The Story Behind the Name

It started in 2008

In 2008 my sister Linda had just given birth to her seventh child when she was diagnosed with cancer and given a few months to live. In the same stretch of time my mother had a stroke, and the scans that followed found cancer in her as well. My father, who had been a driving figure in the early health project I was building, was fighting his own. All three died before that project had grown into anything they would recognise today.

The name Brilin

The name Brilin is a thank you to two of them. Brian Kenton, my uncle, lent the project a building in its first years. Linda is the reason it exists at all. Put Brian and Linda together and you get BriLin.

The work

Those losses sent me into the question that has occupied me ever since: what sits underneath chronic disease, and what can be done about it long before a family reaches the point mine did. I trained and certified in functional medicine and built Brilin into a working practice, with clinics in Christchurch and Timaru and clients consulting online from around the world.

My focus is chronic degenerative illness, with cancer at the centre of it, and my working life is spent reading the research, testing what holds up, and passing on what I learn in plain language.

Brilin was never a one-man effort. It was built by a community of health professionals, researchers and volunteers who gave their time to a project with no guarantee of going anywhere, and I'm clear that the clinic stands on their work as much as mine.

Beyond the clinic

The William Bisset Health Foundation, a registered New Zealand charity, takes that work beyond the clinic doors. Its central initiative is a mobile clinic to bring functional medicine to towns across New Zealand that have never had access to it.

On the page

My memoir, FAT. DIVORCED. HOMELESS. KILLING MYSELF TOMORROW. tells the story of how I got here, which is roughly the order things happened in. Its companion volume, The Forgiveness Conspiracy, is the practical book that came out of surviving it. A third book, [SUPPLY: title of William's third book], is on the way. All three are published under William Bisset Publishing.

Before health, film

Before health there was film. I spent years behind a camera, and my documentary and video work has collected multiple awards along the way. I still shoot, edit and tell stories, now mostly about health, resilience and the people I meet doing this work.

On stage

As a speaker, I talk about the things I actually know: rebuilding a life from nothing, the underlying drivers of chronic illness, and what it looks like to turn personal loss into a mission bigger than yourself. I'm dry, direct and honest about my own failures, and audiences tend to leave having laughed more than they expected to at a talk about cancer.