Congress works for us, right? That's the idea? Well, I guess sometimes you need to check in on your

employees. So let's do that. It's Depresh Mode. I'm John Moe. I'm glad you're here. Most of the time, it's kind of hard to actually reach your Congress people in a direct way to check up on them.

You can call their offices, but the elected member rarely picks up themselves.

You need to leave a message or something.

You can show up at an event and yell questions to them,

but then you're a person yelling questions at an event. So when I had a chance to talk to one

of my state's U.S. senators, I grabbed that opportunity. Tina Smith has been a U.S. senator since

January of 2018. She's a Democrat, represents Minnesota. She took over the seat vacated by

Al Franken when he resigned. Prior to serving in that position, Smith was the lieutenant governor

of Minnesota for three years. I wanted to ask about what was going on in Washington regarding

mental health legislation. And I wanted to find out more about Smith's own experiences

with recurring major depressive disorder.

Senator Tina Smith, welcome to Depression Mode.

Well, thank you, John. I'm so glad to be with you. And I've followed you work for a long time.

So I'm delighted to be talking with you today. Okay. Well, I've, you know, I'm one of your constituents, so I've been following your work as well.

I want to ask you some about your own story, but I would be loath to ignore that I have an actual

U.S. Senator here and ask about some legislation as well. In terms of mental health legislation,

what's been the most important step that you think has been passed and passed into law during

your time in the Senate? I think that the most important thing that we've done has been in the bill that we passed last year.

As part of the steps that we took to make some good, though not enough, improvements to gun safety,

we passed really significant support for mental health

services in this country. And that will make a big difference, especially to community health

...