A theme on the show today is the difference between lowercase letters and uppercase letters or capital letters,

and how much that difference, that shift key on a keyboard, really matters in regard to one's mental state and emotional state and overall gestalt,

the overall compilation of thoughts and actions and tendencies that

constitute the entity known as you. At what point does a person's behavior go from being

a whole bunch of things swirled together described in lowercase letters to an acronym,

in all caps.

Does someone have a penchant for keeping things tidy because they enjoy the feeling of tidiness,

helps them relax, helps them feel better able to handle stuff?

Or are they so bound to a compulsive need to create perfection, obsessed with order, that they can be defined as having those

capital letters, OCD. Do they exhibit some anxious tendencies, or do they have GAD, generalized

anxiety disorder? Does the person's mental state exist within the very broad and often disparate set of criteria for having some depression?

Or do they have MDD? Major depressive disorder.

I don't expect you to always know these answers about yourself or about anyone else.

I certainly don't have those answers very reliably.

And I have a podcast about mental health. It's Depression Mode. I'm John Moe. I'm glad you're here.

I've been making mental health podcasts for many years, and in that time, the separation

between diagnostic acronyms, those capital letters, and complex human conditions, lowercase,

has mattered less and less. Certainly the acronyms are useful when you're trying to get

insurance to cover medicine or treatment. It might help you when you need to tell someone what you have,

but you'd rather not get into a big conversation about it. Of course, the lower case, the big

conversation might paint a fuller picture, one that includes

a lot of the mysteries and contradictions in a person that aren't tidily summed up in abbreviations.

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