Content Warning: This episode discusses suicide, depression, and substance use disorder.
Behind the scenes at In This Family, is our program’s producer, John Moe. Outside of the show, John hosts his own mental health podcast, Depresh Mode with John Moe, and is the author of the best-selling memoir, The Hilarious World of Depression. John shares his earliest experiences with major depressive disorder, years before he understood that this condition was actually very common and had a name. Mental health wasn’t talked about much in the culture in general when John was growing up or in his household in particular, where John connects his late father’s substance use disorder with alcohol to a traumatic childhood, spent under Nazi occupation in Norway. John also talks about the still echoing effects of his older brother’s death by suicide and the approach he takes to the subject of mental health with his own children.
