What Does It Actually Mean to Be With Someone? A podcast that is quietly doing something important: Extremely Human
I come across a lot of mental health content. Some of it is good. Most of it is well-intentioned. Not much of it stops me in my tracks.
Extremely Human stops me in my tracks.
It is a podcast out of Discovery College, a Melbourne-based learning space connected to Alfred Health and headspace Early Psychosis. Hosted by Lucy, a lived experience specialist, and Rachel, a social worker and dialogical practitioner, the show does something deceptively simple: it sits with people in their experiences without rushing them toward resolution. Every episode is a conversation. Not a case study. Not a recovery narrative with a tidy ending. A conversation, with all the messiness and honesty that implies.
I have been recommending it to colleagues, to carers, and to clients who are ready to hear that their experiences make sense in a human context, not just a clinical one. This post is my attempt to explain why.
What the Podcast Is About
The tagline says it well: how can we meet the full range of human experience with kindness and compassion?
Extremely Human explores what the show calls extreme states, a deliberately broad and humanising frame for experiences like psychosis, depression, grief, addiction, euphoria, and the kind of altered or overwhelming states that most people struggle to put language around. The language matters here. Rather than organising episodes around diagnoses or disorders, the podcast starts from the premise that these are human experiences, not just clinical presentations.
Each episode is free, ad-free, available on all major platforms, and accompanied by a full written transcript for accessibility. The original music was created by a young person accessing the headspace Early Psychosis programme. The artwork was commissioned through the podcast's own community. Everything about how it was built reflects its values.
It has now reached over 5,000 listeners across 25 countries. That is a lot of people who needed to hear that they, or someone they love, are not alone in what they are going through.
The stories we share on this podcast are not just stories, but memories of the people who have bravely shared their experiences with us. Remember to take care of yourself as you listen, as well as to take care of the stories that you hear.
That disclaimer, read at the start of every episode, tells you everything you need to know about how Lucy and Rachel approach this work. These are not stories being told about people. They are stories being held with care.
The Episode I Keep Coming Back To
Featured Episode
Title: Is This Really Radical?
Guest: Paul, a psychiatrist and Open Dialogue practitioner
Theme: Humanising mental health care, family inclusion, shared decision making
Available: Extremely Human on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and discovery.college
The title is a genuine question, and it sits with you. Paul is a psychiatrist who also practices Open Dialogue, an approach to mental health crisis that centres the person, includes their family and network in the conversation, and resists the pull toward rapid diagnosis and medication as the default response. In this episode, he talks about what it actually looks like to treat someone as a human being first, and a patient second.
What struck me most was how Paul sits with the tension between systems and values. He is not anti-psychiatry. And…he is not a practitioner who has opted out. He is someone working inside a system he has complicated feelings about, trying to shift it from within, and being honest about how hard that is.
He talks about how medicalisation puts the problem in the person and the responsibility with the expert, and how this framing shuts families out of the very conversations they should be part of. The alternative he describes, shared decision making that includes the people who love the person, sounds almost obvious when you hear it. Which is exactly what makes the episode title land.
Is this really radical? The fact that treating people like people, including their families, listening without rushing, holding uncertainty without immediately pathologising it, could be considered radical in our current mental health system says something important about where we are.
‘Families felt very shut out of those decision making processes because the medicalisation puts the problem in the person and the responsibility with the expert, whereas if it is more shared decision making with people that love the person and the person themselves, I think that even though it does not sound that different, I think it makes a big difference.’
Paul also speaks to the Victorian Royal Commission into Mental Health and the push for less involuntary treatment, more community-based responses, and genuine centring of lived experience. He does not pretend this is straightforward. He acknowledges the professional tensions, the institutional resistance, the very real limits of what one clinician can change on their own.
That honesty is what makes this episode worth sitting with.
Why This Matters to Me as a Clinician
I work at the intersection of neuroscience and relational care. My practice is built on the belief that you cannot treat a brain in isolation from the person, the family, and the meaning system that person lives within. That is not a particularly radical idea in theory. In practice, it remains countercultural.
The mental health system, as it currently operates in Australia, is still largely organised around individual diagnosis and individual treatment. Families are often consulted as an afterthought, if at all. Lived experience is increasingly recognised in policy language but frequently marginalised in actual service delivery. The gap between what we know about human wellbeing and what the system actually does with that knowledge remains wide.
What Paul describes in this episode resonates with something I see in my own work constantly: when families are genuinely included, something shifts. Not just for the person at the centre of care, but for everyone in the room. People feel less alone. The problem becomes more shared, which paradoxically makes it more manageable. Connection itself is therapeutic, not as a nice extra but as a core mechanism of change.
Open Dialogue has a growing evidence base. It also reflects values that have existed in family therapy and systems thinking for decades: the idea that we are always in relationship, that distress is often relational in origin, and that healing tends to require something relational in response.
Treating people like people is not a soft option. It is a clinically serious one. The evidence increasingly supports what the heart already knows.
Who Should Listen
If you are a carer or family member of someone navigating mental health challenges, this podcast will give you language for experiences that have probably been hard to articulate. It will also, I hope, offer some comfort in knowing that the frustrations you feel with a system that often excludes you are not unreasonable.
If you are a clinician, particularly one working in public mental health, this episode will either challenge you or confirm things you already know but rarely hear named out loud in professional settings. Either way, it is worth an hour of your time.
If you are someone who has experienced extreme states yourself, the whole podcast is worth starting at episode one. Not because every episode will feel easy, but because there is something genuinely rare about hearing your experiences treated as meaningful, rather than as symptoms to be managed.
And if you are simply curious about what it looks like when mental health care actually tries to be human, start here.
A Note on the Podcast's Place in the Broader Conversation
Extremely Human is made by people at Discovery College, a recovery college model that grew out of headspace Early Psychosis at Alfred Health in Melbourne. Recovery colleges are built on co-production: courses and resources developed by people with lived experience alongside clinicians, not for them. The podcast is an extension of that model into audio form.
It has reached practitioners, carers, young people who were not ready to join groups but could listen alone on a commute. It has, according to the people who made it, been healing for guests and their families. It has attracted attention internationally, including recognition through the Imroc network in the UK, one of the leading organisations in recovery-oriented mental health practice.
None of that happened because it is slickly produced. It happened because it is genuinely true to something.
Where to Find It
Extremely Human is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and at discovery.college, where you will also find full transcripts of every episode. It is free, ad-free, and genuinely worth your time.
Start with Is This Really Radical? Then decide where you want to go from there.
About The Togetherness Project
We are a neurotherapy practice with locations in Hawthorn (Melbourne) and Fremantle (Perth). We work with individuals and families using QEEG assessment and integrative neuromodulation within a relational, trauma-informed framework.
Family inclusion is central to how we work, not an add-on.