Take It From Us with Kent Johns

Prison officer Rhonda Hāpi-Smith spent 20 years on the wings at Rimutaka and Hawke’s Bay prisons. She’d learnt to be loud and hard and to shut down the sensitive side of herself, because there was no room for it inside. People kept telling her she’d be all right. Off shift, she was drinking a dozen beers a night and turning up to work still smelling of it. Then one morning, still hungover, she unl...

Three people lost to suicide in three years. The last was his brother, Jerome. So endurance athlete Stefan Ozich picked a challenge that genuinely scared him — running Te Araroa end to end and back again, something no one had ever done. He called it The Long Path, after what the trail’s name means, and ran it for men’s mental health. This week on Take It From Us, Stefan talks to Kent about why he...

Election day is 7 November and politics is everywhere right now... but here’s a different kind of perspective on it.  We’re re-releasing our conversation with Grant Robertson about what the job costs the people doing it — whichever way you vote (Todd Muller’s episode is back in your feed today too). “I’m a catastrophiser,” admits New Zealand’s former Deputy Prime Minister. Behind years of COVID de...

With the election on 7 November, we’re re-releasing two conversations that have nothing to do with how you vote, and everything to do with what politics asks of the people in it (Grant Robertson’s episode is back in your feed today too). In May 2020, Todd Muller was elected leader of the National Party — one step from a boyhood dream of being Prime Minister. Within five days, panic attacks were so...

Nic Russell has been through more than most — breast cancer, a heart transplant and Parkinson’s. None of it comes close to 2005, when her three-year-old daughter Kenzie died of bone cancer. Even when she could no longer walk, Kenzie wanted to be alive. Nic has carried that with her ever since. It doesn’t mean pretending things are fine. She’ll have a pity party, but she won’t live there. She leans...

Mia Simcock didn’t know what a psychotic episode was until she had one. She was 19 and studying at Otago when she went five days without sleep and lost touch with reality. A second episode a few years later brought a bipolar 1 diagnosis, and her first instinct was to tell her parents they couldn’t tell a soul. In this episode, Mia tells Kent why she eventually stopped hiding it, what she has to do...

For nearly 20 years as a firefighter, Jemarl Paerata pushed the trauma to the back and drank to keep it there. But one day, after a cardiac arrest callout, he asked the boys in the truck, "Do you ever feel like there might be a little bit more?" The reckoning saw Jemarl give up heavy drinking, leave the fire service and start Te Kaiārahi out of Piha. Since 2022, thousands of rangatahi ha...

"You don't feel Kiwi enough for the Kiwis, but you don't feel Arab enough for the Arabs." Eman Ghandour was 10 when her family moved from Jordan to Dunedin. Growing up, she tried to get her "ratio" to 50/50 Kiwi and Arab, and it kept landing at 80/20. While at Otago Uni she lived as a Kiwi with her friends, then came home to Arab Muslim parents and a constant sense of...

Jason Blyth was nine years old when he asked his psychiatrist a question no child should have to ask: why was he the one being brought in for treatment, when his mother was the one abusing him? Between the ages of two and fifteen, Jason saw around 20 different clinicians. He begged, repeatedly, to be taken away from a home where his own reports describe genuine fear for his life. Nothing changed....

Flynn Mitchell spent three years in a Dunedin university flat built for wheelchair users — accessible kitchen, accessible bathroom, full independence. Then he moved home to Auckland and lost all of it. Now he needs a carer just to wash his own dishes. He's not alone. Ray Finch, CEO of the Laura Ferguson Trust , says nearly 4,000 physically disabled adults across New Zealand are living with ag...

On New Year's Eve 2022, Sam Cox went through the windscreen of a car doing over 100km/h down a gravel road outside Rangiora. His best friend Kaide, who was driving, didn't survive. Sam did — with a brain injury so severe it took him five months to even understand Kaide was gone. Now 19, Sam talks to Kent about memory loss, losing his old friend group, the dad he lost not long after and t...

Shane Cameron spent 17 years as a professional heavyweight boxer — a Commonwealth Games bronze, a world title shot and the 2009 fight against David Tua that ended with him in an ambulance. He didn't watch the footage back until last year.  In this episode, Shane talks to Kent about the memory loss, anger and mood swings he now lives with day to day, and what happened when he asked to be teste...

At 22, Tai Tupou learned that the man who raised him wasn't his biological father. He told no one. For three years he isolated himself, burned bridges and had no idea he was living with depression — until a colleague asked him a simple question. Twice. In this episode, Tai — founder of the The Last Chance Project and a mental health advocate of 14 years — talks about growing up in a Samoan ho...

Five years ago, Meg Vardy was a UK-based researcher studying treatment for anorexia. What most of her colleagues didn't know: she'd been living with anorexia herself for 15 years. She's since stepped away from academia to launch JourneyED , a Dunedin-based charity offering free peer support to people across Aotearoa navigating eating disorders — because, in her words, no one should...

"Who the f*** you really are underneath all the other shit." That's the question Rob Brown puts to every man he coaches — and it's the one he couldn't answer himself for most of his life. Two businesses built and lost, a marriage that ended and a throat cancer diagnosis at 45 - Rob finally sat down with it. In this episode, Rob takes Kent through the anger that surfaced th...

"I'm a catastrophiser," admits Grant Robertson, New Zealand's former Deputy Prime Minister.  It's a confession that sits behind a high-profile political career — years of COVID decisions, and eventually, a panic attack he didn't see coming. As pressure mounted for him to take over from Jacinda Ardern, Grant was ready to reluctantly say yes, until one sentence from his...

Blain Collinge was once the reason his parents started Red Door Recovery — refusing help, deep in addiction, with "no desire to change." Over a decade later, he co-leads the very organisation built to save him. Justine Hamill came to Red Door after her own relapse and recovery, bringing a background in psychotherapy and yoga. Together, they now run a 24/7 recovery service in Upper Hutt —...

She took her first drink at 14 — and for a moment, everything made sense. Suzy Morrison chased that feeling for years, through other substances and eventually heroin, before it nearly cost her everything. She's been in recovery since 1987 — not as an endpoint, but as an ongoing practice she's still learning.  Now a counsellor and clinical supervisor, Suzy sits down with Kent to talk hone...

Jamie Summers thought he was invincible. At 39, working in construction, high stress and no downtime felt like just part of the job. Then he had a stroke. Six and a half years later, he's still living with it — fatigue that doesn't let up, and a mental health toll he doesn't sugarcoat. Now co-founder of Health15, Jamie goes onto construction sites testing workers' blood pressur...

Heidi McIlroy teaches kids who can't make it into a regular classroom. They're too anxious, struggling with their mental health, autistic - kids who carry shame because they think they're broken. She gets it because she's been there. Years of agoraphobia, hiding it, convinced something was wrong with her. So she created a book called "This Is How It Feels". It's...

A different kind of episode this week. Host Kent recently slept rough for one night at the Big Sleepout. He bedded down on cardboard at the AUT campus, part of a group of 70 community leaders raising funds and awareness for people experiencing homelessness in Auckland. One night. Terrible sleep. But he was safe, fed, warm and dry. Which made him realise something: people living on the streets don&...

Joe Daymond is a Kiwi comedian who makes you laugh about the hard stuff - the things most of us hide. He talks about things like mental health and relationships on stage in a way that makes people feel less alone. He's had low times, including two periods where he slept rough in his car for a bit. The first time in 2018, nobody knew. The second time three years later, after he'd already...

Todd Muller was elected leader of the National Party in May 2020, a tantalising final step towards achieving a boyhood dream of one day being Prime Minister.  Within five days, he was experiencing waves of anxiety he'd never felt before - panic attacks so severe he could barely get through speeches, the words on the page constantly moving and disappearing. After 53 days, he stepped down as le...

Chris Bowden lost 5 friends to suicide when he was a young man. He coped badly - drinking, drugs, anger, violence, getting into fights. He was spiralling. A university lecturer noticed something wasn't right and pointed Chris toward help. That counsellor changed his life. Now Chris is a researcher passionate about understanding how young men grieve suicide loss. His PhD research revealed some...

Melanie Rauth grew up in Australia. When her parents separated at 13, she started making different choices - cannabis, the wrong crowd, trouble at school. She had her daughter and in 2010 they moved to New Zealand. Rural isolation and methamphetamine came next. Her life spiralled into crime and five prison stints between 2017 and 2021. But on her last arrest, her young daughter had had enough of e...