Several YEARS BACK, HONOR EASTLY WAS HAVING A VERY HARD TIME - OF THE FEELINGS VARIETY.
After fifteen years of therapy, a stay in a psychiatric ward, and 18-months of hospital programs she still didn’t have the answer. And she was starting to wonder if anyone did.
Meanwhile, around that same time…
Graham Panther was working on Australia’s mental health system.
After years of struggling with his own mental health, he was hoping to foster more human responses to people in distress. But it had begun to feel a bit like hitting his head against a brick wall.
Fast-forward to 2017
Honor’s an increasingly well-known artist, podcaster, and mental health advocate. Graham’s having a bit of a nervous breakdown. They meet in a cafe and get talking about big ideas.
Like, why isn’t there a place you can go when you’re having a hard time, to hear from other people who’ve gone through similar stuff?
Somewhere you can feel like you belong on earth, even when you feel awful?
This was the first meeting of the Big Feels Club.
Photograph by Bri Hammond for Frankie Magazine
HONOR EASTLY
Honor won the 2021 Australian Mental Health Prize in part for her work on the groundbreaking Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, and was hand-picked by the ABC to turn her life story into an award-winning memoir podcast, No Feeling Is Final.
GRAHAM PANTHER
Graham has helped set up and run award-winning mental health services across Australia and New Zealand, and has had millions of views on his ABC column about life with ‘big feelings’.
Not your typical mental health initiative
Between us, we bring a mix of mental health systems know-how, creative industry cred, and unabashed messy life experience.
Just the right recipe for doing something genuinely new, we think.
Most importantly, we both know what it feels like to ‘just ask for help’. To do all the ‘right’ things, for years. And to still feel blown apart most days. We’re not therapists, we don’t claim to be mental health experts. We’re fellow travellers on the big feels path, sharing what we’ve learned along the way.
It’s not just you
Here’s the thing. One in two cases of anxiety and depression last for multiple years, even if you’re doing all the things you’re supposed to do.
But nobody tells you that!
So if it’s you that’s silently struggling, putting on ‘life drag’ just to make it through the day, you can start to think. . .
‘Maybe the problem is just… me?’
Hear from other people who ‘get it’
The Big Feels Club is real content about mental health, made by people who’ve been there too.
Because sometimes you just need to hear from other people who ‘get it’, because they’ve lived it too.
Our articles and podcasts have been downloaded millions of times by sensitive cats around the world. Our memoir podcast No Feeling Is Final won a major international podcasting award, and has been praised by the The New York Times, The Atlantic, TIME, and The Financial Times, who called it “mental explored like never before”.
Each month, our members come together for our online Big Feels Club talk, and thousands more read our regular newsletter, which members have described as a “safety net”, and “a great big hug” in their inbox.
We don’t claim to have ‘The Answer’ (and that’s kind of the point!)
The Big Feels Club won’t replace the traditional supports, or all the hard work you have to do to keep your head above water. But we can make the whole thing a little less lonely.
Some days, ‘The Answer’ is finding other people asking the same big questions.
Dip a toe in by signing up to our email newsletter.
Or read about how you can become a card-carrying member of the Big Feels Club and join a community of sensitive cats gently nudging each other through the hard stuff.