A note to our listeners. This episode contains mentions of self-harm and a mention of suicide.

There are two things going on right now that I want to talk to you about. They're huge things. They can be all-consuming. They're unavoidable.

Thing one, we talk about almost constantly. It's inescapable. You may find that all your conversations

eventually turn to this topic. Thing two, we barely talk about it at all, but there's a good

chance you think about it a lot. Thing one is the upcoming U.S. election. It dominates the news, social media, internet. Thing two,

the one we don't talk about much, is the stress, the fear, the anxiety, the ongoing complex

trauma of thinking about that election and its ramifications and its possible outcomes,

the dread and the hope and the incredible

intense feelings about that election. Maybe it's even distracting you from parts of your life.

You're unable to get as much work done. You can't concentrate. It's interfering with how you

run things. There's a term for this, election stress disorder.

It's not a diagnosis recognized by the medical community, but definitely it's familiar to people

who are going through it. Maybe that's you. We don't talk about this for the same reason we don't

talk much about mental health in

general in our society. That's because it's scary. And this huge event coming in just weeks away now,

we don't know what will happen with the election. And that might be making you kind of a mess.

And it's hard to know what to do about all that.

Might even be hard to talk about.

Well, the talking part is where we come in with our show.

It's Depression Mode. I'm John Moe.

I'm glad you're here.

The function of this program, the reason we work on it, is to name and discuss the sometimes scary world of inner mental turbulence, and maybe come up with some ways to address it, but at least identify what's going on, which might make the whole thing more manageable. A caveat here, I can't make election stress disorder go away for

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