Depression

Clancy Martin lives with two incompatible ideas in his head: "I wish I were dead – and I'm glad my suicides failed." He says he wrote his book especially for people struggling with suicidal thoughts.

Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide have risen in recent years. NY Times reporter Matt Richtel says we lack the therapists and treatment centers to care for teens who are suffering.

Sarah Silverman is known for breaking taboos in her comedy. Her new off-Broadway musical The Bedwetter, adapted from her 2010 memoir of the same name, centers on the most humiliating part of her childhood: wetting the bed every night until she was about 16.

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."

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 CBS News correspondent who became famous for his two-fisted interview style and hard-hitting interviews with politicians, celebrities and newsmakers died Saturday. He was 93. Fresh Air remembers Wallace with excerpts from a 2005 interview.

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.

Lars von Trier's Melancholia stars Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg as sisters who undergo a psychological transformation as disaster approaches. Critic David Edelstein says the film is a sublime fusion of form and content with a truly Wagnerian climax. (Recommended)

The actress stars in Lars von Trier's new psychological drama Melancholia, about depression and the end of the world. She talks about making the film and about working with Von Trier, whose controversial remarks about Hitler got him kicked out of this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Anesthesiologist Emery Brown explains what physicians know — and what they don't know — about the effects of anesthesia. Unlocking its mysteries, he says, will help scientists better understand consciousness and sleep — and could lead to better treatments for pain, sleep disorders and depression.

Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom has been called "a masterpiece" by Time Magazine and has received rave reviews from critics. Franzen talks about the runaway success of his previous novel The Corrections, and the strong reaction elicited by Freedom.

Tom Ford has put his creative sensibilities to work in the service of a Christopher Isherwood tale: A Single Man, which marks Ford's big-screen directorial debut.

Charles Reynolds teaches at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and directs research into late-life mood disorders; now he has co-written a book about depression in the elderly and how to treat it. It's titled Living Longer Depression Free: A Family Guide to Recognizing, Treating, and Preventing Depression in Later Life.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer William Styron died Wednesday of pneumonia at the age of 81. Styron's books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Confessions of Nat Turner (which won the Pulitzer) and Sophie's Choice, which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Meryl Streep. His memoir Darkness Visible detailed his struggles with depression and suicidal impulses. This interview originally aired on Sept. 19, 1990.

Former gubernatorial first lady Kitty Dukakis and writer Larry Tye discuss their new book, Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy. Dukakis, the wife of former Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, battled depression for over 20 years. She says electroconvulsive therapy dramatically changed her life for the better.