Honor Eastly is a writer, artist, podcaster and mental health worker who has made a career of talking about the stuff most of us really don’t want to talk about. Her podcasts Being Honest With My Ex and Starving Artist explored love, heartbreak, rejection, anger, cash, creativity, and class.

Last year she teamed up with the ABC to create No Feeling Is Final, that traced her own mental health story. Like all her work it dealt with money, heartbreak, depression, and suicide. Alongside the strange, mundane, day-to-day realities of sometimes wanting to die.

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To be clear, we’re not talking simply drinking a million beers and staying up late. For musician and writer Andrew W.K, partying is a way to overcome dread and terror to find peace and pleasure. This message, alongside his very good music, has seen him emerge as an unlikely motivational and self-help figure; standing in stark contrast to the crystal-gripping types who usually hold those titles.

Despite being the poster boy for having a good time, his experience with mental health has been more complex than you’d assume. Feeling overwhelmed by his own smallness and “realising the impermanence of everything is so overwhelmingly bleak,” he didn’t succumb to nihilism. But rather embraced the little control we do have—to be happy, to be loved, to get loose.

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Musician Mojo Juju was born to an Indigenous mother and FIlipino father. Like many second generation kids, her parents faced pressure to assimilate, abandon languages, and distance themselves from their own cultures. Growing up, their choice created a gulf in her own identity that left her feeling “displaced and otherised...I was always different”.

She wasn’t alone in these feelings. In the latest episode of the Anxiety Hour, she explains how her parents’ own experiences of race, identity, and history in Australia have created a sense of hereditary disconnection that binds them together. And how she uses her music to populate this post-colonial space to reconnect with her own past.

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Artist Celeste Mountjoy is best known as Filthyratbag. Her work explores partying, drugs, depression, and relationships. Despite only being 18, her spot-on depictions of quarter life crises have seen her attract a mammoth following online. But you don’t become the patron of bad feelings without going through some shit. 

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On paper, VICE correspondent and documentary producer Charlet Duboc has it all. She’s smart, successful, beautiful and travels the world for her interesting job. But when success comes quickly, it's hard to trust. She opens up about not being sure you deserve what you have.

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In 2014, your “friendly neighbourhood rose counter” had a psychotic break that left him wandering terrified and disorientated in Venice Beach, convinced the world was about to end. Osher Günsberg has spent years coming back from that moment, and speaks about learning to trust your own brain after seeing how deeply it can betray you.

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The Anxiety Hour is a program where we meet and profile interesting people, and explore parts of their lives that aren’t always seen. In short we’re asking, what are you afraid of? But more broadly, we're aiming to break out of the usual mental health conversations to highlight our shared experiences and feelings. Now, at this point it sounds kind of heavy, but trust us mental health isn’t always sad. Often it’s weird, funny, frustrating and even uplifting.

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