Fay Jackson, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was 15-years-old was travelling down a dark and lonely road through Hay when her driver, Keith, asked her what she was doing out there.

"I said 'I'm here to speak at the conference', and he said, 'Yes, I know that, but what are you here to speak about?' And I said, 'Oh, mental health.'

"And he said, 'Jeez, do we need you out here! I tell ya, great load of freaks and lunatics running around out here. Complete spazoids and schizos. Stab you in the back as soon as they look at you. We ought to round them all up and stick them on an island and let them kill each other off like we used to with the lepers.'"

He then asked her what she did, whether she was an expert on mental health or a doctor.

"Keith, I'm the nutter," Ms Jackson replied.

The story was told to ABC's Q&A audience on Monday night with the deft humour and gravity that can only come with a lifetime experience of mental illness and the stigma it entails.

Fay Jackson is AWESOME #qanda— Ed Hurley (@EdHurls) October 5, 2015

"I've heard a lot of crap out of people's mouths, but not so much usually from one guy alone with me in the cab of his car on the way out through Hay Plains in the dark," said Ms Jackson, the deputy commissioner at the NSW Mental Health Commission and the chief executive of Vision and Mind.

The experience was symptomatic of a wider social ill that dismisses this type of behaviour as a lesser-insult than other forms of discrimination, Ms Jackson explained.

"Stigma, yes, that is an issue that you have with yourself, but I think [the] bigger issue, really actually is that society is calling [it] stigma … when a whole lot of the time they should be calling it what it actually is, and it's actually discrimination," Ms Jackson said.

"That's illegal and we need to be confronting that," she said.

Ms Jackson spoke candidly about her own confronting struggles with psychosis, including hearing voices so loud and intrusive that she would become almost mute, unable to tell if she was speaking or if it was the manifestation of her illness.

"The hell I got at school ... I actually held onto my tongue when I was speaking so that I knew that it was me speaking," she said.

#qanda Took me years to seek help, wish I had sooner #stupidmalepride— Steve (@born_a_pom) October 5, 2015

Ms Jackson and fellow panelist, former AFL star Wayne Schwass, shared a rare confessional for a national audience they believed would benefit from gaining some insight into how serious mental illness can affect anyone.

"I achieved everything I wanted to achieve after my sporting career, but after 11 years of diagnosis, I grew tired of pretending," Mr Schwass said.

"Every single waking moment of my life was pretending to everybody else, families, friends, pretending I was OK and I was not, I was miserable, very unwell and unhealthy.

"I made the decision to sit down with my family, that's 12 years after diagnosis, and I put it on the table and it was the first beginning of the slow process of getting my life back," he said.

Ms Jackson and Ms Schwass joined the Q&A panel ahead of the ABC's 'Mental As' programming over Mental Health week from October 4 to 11. 

Most moving part of being in @QandA audience tonite was seeing Tony Jones squeeze Fay Jackson's hand at end of taping #mentalas #QandA— Erin O'Loughlin (@WordsbyErin) October 5, 2015