Hi, I’m Joe Diiorio. As the creator of NOTASTIGMA.COM, I’m trying to make a statement. That statement is people with mental health disorders are not a stigma, but people who breathe, dream, and feel. I have always had a desire to help others like me. It wasn’t till I got older that I realized how much I really struggled and felt like nobody knew what I was feeling. This website is about raising Mental Health Awareness, communication, and effective ways of handling the struggle inside of us all to deal with the people around us and to give them ways to deal with us where it doesn’t push us away.

I’m not a doctor, I’m not a therapist, I’m a man who has been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder 1 and have struggled my whole life with it. I have in recent years learned to maintain a mentally healthy lifestyle and find that I have always found myself helping people when I could. Creating this website and podcast helps me raise the level of people that I can help, and of people who can help me. Yes this is therapy for me.

The podcast and the blog will tackle specific topics from depression to death all with very candid look into me and how I deal/dealt with the topics. The podcast will also feature guests from different walks of life, different professions, different issues, even in the mental health field. We will even take questions from email, social media sites like Facebook, and Twitter. The goal is to reach those who want help and don’t know how to start, or to be a platform of support for those who just want to connect and not feel alone in their struggles. Writing this, I wish I had this around when I was younger.