A note to our listeners, this episode contains mention of suicide. Hi, I don't know if you're in

America. Lots of you, I think, are, but a lot of you I know are not. But let me tell you,

I'm here in America, and here in America, loads of folks who are here are kind of freaking out these days.

New Republican presidential administration took charge in January.

That party also controls both houses of Congress, has a majority of like-minded Supreme Court justices,

and the Republicans are not really taking a conciliatory consensus-building centrist approach to governing.

It's loud and one-sided, and it has been busy, huge tariffs, threatening universities,

rounding up immigrants, shipping them away. In terms of domestic programs, there have been

slashed federal agencies, huge cuts or

threats of cuts in social services and programs like Medicaid, which a lot of people rely on for

mental health. Life and the way it is lived and government and democracy are changing. It's a lot.

And compounding the fear that people are feeling is the

idea that the two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, the liberals and the conservatives,

hate each other, that Americans who prefer one party, hate the Americans who prefer the other

party, like more than ever before, to the point where

you wonder if anything can really get done for the benefit of all, and if the acrimony

is just going to get worse and make everything even more intractable and create more and more

problems for everybody to deal with. But we're a show that traffics in hope. Because when you

deal with mental health, when you talk about it all the time like we do, when you think about it

all the time like we do, hope is an essential nutrient. And we don't just wait for it to arrive. We go and look for it. We hunt it down. Sometimes that

investigation takes us to the halls of Congress. It's depression mode. I'm John Moe. I'm glad you're here.

Hello. A little later in the show, a conversation with one of our listeners, who is not a rock star,

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