Ru Paul’s Drag Race star Miz Cracker joins Bristol mental health podcast

Bristol Uni is launching a new mental health podcast for students, with the first episode featuring Ru Paul’s Drag Race star, Miz Cracker.

The show, launching on Monday 5th of April, will feature Miz Cracker sharing her experience of anxiety, with the goal of the podcast hopes to give students the tools they need to feel better more often.

Your Amazing Mind will be hosted by Michael Pearson, the deputy head of Bristol Uni’s Student Counselling Service. Each week will feature a guest speaker and a student who will talk about their own experiences with mental health issues, such as depression or body image.

Miz Cracker, fifth place finisher in the tenth season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, will feature in the first episode alongside Brian, a student at Bristol Uni. They will talk about having anxiety, getting help, and how to cope with it.

Miz gives tips on how she deals with her own anxiety, saying: “Don’t punish yourself for not winning over your anxiety, not handling it right, or not using all the tools in your kit correctly.

“Just be like: we got dealt a blow today and that’s alright. It’s a battle that’s part of a larger war, so don’t take every defeat so seriously.

“I remember in the sexual education that I received in sixth grade in public school. They said ‘you are going to get acne and might have some emotional difficulties from like 13 to 18.’ And so I went from 13 to 18 with terrible acne and horrible anxiety and I was waiting for 18 to come for it to be over.

“Well, now I’m anxious and I’m still using skin medication and I’m 36 – so I was lied to and I’m furious!”

Brian, the first student featuring on the podcast, is a Bristol Uni student who suffered from debilitating anxiety.

“It was getting kind of desperate,” he tells listeners. “I didn’t know what was wrong, but I just felt I couldn’t cope any more. It manifested, in the end, through me just becoming somebody else – I didn’t even recognise myself.

“I started getting keen on writing poetry. So I wrote a poem basically saying I wasn’t on my own – even though I live on my own – because I had demons for company.

“I showed this to my best friend and she said ‘you need help’. I thought: ‘Okay I do’. But it possibly took a year for that to happen. So it was a long process, because accepting you’ve got a problem is difficult.”

A recent survey found that 70% of British students felt their mental health had suffered during the pandemic.

Bristol Uni has been upgrading its wellbeing services in recent years by increasing team sizes and opening up more resources for students.

Podcast host and deputy head of Student Counselling, Michael Pearson, said: “This is one of the only podcasts in the UK to give students a platform to talk about their own experience of mental health issues. With the help of a different specialist each week, the podcast gives advice to students, young people, and adults experiencing similar issues.

“Your Amazing Mind will explore anxiety, body image, LGBTQ+ issues, marginalisation, bereavement, and depression in a deep, relatable and honest way that normalises experiences and gives people lift at the same time.

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