I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello as you may be able to tell from the sound of my voice, I am still struggling with a sore throat.

I am in fact recording this podcast from my bed because well I need to rest. I don't want to miss

an episode of the show even though part of me was going oh but I really didn't

want to miss it because you know it's good to be back and I really want to stay with my routine

and of course it's a reminder that when I do finally recover from this to obviously get a few recorded in advance so that I have some wiggle room on those

occasions where my throat does not want to comply. So of course this is not going to be a

particularly long episode. but I wanted to touch

base on a subject that is being talked about a lot this week which is mental

health and I think I've said before on here about how that just wasn't a term that I was really aware of as a child that many of us were aware of

For me like mental health probably would have been thinking oh that's like when you're a crazy person

because when I was a child it was like you're either normal or you're crazy.

People did not talk about what was going on with them. People didn't say that they were going for

a struggle because, well, you didn't want to be fought off as crazy. And so it's interesting

that over these last few years, you know, this last five years in particular I would say,

there's been a real shift in the narrative around mental health because mental health, so, you know, taking care of our emotional and psychological well-being is something

that all of us have.

And any single one of us can have our mental health compromised, you know, by things that basically stress our emotional and psychological well-being.

And the way in which we lead our lives or certain things that happen to us, you know, even, you know, things in our past can impact on our emotional and psychological well-being.

We also, you know, from the point of view, like if we go through a health

crisis, you know, something's gone on with our body, maybe we're not able to go to work

for a while, or there's some sort of imbalance so we can have chemical

...