Depresh Mode with John Moe

While the acclaimed musician Emma Swift had experienced painful periods of depression in the past, fed by grief or the first Trump presidency, her psychotic break and mental breakdown in 2023 was new territory. She lost touch with reality, believing that her electronic devices had been hacked, that she was being followed, images of heaven and hell emerging. Emma actually had a sense that she was l...

Are ChatGPT and other AI chatbots inducing psychosis? Or exacerbating it? Are people being hospitalized or even killed because the bots seem too human, too understanding, too lifelike? To be clear, the bots are not human. They are software. But they are so convincingly programmed to speak like people that users, especially ones who may already be having trouble discerning reality, begin to sense t...

Alex Edelman loves going to concerts but admits that he usually goes solo. That’s because his ADHD leads Alex to show up pretty late to the show and he often spends part of it on the stairs writing something, occasionally darting into the main room for a song he likes. He can’t make it through most movies either. Alex stars in the new Peacock series The Paper, a sort of descendant of The Office. H...

If you’re looking for a calm mind, do you love a room with little or nothing in it? Or do you need to be wall-to-ceiling with mementos and objects and stuff to give you a sense of peace? We take a look at how the layout of your living space may have an effect on your mental well being with Dr. Beverly Walpole. She’s a clinical psychologist and the founder of Haven | Wellness By Design , a consulti...

When she was growing up in conservative, evangelical rural Minnesota, she knew. When she was excelling at sports, giving and receiving body slams and folding chair hits as a pro wrestler, she knew. Even when she married a woman while still living as a man, Denise knew that she was female. Denise figured it was either suicide or take action to live her truth and fully transition. With her debut spe...

There are plenty of places online to get very serious information on mental health, delivered in tones that are somber, sober, or very dry. Ashly Burch goes a different route on her new YouTube show, I’m Happy You’re Here , employing loads of comedy, puppets, foul language, and mature subject matter to teach what’s going on in complex matters such as anxiety. Ashly is known for her work in the gam...

Because she racks up millions and millions of views for her viral comedy videos on social media, because she’s written two books including the new best-seller A Clean Mess: A Memoir of Sobriety After a Lifetime of Being Numb, because she’s famous and successful, Tiffany Jenkins and her family were invited to travel to California and visit Lego Land. They paid her to have a wonderful vacation. On t...

If you’ve dealt with depression, you know that it’s a disorder that speaks to you, firing off insults and terrible idea, often right in the middle of a conversation. Barges in to tear you down. We all must contend with this rude presence. Aaron Foster is a very funny comedian who is still fairly new to the full-time comedy life but, now in his fifties, he’s done a lot of living to inform his comic...

To blow off steam from an incredibly stressful profession, professional nurse Blake Lynch started putting together little comedy videos on social media as “Nurse Blake”. The clips went viral and he started making live comedy appearances to packed audiences, many of whom were nurses themselves. His celebrity status gave him a chance to lobby for better pay and working conditions for nurses. As Nurs...

Bush lead singer Gavin Rossdale has a lot of memories from growing up as a kid who excelled at sports but also treasured his Lou Reed records. He is also keenly aware of who left during those years: his mother disappearing after divorcing his dad, a beloved aunt passing away, and a revered older sister striking out on her own. Those losses informed his mental health for the rest of his life but so...

Jen slept fine the night before she couldn’t. Just short of 29 years old and after years of excellent sleep, insomnia entered her life leading her down a years-long search for cures, treatments, or even just an explanation of why her life had been turned upside down. Jen Senior is the author of an article, “ Why Can’t Americans Sleep? ” in the Atlantic and she joins us to talk about the intersecti...

Brandon Stickney remembers booze being everywhere growing up in Lockport, New York and he definitely remembers getting a taste for it growing up. Over time, he developed bipolar disorder and his substance use disorder added cocaine and opioids as favorite drugs. Brandon’s love of getting high would cost him his marriage, his successful career as a journalist and author, and his freedom, after gett...

When the comedian, actor, and author Maria Bamford has something to say about mental health, it’s a pretty good idea to give a listen. For one reason, she’s hilarious. Also, she comes at the issue not just as an observer. Maria has a long history with mental health conditions. SHe has spent a good bit of time in in-patient facilities, has dealt with problematic intrusive thoughts, and has been dia...

Hollywood doesn’t exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to portraying mental illness in a sensitive, honest, and appropriately complex way (think Psycho or the notorious caffeine pill episode of Saved by the Bell ). But the top show on Netflix right now, Ginny & Georgia went to great lengths to show mental health conditions honestly. The series tells the story of Georgia, a mother with...

"Beneath the Lilypad" is singer-songwriter Alexandra Savior's third album, but her first in five years. Several years ago, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, type 1. That’s a condition marked with manic highs that can last for weeks or months as well as crushing lows of depression, she’s had both, you’ll hear about that. She’s also dealt with psychosis, and has spent time in an in-patient fa...

As temperatures and sea levels rise, the effects of climate change are being felt in weather patterns, natural disasters, and in both public and personal mental health. We talk with Dr. Caroline Carney, President of Behavioral Health and Chief Medical Officer at Magellan Health in Phoenix about the connection between your mind and the dire conditions Earth is facing. She says the damage is being d...

Rep. Andrea Salinas (D-Ore.) is one of four chairs of the bipartisan Mental Health Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives, a 93-member group of Republicans and Democrats pledging to fight stigma, improve accessibility, and generally make the country’s mental health better. But as the Trump administration floats huge cuts to Medicaid and other social services and as the tone of politics in Ame...

Ethan Sacks is a veteran comics writer, having created stories for Marvel, DC, and numerous Star Wars comics. In the comic A Haunted Girl , Ethan enlisted his daughter Naomi as co-writer to tell a story much more personal than anything involving Star Wars or the Avengers. A Haunted Girl tells the story of Cleo, a character inspired by Naomi’s real life experiences in her teens dealing with depress...

It would take an entire section of show notes here to list all the things Felicia Day has accomplished in her career. Here’s an attempt at making that brief: acted in a bunch of TV shows you know, created and starred in web series, made just so very many online videos, and is now the author and star of an audiobook called Third Eye about someone who is supposed to save the world but fails. In our...

Aperture is the sixth studio album by the indie-folk band The Head And The Heart and it’s kind of a return to the more grounded, collaborative sound of their earliest work. It’s less polished, less highly produced, not as poppy. That’s not an accident. The band has been putting in the work to be more of a cohesive unit by sharing songwriting and singing duties, going to therapy together, and tryin...

There have been ten million contacts, via phone calls, texts, and chats, with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline since it first launched in July of 2022. As its third anniversary approaches, we check in to see how the system is holding up, what the funding and capacity issues are, and what the future might look like with our guest, Hannah Wesolowski, Chief Advocacy Officer for the National Alliance...

Would you open your heart to a bot? Tell it all your problems? Look to a piece of code, a computer program, for high-quality mental healthcare? Some people have said yes and the results are hard to ignore. Dartmouth University test subjects who sought help from Therabot, a generative AI chatbot, showed a 51% reduction in depression symptoms, 31% for anxiety, 19% for eating disorders. Dr. Nicholas...

If you were brought up in a family or a culture that never recognized, discussed, or processed things like depression and trauma, you may have learned to simply hide those difficult feelings away and simply act as if everything’s great. You can be a high achiever, striving perfection, all to keep away demons that you’ve never really faced. Your act can be so good that it even fools you. For a whil...

Cameron Esposito has many titles: hugely successful standup comedian, actor in television and film, writer, podcast host. After a recent rehab stay led to a mental health diagnosis, she has realized that she’s also a person with bipolar disorder, type II. Cameron has a new special, Four Pills , that’s part stand-up comedy and part reflection on the circumstances that led to this discovery as well...

Statistics say that 23% of Americans are currently living with some form of mental illness. For most people, that calls for reaching out for help and receiving treatment and advice on management. But if you’re an FAA-approved airline pilot, disclosing that you have something like a depressive disorder or an anxiety problem can mean a temporary pause or permanent end to your entire career. Of cours...