Depresh Mode with John Moe

• The Personal Side of Huge Cuts to Addiction, Suicide Prevention, and Mental Health Programs

  Over half the employees at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) who were there in January are now gone, include 12 of the 17 senior leaders. SAMHSA is in charge of distributing and administering mental health programs around the country and the cuts to both staffing and to the programs the agency serves have meant many programs addressing addiction and suicide prevention being severely hobbled or shutting down altogether. In turn, that means fewer people getting help and more people suffering. O. Rose Broderick, Disability and Healthcare Reporting Fellow at Stat, joins us to explain the cuts, why they may be happening, and the extremely fragile state of these programs in America today. Rose also share her own connection to mental health, the struggles her own family has endured, and why all mental health stories are, at their heart, personal matters.Thank you to all our listeners who support the show as monthly members of Maximum Fun.Check out our I’m Glad You’re Here and Depresh Mode merchandise at the brand new merch website MaxFunStore.com!Hey, remember, you’re part of Depresh Mode and we want to hear what you want to hear about. What guests and issues would you like to have covered in a future episode? Write us at [email protected] Mode is on BlueSky, Instagram, Substack, and you can join our Preshies Facebook group. Help is available right away.The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988 or 1-800-273-8255, 1-800-273-TALKCrisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741.International suicide hotline numbers available here: https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines

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• Seasonal Affective Disorder and Why It Sucks So Bad

  When we went looking for information on the condition known as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, one of the first things we noticed was that some people aren’t even calling it that anymore. The website for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), for instance, uses the term “major depressive disorder with a seasonal pattern”, which means an acronym of MDDWASP. Here at Depresh Mode, we’re perfectly fine referring to it as “mud wasp”. On this episode of the show, we talk with NAMI’s chief medical officer, Dr. Ken Duckworth, about how it’s similar to and different from traditional depression and what one could do to deal with it. With Ken, we discuss the less common and less understood spring and summer variety of MDDWASP. We also hear from Joy and Christina from our Preshies group on Facebook about their experiences.Thank you to all our listeners who support the show as monthly members of Maximum Fun.Check out our I’m Glad You’re Here and Depresh Mode merchandise at the brand new merch website MaxFunStore.com!Hey, remember, you’re part of Depresh Mode and we want to hear what you want to hear about. What guests and issues would you like to have covered in a future episode? Write us at [email protected] is available right away.The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988 or 1-800-273-8255, 1-800-273-TALKCrisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741.International suicide hotline numbers available here: https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlinesThe Depresh Mode newsletter is available twice a week. Subscribe for free and stay up to date on the show and mental health issues. https://johnmoe.substack.com/John’s acclaimed memoir, The Hilarious World of Depression, is now available in paperback. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250209566/thehilariousworldofdepressionFind the show on X @depreshpod and Instagram @depreshpod.John is on X @johnmoe. 

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• Is Whiteness a Mental Health Problem? Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter Thinks So.

  It’s a question we ask a lot on this show: do you have a mental health problem or is the problem actually rooted in the world you live in? Psychologist Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter says contemporary society lives under three different assumptions: there’s not enough to go around, kill or be killed, and us versus them or divide and conquer and this results in people valuing individualism, competition, and materialism. This way of living, he says, is a result of white dominance or whiteness and it is a distortion of the way humans are meant to live and therefore leads to things like racism, sexism, homophobia, and the brutality of human beings to one another. Dr. Lassiter, author of How I Know White People Are Crazy and Other Stories says whiteness is not a mental health disorder but it is a mental health problem that we all need to face. Dr. Lassiter tells his own story, growing up with a chronic illness, gay, and Black in the South and eventually earning his PhD. in psychology. As he came to understand psychology and the way the world works, he noticed the impact of society’s built-in obstacles on his own mental health journey and among the students and clients he has helped.Thank you to all our listeners who support the show as monthly members of Maximum Fun.Check out our I’m Glad You’re Here and Depresh Mode merchandise at the brand new merch website MaxFunStore.com!Hey, remember, you’re part of Depresh Mode and we want to hear what you want to hear about. What guests and issues would you like to have covered in a future episode? Write us at [email protected] Mode is on BlueSky, Instagram, Substack, and you can join our Preshies Facebook group. Help is available right away.The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988 or 1-800-273-8255, 1-800-273-TALKCrisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741.International suicide hotline numbers available here: https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines

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• Is the U.S. Government Going To Take Away Your Antidepressants?

  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, clearly does not like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), the most popular form of antidepressant on the market. They’re used by millions of Americans on a daily basis. He has tried to tie SSRIs to school shooters despite a lack of evidence to that effect. He has suggested that it’s harder to go off SSRIs than it is to quit heroin. It’s not. Molly Olmstead, a reporter for Slate who has been covering this story closely, says that this does not mean that the government is about to try to ban SSRIs and leave patients without the medicines that may be keeping them alive. But she explains that yes, we are in the midst of a very active anti-SSRI PR campaign by Kennedy and his supporters in the so-called Make America Healthy Again movement and that campaign could presage a much more aggressive set of actions.Thank you to all our listeners who support the show as monthly members of Maximum Fun.Check out our I’m Glad You’re Here and Depresh Mode merchandise at the brand new merch website MaxFunStore.com!Hey, remember, you’re part of Depresh Mode and we want to hear what you want to hear about. What guests and issues would you like to have covered in a future episode? Write us at [email protected] Mode is on BlueSky, Instagram, Substack, and you can join our Preshies Facebook group. Help is available right away.The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988 or 1-800-273-8255, 1-800-273-TALKCrisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741.International suicide hotline numbers available here: https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines 

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• P.E. Moskowitz on Whether Your Mind is Broken or the World Is

  During the violent Charlottesville protests of 2017, journalist and author P.E. Moskowitz was only a few feet away when Heather Heyer was killed by an attacking motorist. 16 years earlier, P.E. was in middle school Spanish class a couple blocks from the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks. The trauma contributed to panic attacks and, finally, a mental breakdown. As they got their life back together, P.E. began to question a lot of conventional wisdom. Were they mentally ill to have such a breakdown or were they responding appropriately to enormous trauma in a difficult world? Are we looking at potential cures when we should be looking at coping or better yet coming up with ways to stop the horrors from ever taking place? They also questioned the role of drugs in mental health treatment. In the book Breaking Awake: A Reporter's Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs and in this intriguing interview, P.E. explains how they look at drugs - both the prescription and street varieties - as tools that can be used positively or negatively, to help or harm. And that patients are owed a lot more options than a shortcut to SSRIs or Adderall in their quest to feel better.Thank you to all our listeners who support the show as monthly members of Maximum Fun.Check out our I’m Glad You’re Here and Depresh Mode merchandise at the brand new merch website MaxFunStore.com!Hey, remember, you’re part of Depresh Mode and we want to hear what you want to hear about. What guests and issues would you like to have covered in a future episode? Write us at [email protected] Mode is on BlueSky, Instagram, Substack, and you can join our Preshies Facebook group. Help is available right away.The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988 or 1-800-273-8255, 1-800-273-TALKCrisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741.International suicide hotline numbers available here: https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines 

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