Depresh Mode with John Moe

When Emily’s twin, Amelia, ended up in the hospital twice, she knew that stress wasn’t something to be dismissed as “all in your head”. First of all, the head is connected to the body (by the neck), so stress is a physical issue that you can feel and be hurt by in all sorts of ways. Too much stress, at work, at home, in life, and you can run up against a real burnout situation. And it can wreak havoc on you mental health and physic...

The patients in the therapy sessions in the new film GROUP: The Schopenhauer Effect are actors, but it’s not a scripted film. The actors were given characters and circumstances and then they improvised dialogue with each other and with the group leader, who is also acting. Kind of. Dr. Elliott Zeisel is one of the most important figures in group therapy in America since the 1970s. With all that knowledge and experience powering him...

Although he has a huge following on social media now, Jonathan Edward Durham’s life as a writer used to be a lot more low tech. It involved locking himself in a room in Los Angeles, pounding away on screenplays that almost no one ever read, sucking back smokes and liquor, barely sleeping, and finding himself to actually be pretty miserable. He did manage to write and self-publish a novel, Winterset Hollow, that found an audience, w...

You might remember Alexandra Paul as one of the stars of Baywatch or the Tom Hanks-Dan Aykroyd Dragnet film. You may not have realized that as a child and on to her long trip through the worlds of modeling and Hollywood, she was bingeing and purging and dealing with severe eating disorders. She tells us about her relationship with sugar and what food meant emotionally. Then we’re joined by Dr. Cynthia Bulik, one of the top experts ...

Dating apps and websites are booming right now as people look for ways to leverage to find love or even just companionship. Liesel Sharabi of Arizona State University compiled a meta-analysis of a huge number of studies about the connection between online dating and mental health and the results? Kind of bad news. People who use the apps compulsively, swiping all day long, are much more likely to be depressed and anxious. But were ...

Niko Stratis knew a couple of things growing up in the Yukon in Canada: that she was, in truth, a woman, despite being regarded by the world as male, and that being trans or different in any way was absolutely not okay. It wasn’t just a matter of identity, it was a matter of safety too, as she worked with guys who vowed that if their child was gay or trans, they would kill that child. Niko discovered some other things, too: the tra...

The ICE surge in Minnesota has meant a huge number of arrests, protests, confrontations, deportations, children and adults sent to detention facilities, and deaths. It’s also meant massive anxiety, fear, and trauma around the state. Marcus Schmit of NAMI Minnesota says this is being felt acutely among people already struggling with severe mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and severe anxiety and depression. H...

In 2007, Amanda Knox, an American studying abroad in Italy, was arrested, tried, and convicted of the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. After years in an Italian jail, she was ultimately freed, reconvicted, and finally exonerated in 2015. Since then, she has married, become a mother, and she has returned to Italy, even meeting with the prosector who concocted outrageous stories that led to her imprisonment. Their meeting is...

Suicide is a problem. It’s perpetually a top cause of death around the world but society shames it, stigmatizes it, and is reluctant to discuss it even when talking about it would save lives. Well guess what, we’re talking about it. We’re offering insight, sympathy, and practical ideas to help yourself and others.

Clancy Martin first thought about suicide when he was two years old and he has attempted suicide many times over the yea...

It was several years into her talk therapy sessions that Stephanie Foo was offered a diagnosis: complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or C-PTSD. Regular PTSD stems from a single traumatic event like a car crash or a mugging. C-PTSD comes from a long series of traumas from which there seems like no escape. Like child abuse. The problems Stephanie was having with her relationships and rage and all sorts of other issues stemmed, sai...

A.J. Daulerio exists as a caricature to a lot of people because he was the guy who published a clip from a Hulk Hogan sex tape on Gawker, got sued by Hogan, and he and Gawker lost to the tune of a $140 million payout. The enmity and shame of that was a lot to carry around, as was a lifelong battle with depression and bipolar disorder type II, as was a pretty profound problem with drug and alcohol abuse. But A.J. sobered up, got tre...

We live in complicated times and, for a whole lot of us, we do so with complicated minds. A billion people worldwide are living with some form of mental illness and 20% of the U.S. population has experienced a mental health crisis in the past year.

Circumstances in our shared world are surely contributing to the problem: climate change and natural disasters, affordability and employment problems domestically, and people living in fe...

It was two years into a vicious cycle of depression and Mike Doughty was falling apart. He was taking more Ambien than he had been prescribed, importing huge boxes of the stuff from India, waking up to find packs of cigarettes, candy wrappers, and pizza boxes with no memory of leaving his Memphis home to make such purchases. He was convinced something was deeply wrong with his heart even though every doctor said there wasn’t. Final...

The intriguing memoir Tom Johnson recently released is called Driven: A Life in Public Service from LBJ to CNN and it’s full of amazing anecdotes. Tom joined the White House in his early twenties, was the one to inform LBJ of Martin Luther King’s shooting, was a giant in newspapers and cable news, and loaned Gorbachev a pen that was used to sign the paperwork dissolving the USSR. Tom’s personal story is a little more vulnerable and...

Anger can be a scary topic for a lot of people. It usually doesn’t feel good when you’re experiencing it and it can be associated with behaviors that are very frightening indeed. But Dr. Ryan Martin, who is one of the few academics specializing in anger and who has written two books about it, says anger is a normal and even beneficial emotion to experience. It’s your body’s way of indicating that some injustice has been done, eithe...

It’s very easy to associate your job with your own sense of self. So it makes that it can be traumatic to be one of the scores of people being laid off in today’s turbulent economy. We are joined by the New York Times’ mental health reporter, Christina Caron, who has been looking at the effect of unemployment - especially long-term unemployment - on mental health. It can lead to more severe depression, anxiety, marital problems, an...

Maureen Johnson loves mysteries. Loves reading classic detective fiction and loves writing mystery stories, which young readers have been gobbling up for years. Some of Maureen’s stories feature teenage sleuth Stevie Bell, who, besides having a knack for solving cold cases, deals with an anxiety disorder. It’s not all there is to Stevie, of course, but it’s definitely there and she has to manage it on an ongoing basis. Maureen tell...

Yes, the holidays are upon us. Getting together with family can be a wonderful, loving experience. It can also be a lot. There can be old grudges, chafing at family roles, the specter of politics might play in. We’re here to help. In This Family is a podcast produced by our host, John Moe, for Nexus Family Healing, a mental health nonprofit based in the Twin Cities. It’s all about the connections between family and mental health.

In...

Cotard’s delusion, also known as Cotard’s syndrome, is an extremely rare condition where the patient believes that they are actually dead. For the bestselling author Esmé Weijun Wang, Cotard’s came along after she had already been traveling a difficult road that involved schizoaffective disorder along with a host of other mental health issues. While experiencing Cotard’s, Esmé urgently told her husband that he was dead too and so w...