – but she does seek to illuminate the very real challenges associated with help-seeking.
Eastly has emerged as a mental health advocate with a mission – to tell the truth about what happens when we ask for help, and to make help more accessible and helpful.
With her partner Graham Panther, also a mental health and suicide prevention advocate, she has started an online and in-person support network called The Big Feels Club. As described on the website: “what we do is not therapy, and that’s kind of the whole point. It’s one of the few spaces you can go and not feel that anyone is trying to ‘fix’ you. In our experience, that’s a sacred thing.” And she has released a moving six-part memoir podcast called No Feeling is Final, which is described as “a story of difference, identity, and why we should stay alive.”
Honor Eastly and her community are doing vital work to raise awareness and provide hope to those who grapple with “big feels” and how to cope with them.
Resources for further exploration:
- The Big Feels Club
- No Feeling is Final podcast
- The power of peer support: How sharing lived experience of mental illness offers ‘a different kind of hope’ (ABC)
- Where do you go when you’re afraid you’ll kill yourself? (ABC)
- ‘When I presented to hospital for my mental health, this is what a nurse asked me.’ (Mama Mia)
- Why I won’t tell someone who’s suicidal to ‘just ask for help’ (ABC)