When I asked Charlie Fioré to join me on the podcast I thought all we would be talking about was epilepsy, then around 3 questions in I discover that Charlie also has cerbral palsy and he was kind enough to delve into both conditions for the rest of the episode. This is an extremely insighftul look into the life of someone living with epilepsy and CP. Charlie is open, vulnerable, frank and oftentimes out right hilarious in his way of discussing these conditions. We discuss the perceptions of...

I'm a public speaker, who is very afraid of talking to strangers... How does THAT WORK? Well I'm excellent at being on stage or on camera, but put me in a networking meeting or a wedding where I know none of the other guests (or even sometimes social situations with some of my closest friends) and I'm an absolute WRECK. I'm also someone who challenges other people to face up to their fears and take ownership of stuff like this... so this is me PUBLICLY taking ownership of this. I'll be...

Apart from having possibly one of ther coolest names on the plante, RJ Zimmerman is a pretty awesome individual. Currently 9 years sober RJ turned around a life of alcoholism, initially to start a family, but ultimately found a freedom in it that he never found at the bottom of any bottle. In the past 18 months, RJ has increasingly seen that his expertise and experience are things that can drastically help others. So with this in mind he is now embarking on the path of being an Alcohol Free...

"I had to get out of a church that was like a cult" this sentence spoken very matter-of-factly was the start of a very interesting and bizarre conversation when I first met Rachel McDerby face to face. She gave me the cliff notes, invovling cultish behaviour in a church, running rehab centers with questionable ethics, an abusive ex and setting up a safe house and I had to stop her in her tracks. Because this was going to be one of those conversations I'd want to recreate for a podcast and...

Is mental illness a diability? Well the short answer is YES! But it took me a LONG way to get to that short answer when answering for myself. If anyone else was to ask me if mental illness is a disability I would say "of course". But if they were to say "is YOUR mental illness a disability" then I would most likely have said no. There's many reasons for this. But the two I boil it down to are not wanting to detract from people with "genuine disabilities" and the other being a strong dollop of...

A mental health podcaster talking to another mental health podcaster? What ever will they think of next. Tom Davies is the host of the Proper Mental Podcast, which is one of (if not the) highest ranking independent UK mental health podcast.  Having lived with his own mental health struggles he found that talking about it with other people was part of the path to recovery. So to make these conversations a guaranteed regular occurance he launched the Proper Mental Podcast, initially with a...

Accessibility in gaming is something many developers are keen to include (nowadays). This is often done by giving accessibility options within the game itself. Whether this be subtitles, audio description or high contrast visual modes or maybe by simplifying controls or offering a series of difficulty level modifiers. But what about where these adjustments aren't enough? Well this is where Special Effect come in. Not only do they cmapaign for more accessibility in games using some of the...

Raynaud's syndrome is more common than you may think, which was a surprise t me because I first heard about it when I met Chelsea Lea MacColl around 5 years ago. Raynaud's is a condition where the person feels the cold in an intense manor. As we talked through it in this interview it became clear that there aren't many ways to explain the difference to a person without the condition of "feeling the cold a bit too much" and it making your life oftentimes a misery. The closest we got was...

Will Hawkins is a coach and a therapist. Coming from a background of physical training, he was interested in what's going on behind the scenes more. Undestanding a person's fears, their needs, their identity and their values. In this episode we talk a lot about emotional intelligence. Why it is important and what people can do to cultivate it. We discuss some of the things that hold a person back and how to generate motivation (or momentum) by tapping into the deeper cores of our identity.

Life, just filterless. This is the motto of Lisa Jayne and the name of her business. Having struggled for many year with her own mental health  one of the areas she found comfort was in her dark sense of humour. Then when looking for clothing that reflected this she couldn't find what she was looking for, so she decided to make it! She now runs the fashion brand Life Just Filterless, which raises awareness of mental health, but also gives those of us with a darker sense of humour somthing to...

It's a big question, but I want to tackle it... are we programmed to be unhappy? The research in this one spans almost 300 years, staring with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the hedonic treadmill, then heading to modern research by the likes of Anna Lembke and Andrew Huberman; all via the Tocqueville Paradox. Each of these pices of research presents a stacked deck, where genuine lasting happiness is a fleeting thing. But is the data the truth? And more importantly... are we bound by it? Link to...

Vennie Kocsis spent her life from 3 until 14 living in a compound as a member of a cult. Struggling with segregation from the rest of the world on the outside, but also separation from her family on the inside; she lived a life that was always filtered through fear. You wouldn't think so listening to her today but she didn't learn about normal relationships, normal friendships and normal boundaries until she got out. In fact she didn't have any degree of a normal education either and was...

Josh Connolly is a powerful man, but not in the way that you may instantly think of that phrase. Yesh he plays rugby, he has also overocome addiction, so we can say that objectively he is strong, both physically and mentally, but there's much more to Josh than that. The power that Josh has - and teaches to others - is to actually embrace our emotions, to be vulnerable with them, to be sensitive to them. Sensitivty and vulnerability are not words you often associate with power, but as Josh...

Having been diagnosed with anxiety and depression as a teenager, Kyra Houghton has been no stranger to the world of mental health. Anxiety and depression were the manifestations of her childhood trauma, but as life progressed these labels didn't quite fit. She was later diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) and at this point began a journey of healing. This journey started with Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT). DBT is one...

Rachael Camp is a powerflifter and a graphic designer, two things that require a lot of fine motor control. She is also a dyspraxic, which is something that hinders the motor control of those who live with it. From humble beginings and a childhood with confusion, shame and regularly being labeled as "clumsy". Rachael only started digging deeper into why some of this may be as an adult. Along the way she receieved a late diagnosis of ADHD, and through the neurodivergent community started to...

Before becoming Mindset By Dave I was a personal trainer, the kind who wanted to learn EVERYTHING! Along the way I noticed many things that working out can teach us about mental health. Lots of the principals involved in training can become powerful analogies for our mental health. This podcast episode is some of my favourites.

Vancouver is currently facing a fentanyl epidemic. The new wave of opiod addiction is a core part of daily life in Vancouver's downtown east side. When seeing this with his own two eyes director Dominic Streeter of Hied and Seek Films knew he had to shed some light on this and ask some very important questions. In his Netflix documentary "Ten Dollar Death Trip" Dom and the team spend time with the people who live in Vancouver's "drug ghetto by design". He speaks with current addicts, former...

Above all things I would call Lady Cleo a communicator. Whether she does this with words, with music of with visual performances one thing is for sure, she does it in a meticulous and often mesmerizing way. I knew I wanted to talk with her when I invited her on the podcast and we decided to focus on kink and cabaret and the concept of discovering your identity. But the tangenets on this one lead to some amazing links being formed and the live audience were just on point at adding to this...

Hannah is a fellow mindset coach and podcast coach, who I had the pleasure of meeting via the Mental Health Blog Awards. In this episode we get into Hannah's "why" for getting into this line of work, along with discussing the most common issues she sees and what resolutions are available for these. We also look to the future and get Hannah's ideas on where coaching plays a role and her personal plans for being a part of that movement. You can check Hannah out at beautifulmind.coach on...

The phrase victims mindset gets thrown around far too readily these days. Usually by people who are just tired of confronting others who just don't seem to want to change. But what if I told you that there's something behind all of that and that? Something that keeps the person stuck in this cycle that if we were to learn a different approach to then we may all be better off for? That something is learned helplessness, a term first coined in 1967 by Psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven F...

Today's guest is Asta, an amazingly strong member of our Twitch community. Asta is someone who suffers with the little know condition Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED). IED basically means that whereas for most of us we feel anger growing gradually and have opportunities to diffuse or walk away, those with IED can go from calm to a full rage in an instant, which can be traumatic for both those around and of course the individual who has the condition too. Asta shares their story here of...

I had the pleasure of meeting Clydie at TwitchCon Amsterdam this year at a meetup for just chatting streamers. And he said something which let me knew I just had to have him on the show: "Autism awareness, or acceptance is not enough, we should be promoting autism celebration" Autism is not something that is "wrong" with a person's brain, it is merely something that is "different" and often these differences are things that the neuro-typical world actually benefit from. However due to years...

Growing up with a mother with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, Face like many neglected young folk had to find his own ways of coping with the world around him. For Face this meant turning to alcohol and drugs and as we all know these things enter us in to cycles that are often (if not always) extremely difficult to remove ourselves from. Our entire worlds often get built around maintaining the habit. Thankfully though Face was able to escape from this cycle, but not before losing a number of...

Sam Phillips, known online as Dare To Dip was a person struggling with alcohol addiction and anxiety. He decided to look for the answers in a different kind of liquid, VERY cold water! Sam set himself the challenge to get out in open water in the sea, every day for a year. Initially it was just for himself, but one of the amazing results of this project was the community he built along the way.