Young Blood - Men’s Mental Health

Mitch McPherson lost his younger brother to suicide in 2013 and living through that tragedy was a major turning point that would come to define his future career. Mitch was a glazier by trade, but for the past 7 years he's been touring the country, sharing his lived experience story with thousands of people at hundreds of events, teaching everyone how to spot the warning signs when someone&#39...

Dylan Buckley is a former AFL player who's life has gone down a path he never imagined... Since his school days, Dyl believed he was destined to play professional footy and that belief turned into a reality when he was swept into the league as a teenager. With his self worth totally wrapped up in his on-field performance, he found himself struggling to keep it together when he wasn't playing up to...

Marc Ryan is 'The Beautiful Bogan' and he’s not your typical standup comedian... He blends light hearted laughs with mental health advocacy - using his gigs as a platform to show people they’re not alone in the struggle. In between jokes, Marc shares the story of the abuse he suffered at the hands of a family member as a teenager and speaks openly about the trauma it caused him - damage he still d...

Back in 2014 Hunter Johnson and a mate created The Man Cave, a program that supports adolescent boys on their journey to becoming men. It was in response to the toxic culture they had all been exposed to over the years and wanting to change things for future generations. Since it started, the man cave has grown to reach more than twenty thousand boys across Australia and is now established as a dr...

Chris Blowes is one of the very few people on earth to literally escape the jaws of death... In 2015 Chris was surfing at Fishery Bay in Port Lincoln, South Australia when he came face to face with every surfers worst nightmare - a great white shark Surviving the horrific attack defied near impossible odds that that to this day Chris still can’t fully comprehend. The ordeal deeply affected his mat...

John Denholm is the founder of South Australia's huge volunteer run men's support network 'SA Brothers'. John started the group back in 2017 on the back of going through his own mental health struggles and coming to the realisation that the men around him needed a platform to support each other. He never intended for it to be a big deal, but with so much demand, the network quickly ballooned out t...

Michael Shafar is a glass half full kind of guy who's such a good comedian, he's been able to make his own harrowing battle with cancer funny. In 2017, Michael was busy making his mark as a stand up comic, when he made the costly decision to ignore one of his testicles growing to more than double the size of the other. By the time he went to the doctor, the testicular cancer had already sp...

Hesh Fernando is the founder of Melbourne start-up 'The Model Man' - a business dedicated to improving the lives of businessmen and doing something about the corporate world's traditional lack of regard for men's mental health. Hesh runs 'The Model Man' alongside his dad; and interestingly, the difficult relationship he had with his father throughout his young life has played a big role in bringin...

If you heard Nathan Lymn's story from someone else, you'd be forgiven for thinking he's making it up... His life so far has been such a random series of events that it's hard to imagine all this stuff could happen to one person - but it's all true. Nathan was a self described 'street kid' living a chaotic life in and out of crisis housing through teenagehood, due to his parents mental illness leav...

Ben Stamatovich is a man who's lived the kind of life many wouldn't survive... Growing up without either of his birth parents, Ben was sleeping rough on the streets from the age of 13 and stealing just to eat and stay warm, soon finding himself trapped in a cycle of homelessness that would dominate his young life. His resourcefulness, the will to survive and the hope that things would one day get...

Sean Weir is the man behind The Shaka Project, a movement that shares Young Blood’s mission to ignite the tough conversations around men’s mental health. It’s based on a clothing line stamped with the shaka hand gesture, symbolising the wearers willingness to be open about their own mental health and be there for their mates. Sean started The Shaka Project thinking it’d just be for his home town,...

Ilan Kidron is an ARIA award winning singer-songwriter responsible for writing the hit anthems for aussie dance music pioneers, the Potbelleez and plenty of tracks for big name artists. Ilan has lived the dream,  enjoying an action packed life on the road for many years that’s brought him great success. But he’s also had to endure immeasurable pain... Ilan’s wife took her own life in 2017, leaving...

Justin Westhoff is a former AFL star, but that’s not why he's on the podcast... For the past 5 years Westy and his business partner Scott Rogash have been working on a revolutionary concept that could completely change the lives of many people experiencing homelessness. They’re building compact, minimalist homes known as pods that can be placed together in vacant blocks of land to form micro-commu...

"The moment I attempted to take my life, I felt instant regret..." Josh Moorhouse is a social innovator, a speaker and a survivor; who's doing everything he can to get the most out of life - so it comes as a shock that just a few years ago he thought he wanted to die... Growing up, Josh always struggled with a deep-seeded feeling that he wasn't good enough - a lack of self worth that grew from per...

Jack Jones is Program Director at The Banksia Project, a free men’s mental health service built on training up every day blokes to help the men in their local communities. Jack’s come a long way in a short time...In his early twenties, he was in crisis, suffering from clinical depression that drove him to be suicidal. Growing up he relied on his sporting prowess for the validation and associated h...

Heath Black is a former AFL veteran who spent 12 years as a midfielder for the Dockers and the Saints. On paper it sounds like every player’s dream, but the reality is he struggled greatly with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, anxiety and ADHD, conditions he didn’t know he had until he was 30. Through the second half of his career, Heath suffered through constant anxiety attacks and lost his love for...

Kelvin Shone and Dan McDonald may be better known by their stripper names Jock Hardy and Taylor Mac, but there's a lot more to these guys than meets the eye. They've have been in the adult entertainment industry for 15 years combined and as you can imagine it’s been wild. But all that action comes at a cost... This line of work goes hand in hand with being objectified, degraded and pressured to pe...

At 8 years old Taylor Harvey was diagnosed with Transverse Myleitis, a rare neurological disease, that initially paralysed one of his legs. Doctors said there was a chance it could’ve left him quadriplegic, but through rehab he regained partial function in the damaged leg and eventually found himself back on the sports field - competing against the able bodied without even realising he had a disab...

"I'd be in my room and it'd be blacked out. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I'd miss birthdays, I'd miss events...I just didn't want to see anyone, I didn't want to talk to anyone and I had to ask myself why am I feeling like this? I think I just had to face every single insecurity, every single fear about myself that I'd been putting off..." These aren't the words you might expect to hear from E...

Matt Newlands is a former police officer turned ‘R U OK? Day’ ambassador and mental health advocate. During his decade in the force, Matt faced pain, distress and violence on a daily basis as he sought to protect the community. The job revealed an insight into the ugly side of humanity that only those who work in the emergency services can fully comprehend. It also led him to the worst day of his...

“It’s all about the art of separation, just deviate away from those who drain your inspiration...” Those are lyrics Glenn Draper wrote for a friend who was trying to get off drugs. Years later he realised he was writing it to himself. These days Glenn’s a dedicated family man who won’t touch a drink - a total 180 from the wildly destructive life he once lived. Glenn is a recovering drug and gambli...

17 year old Flynn Gill is one of less than 4,000 Australians living with cystic fibrosis - a genetic disorder that severely impacts the lungs and digestive system. Flynn was diagnosed with CF just a few weeks after birth and then with CF related diabetes (CFRD) at age 12. It’s a limitation that’s made his life complicated and often uncomfortable. COVID-19 has made things even tougher for Flynn, fo...

Youth detention is institutionalising young men from an early age - feeding a cycle of incarceration that repeats over generations. Although only around 5% of Australians aged 10-17 are indigenous, they account for around 50% of those being kept in youth detention nationwide - and in the Northern Territory it’s close to 100%... Jye Cardona grew up being conditioned to hate authority and watched hi...

Dave Oliver has always lived and breathed rugby, a game known as one of the roughest and most hyper masculine on earth. He’s also gay and from the time he was a teenager until his early thirties, he hid his sexuality from everyone - horrified that he’d be found out and ridiculed by the community that means everything to him. Dave describes the burden he carried for the best part of two decades as...

Men in construction have a history of struggling particularly badly with managing their mental health and as graduate psychologist and former construction worker Simon Tyler says, that’s due in part to the stereotypical hyper masculine culture that exists on work sites - now the focus of his PhD. Simon’s good mate Richie Welch has been in the construction game for more than two decades and both me...