It’s much easier to talk about the weather than it is about mental health. We all know this. Because it’s a lot easier to face the idea of a rainy day than the idea of a mental disorder that might last the rest of one’s life. Still, getting those conversations going with a friend, with a therapist or psychiatrist, or even with yourself is the best way to make the situation less scary and more easily managed. After facing up to some tough issues in the wake of the end of her first marriage, publi...
Jul 12, 2021•46 min•Ep. 17
It’s tempting to try to look for a reason why Joel Kim Booster, ordinarily a very funny and engaging person, feels dead inside, trapped in a persistent depressive state. His father recently died of COVID. The two hadn’t been very close (Joel’s dad was a conservative Christian, Joel is a gay Hollywood star) but were beginning to reconnect. You could point to the pandemic, which left Joel in an apartment he doesn’t like for extended periods. But it’s just as easy to point to things that aren’t esp...
Jul 05, 2021•50 min•Ep. 16
Alexandra Paul wasn’t allowed sugar as a kid but she snuck it anyway, not for the taste but for the comfort it provided. As a teen, Alexandra’s modeling and acting careers were going great. Her relationship with food, on the other hand, had become a real mess. At boarding school, it seemed right and normal to deny herself food in order to be as skinny as possible. The other girls were doing it and no one ever talked about it as a disorder. Over time, as she moved into modeling in New York City a...
Jun 28, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 15
When a loved one dies, the world can become chaos. Everything has changed. The way you drive a car, the way food tastes, the way you even talk to people can feel different and wrong and weird. It feels like you are - for lack of a better term - going crazy. How far apart are grief and mental illness? The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), the standard reference for mental illness, says that if you’re still messed up from grief six months after the death of your person, you have something c...
Jun 21, 2021•49 min•Ep. 14
Hi, folks. John Moe here. I knew about Stephanie Wittels Wachs for quite a while before I met her but correctly figured I’d get to know her one of these days. That’s because our stories have an awful lot of overlap. We’re both writer, we both host podcasts, I live in the Twin Cities and her company, Lemonada, is based here, and most importantly, we both lost our brothers. Lost them twice, really. First to addiction, at which they became different people. Someone in the grip of an addiction exist...
Jun 14, 2021•54 min•Ep. 13
No, bipolar disorder doesn’t mean that you’re kind of cheerful one day and a little bit glum the next. Those are just moods. That’s not a disorder. The Mayo Clinic says of bipolar, “When you become depressed, you may feel sad or hopeless and lose interest or pleasure in most activities. When your mood shifts to mania or hypomania (less extreme than mania), you may feel euphoric, full of energy or unusually irritable. These mood swings can affect sleep, energy, activity, judgment, behavior and th...
Jun 07, 2021•46 min•Ep. 12
Allison Raskin has been attempting to manage her obsessive compulsive disorder for most of her life. It’s meant knowing when she can be home to take a shower during the day. It’s meant not being able to pet a friendly dog she met because even though she adores dogs, the thought of contamination was too overwhelming. She’s treated her OCD to help get the symptoms more under control but it’s a daily challenge to manage things. Allison is pretty honest about that and other struggles on the very pop...
May 31, 2021•45 min•Ep. 11
Before he was a podcast host, radio personality, or a journalist breaking major political news, Jarrett Hill was a kid growing up gay in a religiously conservative environment. So when it was time to come out, it meant defying the homophobic words of his pastor who had urged parents to not let their kids grow up to be “sissies”. He had first started seeing therapists as a result of his parents’ protracted divorce and went intermittently over the years. Finally, with the help of a particularly ob...
May 24, 2021•56 min•Ep. 10
The American mental health care system has had some very fundamental problems for a while now: there are too few therapists, way too few psychiatrists, and it all adds up to not enough people getting the care they need. With COVID, the system needed to make some rapid changes that might go a long way to addressing the problems. Dr. Anthony Sossong is a psychiatrist and he does a lot of work on telehealth platforms. He says the technology has been in place for a while and even though there are so...
May 17, 2021•54 min•Ep. 9
Yeah, this became a pretty big show. Just kept filling up with more guests. It started with a conversation with Zach Kornfeld of The Try Guys , a YouTube comedy troupe that is preposterously famous and beloved. Because these guys are open about their lives and challenges, we know that Zach had a bumpy ride full of mental illness diagnoses and possible trauma. Zach mentioned a talk he heard from Ira Glass that was very influential so we called Ira to see if we could talk to him as well and Ira sa...
May 10, 2021•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 8
Peter Sagal always sounds chipper and fun on the hit NPR quiz show Wait Wait Don't Tell Me but that's always been just one part of his personality. In recent years, Sagal went through a divorce that resulted in his three daughters cutting off all contact with him. He spent some time coming to grips with some depression issues that he had been experiencing and largely walking away from most of his life Peter was also up against the portrayal of the dad who loses everything in movies and televisio...
May 03, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 7
Look, we’re all going to be messed up for a while from COVID. Some of us a lot, some of us a little, some for a very long time, others for not as long. But it’s trauma. It’s an event more powerful than the brain can handle and that means mental health repercussions down the road. So let’s talk about what might happen. Dr. Ken Duckworth, medical director of NAMI, provides insight into how trauma works. Then therapist Dr. Ksera Dyette tells us the trauma signs she’s already seeing in her practice....
Apr 26, 2021•51 min•Ep. 6
Author Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, has connected with a lot of people through her essays and books about the challenges of daily life, getting a lot of laughs from topics that might not appear all that funny. Jenny deals with depression and anxiety that can get pretty fierce. In her new book, Broken, she details her semi-successful TMS treatment and she explains to John Moe how odd and helpful it was. Nowhere, Jenny’s new bookstore in San Antonio, is now open. Get your copy of Broken (in the...
Apr 19, 2021•47 min•Ep. 5
Issues of depression and anxiety have been present in Open Mike Eagle's raps for a long time. His most played track on Spotify is "Ziggy Starfish (Anxiety Raps)" and it's from 2015. Mike has always been more prone to self-effacement and worry than to the boasting and swagger you might find in other hip-hop artists. But after a year that saw him lose his tv show, his touring income, his marriage, and his home, Mike became more open than ever before and hit record on all of it. His album, Anime, T...
Apr 12, 2021•49 min•Ep. 4
Burnout is burning out of control. A lack of motivation at work. A sense that the effort you put in ultimately has no point. A feeling that all of this stuff is getting worse and you can’t do anything about it. Sound familiar? The levels of burnout among employees all over the world are soaring as we pass the year mark of the pandemic. In a global survey, 89% of people say their well being has diminished as part of work. It comes at a time when burnout is listed in the International Classificati...
Apr 05, 2021•42 min•Ep. 3
Welcome to Depresh Mode with John Moe. In this episode, John explains how he came to be in the unique business of having open conversations about the kinds of mental disorders that have been kept quiet for a very long time. He welcomes in Patton Oswalt, who is one of the top comedians in the country today as well as being a popular actor from films like Ratatouille and Big Fan and tv series like King of Queens and AP Bio. Patton explains the role of depression in his own life and how his comedy ...
Mar 29, 2021•55 min•Ep. 1
Comedian, vlogger, author and podcast host Kelsey Darragh keeps a running inventory of the mental health challenges she’s faced and continues to deal with. There are a lot. But panic disorder, depression, and anxiety tend to be her big three. And she doesn’t have them all under control all the time because, well, that’s not how it works. But she’s found that by talking about them and writing about them for herself and an audience, she can make a lot of progress and help people out. Kelsey had fi...
Mar 29, 2021•46 min•Ep. 2
Honest, humane, and even funny conversations about common mental disorders like depression, anxiety, addiction, OCD, PTSD and more. Hear from top artists and entertainers what it’s like to live with an interesting mind and explore big issues in mental illness with experts. No shame, no stigma, and more laughs than you might expect.
Mar 11, 2021•2 min•Ep. 1
