In This Family

Content Warning: This episode discusses autism spectrum disorder. Tera Girardin began to notice that Alex, her youngest son, seemed to be interacting with the world differently than his two older brothers did. This was when Alex was about a year old. By the time Alex was three, the family had a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder for Alex and set about getting him the best help they could for hi...

Content Warning: This episode discusses suicide, schizophrenia, grief, and depression.  James Longman is a veteran television news reporter who has reported from war zones like Ukraine and the Middle East for many years. You may have seen him on ABC World News Tonight, Good Morning America, or Nightline. But it took a special, much more personal investigation to get some answers for his father’s s...

Content Warning: This episode discusses obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and conversion therapy. Kelly and Devin had a great "meet cute" story. They were counselors at a Christian summer camp, fell in love, spent all their time together, then kept it going long distance and finally got married. Kelly knew that Devin had undergone "conversion therapy" to try to rid himself of his attraction to m...

Content Warning: This episode discusses child abuse, substance abuse, sexual abuse, and eating disorders. Every child assumes their family life is normal because they have nothing to compare it to. Still, high school English teacher and author Bridey Thelen-Heidel started to piece together that life with her mom was pretty unusual. Maybe it was the endless succession of dangerous boyfriends her mo...

Content Warning: This episode discusses loss, depression, substance abuse, and eating disorders. Long before she was a Saturday Night Live cast member, star of television sitcoms, author, and co-host of the podcast Bitch Sesh, Casey Wilson was performing plays in her backyard on a stage built by her dad. As a teenager, Casey and her mom bonded over the film Terms of Endearment, which was moving, o...

Content Warning: This episode discusses death, cancer, anorexia, hospitalization, and grief. University of Texas professor and author Mallary Tenore Tarpley’s mom died of breast cancer when Mallary was just eleven years old. Mallary’s health class taught her that our bodies are affected by what we eat so Mallary decided to simply stop eating. That way, went her reasoning, she would stay small, pre...

Content Warning: This episode discusses postpartum depression. Canadian graphic memoirist Teresa Wong has had experiences with parenting that didn’t really match the way things usually go. Her parents were city kids in China sent to work on rural communes during Mao’s cultural revolution. They escaped, swam to Hong Kong where they met, and ended up in Calgary, where Teresa and her brother were bor...

Content Warning: This episode discusses obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It might be unexpected for someone to be both an atheist and a professor of religion but that seeming contradiction makes perfect sense for Chris Stedman, best selling author and professor at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. Chris is the author of the book Faithiest, which, like so much of the work he’s done over the y...

Content Warning: This episode discusses Bipolar Disorder (BPD), Manic Depressive Disorder, and hospitalization. Eighteen-year-old skateboarding star Billy Rohan had been pulled over and decided the best way to demonstrate that he was sober and under control was to do a backflip off a car. The cop on the scene did not see this as a good sign and Billy ended up in a hospital for psychiatric treatmen...

Content Warning: This episode discusses addiction, suicide, grief, child abuse, and neglect. Long before Daria Burke was a high-powered marketing executive with major brands, before she was the best-selling author of her memoir Of My Own Making, Daria was a kid living a rough life in Detroit. Her mother had severe drug addiction issues and was abusive to Daria and her sister and their dad wasn’t a...

Content Warning: This episode discusses grief, loss, suicide, and bipolar disorder.  As a kid, Marisa Renee Lee, author of the best-selling books, Grief is Love: Living with Loss and Waiting for Dawn: Living with Uncertainty, sat in the front row in class. She was driven to achieve, got straight A’s, and worked hard. Then Marisa’s mom got sick with multiple sclerosis and that, combined with her si...

Content Warning: This episode discusses suicide, depression, and substance use disorder.  Behind the scenes at In This Family, is our program’s producer, John Moe. Outside of the show, John hosts his own mental health podcast, Depresh Mode with John Moe, and is the author of the best-selling memoir, The Hilarious World of Depression. John shares his earliest experiences with major depressive disor...

Content Warning: This episode discusses racism, depression, and sexual abuse. At a young age, author Maud Newton was warned by her grandmother about the mental illness that ran through her family history. She was also told wild stories: an ancestor tried for being a witch, a Marxist in 1900s Texas, a grandfather married 13 times. The stories she uncovered in her best-selling book Ancestor Trouble...

Content Warning: This episode discusses violence, rape, and hate crimes.  Long before he won the Kirkus and Pushcart Prizes for his memoir writing, before he started teaching creative writing at Harvard Medical School and hosting the popular podcast Vibe Check, Saeed Jones was a kid growing up in Texas and realizing he was different than most people around him. He was raised Buddhist, for one thin...

Content Warning: This episode discusses homelessness, child abuse, neglect, and sexual assault. David Ambroz does not remember a time before being homeless with his mom and two siblings in New York City, cobbling together sleeps in train stations and emergency room lobbies, grabbing pizza crusts out of trash cans. It was an exciting life but not an easy one, especially given his mother’s schizoaff...

Content Warning: This episode discusses substance abuse, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and sexual assault. Book club members who knock back a few bottles of wine are in for some soul searching if Jessica Guerrieri’s novels are picked for the group discussion. That’s because her books, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and the newly released Both Can Be True, both feature characters st...

Content Warning: This episode discusses suicide, grief, depression, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Adam and Lydia weren’t just siblings, they were comedy collaborators and best friends as well. While Adam had experienced some mental health issues over the years, Lydia’s took a very severe turn in her twenties, just as Adam’s career as a comedian, te...

Content Warning: This episode discusses substance use, depression, anxiety, and death by suicide. Award-winning veteran journalist Meg Kissinger grew up as part of a close-knit family in a noisy and active house. That happens in a home with eight kids. Yet there was nothing but silence when it came to the pervasive bipolar disorder, substance use disorder, depression, and anxiety that heavily impa...

Content Warning: This episode discusses addiction.  As a young resident at Duke University, Joseph Lee saw the profound change that people were capable of when dealing with addiction. He witnessed how people could become healthier than they had ever been with the benefit of skilled treatment, good support, and a lot of determination. Dr. Lee has been with Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation for 17 year...

Content Warning: This episode discusses depression, anxiety, hospitalization, and traumatic experiences. Gary Gulman has been making people laugh for many years as a top touring comedian and frequent guest on late night shows and star of multiple HBO specials. He’s a professional success by any measure. But that didn’t stop him from having a mental health crisis in his forties, where he gave up co...

Content Warning: This episode discusses suicidal ideation and attempted suicide. Her mother was Latina and one of fifteen kids while her dad was Native American and one of ten kids. For the acclaimed author Deborah Jackson Taffa, this meant a very large number of cousins but also a sense of alienation from both her parents’ cultural roots, a degree of being neither one nor the other. Complicating...

Content Warning: this episode discusses depression and suicide.  Childhood and adolescence can be tough for anyone. There’s so much to figure out. Author Rebekah Taussig ( Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body ) had an extra challenge in that she was paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair, the result of cancer diagnosed when she was a year old. After many yea...

Content Warning: This episode discusses suicide, self harm, substance abuse, and violence. You may have seen Isaac Fitzgerald in one of his frequent appearances on The Today Show, cheerfully sharing his latest enthusiastic recommendations for books. And the acclaimed author of the memoirs Dirtbag, Massachusetts and the forthcoming American Rambler really is a cheerful person. But it’s a long way f...

Content Warning: This episode discusses child abuse and rape.  Author Ashley C. Ford did not have it easy growing up. Her mom could be a lot of fun but could also be physically and verbally abusive and just not interested in carrying out the role of parent. She took Ashley to the dentist exactly twice in her childhood, failed to get medical problems addressed that have been with Ashley ever since,...

Content Warning: This episode discusses childhood trauma, emotional abuse and physical abuse. Paul Scheer is known to audiences as an actor, a regular on the series The League and Black Monday, and in recurring roles on Fresh Off the Boat, Veep, and 30 Rock. Recently, Paul has been digging deep into his past to understand what happened during his childhood with an abusive stepfather (who demanded...