Depresh Mode with John Moe

(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...

It’s tricky. That’s what we found when we set out to answer a question we get a lot: “How do I approach a loved one who I’m worried about in terms of mental health?” Obviously, you want to let them know you care but you want to express the depth of your concern. You don’t want to scare them away and make them less likely to seek help. So where’s the line? According to Quanah Walker, of  MakeItOK.o...

You’ll notice that this episode is longer than most of our episodes. That’s just the way it tends to go with Griffin Newman. Episodes of his own podcast, Blank Check, regularly clock in at more than two hours. He acts in films and those often top two hours as well. And although he’s only in his thirties, Griffin has had a long career, growing up in a showbiz-adjacent family and starting in standup...

In this Song Imploder edition of our show (borrowing a format from the podcast Song Exploder), Carl (who records as A.C.) Newman walks us through “Whiteout Conditions”, a song created when his sister was dying of cancer but when he had to get into the studio. Seems like it’s safe to say that when people are in a terrible mental state, they are least equipped to do something as creative as writing...

Rock music isn’t a cure for depression or anxiety. You can’t wail away on “Smoke on the Water” and have all your mental difficulties melt away. That would be awesome, sure, but that’s not how it works. But for Chelsea Ursin, playing was a lot of other things: a break from the nagging mental disorders that created so many problems from a young age, a channel through which to express herself, and an...

You can tell a lot about Kelly Williams Brown’s life by looking at her multiple bowls of tiny origami. Her “lucky stars” are folded in a pattern that Kelly learned and then repeated over and over and over to help her get through the moments of her life when all seemed lost, when death felt preferable. There are many bowls filled with these stars and they are all very large bowls. There must be ten...

It’s much easier to talk about the weather than it is about mental health. We all know this. Because it’s a lot easier to face the idea of a rainy day than the idea of a mental disorder that might last the rest of one’s life. Still, getting those conversations going with a friend, with a therapist or psychiatrist, or even with yourself is the best way to make the situation less scary and more easi...

It’s tempting to try to look for a reason why Joel Kim Booster, ordinarily a very funny and engaging person, feels dead inside, trapped in a persistent depressive state. His father recently died of COVID. The two hadn’t been very close (Joel’s dad was a conservative Christian, Joel is a gay Hollywood star) but were beginning to reconnect. You could point to the pandemic, which left Joel in an apar...

Alexandra Paul wasn’t allowed sugar as a kid but she snuck it anyway, not for the taste but for the comfort it provided. As a teen, Alexandra’s modeling and acting careers were going great. Her relationship with food, on the other hand, had become a real mess. At boarding school, it seemed right and normal to deny herself food in order to be as skinny as possible. The other girls were doing it and...

When a loved one dies, the world can become chaos. Everything has changed. The way you drive a car, the way food tastes, the way you even talk to people can feel different and wrong and weird. It feels like you are - for lack of a better term - going crazy. How far apart are grief and mental illness? The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), the standard reference for mental illness, says that...