Depresh Mode with John Moe

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 anxi...

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...

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 tod...

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 d...

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....

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...

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 f...

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...

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, McSween...

(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, havi...

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,...

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 gi...

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 c...

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 b...

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. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joindepresh

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...

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...

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 pac...

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...

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 a...

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...

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 g...

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...

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, ath...

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...