It was two years into a vicious cycle of depression and Mike Doughty was falling apart. He was taking more Ambien than he had been prescribed, importing huge boxes of the stuff from India, waking up to find packs of cigarettes, candy wrappers, and pizza boxes with no memory of leaving his Memphis home to make such purchases. He was convinced something was deeply wrong with his heart even though every doctor said there wasn’t. Finally, he checked into an in-patient facility that turned out to be ...
Dec 29, 2025•46 min•Ep. 241
The intriguing memoir Tom Johnson recently released is called Driven: A Life in Public Service from LBJ to CNN and it’s full of amazing anecdotes. Tom joined the White House in his early twenties, was the one to inform LBJ of Martin Luther King’s shooting, was a giant in newspapers and cable news, and loaned Gorbachev a pen that was used to sign the paperwork dissolving the USSR. Tom’s personal story is a little more vulnerable and fragile. He tells of experiencing a suicidal depression in a tim...
Dec 22, 2025•41 min•Ep. 240
Anger can be a scary topic for a lot of people. It usually doesn’t feel good when you’re experiencing it and it can be associated with behaviors that are very frightening indeed. But Dr. Ryan Martin, who is one of the few academics specializing in anger and who has written two books about it, says anger is a normal and even beneficial emotion to experience. It’s your body’s way of indicating that some injustice has been done, either to you or someone else. And that’s good information to have. He...
Dec 15, 2025•47 min•Ep. 239
It’s very easy to associate your job with your own sense of self. So it makes that it can be traumatic to be one of the scores of people being laid off in today’s turbulent economy. We are joined by the New York Times’ mental health reporter, Christina Caron, who has been looking at the effect of unemployment - especially long-term unemployment - on mental health. It can lead to more severe depression, anxiety, marital problems, and substance use. She also has some great tips on what you can do ...
Dec 08, 2025•36 min•Ep. 238
Maureen Johnson loves mysteries. Loves reading classic detective fiction and loves writing mystery stories, which young readers have been gobbling up for years. Some of Maureen’s stories feature teenage sleuth Stevie Bell, who, besides having a knack for solving cold cases, deals with an anxiety disorder. It’s not all there is to Stevie, of course, but it’s definitely there and she has to manage it on an ongoing basis. Maureen tells us about Stevie and about her own recent anxiety mystery when s...
Dec 01, 2025•45 min•Ep. 237
Yes, the holidays are upon us. Getting together with family can be a wonderful, loving experience. It can also be a lot. There can be old grudges, chafing at family roles, the specter of politics might play in. We’re here to help. In This Family is a podcast produced by our host, John Moe, for Nexus Family Healing, a mental health nonprofit based in the Twin Cities. It’s all about the connections between family and mental health. In this miniature episode, that show’s host, Dr. Michelle K. Murra...
Nov 26, 2025•18 min
Cotard’s delusion, also known as Cotard’s syndrome, is an extremely rare condition where the patient believes that they are actually dead. For the bestselling author Esmé Weijun Wang, Cotard’s came along after she had already been traveling a difficult road that involved schizoaffective disorder along with a host of other mental health issues. While experiencing Cotard’s, Esmé urgently told her husband that he was dead too and so was their dog. She believed, was certain, that the life she was ex...
Nov 24, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 236
You may find the charges in this episode jarring: depression is not the result of a chemical imbalance, SSRIs aren’t necessarily antidepressants, and the term you use for your mental health condition isn’t scientifically valid. Sarah Fay, author of Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses says it’s dangerous to identify with your diagnosis because it’s kind of made up and it blocks your path to recovery. A doctor told her she was “an anorexic” when Sarah was 12 years old, even though she...
Nov 17, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 235
Over half the employees at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) who were there in January are now gone, include 12 of the 17 senior leaders. SAMHSA is in charge of distributing and administering mental health programs around the country and the cuts to both staffing and to the programs the agency serves have meant many programs addressing addiction and suicide prevention being severely hobbled or shutting down altogether. In turn, that means fewer people getting...
Nov 10, 2025•38 min•Ep. 234
When we went looking for information on the condition known as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, one of the first things we noticed was that some people aren’t even calling it that anymore. The website for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), for instance, uses the term “major depressive disorder with a seasonal pattern”, which means an acronym of MDDWASP. Here at Depresh Mode, we’re perfectly fine referring to it as “mud wasp”. On this episode of the show, we talk with NAMI’s chie...
Nov 03, 2025•41 min•Ep. 137
It’s a question we ask a lot on this show: do you have a mental health problem or is the problem actually rooted in the world you live in? Psychologist Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter says contemporary society lives under three different assumptions: there’s not enough to go around, kill or be killed, and us versus them or divide and conquer and this results in people valuing individualism, competition, and materialism. This way of living, he says, is a result of white dominance or whiteness and i...
Oct 27, 2025•48 min•Ep. 233
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, clearly does not like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), the most popular form of antidepressant on the market. They’re used by millions of Americans on a daily basis. He has tried to tie SSRIs to school shooters despite a lack of evidence to that effect. He has suggested that it’s harder to go off SSRIs than it is to quit heroin. It’s not. Molly Olmstead, a reporter for Slate who has been covering this story close...
Oct 20, 2025•42 min•Ep. 232
During the violent Charlottesville protests of 2017, journalist and author P.E. Moskowitz was only a few feet away when Heather Heyer was killed by an attacking motorist. 16 years earlier, P.E. was in middle school Spanish class a couple blocks from the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks. The trauma contributed to panic attacks and, finally, a mental breakdown. As they got their life back together, P.E. began to question a lot of conventional wisdom. Were they mentally ill to have such a...
Oct 13, 2025•56 min•Ep. 231
If you are one of the many subscribers to the Peloton exercise/media network, you may already be familiar with Kendall Toole. For many years, she was one of the stars of Peloton, exhorting users to push themselves harder, sweat more, and pursue their goals. In those cases, Kendall was positive, cheerful, always with a smile and kind words. But people are complicated and the truth is that Kendall has faced many mental health issues over the course of her life, including depression, anxiety, OCD, ...
Oct 06, 2025•43 min•Ep. 230
At age 59, Anne Abel had never been to a concert. Ever. Music wasn’t part of her upbringing, although emotional abuse and belittlement from her parents absolutely were. Reluctantly agreeing to join her son and daughter-in-law to see Bruce Springsteen, Anne’s mind was absolutely blown by the energy and generosity of the musicians and the crowd. Bruce shined a light on a better possible world and allowed her to have fun for the first time in her life. Something awakened. Soon, Anne booked a solo t...
Sep 29, 2025•47 min•Ep. 229
While the acclaimed musician Emma Swift had experienced painful periods of depression in the past, fed by grief or the first Trump presidency, her psychotic break and mental breakdown in 2023 was new territory. She lost touch with reality, believing that her electronic devices had been hacked, that she was being followed, images of heaven and hell emerging. Emma actually had a sense that she was losing her mind and went to the hospital, reporting as much, but she was turned away because she wasn...
Sep 22, 2025•47 min•Ep. 228
Are ChatGPT and other AI chatbots inducing psychosis? Or exacerbating it? Are people being hospitalized or even killed because the bots seem too human, too understanding, too lifelike? To be clear, the bots are not human. They are software. But they are so convincingly programmed to speak like people that users, especially ones who may already be having trouble discerning reality, begin to sense that the bot is alive and that the user somehow unlocked its sentience. Since the bots are also set u...
Sep 15, 2025•51 min•Ep. 227
Alex Edelman loves going to concerts but admits that he usually goes solo. That’s because his ADHD leads Alex to show up pretty late to the show and he often spends part of it on the stairs writing something, occasionally darting into the main room for a song he likes. He can’t make it through most movies either. Alex stars in the new Peacock series The Paper, a sort of descendant of The Office. His one-man show, Just For Us, about his semi-anonymous visit to a Queens white nationalist meeting, ...
Sep 08, 2025•55 min•Ep. 226
If you’re looking for a calm mind, do you love a room with little or nothing in it? Or do you need to be wall-to-ceiling with mementos and objects and stuff to give you a sense of peace? We take a look at how the layout of your living space may have an effect on your mental well being with Dr. Beverly Walpole. She’s a clinical psychologist and the founder of Haven | Wellness By Design , a consulting service based around the psychology of design. We talk about the idea of attachment to objects an...
Sep 01, 2025•40 min•Ep. 225
When she was growing up in conservative, evangelical rural Minnesota, she knew. When she was excelling at sports, giving and receiving body slams and folding chair hits as a pro wrestler, she knew. Even when she married a woman while still living as a man, Denise knew that she was female. Denise figured it was either suicide or take action to live her truth and fully transition. With her debut special, Bougie on a Budget , now streaming on Apple TV Plus and Amazon Prime, Denise opens up her gend...
Aug 25, 2025•54 min•Ep. 224
There are plenty of places online to get very serious information on mental health, delivered in tones that are somber, sober, or very dry. Ashly Burch goes a different route on her new YouTube show, I’m Happy You’re Here , employing loads of comedy, puppets, foul language, and mature subject matter to teach what’s going on in complex matters such as anxiety. Ashly is known for her work in the games Fortnite , Life is Strange , and The Last of Us Part II , as well as television series like Mythi...
Aug 18, 2025•50 min•Ep. 223
Because she racks up millions and millions of views for her viral comedy videos on social media, because she’s written two books including the new best-seller A Clean Mess: A Memoir of Sobriety After a Lifetime of Being Numb, because she’s famous and successful, Tiffany Jenkins and her family were invited to travel to California and visit Lego Land. They paid her to have a wonderful vacation. On the ground at Lego Land, the first thing Tiffany did was have a complete anxiety-related panic attack...
Aug 11, 2025•54 min•Ep. 222
If you’ve dealt with depression, you know that it’s a disorder that speaks to you, firing off insults and terrible idea, often right in the middle of a conversation. Barges in to tear you down. We all must contend with this rude presence. Aaron Foster is a very funny comedian who is still fairly new to the full-time comedy life but, now in his fifties, he’s done a lot of living to inform his comic material. Much of his recent act is centered on a fairly recent diagnosis of major depressive disor...
Aug 04, 2025•47 min•Ep. 221
To blow off steam from an incredibly stressful profession, professional nurse Blake Lynch started putting together little comedy videos on social media as “Nurse Blake”. The clips went viral and he started making live comedy appearances to packed audiences, many of whom were nurses themselves. His celebrity status gave him a chance to lobby for better pay and working conditions for nurses. As Nurse Blake prepares for a 68-city tour, he talks about the conversion therapy his parents sent him to i...
Jul 28, 2025•44 min•Ep. 220
Bush lead singer Gavin Rossdale has a lot of memories from growing up as a kid who excelled at sports but also treasured his Lou Reed records. He is also keenly aware of who left during those years: his mother disappearing after divorcing his dad, a beloved aunt passing away, and a revered older sister striking out on her own. Those losses informed his mental health for the rest of his life but so did the understanding of his emotional makeup left in the wake. Gavin tells us about that, the pres...
Jul 21, 2025•49 min•Ep. 219
Jen slept fine the night before she couldn’t. Just short of 29 years old and after years of excellent sleep, insomnia entered her life leading her down a years-long search for cures, treatments, or even just an explanation of why her life had been turned upside down. Jen Senior is the author of an article, “ Why Can’t Americans Sleep? ” in the Atlantic and she joins us to talk about the intersection of sleep, depression, anxiety, shame, and so much more. We also discuss sleeping pills, antidepre...
Jul 14, 2025•49 min•Ep. 218
Brandon Stickney remembers booze being everywhere growing up in Lockport, New York and he definitely remembers getting a taste for it growing up. Over time, he developed bipolar disorder and his substance use disorder added cocaine and opioids as favorite drugs. Brandon’s love of getting high would cost him his marriage, his successful career as a journalist and author, and his freedom, after getting busted selling drugs and being sentenced to two years in prison. He tells us about what it’s lik...
Jul 07, 2025•56 min•Ep. 217
When the comedian, actor, and author Maria Bamford has something to say about mental health, it’s a pretty good idea to give a listen. For one reason, she’s hilarious. Also, she comes at the issue not just as an observer. Maria has a long history with mental health conditions. SHe has spent a good bit of time in in-patient facilities, has dealt with problematic intrusive thoughts, and has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, type 2. Maria talks about the issue of access to mental health treatme...
Jun 30, 2025•49 min
Hollywood doesn’t exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to portraying mental illness in a sensitive, honest, and appropriately complex way (think Psycho or the notorious caffeine pill episode of Saved by the Bell ). But the top show on Netflix right now, Ginny & Georgia went to great lengths to show mental health conditions honestly. The series tells the story of Georgia, a mother with a traumatic background, Ginny, her daughter with a habit of self-harming, and it includes chara...
Jun 23, 2025•43 min•Ep. 216
"Beneath the Lilypad" is singer-songwriter Alexandra Savior's third album, but her first in five years. Several years ago, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, type 1. That’s a condition marked with manic highs that can last for weeks or months as well as crushing lows of depression, she’s had both, you’ll hear about that. She’s also dealt with psychosis, and has spent time in an in-patient facility. That mental health journey has informed her work as a songwriter and a musician and inspired...
Jun 16, 2025•46 min•Ep. 215
