Mental Depression

We listen to a 1983 interview with psychologist Timothy Leary, a 1990 interview with spiritual leader Ram Dass and a 2018 interview with How to Change Your Mind author Michael Pollan.

For much of his life, humorist John Moe has dealt with clinical depression that's triggered by stress. Now, faced with the COVID-19 crisis, he says, "my depression wants to flare up."

Actor Zoe Kazan describes her new HBO series, The Plot Against America, as "scarily prescient." The show, which is adapted from Philip Roth's 2004 novel, is set in the U.S. between 1940 and 1942, and imagines a world in which aviator Charles Lindbergh has defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the race for the presidency, moving the country toward fascism.

This week, we're listening back to some favorite Fresh Air interviews from the past decade. In 2016, Springsteen reflected on how he and his music were shaped by home, roots, family and community.

As a black gay kid growing up in Texas in the 1990s, poet Saeed Jones remembers getting negative messages about his identity from every aspect of his life. It was around the time of Matthew Shepard's murder in Wyoming, and Jones felt alone and unsafe.

Four years ago, Eels founder Mark Oliver Everett decided to take a break. After 25 years of making music, he says, "I got to the point where if you do any one thing too much in your life, it catches up to you and makes it clear that you need to do something else."

Gethard's one-man show Career Suicide, which debuts Saturday on HBO, is a comedy about "suicide, depression, alcoholism and all the other funniest parts of life." Originally broadcast Oct. 24, 2016.

On her Hyperbole and a Half blog, Allie Brosh writes stories about her life illustrated with a "very precise crudeness." Most are lighthearted — about her dog or her favorite grammatical mistake ("a lot" vs. "alot) — but her most popular posts have also been the most upsetting, about her crippling depression.

The popular MSNBC host talks about her start in broadcasting, her life and her new book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, in which she argues that America's national defense has become disconnected from public oversight.