This is the distraction pieces podcast episode 383 and some of you may already know

that we've got a special thing going on here in the month for me. I'm doing a series of episodes called Ways Your Header

and I'm going to be talking to a variety of different people about their mental health and how the pandemic has impacted their mental health

and how they feel as we start to come out the other end. You're going to get sick of me saying that but that's the setup.

The reason for doing this was obviously I saw that it's mental health awareness month next week as this episode comes out.

But a lot of you will know that the distraction pieces podcast has had so much discussion of mental health.

There's no point in doing a week focusing on it because every week has some kind of element of it.

So yeah, I decided to do the whole month. There's going to be more episodes than usual and each episode is going to be a combination of these conversations with all sorts of different people including Florence Pugh, Ferncotton, Jamali Maddox, Alaina Heidey, Simon Pegg, Connie Hack,

Dame Baptiste, Jordan Stevens, just loads of really good people but also again anyone who isn't a new listener will know that distraction pieces podcast is about all those people and it's worth noting that everyone that have on in this special has been on previously.

So if you're a fan of any of them just search distraction pieces, Lane Heidey for example and you'll find the original episode or the first episode we did.

But as yeah, as I say, it's not all about the big celebrities is about other people. So I've also got chats in this podcast with my dad and with my God daughter Lola who's 10.

That's going to be in next week's episode and I'm picking things off with a chat with my mom who's been a guest a few times and she works with the Samarins.

So I felt we had a lot of interesting things to talk about with regards to mental health and also find that I've had my mom and my dad on previously and also find that you end up having conversations that you wouldn't have normally.

So it's a really powerful thing to jump into it in work mode as such. Before we get into it though, I would normally in fact I'll say in this episode I'm going to talk to my mom and then to Steven Gariam who's one of my favorite people in the world and also one of the best actors in the world.

Paprasse Adoo who the same can be said about and Gail Polter who is just one of the most amazing people I've ever met.

But before we get into it, I would normally at this point plug my web store or my Patreon or whatever else.

But for this whole month, I'm going to encourage you not to go to my Patreon and not to go to my web store and instead support some mental health charities and two that mean a lot to me.

There's so many specific ones. So if there's one that means something specifically to you, then go there. But calm is a charity I've worked with for many years, campaign against living miserably.

And it's specifically trying to counter the incredibly high suicide rate among men.

But then also Samaritans, obviously the first guest is a Samaritan and the Samaritan's do so much good work and they need as much support as possible really.

So you can either you'll probably be able to find ways to donate to your local Samaritans.

If you want to go specific, go with the Baselton lot. That's where my mum's at.

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