Depresh Mode with John Moe

Therapy is not a competition. You can’t defeat other clients or come in first place. Still, there is such a thing as getting better at going to therapy. There are ways to get the most out of that valuable hour or so you get with a professional. And for that, we turn to professional therapist, author, and podcaster Lori Gottlieb, who offers some plain-spoken advice on building a great relationship,...

Writer, blogger, podcaster, pundit, and reporter Ana Marie Cox joins her good friend John Moe for a conversation about writing. Ana teaches what she calls Third Story Workshops that are dedicated to helping people get their stories out of their minds and onto the page. She says you can look at your story in three parts: what it was like before, what happened, and what you are like now. It’s that t...

Chris Powell is probably best known as the host of the ABC reality show Extreme Weight Loss, which ran for five seasons. On that show, Chris used his experience as a fitness trainer and all around motivational human to help people who wanted to lose 200 pounds or more. And Chris doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to experience mental illness. He comes across as very energetic, very positive, and so...

A special preview of this year's MaxFunDrive Bonus Content! Listen to the whole episode by becoming a member. Go to MaximumFun.org/join and pick a level that works for you! We’ve said it many times on our show: there isn’t one thing that works for everyone to improve mental health. But chances are there’s something out there that will work for you. Maybe it’s a certain type of medication. Perhaps...

What is it like to feel better in your mental state? And what does it take to get there and to stay that way? Those are some of the questions we ask in this interview with the great comedian Gary Gulman. Gary sounds very different than when John Moe first interviewed him back in the fall of 2017 when Gary had been hospitalized for depression and was just beginning to turn things around. We hear ab...

As far as Dana Gould could tell, he had been awake for 11 days. He logically knows that this was probably medically impossible but even if he had slept, he had no memory of doing so, which is pretty significant right there. This incident and the hospitalization that followed it is just one part of Dana’s mental health journey.  He talks about growing up in a family where alcohol was a strong prese...

To celebrate our journey into triple digit episode numbers, we take a look back at episodes that have really stayed with us. They’re not even necessarily our favorite, mind you. It’s not that we think they’re so much better than all the rest. They’re just some episodes that come to mind pretty quickly. Discussed on this show: Depression, Anxiety, and Devil Horns: Chelsea Ursin Saves Her Soul with...

The Greek gods, as depicted in Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus series, are far from stately and dignified. Indeed, they’re neurotic, depressed, and anxious. They’re gossipy and bitter and nasty and petty sometimes. Probably some legit mental disorders banging around, some trauma likely in there as well. In other words, they’re pretty human. Rachel Smythe tells us why mythology has always spoken so de...

It was pretty simple in comedian and writer Zach Zimmerman’s mind when he was a kid: you had to accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior or you would spend all eternity being tortured in the fiery pits of Hell. And he wanted to do that accepting. Problem was, God never spoke to young Zach or gave him any indication that he was saved. No revelatory ecstatic church service or voice from...

Enjoy the debut episode of John Moe's new sleep-aid podcast Sleeping with Celebrities and be sure to subscribe! Andy Daly is a comedian, actor, and podcaster. He starred on the Comedy Central series “Review” and was a supporting actor on HBO’s “Eastbound and Down” as well as a cast member on “MadTV.” Like many people, Andy has a yard at his home and is thus charged with the task of taking care of...

If you’ve listened to our show before, you know that we recommend a period of trial and error to find a mental health treatment that works best for you. Nothing works for everyone, after all, so you have to see what you respond to. Neal Brennan is the embodiment of that concept and in this interview he reports back on how well or poorly it went for him trying Freudian therapy, antidepressants, tra...

The title of KC Davis’s book paints a pretty vivid picture of what her work is about: How To Keep House While Drowning , subtitled “a gentle approach to cleaning and organizing.” KC, a therapist and podcaster, specializes in helping people who have dealt with mental disorders, trauma, postpartum, and other issues but who are still faced with piles of laundry and dishes that need to be addressed. S...

In many ways, Christian Finnegan’s earlier career path made a lot more sense given the path he has traveled. He went to NYU, tried and then dropped acting, and then set out to be a very serious writer and artist. He worked in publishing and fancied a career where his writing would be at the center of his work, possibly as a monologist but never as a stand-in-front-of-a-brick-wall comedian. The ser...

Chris Walla’s life today is very different from where it has been in the past. The musician and producer isn’t in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, where he grew up and lived for many years. He’s in Trondheim, Norway, where he is putting down roots and continues to compose and produce. And while that happens, Death Cab for Cutie, the band he co-founded in the 1990s, is in the midst of a 71-stop...

Veteran podcaster Lauren Ober suspected something was up and that it went beyond covid stress and professional stress and all the other reasons she had been going to therapy for so long. She had been a journalist for many years and her instinct for the story led her to start piecing together that the life she had been experiencing all this time fit the profile of autism. Well spoiler alert, she te...

Kate Beaton’s new book,  Ducks , is not about ducks. At least not really. It’s about people, specifically Kate and the people she worked with during a two-year period after finishing university, working in the remote oil sands region of northern Alberta, Canada. The camps at the oil sands housed hundreds of employees and they were not an easy place to be, filled with depression, broken marriages,...

It’s easy to assume that the life of Paulina Porizkova has always been an easy one. Most people first knew her as an internationally famous model, posing on the covers of fashion magazines and Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues. She married a rock star, Ric Ocasek of The Cars, whom she met while filming a music video for the band. Seems like the sweetest life possible, right? Well, not so fast. Pa...

Honestly, I really expected to call this episode “Covid Sedaris” because David Sedaris had just tested positive for COVID when we taped the interview. But when we spoke, he wasn’t feeling it much at all. Had some symptoms that might have been allergies or COVID but were barely noticeable. Other people have it a lot worse, he says. David has been delighting audiences for 30 years now, ever since th...

On The Great British Bake-Off season nine, Kim-Joy became well known not just for how cute her baked goods were but for how meticulously, exquisitely crafted they were. Her success on the show has been parlayed into a series of cookbooks and even a collaborative card game. Before all that success, things were different for Kim-Joy, including a strained relationship with her father in an unusual ho...

It’s that time of year when tv commercials and store decorations implore you to feel merry and jolly (words we only use this time of year). And if you do feel that way without any complications or nuance, well, good on ya. But for people who live with depression, anxiety, problematic stress reactions, this season can be a real minefield. We’re joined this week by two therapists who are also friend...

It wasn’t until her late twenties that Ellen Forney noticed that her friends couldn’t really keep up with her. Ellen had boundless energy that took the form of dancing for long stretches at home, smoking a lot of pot, vibrating with intense sexuality, and latching on to new friends who were just as unrelentingly intense as she was. But to Ellen, this was just her living her best life. It wasn’t un...

There is no shortage of self-help books in the world positing that the human mind can be explained, that there is a tidy order to things and a discernible reason why everything happens. These are books that claim to have answers. Rachel Aviv’s new book, Strangers to Ourselves , goes in the opposite direction. Through a series of profiles, she presents people and their behavior that defy easy expla...

I mean, even before you see the baked goods available at Depressed Cake Shop, the name alone is good for a laugh. Because what could be less depressing than a cake shop? And then you see the storm cloud cookies or the cupcakes with gray frosting and the joke gets even funnier. The world of depression? It can be pretty hilarious at times. Depressed Cake Shop isn’t fixed to one location, rather it’s...

Granted, there have been people very high on the prospects of psychedelics for a long time as a means of achieving better mental health. But these folks didn’t appear in scientific and medical circles so much as they appeared in drum circles. Things are different now, with very promising research and results being reported on the ability of these drugs to kind of un-stick one’s mind and achieve a...

Kristin Hersh is an acclaimed and accomplished musician and songwriter through her solo work and as part of the bands Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave. When Kristin Hersh was young, her father, Dude (that’s what everyone calls him), taught her some basic chords on the guitar. And that was fine but to Kristin, Dude was just showing her the red, blue, and green chords whereas she wanted to learn, lik...