Frustration with Congress but ultimately plate flex tandems press task apparati
Eventually it all comes back to beam-fastened derrick husk nuts
You can read this newsletter or listen to the Depresh Mode podcast for free if you so choose. That’s because the whole thing is donation-driven. If enough people donate, we can exist. If they don’t, the whole thing will shut down. Go here, pick a level that works for you, then select DEPRESH MODE from the list of shows. And thank you.
Jerks don’t want helpful drop in bucket
I’ll explain. The U.S. House of Representatives, the provincial hotheads who somehow guard our democracy, !, approved a tiny tiny itsy-bitsy funding package of $5 million to do a tiny amount for mental health in America.
The package calls for creating a Behavioral Health Crisis Coordinating Office in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which would be tasked with bolstering access to crisis care. The office would receive $5 million per year starting in fiscal year 2023 until fiscal year 2027.
It also reauthorizes millions of dollars in grants for states, territories, tribes and tribal organizations to go towards community mental health services for adults who have serious mental illnesses, and children who live with grave emotional disturbances. Up to five percent of that funding can go towards early intervention activities.
So $250,000 can go toward early intervention.
That is nothing. That’s gross. That is not taking mental health seriously.
It passed 402-20.
Still…
All 20 “no” votes came from Republicans: Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Mo Brooks (Ala.), Ken Buck (Colo.), Tim Burchett (Tenn.), Michael Cloud (Texas), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Bob Good (Va.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Michael Guest (Miss.), Clay Higgins (La.), Thomas Massie (Ky.), Tom McClintock (Calif.), Mary Miller (Ill.), Ralph Norman (S.C.), Chip Roy (Texas), Greg Steube (Fla.) and Van Taylor (Texas).
These are the people who regularly argue that the problem in America isn’t guns, it’s mental health.
The problem is guns.
(Heavy sigh) So let’s get delighted by Fatboy Slim instead
Fatboy Slim, who uses the name Norman Cook when he’s not DJing and making faces when he hits distortion knobs, is working with Britain’s National Health Service to teach DJ skills to some folks who don’t normally get to do that kind of thing.
Cook is here as part of a scheme funded by NHS charity Heads On to set up arts events for people with severe mental health problems, that also involves singing workshops, samba classes and sound healing. “I really wanted to make music accessible for all,” says Natalie Rowlands, senior occupational therapist at Sussex Partnership who programmed the events, “to break down the stigmas around mental illness, to build people’s confidence and to have really high-class music workshops in really nice venues. A lot of the people here have been musical in the past, but they’ve gone through so much, they’re coming out of it again, and this gives them an amazing opportunity.”
And people in the class dig it, of course.
I talk briefly to Jess, a 34-year-old drummer, who was at music school until her mental health “hit me hard”. She says she came at the suggestion of her support worker – “You can just vanish into nothingness in creativity, but you need to just hang on somehow and put yourself out there again.” She found matching beats quite easy and “genuinely loved it”: “It makes you want to pursue it more and think, ‘I am good enough, I do exist in this world, I’m not just past it.’”
Let’s enjoy Mr. Slim along with Mr. Collins and Mr. Walken:
A while back in my radio career, I used to fly down to Los Angeles from Seattle regularly for work. They’d always put me up at the LA Hotel Downtown. I thought the setting in that video looked very familiar and yep, that’s where they filmed it. The bar at the hotel was also used in Jerry Maguire and the whole hotel was used in the first season of American Idol.
No one cares about this but me.
Faith Salie is on the show on Monday
It’s weird when someone whose work you admire tends to admire your own work. But such is the case with Faith Salie.
We talk about marriages that don’t work at all and ones that do. We talk about parenting and what not to do and whether that is knowable. We talk about her winning a high school beauty pageant and talent show AND a Rhodes Scholarship AND finding out that Hollywood casting people don’t actually care about that.
We don’t talk about her opinion on the word “team” but she has some thoughts from her regular gig on CBS Sunday Morning.
Coming soon to the show: Jamie Loftus
I’ll be interviewing Jamie Loftus next week and I’m very excited. She’s a comedian? Performance artist? Journalist? Person? Let’s go with person.
Like the prankish Nathan Fielder or the strangely sexual Megan Amram, she does elaborately dumb things to make fairly smart points. In 2015, Loftus sold “Shrek nudes,” naked photos of her body painted green, to raise funds for Planned Parenthood. That same year, she started eating David Foster Wallace’s thousand-plus-page novel “Infinite Jest.” In the video she made documenting the process, she pops a page into her mouth like a potato chip and slurps up a ribbon of the book with spaghetti. At some point, she began putting pages into a blender with apples and using a turkey baster to butt-chug the mixture.
And she has a podcast out about the surprisingly creepy world of Mensa, which she infiltrated and joined.
I keep coming back to this show
I like TV, I guess. And I like keeping track of which shows best capture certain things.
The show that best captures grief is The Leftovers.
The show that best captures depression is Patriot.
And sometimes having a victory over depression: