NOVA radio host Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli shares mental health struggles on podcast the Imperfects

Radio star ‘Wippa’ has shared a frightening story from the depths of his mental health crisis and how he still needs support today.

WARNING: This story discusses suicide and may be triggering for some

Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli has made a living out of making Aussies’ mundane commutes more enjoyable.

But the popular radio personality has revealed his bubbly on-air voice is sometimes forced to mask very different feelings.

On the Imperfects podcast, which features interviews with high profile people about their vulnerabilities, the host of Nova’s ‘Fitzy and Wippa with Kate Ritchie’ breakfast show gave a raw account of his past and current mental health struggles.

Speaking with hosts Ryan Shelton and brothers Hugh and Josh van Cuylenburg, Wippa opened up about the severe bullying he suffered as a teenager and the insecurities he faced as he got older.

Kate Ritchie poses with Fitzy & Wippa after joining their radio show.

He told listeners a failed relationship threw him into the depths of a mental health crisis in 2009-2010 and that he takes antidepressants to this day.

His reasons for leaning on medication today are different to when he first did so — when he was aged 18-21. Now, Wippa said he has “a very busy life and a huge responsibility of a wife and kids”.

“It’s so important for you to have a clear head so (antidepressants) shield your head a bit – armour you up a bit – so those moments where you might be getting trapped don’t trap you,” he said.

“So that’s why I take them now, because I can see when I start to spiral … I’ve worked out a little bit of what the signs are”.

Michael 'Wippa' Wipfli, his wife Lisa and their three kids. Picture: Richard Dobson

Responding to comedian Shelton’s question about what those signs were, Wippa said failure and his mind “getting stuck on things” were triggers.

“I remember driving along with (my wife) Lisa once and I just started crying and she said ‘what’s wrong?” and I said ‘I don’t know’,” he said.

“Things just play over and over, things that don’t even matter … it’s so ridiculous”.

Two examples Wippa gave were a disagreement with colleagues at work over a radio segment, and a time someone tried to sell him a table which he felt was overpriced.

“I stewed over what I was gonna do to this guy like you wouldn’t believe … I’d lie in bed thinking I’m gonna call every interior designer and tell them to never buy from him cause this guy is a crook,” he said.

Wippa says everything he’s been through led him to Lisa. Picture: Supplied

“Who gives a f**k about a table mate, it’s a table, buy another one. But it was stuck in my head.”

He reflected on his darkest ever moments, which dated back to 2009 while he co-hosted the NOVA drive show with Shelton and Monty Dimond.

“We’re doing a radio show that’s meant to be a relief for everyone coming home at the end of the day and I was going down 100 miles an hour,” he said.

A recent break-up sent him into a spiral which culminated in staring at a balcony in an Adelaide hotel with Shelton, though he did not share the dangerous thought.

Hugh van Cuylenburg. Picture: Supplied

“I remember thinking, not that I could end it, but I looked it like that would make it all go away,” he said.

The scare prompted him to call his doctor.

On the same trip, Wippa was in a taxi when he turned to Shelton and said: “Sheltzie, I’m trying so hard,” causing his friend to grab his leg.

“I just needed someone to hold me,” Wippa said. “It’s so scary — where you go to is so scary.”

Shelton said the story about the balcony “rattled” him as he wasn’t aware of it, but that he would never forget the moment in the taxi.

Ryan Shelton. Picture: Paramount+

“It felt very out of character for you because you’re a very positive, upbeat person,” he said. “So when we were in Adelaide in the cab and … you started crying and it just burst out of you, it was a shock – I didn’t know what else to do, it was full on.

“In terms of what I’d been thinking about, I was just hoping we’d hold onto our rating for our weekday lunch.”

In a silver lining to his past struggles, Wippa said the broken heart and everything that followed would not have led him to his wife Lisa, with whom he shares three children with.

“I don’t think I would have ever ended it because this whole thing spiralled out of a failed romance and an attempt to get her back and I remember thinking, ‘if I’m not here, I can’t get her back,” Wippa said of what got him through the immediate crisis.

“But if I hadn’t been through what I’ve been through, I wouldn’t have met Lisa and that was the next stage of my life. You don’t have to go through that to find the love of your life — there are much easier ways — but in the failure of that relationship, it took me from a boy to a man.”

Wippa has been on air for 20 years.

Fast-forward nearly 15 years, and while Wippa still occasionally struggles with his mental health, he has learned how to cope and the tools that help him — with exercise being a huge one.

One of his favourite metaphors was of someone under water whose occasional breaths become more frequent and “all of a sudden you don’t want to lie in the water anymore”.

“You slowly pick yourself up,” he said. “The hardest part was thinking, what happens after this? Am I going to make a full recovery?

“But in a weird way, the experience grows you into something more knowledgeable, more skilled, more armed and takes you to a different place in life”.

Another purpose of experiencing his darkest days was to help others, and for each person to know that they are needed, he said.

“We have to somehow turn this into a positive and build from that,” he said.

The Imperfects podcast is the brainchild of Hugh van Cuylenburg, who founded the mental health education initiative, the Resilience Project. He also wrote a mental health book with the same title.

In its bio, the Imperfects is described as being “all about how perfectly imperfect we are”.

“Constantly comparing ourselves to others cannot only be exhausting, but extremely harmful. However, when we share our struggles, we start to realise that everyone, no matter how successful, has something they are battling with,” the bio reads.

“In this podcast, Hugh, Josh and Ryan chat to a variety of interesting people who bravely share their struggles and imperfections, and we all learn some valuable takeaways we can apply to our own imperfect lives”.