The Mental Illness Happy Hour

Oh boy! Is that Lexapro for me?!

As I mentioned in my last post, I am loving the podcasts. I don't know why it took me so long to get on board, because I have always been a fan of listening to people talk more than listening to music. Back when I was a little kid, maybe nine or ten, I was obsessed with the TV show Friends, which was still current, though I mostly watched it in syndication on whatever channel it was playing for an hour every day after school. My parents had a rule that we couldn't have TV or computers in our rooms, an idea that now seems archaic, especially with regards to computers, but made sense in the 90s. Even if I had had a computer  this was years before podcasts or streaming existed, and I wasn't a little Einstein, ready to tune into NPR. So what I did was take my tape recorder and set it by the TV, and tape ten or eleven episodes of Friends, stopping it during commercials and hitting play soon as it came back on. Then, I would listen to an audio only episode of Friends as I cleaned my room. I haven't listened to those tapes for about 16 years, but I can still recite ten random episodes of Friends by heart if they ever come on when I'm watching bad TV in a hotel room.

You guys, is Jennifer Aniston a vampire? She does not age.

It's exactly this type of odd childhood behavior that makes the Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast resonate with me so much. 

Created and hosted by comedian Paul Gilmartin, it is a "weekly, hour-long audio podcast consisting of interviews with artists, friends and the occasional doctor. The show is geared towards anyone interested in or affected by depression, addiction and other mental challenges which are so prevalent in the creative arts."

Gilmartin is best known for his years hosting TBS's Dinner and a Movie, and is also a stand up comedian with a lot of famous, funny, creative friends, who he invites on the podcast where they discuss their various mental illnesses, how they grew up, and how they've dealt with their issues as they've gotten older. 

Sometimes the show can be a little off-putting at first. I fully embrace total honesty, and I was still a little bit taken aback with how frank Gilmartin is about his mother sexually abusing him, or the various listener emails he reads about sexual perversions, sometimes dealing with zoophilia, or pedophilia, or lots of other taboo, illegal philias.

However, that's usually only the first ten or so minutes, and then Gilmartin really starts exploring the life and mind of his guest, and that tends to be fascinating, especially, for me, when the guests are women whom I greatly admire and respect, such as comedians Jamie Denbo, Morgan Murphy, or Jen Kirkman.

Jen Kirkman is a funny, beautiful lady. She should talk to Jennifer Aniston to ensure this doesn't change!

In each of their episodes, all three hilarious women talk very insightfully about their various issues—

for the first two depression, and for Jen Kirkman, anxiety—and how these problems have affected and in a way, created, their lives.

It's no surprise creative, driven people often have a lot of mental illness to deal with. One way to deal with the feeling that you are going crazy and there is nothing you can do about it is to make jokes-the kind of cutting, honest humor that is the funniest kind. At the same time, and I speak from experience, that level of emotional or mental pain tends to make someone highly perceptive to the people and world around them, which seems to be a shared trait of a lot of creative people.

And on top of all that, these are also successful people. Creative people already tend to have tons of mental shit to deal with, but top that off with a butt load of drive, and you have a recipe for crazy.

I deal with anxiety, and I find it very comforting to hear so many people I admire and look up to talk so openly about it. It also leaves me feeling very lucky; all of my anxiety come from within. I was never sexually, verbally, or physically abused, and listening to the stories of so many people who have gives me the utmost respect for how they've dealt with that. At the same time, it's also nice to listen to the episodes of people more like me, people like Jen Kirkman, who's had a relatively pleasant life but was just born with a weird chemical imbalance which makes her "crazy" just because!

If you've read all this and are still interested rather than put off,  you can listen to The Mental Illness Happy Hour here or download episodes on itunes.

See you next time with a slightly less depressing obsession, I swear it!