NOTE: Not a great episode to listen to with your kids in the room. Everyone would be uncomfortable. Sexual health is part of health. Mental health is also part of health. This week, we talk about the relationship between the two and some ideas to take care of both. This is a topic that emerged from our Preshies listener discussion group on Facebook. A lot of people find that the depression or anxiety or other mental disorders they’ve been dealing with have made it a lot more difficult to enjoy t...
Jan 24, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 45
You can find plenty of articles online about Amanda Knox and her Italian court case, some from more reputable publications than others. Amanda was convicted twice and cleared twice of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, while the two were studying abroad in the Italian city of Perugia. She spent four years incarcerated in Italy before her name was finally cleared. Our interview picks up, for the most part, after that exoneration and it’s about how to manage one’s mental health after going ...
Jan 17, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 44
Most people have pictures of themselves at a younger age, maybe even a couple moderately embarrassing home videos kicking around. In Connor Franta’s case, he has a vast library of often deeply personal videos on YouTube spanning half his life that are regularly watched by over five million subscribers. And yes, plenty of those videos, especially when he was a lot younger, make him cringe a lot today. But these records also trace the path of a young man growing up, facing then sharing the truth a...
Jan 10, 2022•56 min•Ep. 43
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder can wreak havoc in a person’s life, especially when you don’t know you have it and especially when you have to deal with a lot of people who don’t understand it. We hear stories of those struggles this week but we also hear about victories that were earned through hard work and wisdom. For writer and comedian Dave Holmes, the best part of getting his ADHD diagnosed, treated, and under control is the experience of drying the last dish when he does the dish...
Jan 03, 2022•52 min•Ep. 42
There is plenty of information coming out of the CDC about COVID that has nothing to do with actual viruses in droplets. America’s mental health condition is not really good right now, with rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation measuring way, way above how they were before the pandemic. Once the virus is contained and the worst of the threat has passed, we won’t be out of the woods. We’ll just be entering a different kind of woods. In this week’s episode, a talk about how complex t...
Dec 27, 2021•39 min•Ep. 41
Sure, we know Santa Claus flies around the world delivering presents, but doesn’t that seem awfully compulsive? And what’s with the meticulous list of judgments he keeps? And why is he fixated on everyone believing in him? Like, ultimately, what’s Santa’s deal, mental health wise? John is joined by Broti Gupta, Carolina Hidalgo, and Hal Lublin to analyze (without being at all qualified to do so) a variety of Christmas figures who seem prone to rather odd behaviors. We have familiar characters li...
Dec 20, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 40
It’s not really the most direct route to comedy success: grow up in conservative Mormon Utah, be closeted about your sexuality even to yourself, try to live up to what is expected of you, ditch it all for show biz, come out of the closet, and then make it big. But we know it’s worked for at least one person: Bridger Winegar. The host of the I Said No Gifts podcasts walks us through his effort to figure out who he was, which included a long stretch of figuring he’d have to keep his homosexuality ...
Dec 13, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 39
Aimee Mann has a brilliant new album out called Queens of the Summer Hotel with songs about mental illness and identity, all inspired by the book Girl, Interrupted. The album is new but the songs are not, mostly written and recorded before Aimee had a career-threatening health scare. About a year ago, she lost part of her hearing, leaving her unable to pick up on certain frequencies. What had been music before became what she describes as a fuzzy, distorted electronic sound. This presented a sig...
Dec 06, 2021•43 min•Ep. 38
It wasn’t supposed to be like this for Broti Gupta. This comedy thing. It wasn’t supposed to be happening at all. She grew up the daughter of a doctor and there was an expectation she’d follow the same path. But as a college student, she just couldn’t shake the strong interest in comedy that led her down a different path entirely, away from med school and toward places like the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and Second City. Today, she’s a writer for The Simpsons and a rising star in comedy circles. O...
Nov 29, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 37
(takes a moment to secure tongue firmly in cheek) It would be rude to make fun of Josh Gondelman just because he’s a little strange. Or not strange. Instead, we’re going to learn from Josh about his career, his life, and how, even though he’s very bad at dancing he does it anyway. Then our pal comedian Gary Gulman for a response to what we heard. Gary is arguably the king of depressed comedy, having taken off the issue in his special The Great Depresh. Follow Josh Gondelman and Gary Gulman on Tw...
Nov 22, 2021•44 min•Ep. 36
Ivan Maisel’s words have been available to the general public for decades. It’s just that those words have tended to be about what’s happening with the Crimson Tide’s offense or who got the head coach job at UCLA. And although his work as a college football reporter is important to him, Ivan’s writing about his late son, Max Maisel, goes infinitely deeper. Max died by suicide in 2015. Max’s death, and more so his life, are the subject of I Keep Trying To Catch His Eye, Ivan Maisel’s new memoir. ...
Nov 15, 2021•52 min•Ep. 35
You’ve seen John Ross Bowie on a screen before. I’m sure of it. Maybe it was the Big Bang Theory or Curb Your Enthusiasm or some of the other eight zillion credits he has. John’s been dealing with depression and anxiety even longer than he’s been an actor, which has meant guiding a complicated brain across uncertain situations for quite a while. And maybe, if we believe the forecasts about the gig economy, a lot more of us will be living a similar lifestyle before too long. No, we won’t all be o...
Nov 08, 2021•50 min•Ep. 34
Let’s get this out of the way first: there are a LOT of video games available, including a lot of games that don’t require you to kill people and don’t involve Mario, Luigi, Wario, or Waluigi. And among those are several games that approach mental health issues in a truthful and sympathetic way. These games, often made by small independent studios, might take place in fantastical worlds but they can involve honest examinations of depression, trauma, and anxiety. And playing the games can bring a...
Nov 01, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 33
Forming emotional bonds with fellow human beings is one of the most basic instincts we have. There’s a primal urge to attach yourself to others, for safety, for mating purposes, or hell just to have lunch. But just because that desire is present doesn’t mean that it’s easy or even inevitable to actually form those connections. At the same time, we’re all going to spend some time alone. Maybe in brief moments, maybe for very long stretches. Comedian, actor, and writer Lane Moore thinks about thes...
Oct 25, 2021•52 min•Ep. 32
Depresh Mode with John Moe and Go Fact Yourself got together to celebrate MaxFun Block Party! If you enjoyed this conversation we had with host J. Keith van Straaten, be sure to subscribe to Go Fact Yourself on maximumfun.org.
Oct 19, 2021•38 min
Amos Lee has a wonderfully smooth singing voice and plays the acoustic guitar beautifully. And if you never paid attention to his lyrics, you might even find his music to soothing and mellow. If you do lean into his lyrics a little and if you open yourself up to his tone and phrasing, you will soon find references to pain, loneliness, depression, anxiety, and trauma. This is especially the case on Amos’s upcoming album, Dreamland. He says he’s more comfortable talking about that side of himself ...
Oct 18, 2021•43 min•Ep. 31
Within the comedy world, Tom Scharpling is known as a bit of a Swiss Army Knife. He’s the host of the long running Best Show , online now and on WFMU before that. He’s a veteran TV writer on shows like Monk and What We Do In The Shadows . He directs music videos. Now he’s a book writer, with the memoir It Never Ends. In that book and in our interview, he tells stories of his own mental health journey that he’s never shared with an audience before. Tom started running into trouble with depression...
Oct 11, 2021•56 min•Ep. 30
World Mental Health Day is this coming weekend and Depresh Mode host John Moe is feeling a bit reflective. When your job involves talking about mental health all the time, every day is kind of World Mental Health Day. All the ones ending in Y anyway. In this special bonus episode, John narrows down what could have been a list of hundreds of important things to know to just six. It was hard to pack in. He was shooting for three or four. Please listen to the episode for full elaboration but you sh...
Oct 08, 2021•21 min
Alison Rosen cautions us to not read too much into the title of her show. It’s really just an expression that was popular in slang vernacular a few years ago when the podcast started. Besides, if every person listening or appearing on the show was her new best friend, that makes her pretty fickle on friendship. But the name works really well because she does things a friend should. She shares her stories, she’s vulnerable, and she genuinely cares about the person she’s talking to. In this episod...
Oct 04, 2021•54 min•Ep. 29
Podcast listeners know Janet from the JV Club podcast here on Maximum Fun. Television audiences know her from You’re The Worst and Stan Against Evil, among many other credits. And fans of live comedy might know Janet as one of the founders of SF Sketchfest. But there was a time in Janet’s life when she didn’t know her as much of anything. As a young person, she dealt with depression and anxiety as well as a condition that you don’t hear talked about nearly as often: DPDR, or depersonalization de...
Sep 27, 2021•56 min•Ep. 28
We’ve all seen screen portrayals of people with mental illnesses and we’ve all seen ones that miss the mark pretty badly. Someone has a vague sense of “crazy” about them so they turn into an evil sadist. A motel manager in the rather broadly titled film “Psycho” dresses up as his dead mother and murders a guest in the shower. Or someone just hamming through an over the top performance as a person with multiple personalities. In this episode, we blow the whistle on some stuff like that but we als...
Sep 20, 2021•49 min•Ep. 27
Therapy isn’t about hating your mother. It’s not about crying over something that happened when you were six and then dwelling on it for the rest of your life. And the difficulty or trauma you faced back then is not something you can simply “get over” or “move past”. Good therapy is much more like what Jackie Kashian did, as she describes in this episode. She talks about the violence in her home growing up. And the neglect. And the substance use and death of her mother. Then she talks about goin...
Sep 13, 2021•57 min•Ep. 26
COVID has been traumatic for young people. For a year and a half now, it’s either been impossible to go to school or the place that they go to doesn’t match what they used to know as school. The virus may have caused severe illness or death in their families. It’s a frightening time for all of us and especially so among the youngest and most vulnerable. So as in-class education really begins again in earnest, what’s the state of these people showing up to the classrooms and how can we, not just ...
Sep 06, 2021•48 min•Ep. 25
When we asked Dr. Darshan Mehta, Medical Director of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine in Boston and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, about the image problem that meditation had, he knew exactly what we were talking about. As he points out, when media outlets write about meditation, it tends to be accompanied by a photo or illustration of a glowing, athletic white woman in a particular yoga pose. This tendency is kind of funny, sure, but it also conve...
Aug 30, 2021•56 min•Ep. 24
The first thing that I noticed when watching Tuca & Bertie was that there was a LOT going on. Bertie is frantically trying to navigate her magazine job at Conde Nest AND her dream of being professional baker AND her relationship with her loving and sometimes perplexing boyfriend Speckle. Tuca is just trying to navigate what it means to be a responsible adult as she manages sobriety, romance, and a changing relationship with her best friend, Bertie. Beyond that, there’s just a lot happening on th...
Aug 23, 2021•59 min•Ep. 23
It’s tricky. That’s what we found when we set out to answer a question we get a lot: “How do I approach a loved one who I’m worried about in terms of mental health?” Obviously, you want to let them know you care but you want to express the depth of your concern. You don’t want to scare them away and make them less likely to seek help. So where’s the line? According to Quanah Walker, of MakeItOK.org and Director of Behavioral Health at HealthPartners, it starts with knowing the person you’re talk...
Aug 16, 2021•40 min•Ep. 22
You’ll notice that this episode is longer than most of our episodes. That’s just the way it tends to go with Griffin Newman. Episodes of his own podcast, Blank Check, regularly clock in at more than two hours. He acts in films and those often top two hours as well. And although he’s only in his thirties, Griffin has had a long career, growing up in a showbiz-adjacent family and starting in standup while not yet out of middle school. We hear how he quit acting (several times) and always got pulle...
Aug 09, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 21
In this Song Imploder edition of our show (borrowing a format from the podcast Song Exploder), Carl (who records as A.C.) Newman walks us through “Whiteout Conditions”, a song created when his sister was dying of cancer but when he had to get into the studio. Seems like it’s safe to say that when people are in a terrible mental state, they are least equipped to do something as creative as writing songs. But Carl isn’t like most people. The leader of the Canadian group The New Pornographers says ...
Aug 02, 2021•46 min•Ep. 20
Rock music isn’t a cure for depression or anxiety. You can’t wail away on “Smoke on the Water” and have all your mental difficulties melt away. That would be awesome, sure, but that’s not how it works. But for Chelsea Ursin, playing was a lot of other things: a break from the nagging mental disorders that created so many problems from a young age, a channel through which to express herself, and an opportunity to help the next generation of girls have a smoother and healthier time than she did. U...
Jul 26, 2021•53 min•Ep. 19
You can tell a lot about Kelly Williams Brown’s life by looking at her multiple bowls of tiny origami. Her “lucky stars” are folded in a pattern that Kelly learned and then repeated over and over and over to help her get through the moments of her life when all seemed lost, when death felt preferable. There are many bowls filled with these stars and they are all very large bowls. There must be tens of thousands of these stars and she keeps the bowls in easy reach in her Salem, Ore. home, reminde...
Jul 19, 2021•57 min•Ep. 18
