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At 19, Michael was living with psychosis - hearing voices, seeing things other people couldn’t, and trying to hold himself together while training as a nurse.

In this episode, he takes us right into the moment it all collided: on a hospital ward, caring for someone who couldn’t move or speak, while the voices in his head were telling him to end his life. It was the night he lost nursing and, for a while, lost himself too.

Michael speaks honestly about what came next: the secrecy, the stigma, the friendships that disappeared, and the deep depression that followed. He also talks about identity, including what it meant to come out as a gay man in Ireland, at a time when shame and silence were already crushing him.

But this is also a recovery story - and peer support sits right at the heart of it.

Michael explains what personal recovery really means when symptoms don’t just disappear. The daily work. The coping tools. The planning. The small choices that keep you one step ahead. And he shares how peer support works in practice - not as “telling your story”, but finding the overlap between two lives and building trust from there.

We also get into lived experience as knowledge - why peer work can’t be supervised using a clinical model, and why the heart of peer support is equality, relationship, and real-world connection.

Most of all, Michael leaves you with one clear message:

Just because you live with psychosis, your life is not over.

Listen if you’re interested in: psychosis, voice-hearing, stigma, identity, personal recovery, WRAP, and what peer support looks like when it’s done properly.

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With-you consultancy: www.with-you.co.uk