Depresh Mode with John Moe

The title of Elizabeth Roberts’ new book, In Praise of Addiction, is likely to catch your attention, maybe even set off some cognitive dissonance in your mind. But the University of Michigan’s Elizabeth Roberts doesn’t want you to be unhealthy or take up new habits that can hurt you and others, she just wants you to consider that maybe we haven’t been looking at addiction with the clearest of eyes. Why are some substances and habits tolerated and others scorned, their users told by society to abstain and isolated until they do? In her time living in Mexico, she noticed a big difference between people who drank or did drugs to cut themselves off from society versus those who used substances to connect with one another. She offers her analysis on how this was impacted by NAFTA and the War on Drugs in Mexico and puritanism and capitalism in the United States. This is a complicated issue but it’s pretty healthy to challenge assumptions and to take a look at how those assumptions came to be established in the first place.

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 depreshmode@maximumfun.org.

Depresh 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-TALK

Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741.

International suicide hotline numbers available here: https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines

Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joindepresh

British-born, LA-based author and illustrator Gemma Correll had a couple of reasons to choose  the motif of an amusement park for her new anxiety book, Anxietyland. One, she loves amusement parks and wanted to be able to write off a Disneyland trip as a research expedition. And also, there are so many great metaphors to be found there like emotional rollercoasters and a worry-go-round. With hilarious candor, Gemma shares her own story about fearing coyotes would eat her pets (there are no coyotes in England), taking endless flights of stairs to avoid elevators, and dealing with alcohol, who becomes a friend but not, ultimately, a good one.

Secretary of Health & Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is, to put it mildly, a skeptic of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) medication, a form of meds that millions of Americans use regularly with tremendous benefit. He was once on SSRIs, went off them, then became addicted to heroin, and he believes these events are linked. He also believes they cause school shootings and cause harm to developing fetuses. There is no evidence to support this. Andrea Salinas, a Democrat who represents the 6th district in Oregon in the House of Representatives, joins us to unpack Kennedy’s latest efforts to curtail SSRI use and availability and what her minority party is doing to answer the threat.

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 depreshmode@maximumfun.org.

Depresh 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-TALK

Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741.

International suicide hotline numbers available here: https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines

Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joindepresh

Secretary of Health & Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is, to put it mildly, a skeptic of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) medication, a form of meds that millions of Americans use regularly with tremendous benefit. He was once on SSRIs, went off them, then became addicted to heroin, and he believes these events are linked. He also believes they cause school shootings and cause harm to developing fetuses. There is no evidence to support this. Andrea Salinas, a Democrat who represents the 6th district in Oregon in the House of Representatives, joins us to unpack Kennedy’s latest efforts to curtail SSRI use and availability and what her minority party is doing to answer the threat.

Then we’re joined by journalist Jason Gale, author of the book After Covid: The Health Impacts That Will Last Generations, for an update on the long-term mental health effects of the pandemic’s trauma and of long covid.

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 depreshmode@maximumfun.org.

Depresh 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-TALK

Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741.

International suicide hotline numbers available here: https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines

Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joindepresh

Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joindepresh

If you’ve ever listened to Robyn Hitchcock’s music, you know that it can get pretty surrealistic. Some might say divinely bizarre and eclectic. Others might just say weird. All of that’s fine with the London-born, Nashville-based artist, who has been putting out music on his own and with The Soft Boys and The Egyptians for half a century. Robyn says he’s very happy to be in touch with a world beyond the view of the average human and enjoys communicating that world to the rest of us. Part of it has to do, he says, with being pretty solidly on the spectrum and seeing that not as a hindrance but an opportunity. He tells us about such matters as feathery Mexican serpent gods, polka dot shirts, the lives of Syd Barrett and Roger Barrett, and his partnership with his wife and record label head Emma Swift, who was on our show a few months ago.

Our host John Moe is a big Robyn fan and wrote five introductions to this episode. If you want to skip them (and you’d be really missing out), the interview itself begins around [12:13].

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 depreshmode@maximumfun.org.

Depresh 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-TALK

Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741.

International suicide hotline numbers available here: https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines

Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joindepresh

There is no Tom behind TOMS Shoes. It’s short for “Tomorrow’s.” There is a Blake, however. Blake Mycoskie founded the company in 2006 under the model that for every pair sold, a second pair would be donated to children in the developing world. TOMS took off, which meant years of constant work for Blake, traveling the world telling the TOMS story, and ultimately getting burned out and selling the company. Despite all the snowboarding he could now do, Blake found himself without purpose and lonely (all his friends worked at the company he just quit because those were the only people he had time to see.) His mental health crashed. He became depressed and anxious for the first time ever, considered suicide, and traveled the world trying every kind of treatment he could find. In the end, getting off meds that were wrong for him and good therapy helped him find the core wound that had been driving him all those years and set out to address it. Blake Mycoskie has a new podcast, No Magic Pill, about how people seek to solve their problems.

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 depreshmode@maximumfun.org.

Depresh 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-TALK

Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741.

International suicide hotline numbers available here: https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines

Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joindepresh