Costco is offering mental healthcare. My show is offering a Felicia Day interview.
The Biden administration is offering funding for youth mental health and covid tests
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It’s Felicia Day Day on the podcast
I think I first reached out to Felicia Day about doing an interview back in 2016 when we were getting ready to launch the old show I did over at the old place. She had been pretty open about having dealt with anxiety and depression and I was intrigued then, as I have been since, how she still manages to make so very much. Generally it’s harder for people with Big A and Big D to get a lot of stuff done because they’re expending a lot of energy just to get through the day.
Finally, seven years later, I got the interview and got to ask her about that very thing.
Felicia says she was just set up that way. She was able to do a lot of stuff AND had to deal with depresh and especially anxiety at the same time. The anxiety got channeled through the work when she was doing stuff like writing, producing, and starring in The Guild, her very popular web series about a group of online gamers.
Which isn’t to say that keeping busy prevents anxiety from getting the best of a person. In fact, it’s a really effective recipe for burnout, which Felicia experienced after what she describes as metaphorically hitting a brick wall at 400 miles per hour.
So she talks about that as well as how her life has been different since unpeeling herself from that wall. Felicia is a parent now and she says that as well as the pandemic slowed things down a lot, as did her departure from the kind of dehumanizing world of Hollywood. Felicia’s latest project, Third Eye, is an audiobook from Audible coming out next month. It was originally pitched as a movie or television series but when that didn’t fly, she wrote out the 400 pages of the thing herself and made it an audiobook.
Third Eye is about someone who was supposed to be the savior of humanity (played by Felicia herself) and who failed at that quest. And now has to live in the world that remains.
Costco offering mental health services
I guess as long as the cost of a telehealth appointment is the same as one of their hot dogs, I’m on board. What? It’s not? Oh man.
Costco is partnering with an organization called Sesame:
The New York-based company said its platform doesn’t accept health insurance because it primarily caters to uninsured Americans and those with high-deductible plans who prefer to pay cash for their health care. It said its model helps keep prices of services low for its users.
The services listed on Costco Pharmacy’s homepage, include virtual primary care visits for $29, health checkups (a standard lab panel and a virtual follow-up consultation with a provider) for just $72 and online mental health visits for $79.
You might be thinking the same thing I’m thinking: is this high quality mental health service or is KIRKLAND brand mental health service?
Do I have to buy a 12-pack of mental health visits just to get one?
Will they give out little samples of cognitive behavioral therapy if I visit on a Saturday afternoon?
Does it seem kind of fucked up to not take insurance?
Biden administration announces over $200 million in youth mental health funding
This one gets pretty granular in a hurry but here are some of the top line highlights:
SAMHSA is awarding $131.7 million in grant programs that connect youth and families to behavioral health services.
HRSA is awarding $55 million to expand access to mental health care for young people, including access to mental health care in schools.
ACF is awarding $20 million to improve the quality of mental health services provided to children involved in the child welfare system.
New Medicaid funding - PDF that helps expand access to health services, including mental health services, for eligible children in schools.
Is $200 million a lot for you and me? If we found it on the street? Yes, of course. Is it a lot for the federal government? Of course not. It’s a drop in the bucket. But I would rather have a bucket with some drops in it than an empty bucket. And I’d rather have an administration that seems to recognize the emergency state of youth mental health in America than one that doesn’t.
The woods and how we’re not out of them
Any American household can now get four free covid tests from the gummint. You just go to this website and sign up, takes less than half a minute. You should do this. Go do this. My bass player has covid and that’s why we couldn’t practice this week. There are better reasons also.
But just do this. Do it. Do this. This: do.
This week on Sleeping with Celebrities: Zak Orth rolls his t-shirts
You might recall Zak Orth as “J.J.” from the very funny film Wet Hot American Summer or perhaps you might recall him as “Aaron” from the drama series Revolution. If you haven’t seen those, well, don’t worry because he has an IMDb list of credits as long as your arm, even if you have a very long arm. On our program, Zak shares his rather extensive thoughts on laundry: how it should be sorted, whether hot water should be used, and what is the proper way to store one’s T-shirts. Zak also recalls the time he slept for 22 hours. He awoke well-rested but also hungry.