ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗
If you're navigating mental health struggles, addiction or recovery — your own or someone else's — you'll hear what actually worked, what didn't and what people wish they'd known sooner.
Take It From Us is the voice of lived experience, featuring people sharing their own journeys, unscripted and unfiltered.
Host Kent Johns is a broadcaster and health coach who believes everyone has a story worth hearing if someone takes the time to really listen.
Press play — you might hear your own story in someone else's.
If you need support, click here for helpful links, phone numbers and resources: https://ember.org.nz/resources/in-a-crisis/
Hosts:
Update frequency:
weekly
Average audio length:
34 minutes
Guest interviews
English
New Zealand
68 episodes
since June 25, 2025
episodic
LATEST EPISODE 🔗
Election day is 7 November and politics is everywhere right now... but here’s a different kind of perspective on it.
We’re re-releasing our conversation with Grant Robertson about what the job costs the people doing it — whichever way you vote (Todd Muller’s episode is back in your feed today too)…
SEARCH PAST EPISODES
Search past episodes of Take It From Us with Kent Johns .
PREVIOUS EPISODES 🔗
With the election on 7 November, we’re re-releasing two conversations that have nothing to do with how you vote, and everything to do with what politics asks of the people in it (Grant Robertson’s episode is back in your feed today too).
In May 2020, Todd Muller was elected leader of the National P…
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 d…
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 …
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 drin…
"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 Un…
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 …
Flynn Mitchell spent three years in a Dunedin university flat built for wheelchair users — accessible kitchen, accessible bathroom, full independence. Then he moved home to Auckland and lost all of it. Now he needs a carer just to wash his own dishes.
He's not alone. Ray Finch, CEO of the Laur…
On New Year's Eve 2022, Sam Cox went through the windscreen of a car doing over 100km/h down a gravel road outside Rangiora. His best friend Kaide, who was driving, didn't survive. Sam did — with a brain injury so severe it took him five months to even understand Kaide was gone.
Now 19, S…
Shane Cameron spent 17 years as a professional heavyweight boxer — a Commonwealth Games bronze, a world title shot and the 2009 fight against David Tua that ended with him in an ambulance. He didn't watch the footage back until last year.
In this episode, Shane talks to Kent about the memory …
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ember, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
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