Joanie is Clint Malarchuk's wife. We had Clint on the podcast twice the past month and initially recorded with Joanie to color in some of our conversation with him. After we hung up with her, we knew we had to cut a full episode.

Our guardians aren't always our parents. More often, down the road at least, they're a spouse, a child, maybe a friend who's looking down from above. Whoever it happens to be, our guardians help guide us through life - with signs, with words, with actions. But when someone is suffering from mental illness, that job gets confusing, especially if you don't know what you're dealing with.

Joanie's first interaction with mental illness was shortly after she met Clint. He was frozen from his OCD, in a hotel room a few hundred miles from home. She helped get him back but more importantly, she got busy doing the research so she knew how to help the next time it happened. A decade later, Clint and Joanie are still in love, advocating louder than ever for mental health and continuing to use their experiences to help sufferers and their guardians navigate the waters of mental illness.