Depresh Mode with John Moe

Jason Kander had heard of post-traumatic stress disorder. He just didn’t think he had it. After all, he hadn’t been in any firefights while stationed in wartime Afghanistan, he had merely worked as an intelligence officer. And even though that job put him in positions of tremendous vulnerability where he may have to kill or be killed in an instant, it never occurred to him that he was experiencing...

People are many things. Tabitha Soren became famous for her conversations with star musicians of the 90’s during her stint on MTV News. But that’s not who she is anymore. Tabitha is, among many things, a mother grieving the loss of her daughter, Dixie, in a 2021 car accident. She talks about the challenge of having to come up with words to talk about Dixie and what her family has been through in t...

Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA, is serving his second non-consecutive term as U.S. Surgeon General, having previously served under President Obama. Dr. Murthy’s office has issued a Framework for Mental Health & Well-Being in the Workplace. It’s a set of guidelines aimed at reducing burnout at work and promoting positive mental health: 1. Protection from Harm 2. Connection and Community 3. W...

If you’re a fan of the podcast Song Exploder, and a whole lot of people are, you know that it’s all about creativity. A musician walks the audience through the components of their song and the inspirations and decisions that went into forming those parts as they came together as a whole. Meanwhile, Hrishikesh Hirway, creator of the show, drops in separated tracks so you can follow the story.  It’s...

A lot of people think of clinical depression as a condition wherein the patient lies in bed immobilized with sadness and despair. And sure, it can present that way. But depression can show up in a lot of other ways too, including road rage, which John details in a harrowing and darkly funny chapter of his memoir. Learn why frat bros in fancy trucks set off a potentially dangerous episode at the ci...

From a very early age, Kevin Love was great at sports. He had the talent, the size, and, most of all, he loved playing basketball. In this way, he was just like his father, Stan, who played in the NBA long ago. But with high achievement comes more pressure than Kevin was ready to handle and depression and anxiety came calling.  As Kevin’s career progressed - scholarship player at UCLA, 5th overall...

You Are Not Alone: the NAMI Guide to Navigating Mental Health is a deep and thorough look at mental health and mental illness as they are experienced by people from all walks of life. The book’s author, Dr. Ken Duckworth, medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, interviewed 130 people who have dealt with trauma, depression, psychosis, OCD, and just about any other mental disord...

Eating disorders are, unfortunately, pretty common. It’s also pretty common to experience shame and anxiety about them and thus suffer in silence. Annie Weisman is a veteran playwright and television writer and producer. From her late teens to age 30, Annie dealt with bulimia. She was binging and purging and not telling anyone. Even after she got help for the condition (she now considers herself t...

In the entire 321-year history of Yale University, the most popular class ever is a relatively new one called “Psychology and the Good Life”, taught by Dr. Laurie Santos. Since it’s debut in 2018, it has proved to be so much in demand that Yale now offers a version of the class for free online to anyone in the world. Part of the appeal is that Dr. Santos is a really great professor. She’s smart, p...

It used to be that Jonathan Ames read and wrote all kinds of books. But somewhere along the line everything but detective novels kind of fell away and now that’s pretty much his thing. His big project these days is a detective series, featuring private eye Happy Doll, a 50-year-old Angeleno who tries to solve cases and not get killed in the process. Ames says we relate to detective stories because...

Maybe you, dear podcast listener, put on a couple of pounds during COVID. You were home more because there weren’t as many other places to go. You just weren’t as active. That was the case with actor and singer Lola Kirke, who describes this period of cocooning at home as being a time she was very happy. But chances are you weren’t prevented from working in your chosen field as a result of that bo...

You really should watch City of Ghosts. It’s on Netflix, six episodes long, and it’s a delightful and important exploration of Los Angeles, cultures, and how we manage history. City of Ghosts also happens to be, at least at first glance, a show for children. It’s animated and features a group of kid characters who fan out across L.A. to interview and record the ghosts that live there. It’s guilele...

Gaby Dunn is well-known to podcast audiences for her shows Just Between Us, co-hosted by Allison Raskin, and Bad With Money with Gaby Dunn. They’re well-known to readers for books like I Hate Everyone But You and Bury the Lede and articles in The New York Times and Buzzfeed.  But Gaby Dunn hasn’t always been well-known to Gaby Dunn. Raised in Florida, where talk about sexual orientation was scarce...

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...

Getting Jamie Lee Curtis to open about her many years spent addicted to Vicodin is, frankly, not very difficult. She wants to talk about it. And that’s for a couple of reasons. One, she wants to make it clear that she’s no different from any other addict in any other walk of life. That’s why she calls herself a dope fiend. She just happens to have had success in an industry she derisively calls “s...

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, a...

Even if you’re not completely aware of Shane Koyczan’s poem “To This Day” , at least 25 million other people are. That’s how many views the YouTube video of the poem has as of the time we made this episode. It’s not just a great poem, it strikes a nerve. “To This Day” talks in a very direct and meaningful way about the effects of bullying and how people can carry it with them from the playground d...

Right now, in Jamie Loftus’s childhood home in Brockton, Mass., there are dozens, maybe hundreds of notebooks in storage boxes. They’re from second grade up through middle school and each of the notebooks is filled, cover to cover, with detailed descriptions of where she was and what was happening: who was there, what were they wearing, what was on the walls. The descriptions are all written in a...

This episode of Depresh Mode with John Moe came about as part of a challenge to our listeners: if we reached our member goal during the last Max Fun Drive, we’d make and release an episode with Justin McElroy. We hit the goal, here it is. Of course, making that goal can be and was a pretty nervous-making enterprise. There’s more than a bit of anxiety involved.  Appropriately to that proposition, a...

The CBS News Sunday Morning commentator, Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me panelist, and veteran actor had all the approval and validation one could want early in her life. She was a pageant winner, Harvard grad, and Rhodes Scholar by the time she went to Los Angeles to make it in film and television. But the vagaries of the entertainment industry, the death of her mother, and an unsuccessful marriage sh...

It’s not actually all that hard to tell when Tim Heidecker is kidding and when he’s not, but it does take a little bit of practice. When he’s performing on shows like  Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!  or  Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories , it’s comedy. When he acts in comedic movies, sure, that’s comedy as well. But on albums such as his new one,  High School , you don’t need to listen carefully...

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...

Comedian and writer Ginny Hogan got interested in standup comedy when she was in her twenties and working at a tech startup in San Francisco. Soon she was hooked on comedy. And alcohol. She got hooked on alcohol as well. The comedy was definitely more positive and healthy than the alcohol. In this interview, Ginny recounts a habit she developed for getting drunk, picking up a little extra wine to...

Jamie never expected to be a mental health advocate. He was working in the industry that had always been his dream career: surfing apparel. But things changed after several days spent taking care of a young woman he didn’t know, who was struggling with suicidal thoughts, substance use disorder, and self-harm. Renee had carved the word “fuckup” onto her arms but couldn’t get into a treatment facili...

Right now, in our society, there is so much to be anxious about. There are many factors that could lead one to feel depressed and defeated. If one already has a tendency toward anxiety and depression, that path can be even shorter. But as a member of that society, one must look for hope anyway. It’s that dynamic relationship between despair and hope that led us to reach out to Maggie Smith. The Am...