I wanted to share with you a new podcast created by my friend Mike Edward called Living with Chronic Mental Illness. It’s about his own journey with chronic schizoaffective disorder. As the host says, “It’s the story of challenging moments, of failures, of successes, of love, of loss, and of hope. This is the story of how ignorance lost its bliss.”
It seems like sometimes people try to portray a sanitized picture of mental illness in an attempt to make it more socially acceptable.The downside of this is that there are a lot of us who don’t have a neat and tidy experience of mental illness, and I like that this podcast captures the reality that life with a chronic mental illness is hard. The host is honest and open about the challenges he’s faced and the fact that he continues to face challenges on an ongoing basis due to his illness.
I tend to have a hard time concentrating on auditory information, so I liked that the episodes are on the shorter side, each lasting about 5-10 minutes.
The podcast is embedded below, and you can get to it via Linktree. New episodes are posted weekly on Mondays at 12am. I encourage you to check it out!
Podcasting has certainly been growing in popularity. An article on Buzzsprout from earlier this month offers the following statistics pulled from various sources:
- In 2022, 62% of Americans age 12+ have listened to a podcast
- 38% of Americans age 12+ listen to podcasts at least monthly, and 26% listen weekly
- The number of podcast listeners in the US has grown from 46.1 million in 2017 to 82.7 million in 2021
Here are some Buzzsprout platform stats from August 2022:
- 118.8 million downloads
- 170.5K new episodes
- 114.3K active podcasts
Personally, I’ve never thought about doing a podcast or being a guest on one; I’m a writer, not a talker. Aside from podcasts created by friends, I’m not a podcast listener, either; the written word is a better medium for me than the spoken word. However, there are probably a lot of people for whom the written word is not an ideal medium, and venturing out into things like podcasting is a way to reach different audiences. And when it comes to getting the word out about the reality of mental illness, the more different audiences that can be reached the better.
Besides Living with Chronic Mental Illness, another podcast I would recommend is Perfectly Imperfect by my friend Johnzelle Anderson. It focuses on Black mental health and social justice issue. If there are any mental health-related podcasts you’d like to recommend, feel free to drop the links in the comments below.
Are you a regular podcast listener? Do you have any thoughts on whether the rise in popularity of podcasting will impact the popularity of blogging?