You've never heard stories like this, told like this: lllawarra podcast wins award

An innovative Illawarra podcast is among eight winners of the 2024 Wayahead Mental Health Matters Awards.

A Good Mind To, produced in Port Kembla by filmmaker, community worker, editor, writer and youth worker Phil Crawford, claimed the Media and the Arts category at the awards.

The sound-rich podcast shares authentic and impactful stories from individuals with lived experience of mental ill-health, focusing on challenging topics like domestic violence, drug use and suicide.

From a journey of ADHD told through hip-hop music to a poem about institutional sexual abuse in the Catholic education system, the 14 episodes feature raw, honest and sometimes humorous narratives emphasising resilience and hope – all told the way the talents want them told.

Collaboration is a critical component of the A Good Mind To approach.

“I always tell our participants that this is their story, I’ll be their editor and they can boss me around. Some have definite ideas, others are happy to go along for the ride. The outcomes are all so different and always interesting,” Phil says.

“It’s not a traditional interview podcast. Sometimes you do hear my voice but the people involved had autonomy on what parts of their story they told and how they tell it.

“One woman was interested in Dungeons & Dragons and talked about how she started to get into that game six months after she got a diagnosis for a mood disorder. When she was creating a character for the game, she thought about the experience of getting that diagnosis and what it could mean for the character’s personality. In a way, her character gave her an outlet to lean into it, to make the most of opportunities; and that’s how she came to view that diagnosis.”

A Good Mind To follows Phil’s work for Beyond Empathy, an arts company that works with people experiencing hardship or disadvantage, where Phil made a number of award-winning films with young people in public housing estates before experimenting with podcasting.

He tapped into that experience while pitching for funding from South Eastern NSW Primary Health Network COORDINAIRE, which wanted a program exploring complex mental ill-health.

During the Wayahead Mental Health Matters Awards submission process, Phil looked into the production’s impact on participants and audiences.

“We found creating those stories had duel benefits: it seemed to be a positive experience for the people involved and the audience seemed to respond with feeling connected, finding commonalities and finding it useful,” he says.

“One person who teaches psychology at UOW, specialising in narrative therapy, had been using the episodes as a good example of the value of being able to tell and own parts of your story.

“There is still a lot of stigma around acute mental ill-health. The stories you get in the media are often oversimplified. In a podcast, you get the advantage of being able to sit with them for a while and, often, to hear the humour in them.”

In his episode “The Tesla Podcast”, a writer named Scott provides insights into his experiences with mental health institutions and shares some of his “emptying the cache” writing.

He says it’s a good outlet in a number of ways.

“Phil really wanted to collaborate on it. I would send him bits of my writing, then we’d sit in his car in different carparks on weekends and record our conversations about it,” he says.

“I would describe my writing as quite self-reflective. I find it helpful to put those thoughts down in writing and then read them aloud … It’s also good to get some of my writing out there.”

The 2024 Wayahead Mental Health Matters Awards, a key part of Wayahead’s Mental Health Month for October, aim to recognise the achievements of individuals and organisations who have worked to improve understanding, awareness, service provision and the general mental health of NSW communities.

Wayahead CEO Sharon Grocott says the winners all demonstrate extraordinary commitment to mental health awareness, education and advocacy.

“Each of these projects has helped in their own innovative way to reduce the stigma of mental health and to open up the conversation in their communities,” she says.

“Our theme this year is ‘Let’s Talk About It’ and these initiatives are to be commended for their efforts in getting everyone to do just that for the sake of our wellbeing.”

The winners are:

• Mental Health Promotion Award: Mongrels Men’s Health and Wellbeing (Northern Beaches)
• Rainbow Inclusion Award: NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors – STARTTS: (Parramatta) Workplace
• Wellbeing Award: Sydney University (Sydney)
• Community Initiative Award: Riding for the Disabled (Sydney)
• Youth Award: Sound Mentoring program (Sydney)
• Aboriginal Social And Emotional Wellbeing Award: The MindED + CultureAWARE High School Program (Sydney)
• Media and the Arts Award: A Good Mind To podcast (Port Kembla)
• Leadership Through Lived Experience Award: Jenny Learmont (Bowral).