When Was Your Hardest Time? Honest Q&A On Mental Health, Therapy, Grief & Recovery
On The Mend
High Performance
4.9 • 566 Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2026
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In honour of Mental Health Awareness Week, this special compilation episode curates life-changing insights from people who have faced addiction, grief, anxiety, and personal struggle firsthand.
Featuring conversations with Tony Adams, Roy Stride, John Robins, Matt Haig, Marisa Peer, Simon Thomas, and other leading voices, this episode explores what it really means to recover, rebuild confidence, and find hope during difficult moments.
From radical honesty and vulnerability to practical tools for improving mental resilience, these stories highlight the importance of connection, self-awareness, and asking for support. Together, they offer a powerful reminder that while recovery is never easy, change is possible and healing can begin with a single conversation.
This episode covers the following themes: Mental Health, Vulnerability, Sobriety, Resilience, Honesty, and Healing.
Need Support?
Samaritans: Call 116 123 or visit samaritans.org
Narcotics Anonymous: na.org
Alcoholics Anonymous: alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk
Mental Health Mates: mentalhealthmates.co.uk
Shout: https: giveusashout.org
IAPT: https://www.england.nhs.uk/mental-health/adults/nhs-talking-therapies/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Want to know who's coming up next? Hit follow wherever you get your podcast and you'll be the first to find out. |
| 0:06.5 | All right guys, these are the questions people don't usually ask, but probably should. |
| 0:11.4 | What's the best quote to live by for better mental health? |
| 0:14.9 | What's the most difficult truth? Oh my God. |
| 0:18.6 | What's something you wish someone had asked you when you were struggling? |
| 0:24.1 | What was the moment you realized grief was going to change you forever? |
| 0:29.4 | I'm going to try to do this without crying. |
| 0:34.0 | Welcome back to On the Mend. |
| 0:35.4 | It is Mental Health Awareness Week and the theme this year is action. Now we talk a lot about action on On the Men, don't we? And I think one of the most important things about anything really is knowledge is all well and good, right? But unless you do action, unless you take action on that knowledge, it's kind of irrelevant, right? We've actually been a bit sneaky here because after a cause with guests, we've kept people back and gone a bit deeper with them, asking them questions around mental health, going a little bit deeper on everything. Now, some of the questions we're going to ask them have actually been submitted by you. So keep an ear out to see if yours got answered. If yours does get asked and gets answered, please mention it in the comments. We'd love to hear from you and see what you thought of the answer. And look, we've asked them to answer honestly, right? We didn't want them overthinking it. We didn't want PR answers. We just wanted them to be 100% real and they really, really were. So what you're going to hear today is a bit of a mix, people you recognise from previous episodes, and also a bit of a sneak peek at some of the guests we've got coming up. So you're getting an early listen before those episodes even drop, which is pretty exciting. Actually, we've never done anything like that's before, ever, have we? Like, we've never, like, put it out, like, we've kind of, it's a little bit of a sneak behind the curtain the curtain really because obviously we record these sometimes we record them weeks in advance and then we have them lying |
| 1:48.7 | around going right we can't wait for this to get out for you to hear what we've got coming up |
| 1:52.1 | look if you're the kind of person who struggles to open up about this stuff right or |
| 1:55.5 | struggles to have a conversation like this with somebody this episode is for you right |
| 2:00.1 | what I advise you to do is take a question that we've asked right have a conversation like this with somebody. This episode is for you, right? What I advise you to do |
| 2:01.7 | is take a question that we've asked, right? Have a look at it. Maybe have a go at answering it |
| 2:06.1 | yourself. If you put something down, it might help you to get it out there, but it also might |
| 2:11.4 | really help someone else reading it more than you could possibly expect. Because the whole point |
| 2:15.7 | of this is to get people talking, |
| 2:23.5 | right? Let's get onto it. All right, first up is Roy Stride. Right, when Roy came on the podcast, he was pretty open about the fact that he'd never really talked about this stuff in much debt |
| 2:26.9 | before. And you could really feel that, but together we went quite deep and he opened up about |
| 2:31.4 | something that a lot of men struggle with and what actually |
| 2:34.3 | helps him stay in a good place mentally. |
| 2:37.0 | Right, right, everyone, pick a question. |
... |
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