Depresh Mode with John Moe

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...

Therapy is not a competition. You can’t defeat other clients or come in first place. Still, there is such a thing as getting better at going to therapy. There are ways to get the most out of that valuable hour or so you get with a professional. And for that, we turn to professional therapist, author, and podcaster Lori Gottlieb, who offers some plain-spoken advice on building a great relationship,...

Writer, blogger, podcaster, pundit, and reporter Ana Marie Cox joins her good friend John Moe for a conversation about writing. Ana teaches what she calls Third Story Workshops that are dedicated to helping people get their stories out of their minds and onto the page. She says you can look at your story in three parts: what it was like before, what happened, and what you are like now. It’s that t...

Chris Powell is probably best known as the host of the ABC reality show Extreme Weight Loss, which ran for five seasons. On that show, Chris used his experience as a fitness trainer and all around motivational human to help people who wanted to lose 200 pounds or more. And Chris doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to experience mental illness. He comes across as very energetic, very positive, and so...

A special preview of this year's MaxFunDrive Bonus Content! Listen to the whole episode by becoming a member. Go to MaximumFun.org/join and pick a level that works for you! We’ve said it many times on our show: there isn’t one thing that works for everyone to improve mental health. But chances are there’s something out there that will work for you. Maybe it’s a certain type of medication. Perhaps...

What is it like to feel better in your mental state? And what does it take to get there and to stay that way? Those are some of the questions we ask in this interview with the great comedian Gary Gulman. Gary sounds very different than when John Moe first interviewed him back in the fall of 2017 when Gary had been hospitalized for depression and was just beginning to turn things around. We hear ab...

As far as Dana Gould could tell, he had been awake for 11 days. He logically knows that this was probably medically impossible but even if he had slept, he had no memory of doing so, which is pretty significant right there. This incident and the hospitalization that followed it is just one part of Dana’s mental health journey.  He talks about growing up in a family where alcohol was a strong prese...

To celebrate our journey into triple digit episode numbers, we take a look back at episodes that have really stayed with us. They’re not even necessarily our favorite, mind you. It’s not that we think they’re so much better than all the rest. They’re just some episodes that come to mind pretty quickly. Discussed on this show: Depression, Anxiety, and Devil Horns: Chelsea Ursin Saves Her Soul with...

The Greek gods, as depicted in Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus series, are far from stately and dignified. Indeed, they’re neurotic, depressed, and anxious. They’re gossipy and bitter and nasty and petty sometimes. Probably some legit mental disorders banging around, some trauma likely in there as well. In other words, they’re pretty human. Rachel Smythe tells us why mythology has always spoken so de...

It was pretty simple in comedian and writer Zach Zimmerman’s mind when he was a kid: you had to accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior or you would spend all eternity being tortured in the fiery pits of Hell. And he wanted to do that accepting. Problem was, God never spoke to young Zach or gave him any indication that he was saved. No revelatory ecstatic church service or voice from...

Enjoy the debut episode of John Moe's new sleep-aid podcast Sleeping with Celebrities and be sure to subscribe! Andy Daly is a comedian, actor, and podcaster. He starred on the Comedy Central series “Review” and was a supporting actor on HBO’s “Eastbound and Down” as well as a cast member on “MadTV.” Like many people, Andy has a yard at his home and is thus charged with the task of taking care of...

If you’ve listened to our show before, you know that we recommend a period of trial and error to find a mental health treatment that works best for you. Nothing works for everyone, after all, so you have to see what you respond to. Neal Brennan is the embodiment of that concept and in this interview he reports back on how well or poorly it went for him trying Freudian therapy, antidepressants, tra...

The title of KC Davis’s book paints a pretty vivid picture of what her work is about: How To Keep House While Drowning , subtitled “a gentle approach to cleaning and organizing.” KC, a therapist and podcaster, specializes in helping people who have dealt with mental disorders, trauma, postpartum, and other issues but who are still faced with piles of laundry and dishes that need to be addressed. S...

In many ways, Christian Finnegan’s earlier career path made a lot more sense given the path he has traveled. He went to NYU, tried and then dropped acting, and then set out to be a very serious writer and artist. He worked in publishing and fancied a career where his writing would be at the center of his work, possibly as a monologist but never as a stand-in-front-of-a-brick-wall comedian. The ser...

Chris Walla’s life today is very different from where it has been in the past. The musician and producer isn’t in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, where he grew up and lived for many years. He’s in Trondheim, Norway, where he is putting down roots and continues to compose and produce. And while that happens, Death Cab for Cutie, the band he co-founded in the 1990s, is in the midst of a 71-stop...

Veteran podcaster Lauren Ober suspected something was up and that it went beyond covid stress and professional stress and all the other reasons she had been going to therapy for so long. She had been a journalist for many years and her instinct for the story led her to start piecing together that the life she had been experiencing all this time fit the profile of autism. Well spoiler alert, she te...

Kate Beaton’s new book,  Ducks , is not about ducks. At least not really. It’s about people, specifically Kate and the people she worked with during a two-year period after finishing university, working in the remote oil sands region of northern Alberta, Canada. The camps at the oil sands housed hundreds of employees and they were not an easy place to be, filled with depression, broken marriages,...