Content Warning: This episode discusses depression, anxiety, hospitalization, and traumatic experiences.

Gary Gulman has been making people laugh for many years as a top touring comedian and frequent guest on late night shows and star of multiple HBO specials. He’s a professional success by any measure. But that didn’t stop him from having a mental health crisis in his forties, where he gave up comedy, was hospitalized, and ultimately moved back in with his mother. In this revealing conversation with Nexus Family Healing CEO Dr. Michelle K. Murray, Gary reveals the depressive and anxious tendencies of his youth, his struggles connecting with his parents, and how a traumatic event fueled his depression.

This is an encore presentation first aired in October 2025.

Content Warning: This episode discusses suicidal ideation and attempted suicide.

Her mother was Latina and one of fifteen kids while her dad was Native American and one of ten kids. For the acclaimed author Deborah Jackson Taffa, this meant a very large number of cousins but also a sense of alienation from both her parents’ cultural roots, a degree of being neither one nor the other. Complicating her sense of belonging was the fact that she and her late mother never really bonded, leaving Deborah to feel like an outcast in her own family as well, which led to mental health problems and an attempted suicide. But Deborah was loved, especially by her father, who read Deborah’s memoir, Whiskey Tender, and said it was accurate. Deborah was the first in her family to graduate high school and is now the director of the MFA creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She says all the accolades her work has received, including being a finalist for the National Book Award, would have meant nothing if her dad hadn’t loved the book. But he did.

Content Warning: this episode discusses depression and suicide.

Childhood and adolescence can be tough for anyone. There’s so much to figure out. Author Rebekah Taussig (Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body) had an extra challenge in that she was paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair, the result of cancer diagnosed when she was a year old. After many years trying to make her disability okay for everyone else and seeing her paralyzed legs as ugly, Rebekah developed a depressive disorder. But as an adult, she had something of an awakening about disability, realizing that there wasn’t something deficient in herself, it was more an issue of living in an ableist world that refuses to provide access for everyone. Later, when Rebekah became a mom to a boy named Otto, she dealt with postpartum depression and issues of feeling that she wasn’t enough for him. Through careful work and support from her husband, Rebekah is in a good place now and here to tell a story that anyone could benefit from hearing.