Kevin Hollingsworth: 16 years in recovery from Methamphetamine addiction

Nic Russell has been through more than most — breast cancer, a heart transplant and Parkinson’s. None of it comes close to 2005, when her three-year-old daughter Kenzie died of bone cancer. Even when she could no longer walk, Kenzie wanted to be alive. Nic has carried that with her ever since. It doesn’t mean pretending things are fine. She’ll have a pity party, but she won’t live there. She leans on good friends, cold water and dark comedy. When Kenzie died, the professional support stopped....

Mia Simcock didn’t know what a psychotic episode was until she had one. She was 19 and studying at Otago when she went five days without sleep and lost touch with reality. A second episode a few years later brought a bipolar 1 diagnosis, and her first instinct was to tell her parents they couldn’t tell a soul. In this episode, Mia tells Kent why she eventually stopped hiding it, what she has to do to manage her health from the minute she wakes up, and why people struggle to believe she’s unwe...

For nearly 20 years as a firefighter, Jemarl Paerata pushed the trauma to the back and drank to keep it there. But one day, after a cardiac arrest callout, he asked the boys in the truck, "Do you ever feel like there might be a little bit more?" The reckoning saw Jemarl give up heavy drinking, leave the fire service and start Te Kaiārahi out of Piha. Since 2022, thousands of rangatahi have come through his programmes — surfing, bush walks, cold water, breathwork, and the stories of Tāne Mahut...

"You don't feel Kiwi enough for the Kiwis, but you don't feel Arab enough for the Arabs." Eman Ghandour was 10 when her family moved from Jordan to Dunedin. Growing up, she tried to get her "ratio" to 50/50 Kiwi and Arab, and it kept landing at 80/20. While at Otago Uni she lived as a Kiwi with her friends, then came home to Arab Muslim parents and a constant sense of guilt. Her mid-20s, she says, were the worst years. In 2021 she started a group chat for young ethnic women who were feeling t...

Jason Blyth was nine years old when he asked his psychiatrist a question no child should have to ask: why was he the one being brought in for treatment, when his mother was the one abusing him? Between the ages of two and fifteen, Jason saw around 20 different clinicians. He begged, repeatedly, to be taken away from a home where his own reports describe genuine fear for his life. Nothing changed. By eleven, he'd stopped asking. Jason Blyth’s story is a Hollywood epic of survival and redemptio...