Presenting: P.E. Moskowitz on Whether Your Mind is Broken or the World Is (with Depresh Mode)

0:00Hi there, it's YoA, I am so excited to tell you about Radiotopia's newest show, Amityvilleville. Alex Goldman, host of HyperFixed and from a host of Reply All, teams up with his close friend, journalist and supernatural phenomena enthusiast Caroline Thompson to review all 91 movies in the Amityville franchise. Inspired by the true story of the defaio family murders in 1974, the Amityville horror became the second highest grossing movie when it came out in 1979, spawning books, documentaries, and of course a sprawling and bizarre film franchise. Along the way, some enterprising filmmakers, they realized that you can't copyright the name Amityville, which has led to a total of 91 movies in the franchise, including titles like Amityville Elevator, Amityville Outhouse, Amityville Job Interview, even Amityville in space. Yes, these are all real movies. The show will feature recaps of all 91 movies in the order they were released, and there

1:04will also be special one-off episodes featuring interviews with people involved in the making of the films, or even in the investigation of the alleged haunting at one 12-ocean avenue in Amityville, New York. The show weaves cinema, pop culture, true crime, the ghost hunter industrial complex, and a couple of horror fans chopping it up. Don't miss it. Amityvilleville, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. It's YoA. If you're new to the show, welcome. On Proxy, people bring me very specific emotional conundrums, the kinds of problems that make them feel alone, and I go looking for a stranger who's lived something close enough to help them get a little less stuck. If you want to try a classic proxy case, a great place to start is an episode by Sexual Life Guy, and if you haven't already follow the show, we got a new season of cases coming mid-April. In the meantime, I have been sharing episodes from shows that I think proxy listeners will

2:08appreciate. Shows that make space for honest, real, raw conversations about the emotional parts of being human. This episode comes from DepreshVode, hosted by the comedian John Moe. Besides having a great name for a podcast, proxy engineer Kyle laughed for, I think a full 15 seconds when I told him about the show. DepreshVode is a show where John talks with artists, writers, comedians, and all kinds of thoughtful people about mental health, the messy, complicated reality of it. What I love about this show is how much room it gives to people to be open about the things we usually keep quiet. If you have ever found yourself stuck in your head trying to make sense of your feelings, I think you'll enjoy it. Today's episode is an interview with journalist P.E. Mosquitz about a big question. When your mind feels broken, is it you or is it the world?

3:13This is John Moe from DepreshVode. We won't play the whole song, it's super long, but we will play the very, very beginning. Cut it there, not doing the skirmish or mama parts, just that first part. It's what I've thought for a while about mental health issues, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, thought about it even more after this week's interview. Are these problems a distortion of reality, a distortion of the truth, a work of imagination, fantasy?

4:13Or is this the real life? Do we get immobilized by depression and anxiety because we see the truth about how the world is? We see the truth of the traumas we've been through. In short, is it me or is it the world? Me or them? It's an important question to at least consider, even if it's not easily answered, because it applies to how we address these interesting minds that many of us seem to be stuck with. If it's fantasy, if these conditions cause us to see a distortion of the world, we try to treat our minds by jolting ourselves back to a healthy and pleasant normal, if that exists. If we allow that we're having a rational response to the world and our personal trauma, then we're saying we are the normal ones, and treatment becomes a way of dealing with that reality, grim as it may be, and managing ourselves so we're equipped for that landscape.

5:15A lot of mental health medicine and treatment operates on option one that we're getting it distorted, an effort to help you live in the peaceful, normal world, which is different than the one you're currently in. Maybe we need to explore the help being a way to cope with the grim reality. Maybe we need to look more at option two. It's Depression Mode. I'm John Moe. I'm glad you're here. PE Mosquits is an author and journalist. They're the author of How to Kill a City in 2017 and 2020 is the case against free speech. Their new book is Breaking Awake, a reporter's search for a new life and a new world through drugs. They also run mental health, H-E-L-L-T-H, a newsletter about psychology, psychiatry, and society.

6:15PE is a survivor of a few things, being within inches of a protester, being murdered in Charlottesville, being within blocks of the World Trade Center on 9-11. They've experienced and survived a mental breakdown. They don't want to be defined by diagnostic terms. They see their mental state as part of being in the world as it is. They've been through extensive therapy and they've tried a lot of drugs of the pharmaceutical and street slash recreational varieties in order to feel better. Neither they nor I want to tell you how to manage your own mental health, but I think it's good to think about some different perspectives. Steve Moskowitz, welcome to Depression Mode. Thanks for having me. In thinking about your story, I wonder, should we begin with Charlottesville or begin with

7:179-11 to kind of get at your personal story as your story informs the other things we're also going to talk about? Yeah. I think Charlottesville, even though it happened after 9-11, kind of started the whole breakdown of my life. Then 9-11 appeared in there, so maybe we can start with Charlottesville. Tell me what happened to you in Charlottesville. Yeah, so I was a 27-year-old reporter reporting for a now-defunct news site and also kind of leftist anti-racist activists. So I was there both for this lefty publication in Virginia and also as a counter-protester. Charlottesville was this huge neo-Nazi far-right rally they were trying to save a Confederate statue that was being taken down in this public square there.

8:19And I went down from Philadelphia where I lived at the time with two friends. In a way, it was having a great time being a counter-protester feeling like we were on the right side of history, contributing towards the fight or whatever, and then kind of at the peak moment of this kind of ecstatic feeling that we'd won, that we'd kick the Nazis out of the town that the statue would come down in that we were just fighting for a good cause. James Alexfields, a neo-Nazi drove his Dodge Challenger into the crowd of protesters and I was a few feet away and he killed an anti-racist activist Heather Haier and I saw bodies flying and I lost my friends in the crowd and dropped my phone and had other people blood on me and you know the whole scenario I guess lasted maybe five minutes and in

9:21that time I think my entire nervous system, my entire psyche was kind of wrecked. But it took me, it took me a while to realize that that's what had happened. Yeah, you write about how you didn't fall apart right there on the spot, you went and finished your article and you made phone calls and sent emails. How long after that did things start to fall apart? About a month and very suddenly I think what I realized with hindsight was that I was extremely good at suppression, as a repression of my feelings at that point in my life without even being aware that that's what I was doing. But the month after Charlottesville I just kind of kept my head down, I kept ignoring this kind of anxious bubbling feeling I was having and then I was on a work trip to Oakland, California to give a talk on my first book and was in a hotel room and woke

10:25up one morning feeling like I was in a completely different universe. My hands were shaking. I felt like I was being chased by a pack of wild animals, basically I couldn't stop moving if I did sit down. It felt like all the energy coursing through me would shoot up into my brain and then cause me out of a panic attack. I basically just had a mental breakdown and it was terrifying in and of itself, but it was also just terrifying not understanding what was happening to me, not understanding how it could feel so out of control of my brain and body. Had you had panic attacks previously? I had a few kind of like normal run of the male panic attacks during a big move from one city to another kind of getting overwhelmed and feeling like oh no am I having a heart attack or you know am I going crazy or something. I had a few of those and then they would subside after you know an hour or something and

11:30I could recognize them as panic attacks. So when this happened it felt much more intense and then also just didn't stop. So I kept thinking oh this is just a panic attack except every hour, every day and then every week it just kept going. So what did you do it kept compounding over the course of several weeks. What did you do about it? In the immediate term I called my therapist who told me calm me down a little bit just enough to make me realize I could survive and get back to Philadelphia and he told me to take a clonipin which I thankfully had carried on me since I had had a few panic attacks and the clonipin really really really really really helped it just helped me not feel like I was about to die at any given moment and eventually got back to I went to New York

12:32where I'm from where my parents live to stay with them because I was not capable of living a normal adult independently at that point and they're both psychoanalysts actually and they helped me they helped explain to me that you know this kind of made sense that people go through periods like this sometimes where you know there's this perfect storm of things that happened and your brain is overwhelmed and it takes a while but you have to sort through it and then after a few weeks went back to Philadelphia started going to therapy three times a week and then the next essentially year two years of my life were just healing from that trying to get back to a stable baseline where my nervous system was not a wreck. And I feel compelled to ask about your experiences as a child during 9-11 because that that was another trauma that certainly informs your your history tell me about what happened to you then.

13:36Yeah so when I was 13 my middle school was two blocks from the World Trade Center and I was in school when the first plane hit in Spanish class and the building shook in my notebook dropped to the floor and we were all ushered down to the cafeteria and that's when the second plane hit and then my friend's mom took him and me and about eight other kids out of the school because she was convinced that the building was going to collapse and we all thought she was crazy and then as we were crossing the street on the west side highway just seeing people falling out of the building seeing people with blood and dust on their faces walking towards our my friend's house the tower in fact did collapse and we had to run away from the from the kind of plume that was chasing after us and then when we got back to my friend's house the

14:38second tower collapsed and we thought our whole school had died because it fell kind of in the direction of her school thankfully everyone was fine but we were out of school for about six months and I was I was a teen I didn't know really what trauma was it's not that I I don't think I was purposely trying to suppress it but I just I just think it's too much for any 13-year-old to handle something like that and so even though I went to therapy I just didn't understand how it affected me and I think that kind of just went in another box in my brain and to never be opened again and obviously Charlottesville and 9-11 aren't like directly related but Charlottesville was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back like I just had too much pent up behind this wall in my brain and all of a sudden this event opened it all so when Charlottesville happened and when my my nervous breakdown happened after Charlottesville it turned out that I didn't only have to sort

15:44through Charlottesville I had to sort through the terror I felt during 9-11 and sort through my my family's history you know come I come from a family of Holocaust survivors there's always this kind of feeling within my family of like the next terrible thing is is gonna happen right yeah sudden terrible violence can happen when you least expect it is sort of the theme yeah yeah and then in a way it's like these two events prove that that was very true anything that that triggered this kind of ancestral trauma or like things I just that had been imparted to me subconsciously by my parents and grandparents and and that in a way was one of the hardest things to get over I'm not sure I am over it but just this idea that even if you're safe any given moment that who knows what the next what the next thing might be has that made you hyper vigilant your whole life like just expecting something terrible is gonna happen uh yeah I mean I think I've worked

16:48on it a lot a lot a lot a lot in the past seven years but it's still something I struggle with as I write in the book like one of the biggest uh things I work through in therapy is this feeling of of of happiness or or feeling like free or untethered to anything i.e not hyper vigilant that that almost in itself is a trigger because when when my subconscious when my nervous system realizes that I'm not on guard that I've let myself be vulnerable that I've let myself you know have a fun night with friends or or you know hug out with a guy and had good sex if I'm allowed to talk about that on this podcast but you know just anything anything that provides a kind of joy but is vulnerable all of a sudden the the other part of my brain says hold on you've let your guard down and then I that's that can trigger a panic attack and so working through that has been really hard because it feels like this kind of catch 22 of like I'm trying to

17:52become happier and freer and less uh less you know beholden to my kind of PTSD but then when I do that it it triggers the PTSD yeah well I want to ask about um about drugs here in a minute but I want to ask you also about you know if if somebody hears oh P mask was had a mental breakdown in Oakland this is what it happened and then and then it was a long journey from that I think the natural human instinct is to say oh well when did they get over it how long did it last when was it finally done and it's sort of part of the thesis of of what you write about as I understand it that um that it's not something to be solved and walked away from but is it fair to say it becomes an evolution of who you are yeah I think it it transforms you and there's no way for it not to

18:55and I think one of the most painful parts of the process of healing is that there is no going back to this kind of like pre pre traumatized state and it was really painful to try for for years in therapy I just wanted to be fixed that I wanted to to not have the brain I had now I wanted to have the brain I had before uh Charlottesville you know and and the more I accepted that this had to transform me in some way the easier the the healing got but I think in our in our culture in the way we usually talk about mental health it is so much about cure right it's it's um we give ourselves as narrative of like you know you were sick or anxious or traumatized and then you took the right pill or you went to the right kind of therapy or whatever and then you're fixed um and

19:56I think that not only does that not work for everyone it also kind of disenables the positive aspects of of this kind of transformation not that there's any kind of silver lining to trauma because like no one should have to go through any of that kind of stuff but um but I feel like a different and in many ways better version of myself than they did before uh my mental breakdown because it allowed me to explore what I really wanted what was really important important to me my own identity um my own relation to my work in the world and and I I now feel more open to the world I now feel more open to like a kind of hippie-dippy like love thy neighbor like everyone than it together kind of you know I just have a lot more love in my heart now frankly than I did before um and I feel more vulnerable I feel less like capable of living life in a kind of normative capitalist productive sense but I feel I feel like I've I've changed and and I kind of

21:01wouldn't trade that for anything in the world more with PE mosquits in a moment hey I wanted to quickly tell you about another podcast this is one that I'm not hosting but I am producing it's called in this family and it's all about the connection between mental health and families the families were born into the ones we create what mental health issues we inherit from genes or environment and what we do or don't pass on we have guests like Gary Gullman Dr. Joseph Lee from Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation Maria Bamford is coming up it gets really fascinating look for in this family wherever you get your podcasts this show is supported by Odoo when you buy business software from lots of vendors the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing Odoo solves this it's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple

22:06and affordable way you can save money without missing out on the features you need check out ododod.com that's odod.com taking care of your eyes shouldn't be a hassle that's why Warby Parker is a one-stop shop for all your vision needs our prescription glasses and sunglasses are expertly crafted and unexpectedly affordable stop by a nearby store or use our app to virtually try on frames and get personalized recommendations did we mention we offer i exams and take vision insurance to for everything you need to see head to your nearest Warby Parker store or visit warbyparker.com today that's warbyparker.com I just went the weekend with some friends and they're extremely cute toddlers and so I'm excited to let them and you know about a great podcast called The Longest Shortest Time. The show is hosted by OG Hillary Frank and she covers all aspects of parenthood and reproductive health she's got an episode about sex ed at her daughter school

23:06there's one about birth control and the FAA and another that follows the journey of a single trans dad but she also talks to plenty of non-parents so you don't have to be a parent to listen the stories are surprising fun edgy poignant they'll give you all the feels the show was on hiatus for five years and I'm so excited that it's back now with new episodes find the Longest Shortest Time in all podcast apps or at longashortistime.com we're back talking with P.E. Mosquitz author of Breaking Awake a reporter search for a new life and a new world through drugs well let's it's funny I was going to ask as in my notes I was going to ask what guided your experience through the use of and I paused to say medication or drugs which of course mean the same thing

24:07but as you point out they have a different they carry different meanings in in our society having to do with class and race and cast and and all these other things let's talk about that a little bit first why do we why do we use different names for the same thing here right I mean I think so probably unsurprisingly as with everything in America it comes down to like a history of racism um you know back in the 1800s early 1900s when there was a lot of immigration to America there was this idea that that there were Chinese men who were like capturing white women and bringing them to opium dens and corrupting them and so this idea that opium the illegal bad drug was was harmful was was you know what everyone thought with the New York Times and every other media institution would write about the kind this kind of menace that's plaguing white society that's

25:09the fault of of immigrants right and then at the same time white people were being prescribed opiates from their doctors at higher rates than people were doing opium so like everyone was kind of high on on opiates in this moment in history but it allowed for this kind of sheen of of respectability to a drug to see it as a medication so it's like you know bad illegal drug for for the and good regulated medication for me and and I think we still see that history playing playing out today where um you know Adderall and other ADHD drugs are extremely extremely similar chemically to to street speed and if you ask someone who who does illegal speed if you take enough Adderall it feels like speed because it is speed um and that doesn't mean it's bad but it means that these are essentially the same drugs but people without privilege who you know through no fault

26:10with their own just you know we're born with less money born in the wrong location whatever don't have access to the the doctors the the system by which your speed comes to regulated tested in in normal small doses you don't get to go to a psychiatrist or uh or any kind of psychopharmacologist or whatever for every week or month or whatever and and check in so instead you're you're you're you're trying to solve many of the same issues that someone like me I take Adderall almost every day and it helps a lot but the people who are taking illegal drugs many ways trying to do the same thing um they're trying to ameliorate their pains they're trying to feel less anxious or more focused or like they can make it through the day we just we've relegated them to this dark underbelly world where they're using drugs and we're using medications you mentioned clonipin is that is that a med that you

27:15is that as far back as you go I guess with with meds and how how long were you on that and what does it do yeah so clonipin is a benzodiazepine uh like zanix is probably it's more popular cousin and uh I was prescribed it for a for occasional panic attacks it's not something that's great to take on a daily basis because your brain adjusts to it pretty quickly and then without it you go through withdrawal and um probably become more anxious but basically what it does is just like calm down the the receptors in your brain that are responsible for for your nervous system telling you to to be anxious um and so it works like a charm um and it's very similar to drugs that have been around for you know 75 years at this point you know very similar to the ones like uh you know mothers that will help her the the the rolling stone song was about housewives taking uh valium which is essentially the same thing as as clonipin um and I found it extremely helpful

28:22I you know if I had a panic attack every time I would wake up in the morning after my my breakdown and feel like I was being chased by a pack of wolves or whatever clonipin didn't solve any of that because I still needed to like rework my nervous system explore my trauma therapy do all of that healing but clonipin one gave me a break from that so that I didn't feel like I couldn't do it like it without that I think I just would have been too stressed and feeling too crazy all the time I needed a mental break um but I think more importantly what it did is show show my brain that there was a future that didn't feel as horrible as the present because I once I took a clonipin I was like oh that version of me is still in there the version of me that can sit on a couch and look at my phone without having a panic attack still exists and so it gave me in a way something to fight for um and that's how I feel about a lot of drugs is it's less about their effect and more

29:24about the kind of lesson you can take from them that through an altered state you you can see a different version of yourself or the world or life or just a different perspective and then take that with you when you're not on the drug I wanted to ask about SSRIs or antidepressants in general how did you're thinking on that substance how has that evolved through the years because that's such a that's taken so commonly by so many people right I've been on various antidepressants for years throughout my life and again they were helpful um when I was maybe a year out of of my mental breakdown and still really struggling but not in such a crisis state anymore but still so near crisis state um I began taking this drug effectser which is an SNRI which is basically the same thing as an SSRI but I won't get in trouble you know slight mechanical differences or whatever slightly different but yeah yeah from the same same idea basically um and it really

30:28helped calm down my anxiety helped me have fewer panic attacks the problem is that it also calm down everything else so the kind of ecstasy and joy one is capable of feeling in life to me felt very muted on that drug um there was this moment where I you know was uh with my boyfriend and realized that like I couldn't feel the joy of sex right and then there was another moment where I was with my parents in the in the bayou in Louisiana where I was living in New Orleans at the time and we're in this beautiful uh kind of alien landscape that you know just should have made me feel this kind of like awe and wonder and instead I just felt kind of nothing um and then the last straw for me was driving which I love driving um and uh I love cars I'm just like a car nerd and driving and listening to to corn that the heavy metal band and like I knew that I

31:30should be kind of having goosebumps and feeling exhilarated and again instead I felt nothing and I realized that I couldn't live my my life like that um especially as a writer like I need to be able to feel things in order to to understand them and and to write about them effectively and I'm not against any drug I think SSRIs are great for many people I think the difference between something like an SSRI and uh clonopin let's say is that SSRIs are often viewed not as tools but as cures um they're they're not seen as like modifiers of of behavior or thoughts or or or feelings they're seen as kind of like you have a chemical imbalance and this fixes it and I think that disenables people from from understanding their their uses and their drawbacks um I think it it's very different to prescribe someone an SSRI and say like okay for the next year while you're going through a particularly hard time you'll take this and then also in combination with that

32:33go to therapy do other things that help you figure out what's causing all the anxiety and depression right um instead what usually happens is the vast majority of people who are prescribed SSRIs get them from their primary care doctor they don't even get to see a mental health specialist and they're put on them for years and years and years and often entire lifetimes um and so again I'm not against any drug but I'm against a system that completely individualizes our mental health and a system that sees drugs as the end all be all only solution and basically just like says like put you on a pill fix you goodbye right it I mean a lot of people uh including people I've talked to on the show I've asked directly about this I have said you know I will take that bargain I will give up my highs my you know super highs I'll give up transcendent joy if it means that these crashing loads that I don't have to deal with you know are are gone like

33:38which can lead to suicidality in many cases right that that level of despair you know I'll trade I'll trade the high and low in order in order to establish a middle totally and if that's what one wants to do then go for it but I think the thing I think the thing that pisses me off is that we're not given many other options and an ideal world I mean I'm in an incredibly privileged position for several reasons like one just like monetarily I can afford years of therapy I can afford to explore things like bodywork and you know acupuncture and yoga and all these things all the other modalities of healing and then I'm privileged in the sense of like this is my job is to figure out what's going on with my brain and like what modifiers of of my brain work best um so a lot of people that that is their only option is to kind of take that that compromise of you know maybe this makes me feel a little numb or a little less creative or whatever but at least I

34:41don't feel despondent all the time and that's fine I just wish that people were given that the myriad other tools that are available but those tools take time they're more expensive insurance doesn't cover things like somatic therapy and and bodywork and stuff like that usually so I think it's we're given this kind of false choice where it's like either you take this and you feel numb but okay or you don't take it and you want to kill yourself all the time but we're thinking way too small like there there's such a larger world out there of healing and possibility and I just instead of faulting anyone person for taking anyone drug I just want everyone to have that many options I mean it's I've been doing this show and another one very much like it since 2016 I've done tons and tons of interviews and there's a handful of questions that I I keep coming back to because I don't feel like I can ever answer them um and

35:42and one of them is especially with with depression with major depressive disorder is is this um a warping of reality or is this a rational response to uh the world that we live in to the politics that we live in through the social climate we live in through the environmental climate that we live in and and you you write in your book so perhaps asking whether anti-depressants or any other mental health medication is effective is too small a question perhaps a better one would be why are we also depressed in the first place do you think that what we're all calling depression is just clear-eyed reality of the horror of the truth um I think it's it's both to to vastly oversimplify Freud he basically believed that like depression was a kind of form of anger

36:44turned inwards that you know there are these these energetic flows of like you feel abused or mistreated or you feel angry at a person or whatever it may be and you internalize that you don't have enough release of that and it turns into you know depression anxiety or whatever other neuroses because that that kind of anger is still trapped within you so I think I think in a way there's no way to feel normally healthy period at all within our society currently I think that that that is the wrong goal that we shouldn't be going for that because you know the metaphor I often give is like if you go to therapy or you take a medication or whatever it may be I feel like often what we're doing is like there's this polluted lake with a bunch of fish in it where all the fish and uh and the pollution the polluted lake is making all the fish sick by taking an antidepressant by going to therapy whatever individualist solution one has to to feeling depressed um it's like

37:50we're picking the fish up out of the water and giving it medicine and then throwing it right back into the polluted lake right and so that's that's how I feel uh in terms of in terms of depression is like yes it is kind of impossible to cure in any kind of societal level um or any kind of individual level when it's what society is doing to so many of us but that being said that doesn't mean you shouldn't give the fish medicine right like like there are ways to feel better at an individual level there are ways to feel like even if you even if you end up right back in that same pond you still deserve to be out of it getting the medicine for uh for a bit maybe this is a bad metaphor I don't know but no it's working I think but yeah I mean I think I think that you know just it's it's both like there's no way to to to feel 100% normal or cured in this society that being said like you deserve to be able to try you deserve to have these opportunities to get that kind of

38:53anger that's been imparted into by society out to have to have places and spaces to mourn to grieve to feel your pain and not feel like it's all within you more with author PE mosquets in a moment this show is supported by blue land living a cleaner and more sustainable lifestyle by reducing single use plastics is a small action that makes a big difference and blue land is on a mission to make it easy for everyone to make those sustainable choices they believe that hardworking clean products can be the norm not the exception so that you can do better for your family and the planet at the

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41:05you've taken a variety of substances some prescription things you pick up at a pharmacy other things that you know that you pick up at a party or you pick up from a friend is there is there a difference between one group and the other group in terms of how they've made you feel or does it just depend on the the substance and the context in which you're consuming it to determine how helpful it is the ones you pick up at a party are are more fun but no I mean I think I you know I've started to just view drugs medications which are drugs all as just tools and tools can be used in in productive and negative ways I am on Adderall as I said now and it's tremendously helpful at keeping me able to do my work and not feel like my life is falling apart but I have been on Adderall when I was like 15 and was a drug

42:09addict and was like abusing it and that is no different than you know basically doing speed from the street so so it can be helpful it can be harmful and same with same thing with illegal drugs you know Kenamine helped me envision a life in which I was no longer so traumatized I tell the story in the book of laying down in my house in New Orleans with my best friend who also was in Charlottesville with me we were kind of PTSD buddies together and doing Kenamine and listening to a Lady Gaga help them and just feeling this feeling of floating above my body and seeing my my life from a bird's eye view and and that helping me realize that I I did indeed have a future and so I I just think at the end of the day they're all they're all tools and I think the context with in with which you take those tools is really important too um if you're doing

43:12Kenamine treatments at at a infusion center for example that can be really helpful but I think one of the things one of the healing potentials of drugs is through their context like when I've taken Kenamine or LSD and I've been at a rave surrounded by a thousand sweaty people in feeling like to you know to butcher the quote of Eric from a psychoanalyst from the 60s like to feel like but a drop of water on the crest of a wave in the ocean or whatever of your fellow man right like that that feeling of community that feeling of a deep ecstasy and possibility of what it can mean to all come together and feel free from the bounds of of normative society like that that's enabled by both being with people but also being on on certain kinds of drugs right and I think unfortunately what's happened is we have destigmatized a lot of these drugs which is good like we've

44:15destigmatized Kenamine we've seen it as a legitimate treatment of depression we're doing studies on MDMA and LSD and psilocybin and and uh seeing how how well they affect PTSD or depression that's all great but at the same time I think it de contextualizes these things so that we don't realize that part of the reason they're so helpful is because they enable certain certain uh ways of being in in the real world um and so I just I just worry that we kind of neuter the efficacy of these drugs when we try to turn them into quote unquote medications because people are seeing the drugs as the solution as opposed to the state of mind as opposed as a tool like you said uh to the the state of mind that would be for lack of a better term better mental health yeah I mean I think when I am at a underground rave and in bushwick or whatever and I'm on Kenamine and I'm dancing with

45:18someone and feeling feeling like wow maybe a better future is possible maybe uh maybe like this feeling of of togetherness and this feeling of joy is something that it can bring into my life more that if we abolished capitalism that it would be more common to have these moments of togetherness and joy right um that that isn't able to buy this drug but if I am in a ketamine infusion clinic I just don't think you get the same you the answer your brain gives you is a different answer right and so that doesn't mean that it's bad but I think drugs can be like modifiers of your psyche and your emotions so that you fit back into the current system better so that you can concentrate on work better you know like silicone valley uh tech bros are like obsessed with micro dosing all forms of drugs to heighten their productivity and so they can code better um and that to me

46:19is not the highest invest use of any of these substances so to me it's it's less about like whether the substance is good or bad it's about like how are you using the tool what context are you operating in and like is that is that to envision a better future for yourself or the world or is that to optimize yourself to fit into our current shape world now not all of us listening to the show um are going to be at an underground raven in bushwick why not most of us rarely get invited i'm more likely to be at the trader jose and saint paul and so and which gets me to the question about uh the availability of some of these substances legalization of some of these substances i mean i i write a newsletter for our show every week and just just today the day that we're taping this interview there was a story about the massive relief for generalized anxiety disorder that comes with a single larger dosage of lsd like they tried it on a smaller

47:26dosage no different than placebo they tried it on a larger dosage huge relief for months and months at a time from a a single dosage and i thought well that that's fascinating but i'm not going to be able to get that at Walgreens anytime soon um and so do you do you see that narrowing um you know to a point where i mean you you write about it in the book like when prosak became availability available available you know like it was heralded as this new change milltown or or valium all all these things um do you think that is coming for some of these other substances so that somebody who goes to trader jose and saint paul can have the same experience as somebody in an underground raven bushwick i think that will probably never reach a point where you can like get at plus you got to go to our trader jose it's just amazing sorry um i i'm more of a all-d shopper i

48:28think okay all right but i think that will never reach a point where pharmacies are dispensing like mind altering medication that like makes you trip so that you can like go to a rave like i think that's not i don't think our medical system whatever allow for that but what i do think is is very possible is that these drugs will be formulated into less intense versions of themselves that are more patentable and that cause less kind of mind altering behavior but they can be extremely effective for for things like depression um and i think that that's a great thing i think the problem as you as you were mentioning is like this is what we always do with every drug like milltown this tranquilizer in the 1950s everyone and their mother literally was on it and then you know after 10 years of the and all of america being tranquilized we were like wait whoops this is addictive it has a lot of side effects we probably shouldn't be taking this and then so the prescription drug industry came came back with benzodiazepines like valium and clonipin and same process repeatable

49:35uh finally we have the cure to to the blues or the cure to anxiety right um and then turns out those were addictive and had a lot of side effects and then in the 1980s they came out with a new class of drugs uh anti-dopressants as a psorias where they were like finally we figured out uh what you know how to make a non addictive mental health med that cures everyone's problems um and it turns out that when they have a lot of side effects but two they're they're not working um like they might be working for some people on an individual level but check any any chart of anxiety depression suicide in the united states it's going up and up and up the the drug simply aren't enough and then so i think what i'm worried about with the kind of destigmatization and formative because pharmaceuticalization of of things like kentamine and lst is that we're going to see again these things as as cures um in the same way we viewed ss psorias as cures as opposed to tools and meanwhile we're ignoring that that proverbial polluted lake that that no matter

50:41how much how many drugs you legalize how many medications you give people that we have to stop making people sick in the first place and there is never going to be a pill or anything that that does that um you write in the book i refuse to call my inability to sit still for 10 hours without medication eighty hd and i refuse to call my overwhelmed depression or bipolar disorder psychosis or anything else my problems are based in the real world not in my brain do you believe in the acronyms in in the the dsm diagnoses as as real things or not there's a large misconception amongst the general public with with the dsm and diagnosis in general i you know as i see it talked about online these are these are immovable categories that are are completely scientific and and almost chemical in nature if you have a dhd it's because

51:45you know a brain scan showed you have a dhd and first of all that's not really true but second of all like even the most mainstream psychiatrist acknowledges that these things are clusters of symptoms they're not like immovable uh a movable like it's not like the same thing as like you have a broken leg because you're born as like this adhd is a cluster of symptoms and that's why the dsm changes every few years to change the cluster of symptoms uh and call it something new um so i don't think it should be a controversial opinion to say like diagnosis is not like a material fact it's a it's a way of description of of certain behaviors and reactions to things um and you know if you look at me like i have many of those symptoms and clusters that that are labeled adhd i think the thing that that angers me and the thing that i'm scared of in relying too much on diagnosis is that it almost becomes a form of gasulating

52:49oneself because you start to believe that everything you're experiencing is within your own individuality within your own head within your own own chemical makeup as opposed to legitimate reactions to the world and the world is horrible so like maybe the maybe the reason you feel inattentive is because you hate your job maybe the reason you feel inattentive is because life makes us so anxious that we have energy coursing through our nervous system that it makes it really hard to sit fucking still um and that doesn't mean that you shouldn't get an adhd diagnosis and you shouldn't get prescribed a drug if that would that would help but I do think it means we should stop individualizing and internalizing what are material external problems we should stop essentially convincing ourselves that the world is not at fault that we are at fault because that completely disenables us from from seeing what should be obvious to everyone which is that

53:52you know iavdhd you the person down the street have bipolar you the person next to me has depression but we're all in the same boat we're all dealing with the same thing we're having varied responses to the exact same inputs i had a conversation with with my therapist one time early on when we were meeting and i and i said well you know i think this might be generally gad generalizing anxiety disorder might be in PTSD from this incident and she said john stop it she's like let me tell you those those terms are for insurance purposes right here you know this is this is how we get someone else to help pay for some of your treatment let's talk about life instead yeah exactly and like i think that works yeah i think one of the most helpful parts of therapy for me hasn't been in kind of like diagnosing me with anything it's been in just acknowledging and feeling validated that it makes sense that i feel the ways i do you know

54:56i remember this one session with my therapist a few years ago where i like kind of took stock of everything that had happened to me in life and like everything that was happening in the world and and then being like you know why am i so depressed in my therapist was like i mean he didn't use these words but he was kind of just like what the fuck are you talking about like of course you're depressed like you you almost died you have trauma twice that you have lots of trauma the world is really bad like what what do you expect to feel and that it felt like such a revelation because i was like oh right this isn't my fault and this isn't something i can purely control in my brain it is a legitimate reaction to it to what's happening around me how you were feet away from to deadly terrorist attacks these huge major traumas in your life after after the work that you've put in on those things and and the work you've put in on on your brain and on your happiness and

56:02congratulations on doing all that work where do those things live with you today like how how are they present in your mind today i think in a way they've helped me feel less alone and the healing work i've done has helped me feel less alone because i think you know charlotte's feel for example is like a very direct form of you know the violence of fascism and how that kind of like affects people that you know the kind of violence and energy of anionatsi was in many ways like literally put into my body and then left for for me to deal with and figure out um but let's become obvious to me through my healing and through my writing and then you know reporting in this book is like most people are going through similar things it's just less obvious forms of it right it's like not everyone is having anionatsi try to murder them but everyone is is having the violence of

57:06capitalism of police violence of racism of classism sexism imparted into their psyches on a day-to-day basis and that really breaks people it really you know shuts them down makes them feel lonely and despondent and they're you know and then meanwhile we have very very few outlets for any of that that you know people are are often physically separated from each other down you know suburban roads and you know like there's no community center or parks or whatever it's like that i've realized that all of us are going through the same thing and that's in a way even though that's a depressing fact that we're all dealing with so much psychic violence in a way it's felt incredibly like i don't know it's made me feel love for the world and it's made me feel like less lonely i feel i feel like i'm in it together with everyone because even though all of our experiences are different we're all we're all kind of dealing with the same thing

58:09book is breaking awake a reporter's search for new life and a new world through drugs pe muskowitz thank you so much thank you thank you to pe muskowitz for that conversation look here's my philosophy let's learn what we can let's hear from a bunch of different perspective let's expose ourselves to a huge variety of personal experiences and stories of what works and what doesn't because really we're behind on this one on mental health our society for centuries has shamed mental illness made it something embarrassing to talk about people with interesting minds like me and maybe you have been discouraged from learning about stuff that will help there's a hole i think we got a plant trees in that hole crops flowers maybe stuff that will grow and contribute like imagine if we were encouraged to figure out mental health at the same speed and with the same acclaim and support and drive

59:16that we provided aviation a century ago you know there were just 66 years between the right brothers and the moon landing 23,953 days that's it imagine if we did that with mental health that drive that purpose that exploration that innovation that celebration what would our mental health moon landing be so our show is not funded like the space program a bit smaller but we'll do our part here to give you ideas and points of view and stories and encouragement see what you can learn we'll do what we can speaking of funding we don't ask for NASA grants but we would love you to be a member of the show that's the only way that we're able to make the show and bring those stories to you we really appreciate those of you who donate and support the show it is how I can keep making the show how we can all keep making the show and it's easy to do just go to maximumfund.org slash join find a level that works for you and then pick to press mode from the list

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1:01:24but I imagine it holds for adults who aren't self conscious and really want a sucker depression mode is made possible by your contributions our production team includes Ragu Manavalan Kevin Ferguson and me we get booking out from merit Davis rent Miller wrote and performed our theme song building wings depression mode is a production of maximum fun and in popoo chick i'm john mo bye now no one knows the answer maybe there's no answer I just keep on dancing

1:02:26hi spiel red key in Seattle you're not doing it wrong just begin again maximum fun a work-road network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you radio tapioe from prx