Let’s be real, this is the number one question I’d have if I’d just listened to a show like No Feeling Is Final. Check out the deep dive here on everything I’ve been up to in the seven years since the show came out, including the full goss on how my mental health has been :)

Oh man. We keep calling No Feeling Is Final ‘the little podcast that could’ (like ‘the little engine that could’) because it got SO MUCH bigger than we’d ever expected. 

Praise from places like TIME magazine, the New York Times, The Atlantic, AV Club, and even - this one I really didn’t see coming - the Financial Times(??). Plus the Director’s Choice Award at the Third Coast Festival in Chicago, which is kind of like the Oscars of podcasting (the… ahem… Poscars?)

Not bad for a weird little podcast made in Australia eh?

But the biggest thing by far for us was all the listener feedback. I’m talking, mountains of listener feedback. You can read a few of those responses over in the “How Is Honor Doing These Days?” piece. Or read a bunch more listener quotes here over on Big Feels Club.

Making No Feeling with the ABC - with Joel Werner, Graham Panther, and our producer Alice Moldovan - is still the most nourishing creative experience I’ve had in my life. I doubt I’ll ever have anything quite like that again. (Shoutout also to Russell Stapleton who did the amazing sound design and everyone else at ABC who helped out).

I think you can hear how much fun we had making it, even though the subject matter can be really heavy. All the little silly audio clips me and Graham made together on my phone, as I documented the experience. (After a while he stopped bothering to ask, “wait, are you recording this?” and just went with it. Love ya Grey.)

Much of the audio in the show is actual ‘life tape’ – either old recordings I had, or stuff I was documenting in the moment once we knew we were making the show. Then a few things were re-enactments. And we had fun with these too, despite the subject matter!

If you want to hear more about how we made the podcast, come to our behind-the-scenes webinar on May 30!

Because when I made the show, my mental health story didn’t have a nice neat ending. Despite asking for help for years, I still didn’t feel like I had ‘The Answer’. And I didn’t really see much of that story anywhere at the time. Mental health stories without a nice neat ending. 

It’s a big part of what me and Graham work on now with Big Feels Club, telling more realistic mental health stories, “messy” mental health recovery journeys that don’t always go in one straight line from bad to good. (Find more out about Big Feels and how you can get involved here). By being more honest about mental health, we hope to encourage people to be more compassionate and “realistic” about what recovery can look like (for themselves and for the people around them).

I am! And gosh, it’s been quite a bit of stuff! 

I hate writing braggy CV stuff so boyfriend Graham will do this bit. Ahem, please welcome boyfriend Graham…

Graham: I mean genuinely what haven’t you done this last seven years? You were a senior advisor to The Royal Commission Into Mental Health, which was the single biggest bit of mental health reform in decades here in our home state of Victoria. They quoted you in parliament! Oh and winning the Australian Mental Health Prize?? We should probably mention that?

Honor: The prize for having the best mental health in all of Australia. 

G: That’s right. You’ve done your 10,000 hours of therapy, and someone finally recognised that. 

H: Is that it? Can we move on now? 

G: Na we should probably mention the Big Feels Club. 

H: Go on… 

G: I mean it’s like, kind of a big deal now? Especially given it originally started on our couch, and it’s now helping like, thousands of big feelers around the world feel less alone on the long term mental health path?

H: Our couch is still its spiritual home. 

G: And still my main work desk. 

H: Okay braggy bit done yeah? Thank you boyfriend Graham.

Check out the “How is Honor Doing These Days?” deep dive for the full goss on these past seven years.

Yes! Best way to keep in touch with it all is to sign up to The Big Feels Club, the community Graham and I run for big feelers around the world. It’s free, and it’s full of other people who listened to No Feeling Is Final and thought, ‘finally! A mental health story I can actually relate to??’. 

It’s where we’ll let you know about all our upcoming experiments - like the LIVE SHOW version of No Feeling Is Final (eep!).

Sign up in the box at the bottom of this page. Or read more about Big Feels Club here, in this article boyfriend Graham wrote just for No Feeling Is Final listeners :)

Thank you to everyone who’s asked me this question - I’ve finally gotten my act together and you can find my songs from the show here. Happy listening!

How I think of it now is that I have a penchant for chronic and unrelenting anxiety, and when this is very extreme and overwhelming that’s when it turns into suicidal thinking. 

In some ways I’ve come to accept that I think this is always going to be a character in my life, albeit one that’s not always on stage. 

Will it be a main character or a B-plot? I’m not entirely sure, but what I do know is that it’s been such an orientating force in my life thus far (literally shaping my work, relationships, major life decisions) so I don’t imagine that that mode that my brain can sometimes fall into will completely disappear any time soon. 

How do I feel about that? At the moment, strangely peaceful. I’m in a really good place (knock on wood) which helps. And I’ve also found a few more tools just recently that are really helping my mental health.

These kinds of profound (and often ongoing) experiences are not ones you just “get over”, especially if they’ve come up for you more than once. Part of the process is working out how to find a healthy balance between accepting and grieving things you’ve lost, and challenging yourself to find the best way to live your life, with all that that entails. And that my friends, is no mean feat, and an ongoing #journey.

For more on all this, see the “How Is Honor These Days?” deep dive we wrote just for No Feeling listeners.

This is something I’ve heard from a few listeners. Mostly listeners who will then tell me things their own internal mean voice says and confidently report that theirs is far more caustic and horrible than mine sounds. And look, this may be true! It’s not a competition. 

Honor’s Mean Voice: You’re only saying that because you’re losing. 

But if that’s you out there thinking ‘oh no I am way more messed up than this chick’, the following may be useful info. 

The truth is, the mean voice in the show is pretty toned down compared to my own actual inner monologue in my worst moments. This was a creative choice, made for a couple of reasons. 

1) We felt that bombarding the listener with some of the most truly awful shit my mean voice threw at me did not seem like a wise choice, given the intimacy of the medium and the likelihood that many listeners would have had this very experience themselves. 

2) It was also just a creative choice, to gesture toward certain things rather than depict them in all their raw unfiltered glory. I have found this tends to have the dual benefit of feeling authentic to those who already ‘get it’, without overwhelming and scaring off those newer to the subject. 

But the trade off is, for a few listeners, it might feel like it doesn’t fully capture the meanness their mind can conjure. So just trust me, it can get really mean and horrible.

As you might imagine, this is on purpose. Creating this podcast was quite vulnerable for me (what??). I wanted to capture a specific period in my journey without sharing every medical detail, because I knew firsthand the very real stigma some diagnoses hold, and my discomfort with people passing judgement on my experience. Plus, as I describe in the show, my relationship to the different diagnoses I’ve received over the years is complex.

As I describe in the show, the ‘type II’ diagnosis I eventually received was useful at first, and then began to feel like a box I was trapped in. I received that particular diagnosis after a short one-off session with a clinician who I had trouble communicating with (there was a bit of a language barrier) and who I never saw again.

In the years since, working with clinicians who really had the time to understand me, we found that social anxiety disorder and major depression better explained my symptoms.

The show was meant to speak (without being too didactic) to the way in which diagnostic labels can stick and affect how you're seen by people (and clinicians) in sometimes unhelpful ways. This was why the impact of diagnosis was more important to the story than the diagnosis itself.

Even so, I have received a number of messages over the years from clinicians (and non-clinicians) making assumptions about what my diagnosis is, even saying that I am a “classical exemplar” of XYZ diagnosis or that I “clearly have a fundamental developmental issue with the structure of my personality” (yum). As you might imagine, these kinds of messages can feel pretty weird to have randomly sent to your inbox, especially when they come from experienced clinicians. Thankfully I’m in a good place now (and have gotten used to it) so I can take it in my stride.

One of the ideas I was interested in when writing the podcast is actually that diagnostic criteria can be more of a grey area than we realise (more than one study has found that psychiatrists agree on a person’s diagnosis less than 50% of the time when given the same info and time with a patient). Nevertheless, words from clinicians carry significant weight, and we can hold onto them very strongly even and possibly especially when they might not be helpful. I didn’t anticipate getting these kinds of emails (especially not that I’d still be receiving them - seven years on) when I first wrote the series. So I’m quite glad I went with my gut and didn’t talk about specific diagnoses for myself.

Look, a bunch of things have been helpful over the years. 

A few that I talk about in the show that helped at different times are: 

• Therapy and hospital programs 

• Peer support (aka finding other people on the same big path)

• Exercise

• Diet

• Sleep

• ACT, DBT, and other therapies like Schema

The challenging thing is, of course, that none of these was ‘The One Simple Answer’. As boyfriend Graham says, if you're lucky, some mix of all the things you try will eventually add up to the answer, but you have to do that math yourself — something which can take a lot of time, energy, and money to do.

More recently, and much to my surprise, I have found psych drugs useful – something that, as you might remember from the show, had previously not been super helpful for me. Read all about that in the “How Is Honor These Days?” update.

Graham and I both also write regularly about the little (and sometimes big) things that DO help us over at Big Feels Club.

Check out the listener guide.

We’ve heard from a few family members and partners that listening to the show helped them better understand long term mental health struggles. So I’d say, the fact you’re even listening to the show is a big step!

I have no magic easy answer here, but here’s one useful thing. My boyfriend Graham wrote this great piece for the ABC about the experience of walking alongside me during my darkest times. You might find it useful (and a little bit nourishing too)?

Potentially! Graham and I do mental health talks (mainly in workplaces and at conferences). More info on those here.

As you can imagine, I can’t reply individually to all the emails and other messages I get. But I love hearing what the show meant to people. You can send me a little message via this form. 

You can also add further questions, and if I get them a few times I may add more answers here. 

Or if you can, come to the webinar Graham and I are putting on through Big Feels Club? I’ll answer more questions there. Sign up for that at the top of this page!