TV presenter Osher Günsberg hopes creating So What? Now What? with illustrator Campbell Walker kickstarts a conversation about mental health issues.
Mental health is a subject that some people shy away from, especially young men. Are you hoping your book speaks to them?
I started my podcast in 2013 because I wasn’t hearing the kind of conversations I needed to hear when I wasn’t doing well. This is the exact book that I wish I had then. In fact, the title is a direct quote from my mentor who was talking me through a very, very sticky part of my life. I was busy having a massive pity party for myself. And he just said to me, “So what? Now what?” You can read almost a direct version of that conversation in this book. It was so transformatively impactful for me, and I really wanted more people to have a similar experience.
How did you come up with this idea for the graphic novel?
Our brains process pictures at least 10 times faster than they can process words. I wanted to make sure the book was brief enough that you could read it in one sitting. But that can prove a challenge when it comes to some of the dense psychological concepts I wanted to cover. Depicting them visually was an obvious choice because, let’s be honest, who’s going to pick up a 1000-page book called So What? Now What? As I started to sketch out the ideas, it became obvious to me that there was only one artist who would bring the concepts to life, and that was the talented Campbell Walker. I was over the moon when he agreed to do it.
At what point in your life did you come across Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT)?
For me, ACT came along right before my youngest Wolfgang was born. I’d been off meds for quite a while and, like many dads, the impending change of life that a child brings was serving up some very difficult things for me. My wife Audrey took one look at me and said, “I need you to get back on meds, I need you around for this baby”. I was in my psychiatrist’s office the next day, and I asked him about some talk therapy which could go alongside getting back on the medication. I’d heard about ACT before, and with his blessing, I went and pursued it.
How did it change your life?
Like anything, it takes work, and the work I did with my therapist was very difficult, I’ll be honest with you, but it was worth it because it gave me the skills to be able to sit with uncomfortable thoughts and feelings but still have a really rich and wonderful life. Prior to that, I had been stuck in avoidance and stuck in pain because I didn’t believe I could hold both ideas in my head. But that’s what this work has given me the ability to do. To hold something quite awful that I can’t control in one hand, and still have the ability to mess around and play silly buggers with my son on the living room floor.
Do you have any other ideas for a similar project in the future?
We’re planning a tour for this book as well, but considering the main character is an anthropomorphic glove, I’m going all out and working with a mate who was involved with the Minecraft movie to do live motion capture on stage, to have the main character of the book be animated in real-time behind us. It’s incredibly ambitious and relying on hacked-together technical things and will probably break but if I know anything from my career, it’s that you gotta swing for the fences if you want any chance of getting a home run.
So What? Now What? is out now, published by Penguin $24.99
