John (some names have been changed in this story to protect our sources’ anonymity) is a successful citizen of the beer world. He owns a brewpub. It’s busy most days and packed out on weekends. His beer has won accolades and medals. He has a wife and a young son. He’s tall, good looking, and muscular. In the years I’ve known him, I would describe him as warm, friendly, and generous. He was also bullied as a child and never told anyone. He says he’s carried it with him all of his life, but thought it was in the past. Until one night his wife found him outside their family home. He was screaming, curled in a ball. He recalls being so upset he couldn’t move. “I had nothing in me,” he says. The following week, things got worse.

“The anxiety just took hold so much that I literally jumped out of a moving car and ran to the edge of a bridge,” he remembers. “The second I looked down and realized what I was trying to do, I dropped everything and ran down a path, barefoot, for about a kilometer. By that point, police became aware, they found me, then sat me down, and called an ambulance.”

That was earlier this year. He realizes now that he’s always carried around a lot of anxiety, and it stems back to the childhood bullying. Despite outward success at the time, he calls it the “darkest place” in which he’s ever been.

Craig Basford, from Big Shed Brewing Concern, in Adelaide, remembers the first time he realized he was having an anxiety attack: “It was the worst sensation. I wanted to run and keep running. I wanted to get away from it.”

It was triggered by two everyday occurrences for a small brewery owner: a stuck mash, and an industry peer stopping in to say hi. What he thought was a one-off attack soon became a regular event. Workplace challenges, part and parcel of opening a brewery, made things feel like “the end of the world, all of the time.”

“You feel like you’re putting your families on the line, and your livelihoods on the line to do this thing,” Basford says. “And when it feels like it’s not working, [you think] you’ve made the biggest mistake of your life.”

From the outside, the beer industry can seem like a great lifestyle choice. No more 9-5 workdays, and lots of events filled with beer and friends. However, that often means days or weeks away from home. For Basford, those times can be challenging.

“Of course, we don’t help ourselves and we curate a social media presence which shows us having a good time because that’s part of the schtick,” he admits. “It’s fun on the first night, it’s ok on the second night, but it gets really tiring really quickly.”

It was one such week that caused Exit Brewing’s Fraser Rettie to realize he maybe needed help. Seeing breweries celebrating success and seeming to do it with relative ease turned his self-doubt into self-loathing.

“You see breweries that are bigger than you and getting so much more traction than you are, which probably makes me feel that I’m not doing as well as I could be,” he says.