Why We Still Don’t Ask For Help | With Lily Gresele
We know mental health exists. We talk about it. We post about it. We ask "are you okay?".
So why is it still so f*cking hard to actually ask for help when we need it?
Founder of How to Be Well, Lily Gresele, shares what happened when leaving elite gymnastics left her without a sense of identity, how she eventually sought help after years of hiding what was really going on, and why knowing support exists doesn't necessarily mean you'll reach for it.
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This episode includes discussion of suicidal ideation, depression, trauma, mental health challenges, and alcohol use. If anything in this episode raises something for you, Lifeline (13 11 14) and the Suicide Call Back Service (1300 659 467) are available 24/7.
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In this episode, you'll hear:
👉 How leaving elite gymnastics triggered an identity crisis — Lily spent most of her childhood in elite gymnastics, starting in the programme at eight and eventually leaving after physical and emotional burnout. When the sport disappeared, so did the identity, purpose, and validation she had built around it.
👉 Why being told that vulnerability is weakness can follow you for years — Lily describes growing up in an environment where crying, showing emotion, and asking for support were treated as signs of weakness. She carried those beliefs outside the gym and became extremely good at hiding what she was experiencing.
👉 The moment her mum realised something was wrong — Lily says she didn't understand what was happening to her or even recognise that the way she was thinking was a mental health challenge. Eventually, after her mum asked what was wrong, Lily broke down and said she was sad all the time. That conversation led to her first GP appointment and the first step towards getting support.
👉 Why finding the right psychologist can take more than one try — Lily's first experience with a psychologist didn't work for her, and she initially decided that psychologists were useless. Trying someone else changed that. She talks about why one bad experience with mental health care shouldn't mean giving up on finding someone who works for you.
The conversation
A decade of validation, gone overnight
Lily entered an elite gymnastics program at eight years old and stayed in it through most of her school years, training more hours than she spent at home. She describes an environment with little positivity and real punishment for showing emotion; crying in pain or frustration could get a gymnast sent out of the gym until they were "ready to train properly." Athletes are classed as senior competitors from the year they turn 16, meaning some are training and competing under senior-level pressure at 15.
In Year 12, at seventeen, Lily decided to leave. There was no easing out of it. She describes being told, in effect, that she was now irrelevant to the program, and to move on. For someone whose entire identity, routine, and sense of self-worth had been built around the sport since childhood, the exit was abrupt and total. She fell into what she calls an identity crisis: no longer sure who she was, what her purpose was, or why she still mattered, now that gymnastics no longer defined her.
A hospital bed, years later
Skip forward. Lily is in her early twenties. She's been in therapy on and off for years; attending sessions, technically "in the system", but for a long stretch, she'd been giving her psychologist one-word, surface-level answers about how she was doing, while privately experiencing ongoing depression and suicidal thoughts she never disclosed. She calls this period "passive recovery": showing up, but not actually being honest about what was happening.
One night, unable to trust her own thoughts and no longer feeling safe, she told her mother and the two of them went to hospital. She's candid that an emergency department isn't necessarily a place that gives you much beyond immediate safety; she describes being triaged, then sitting in a hospital bed, answering the same standard questions she'd answered before. But something shifted. She says she made a conscious decision, right there, to stop waiting for a single breakthrough and start being proactive about her own recovery.
Three things, not one big fix
What she actually did next is deliberately unglamorous. She narrowed her focus to three specific, controllable factors in her life: cutting back on the binge drinking that had become her main way of socialising, coming off the contraceptive pill, and trying a different class of antidepressant; an SNRI, having already tried several SSRIs without success. She's upfront that she can't say which of the three actually made the difference, or whether it was the combination. But she says that from that point, as of this recording, she'd gone roughly 18 months to two years without an active suicidal thought.
What "irrelevant" became
Close the loop back to the seventeen-year-old told she no longer mattered to the only world she'd known. That same person is now the founder of How to Be Well, a mental health platform she started close to six years ago while studying psychology at university, not long after her own diagnosis. Her reasoning for starting it was simple: no one around her had ever spoken openly about mental health, and she didn't want to be the only person going through it in silence.
How to Be Well, one deleted Instagram post at a time
Lily built and deleted the platform's original Instagram page three times before it ever existed publicly. It only went live because, at a moment she couldn't bring herself to press "post," her partner at the time did it for her. From there, How to Be Well has grown into workshop facilitation, a rural WA speaking tour, and How to Be Well Community, an app-based space offering peer chat, guided grounding and mindfulness audio, and a monthly group check-in call.
The community sits at close to 100 members, currently paying for the $14.99-a-month tier. Something Lily attributes less to the price itself and more to where people place mental health maintenance on their list of everyday priorities.
What she learned taking the conversation into regional WA
Touring regional WA to talk about mental health, Lily found the core challenges, fear of judgement, shame, not knowing where to start… showed up consistently regardless of location, and that younger people in the country reported experiences strikingly similar to their city peers, largely due to shared exposure through social media. Older residents, by contrast, more often treated the conversation as a chance to reflect on how mental health simply wasn't discussed in their own youth. One consistent finding across every town: most young people could name a safe person or service to go to if they needed help. Whether they'd actually use it in a crisis was a different question entirely.
Why awareness isn't the same as action
Lily's broader thesis, shaped by both her own experience and years of community work, is that Australia doesn't have an awareness problem anymore; campaigns, days of action, and general recognition that mental health exists are everywhere. What she thinks is still unresolved is the actual mechanics of taking the first step: fear of judgement, financial barriers, long public wait lists, simply not knowing how to get a referral, and a hustle-culture environment that treats mental health maintenance as optional rather than a daily practice, only to be addressed once someone hits a crisis point.
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A Mental Health Care Plan is prepared by a GP and allows a patient to access Medicare rebates for psychology or counselling sessions under the Better Access initiative. As of recent guidelines, this provides a rebate toward up to 10 individual sessions with an eligible mental health professional per calendar year (down from a temporary 20-session allowance introduced during the pandemic, which ended in 2022).
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A psychologist typically holds a postgraduate degree in psychology and provides talk-based therapies, but in most cases cannot prescribe medication. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who has completed further specialist training in mental health, which means they can prescribe and adjust medication, order medical tests, and are often involved in more complex or higher-acuity cases.
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Both are common classes of antidepressant. An SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) works primarily by increasing the availability of serotonin in the brain. An SNRI (serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor) affects both serotonin and norepinephrine (noradrenaline). Because people respond differently to each, it's common for a prescriber to try a different class if an initial medication hasn't been effective.
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Yes. The Australian Human Rights Commission's 2021 independent review of gymnastics culture in Australia, Change the Routine, found widespread evidence of emotional abuse, body shaming, and a culture of fear across the sport nationally, along with early specialisation and intense pressure placed on very young athletes.
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Wait times vary significantly by service and region, but recent Australian research has found substantial delays are common; one 2025 study published in JAMA Network Open found some Australians face a median wait of over 250 days for a first psychiatry appointment in the public system, with longer waits outside major cities.
Her own recovery involved making changes she could control, including reducing her alcohol consumption, trying a different medication, and coming off the contraceptive pill. She also started doing more things alone, spending time with people who shared her values, and respecting her social limits instead of constantly pushing past them.
She stresses that there isn't one answer that works for everyone. Recovery can involve trial and error, and something that helps one person might not help another.
About LiLy Gresele
Lily Gresele is the founder of How to Be Well, a mental health platform she started in 2019 after her own experience with clinical depression, social anxiety, and PTSD, developed in the years following her exit from an elite gymnastics program.
How to Be Well has grown from a personal Instagram page into workshop facilitation, a rural WA speaking tour, and How to Be Well Community; a non-clinical, app-based support space offering peer connection, guided audio tools, and monthly group check-ins for people who are on waiting lists, not ready for therapy, or looking for support between appointments.
👉 Want to connect with Lily or get involved with How to Be Well? Find Lily through How to Be Well and her instagram.
