Here are three things you might conclude from this week's episode of the show.

One, that a chemical imbalance, in iron, for instance, can absolutely lead to a mental health

problem, anxiety, for instance. Two, that anxiety can be big and powerful. And for purposes

of creative visualization used for coping with set anxiety,

it can also be tall and covered in long red hair and wear tennis shoes and require some creative

problem solving from Bugs Bunny. Three, that murder mysteries, while certainly not good for the fictional person who has been murdered, can be good for you.

It's Depression Mode. I'm John Moe. I'm glad you're here.

Yeah, we're going to talk about anxiety today.

In particular, we're going to look at how it can be handled creatively.

I mean, creative in the sense of the creative ways one can use to cope with anxiety in one's own life,

and the creative ways one can use to handle it in writing about fictional characters. Both, it turns out, can be helpful. Maureen Johnson is the

author of just so many books, on her own 19 of them. Counting the ones that she's co-written with other people, I get 33.

Maureen writes in the field of YA or young adult fiction, typically readers in their teens,

but books that can talk about adult themes, like solving murder cases, for instance.

Among her well-known characters is Stevie Bell, a teenage detective

who lives with anxiety. And it's not like a character who develops quickly a condition of

anxiety and then conquers her fears and overcomes them and then is fine forevermore. No,

anxiety is more just something that Stevie lives with. It's part of her life.

Maureen Johnson herself has experienced anxiety, but in kind of a different way than Stevie,

and in a different way than a lot of people that we talk to on this show, actually. It was pretty

isolated and like a murder mystery, solved.

And I get that yours may not be easily solved or even solvable. Everyone's journey is different.

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