Depresh Mode with John Moe

Memoirist John Cotter describes his partial loss of hearing through a series of anecdotes. Running along the Massachusetts coastline, he found he could no longer hear the rush and ebb of the ocean waves. He danced at a wedding to what he thought was an indiscriminate wall of cacophony but when his wife said it was “Billie Jean”, John’s brain was able to assemble the sound together through memory....

Trans people are under attack in the United States, both literally, through violence and threats of violence, and figuratively, in the form of anti-trans legislation and discrimination. This can be depressing for trans people and can make them anxious. So what does it mean for people who happen to be trans and already deal with depression and anxiety disorders? We find out one person’s experience...

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...

Aparna Nancherla’s new book, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome , covers a lot of mental health territory, much of which she talks about in this interview. Despite being an accomplished comedian and actor, thus having no reason to suffer from impostor syndrome, she still does, because that particular phenomena is impervious to logic. Nor does her success keep away perfectionism...

Investigative reporter and Columbia University journalism professor Meg Kissinger has, for many years, specialized in uncovering the catastrophic state of mental health care in America, particularly in Milwaukee, where she has lived for many years. Recently, she used that reporter’s tenacity in learning and telling the story of her own family of origin in her book While You Were Out: An Intimate F...

“Every time I’m on the sidewalk, I want to step into the road,” sings Lydia Loveless on her new song “Runaway.” “Let this Kia flatten me cause I don’t want to come home.” It’s a set of lyrics that packs a wallop but one that she laughs about in our interview. Lydia is in a pretty good place right now, anticipating the release of her new album, Nothing’s Gonna Stand In My Way Again  and with her de...

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...

Patrick Page has earned a reputation as one of the top classical actors in America today and one of the best at playing villains. He’s played Iago in  Othello , the Grinch, Marc Antony and Brutus in  Julius Caesar , Scar in  The Lion King , King Lear, and Hades in  Hadestown  to name very few of his roles in a decades long career. But Patrick has faced off against a classical villain off stage as...

Have you ever felt like an impostor? Some of you, the listeners, wrote in to answer this question. According to Dr. Valerie Young from the Impostor Syndrome Institute, about 70% of you will answer that question with a “yes.” Dr. Young joins us to discuss both the internal and external factors that cause impostor syndrome, as well as what individuals and organizations can do to lessen it. Dr. Ken D...

This episode originally aired on August 1, 2022. 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 h...

Before she was a cast member on Saturday Night Live, Sasheer Zamata was a cast member at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, where she would climb inside the character costumes and mingle with guests at the park. One particular costume, Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, was particularly cumbersome and uncomfortable and that’s where Sasheer had her first ever, full-blown panic attack. She shares th...

Bethany Cosentino describes her new album as “a coming-of-age story about a 36-year-old woman reclaiming her life and what matters against the landscape of the world ending.” That last bit of that description is hard to miss and indeed climate anxiety figures heavily in the record but let’s not look past the middle part of the description, the part with the reclaiming life and what matters. In thi...

Nick Seluk had been drawing an online comic called Awkward Yeti about a socially stumbling cryptid named Lars while working a corporate day job as a graphic designer. Eventually, Seluk started creating strips where Lars’s heart and brain were walking around on their own, trying to strike a balance between their emotional and logical tendencies. And audiences responded, sending Heart and Brain into...

This episode originally aired on September 12, 2022. 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 D...

When Emi Nietfeld was applying to colleges, she had her eyes set firmly on the Ivy League. Through her childhood years spent in foster care, shelters, psychiatric hospitals, very occasionally with her problematic mother, and finally a boarding school, Emi was fixated on getting into the most difficult college she could. In an effort to tell her full story, she wrote an application essay that inclu...

Kate Speer is a New England writer, entrepreneur, and mental health advocate. She has a popular Instagram account and Substack newsletter where she often talks about mental illness, recovery, and how her psychiatric service dogs Waffle and Tugboat have helped along her mental health journey. Kate’s loyal readers have also heard a lot about her friend Maura, how they met in an in-patient facility a...

You don’t have to listen all that deeply into the song catalog of singer-songwriter Noah Kahan to hear mention of mental health themes. It’s an important topic for Noah in his own life, which has involved struggles with depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia. And because mental health is important in Noah’s life, it shows up a lot in his intensely personal, vulnerable, and revealing music. Growi...

A good day for Michael Landsberg goes up to about a seven but not really any higher than that. His mood doesn’t raise up to an eight, nine, or ten due to the medication he takes for his longstanding major depressive disorder. But Michael’s low days don’t go below a four thanks to the same medication. It’s a bargain that Landsberg is comfortable with. We also discuss Landsberg’s discovery of his ow...

Bruce Springsteen was coming off his first number one album and first top ten single when, in 1982, he retreated to a small New Jersey bedroom to record something unexpected. What he made, the album Nebraska, is darker, starker, simpler, and deeper than any of his previous work and it reflected some of the more painful components of Springsteen’s mental makeup. Warren Zanes, a musician himself as...

Members of Congress answer to their constituents, ultimately. They work for us. So this week, we check in on one of our employees, the junior senator from Minnesota, Tina Smith. Smith is very active on the topic of mental health and gives us updates on legislation that is moving - sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly - through the U.S. Senate. We discuss the provider shortage, the innovation around...

Some important questions tackled in this week’s episode with the author of  Adult Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers : When does someone have an actual personality disorder and when are they simply being a bit of a jerk? Can someone with genuine NPD even recognize that they have it? What does therapy look like for someone with NPD? How does a narcissistic parent influence the mental and emotional m...

We all have voices inside ourselves that give us advice on what to do in a given situation. Not talking about literal voices that you genuinely hear, just thoughts that you have when a decision needs to be made or something needs to be navigated. And those voices sometimes contradict each other so you need to know which one has your best interests at heart. Author Cheryl Strayed refers to her nega...

Samantha Irby has visualized a lot of scenarios that get more than a little unnerving. The driver behind her gets so impatient with her driving that he runs her off the road, drags her out of her car, and then beats the crap out of her. In another imagining, she’s at an author event and someone has gone to the trouble of buying a ticket just to run up on stage and yell obscenities at her. I mean,...

When our society and our entire culture gets behind a cause, we can really make a difference. And it’s happened before. Back in the day, littering made public spaces look awful but we got together and did something about it. We created an owl mascot and, more directly, changed our way of thinking. We got together on causes like smoking and drunk driving and while those problems have not been eradi...

Hero Journey Club is a business that offers mental health support groups for video game enthusiasts, run by therapists. The group sessions happen over the online voice and instant messaging platform Discord and the participants, the gamers, are playing games while the sessions take place. Sometimes collaboratively on the same game, sometimes on completely different games. The group members are usu...