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Television’s Jenn Lyon is beautiful and famous; from the outside looking in, she seems to have it all. But Ms. Lyon has a serious eating disorder that, while in recovery, still impacts her daily life.

Join us as the “Claws” star shares her lifelong struggle with food and dieting. We also discuss how the smoke and mirrors of Hollywood contribute to diet culture and how that culture affects every aspect of American life — especially for women.

Jenn Lyon

Jenn Lyon stars as Jennifer in the hit TNT series “CLAWS,” opposite Niecy Nash, returning for its fourth and final season this December.

Jenn has graced both stage and screen, starring opposite the likes of Timothy Olyphant in “Hold On To Me Darling,” and as his love interest in FX’s “Justified,” (seasons three and four). She also starred opposite George Lopez and Danny Trejo in the sitcom “Saint George.”

Having struggled for many years with an eating disorder that almost ended her life, Jenn has become a tremendous advocate for mental health; she serves as an activist for NEDA, as well as The Loveland Foundation (an organization that provides healing and opportunities to women and girls of color). Jenn also sits on the board for Martha Plimpton’s A is For (a nonprofit organization that advocates for women’s reproductive rights), and volunteers for Black Women Lead. In her spare time, she works at a food pantry in Brooklyn twice a week.

Aside from her on-camera talents, Jenn is also a writer/producer/co-founder of internet sketch group POYKPAC, which has produced sketches with more than 100 million views to date. They have written for and been seen on MTV, IFC, G4, CBS, and CNN. Find Jenn on Instagram and at jennlyon.net.

Gabe Howard

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, “Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations,” available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author.

Gabe makes his home in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He lives with his supportive wife, Kendall, and a Miniature Schnauzer dog that he never wanted, but now can’t imagine life without. To learn more about Gabe, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Producer’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: You’re listening to Inside Mental Health: A Psych Central Podcast where experts share experiences and the latest thinking on mental health and psychology. Here’s your host, Gabe Howard.

Gabe Howard: Hello, everyone, I’m your host, Gabe Howard, and I want to thank our sponsor, Better Help. You can grab a week free by visiting BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral. Calling into the show today we have Jenn Lyon. Ms. Lyon is an award winning actress who currently stars as Jennifer in the hit TNT series Claws opposite Niecy Nash. The fourth and final season airs this fall. Ms. Lyon is devoted to being of service to others, engaging in numerous philanthropic endeavors, including advocating for body positivity and mental health. She lends her voice to the National Eating Disorder Association, as well as the Loveland Foundation, an organization that provides opportunities and healing to black women and girls in communities of color. Ms. Lyon, welcome to the show.

Jenn Lyon: Hi, thank you for having me. I’m stoked to be here.

Gabe Howard: We are stoked that you are here as well. Let’s start at the beginning. Now you aren’t just an eating disorder and mental health advocate. You are someone who lives with an eating disorder and has struggled with mental health issues. Can you share with our listeners the abridged version of your story?

Jenn Lyon: Sure, yeah. You know, I’m not only the president, I’m also a client, remember that from Hair Club for Men?

Gabe Howard: I do. Isn’t that like the greatest joke? And the younger generation doesn’t get that like, I pulled that out at a college and they just blank stares. I was like, Oh, I’ve turned a corner.

Jenn Lyon: Yeah, the other day, I said looks like a pump, feels like a sneaker, and it was just stares,

Gabe Howard: Yep, yep. The other one is Calgon, take me away. Nobody gets it.

Jenn Lyon: Oh, take me away, oh, okay, so we’re officially old. And I’ll give you the abridged version of my eating disorder journey?

Gabe Howard: Yes, please.

Jenn Lyon: Sure. I come from a family of southern women that have always dieted, I was like always a big girl and there’s just always a lot of food talk and this is nothing against my mom or my aunts or like it was just the culture that women were always trying to lose weight. It’s the water we swim in. I vacillated between diets all my life, and then I think for the first time when I was 16, I lost about 80 pounds by starving myself and a lot of doors opened for me. All of a sudden was considered beautiful. I got cast in a community theater thing. Boys started to look at me. I felt like I got along with my parents better. Like, I just it seemed like the world was a different place when I was a smaller size. And that sort of started me on a journey of gaining and losing the same, the same probably 80 to 90 pounds over and over through starving and then bingeing. And then I think I really took it to another level in my mid to late 20s. I was doing a lot of theater. I was on the bigger side of me, and I was like, how small do I have to get to be in film and TV I wonder? And I started to starve myself and over exercise and embarked on, like about a decade long journey of being as small as I could possibly be and not eating and being so afraid of food and so afraid of gaining weight.

Jenn Lyon: And it eventually morphed into bulimia, which is very common. You know, you can only starve yourself for so long before your biology sort of takes over. It got so bad I was probably throwing up 15 times a day. I couldn’t keep anything down, and I eventually went into an eating disorder rehab from the Renfrew Center here in New York City and started on the path to recovery. And I’m five years in recovery now, and it’s certainly not linear. It’s not like I went in there, and then all of a sudden my struggles with food stopped and I never threw up again, or I never wanted to starve again. But I feel so firmly rooted in this path of recovery, and it’s so much more stable now.

Gabe Howard: Thank you so much for being open and for sharing. Now, I understand from your bio that you have body dysmorphic disorder?

Jenn Lyon: Sure. Yeah, and I actually think I don’t know one woman, I’m truly not friends with one woman who sees herself accurately and who doesn’t struggle with food and with the diet industry and with wanting to be different than she is. It’s truly epidemic.

Gabe Howard: As someone who lives with binge eating disorder, I’ve encountered a lot of people who would just flippantly say to me, Gabe, just stop eating or, Gabe, you need to go on a diet. And diet culture is a thing. But as you’ve said numerous times, diet culture is not this positive, healthy culture that people seem to think that it is.

Jenn Lyon: Yeah. Diet culture, and also now it’s sort of morphed into this sort of catch all of wellness. I find it extraordinarily detrimental to women and men. I didn’t mean to say just women struggle with body dysmorphia or body image. Of course it’s men too and non-binary people and all of us. This obsession with food and with fitting into these narrow confines of beauty completely takes out of account food deserts, discrepancies in wealth, mental health. Like there’s so many things that go into what’s on our plate. None of it has to do with like learning to listen to our bodies, learning to uncover terrible hidden beliefs or feeling trauma like that’s the root cause of most binge eating and eating disorders. But also when you get out of the root cause, it’s because the culture in which we live is constantly telling us to not listen to our body’s cues and its hunger. Like intuitive eating, I feel is the only way to live your life because the quickest way to be obsessed with food is to not eat it. Your body will come back at you tenfold, and just like people are saying, just stop eating too much, Gabe. Well, then if you start to restrict, that’s just the flip side of the binge, you’ll just binge harder. What you actually have to do with the aid and help of a professional, you really can’t do it by yourself because it’s so embedded in, like written on your bones by the time it’s gotcha is that you have to heal those parts of yourself.

Gabe Howard: I think that women have it worse than men. You know, I haven’t lived on both sides of the spectrum, but sincerely I don’t think that you have to really be all that observant to see that there are more beauty magazines for women than there are for men, right?

Jenn Lyon: Sure, yeah, yeah.

Gabe Howard: I mean, that’s again, I think you can just be just casual and walk anywhere and see, OK, there’s 100 hundred beauty magazines, and then we have Men’s Health.

Jenn Lyon: But I just think I think everybody just like men also have these fears and these, you know, terrible ideas. They’re also targeted by the fitness industry. Like, let’s not leave them out just because women are targeted more.

Gabe Howard: As a man with binge eating disorder, we should absolutely not leave men out because, you know, I don’t want to die, and I’m glad I got help

Jenn Lyon: Absolutely.

Gabe Howard: And. But I do think that it’s, you know, probably a bit disingenuous to say that it was worse for me. You know, for example, I’m six foot three, but I had to weigh about 500 pounds before people were like, Dude, you might be out of control. And when I went to like the binge eating support groups and I started getting therapy, the women who were told that they were out of control. My natural body weight should be about 225, and I doubled it before people were starting to say, Hey, buddy, maybe you should get some help. Whereas women were 100 pounds overweight, you know, 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent over when people started knocking on their door.

Jenn Lyon: Right.

Gabe Howard: You know, I know there’s somebody out there that’s going to say, Well, see, Gabe, women get help sooner because yeah, that’s not why they got help sooner. They got help sooner because the bar was lower.

Jenn Lyon: Right,

Gabe Howard: And that’s sad on both sides.

Jenn Lyon: Right, and also, you know, binge eating gets so much less. It’s starting to get a little more notoriety and acceptance now, but like I feel like when women are wasting away, or men are wasting away, we really worry about them. But when people are overweight, we’re like, Oh, it’s a personal failing. They should really just cut back. And it’s like, No, no, no, no, no. This is just the flip side of the coin. This is just as devastating. It’s just as life threatening. Eating disorders have the highest morbidity rate of any mental illness on both sides. I’m glad that it’s getting more recognition now as being as devastating as it is, it’s not fun, it’s terrible and it’s terrifying to not be able to stop eating. I wish people knew.

Gabe Howard: You know, eating is good, you can enjoy eating, you can enjoy

Jenn Lyon: Right.

Gabe Howard: Cooking, you can enjoy your mother’s meatloaf. But binge eating wrecks that it turns it into a compulsion. It’s something that you have to do, and you need more and more and more and more. So suddenly, you know the piece of birthday cake to celebrate that you turned 40, it no longer feels good. And.

Jenn Lyon: Yeah, that’s right.

Gabe Howard: And it’s such a bummer, because birthday cake is wonderful.

Jenn Lyon: Birthday cake is so wonderful, but when birthday cake starts to represent more than being birthday cake, like when we attach a value of good or bad to it and it starts to loom large like that and you can’t stop or you won’t let yourself have it like, then you’re in a prison because birthday cake has got you in a hold man, and it’s terrifying.

Gabe Howard: Wouldn’t it be awesome if the diet industry had it right? Like have a shake for breakfast, a shake for? I think that might be another one of those things that maybe the younger generation doesn’t understand. But these ads were everywhere.

Jenn Lyon: Everywhere.

Gabe Howard: And they made it sound so easy. You know, two shakes, sensible dinner, boom. Problem solved. But of course, it didn’t address that not everybody eats because they’re hungry. In fact, I

Jenn Lyon: Right.

Gabe Howard: Would argue and I do not have data on this, but most people eat for a variety of reasons other than hunger. We eat to celebrate birthdays, holidays.

Jenn Lyon: Right.

Gabe Howard: We eat because it’s lunchtime, you know, those of us with 9-5 jobs, noon is when you eat. Well, what if we’re not hungry? Tough. Noon is when we eat.

Jenn Lyon: Right, exactly. Well, when I learned and I’m still learning how to do intuitive eating, emotional eating is also a part of intuitive eating. It’s not just about being like, Well, I think my body needs an orange. Sometimes you miss home, so you make a cheesy lasagna because it reminds you of your grandmother. Sometimes you feel sad and you’re like, Gosh, I need something comforting something from this other time in my life when I felt happier, like it’s cultural. It’s all those things. Yes, a nine to five job. Like, I have this amount of time to eat, or if I’m working three jobs, I’m working third shift. I have to eat in my car on the way to somewhere. Like diet culture assumes, first of all, that there’s something wrong with you and that we have to fix it. And that’s how they get their money. So they have to convince you that you’re broken. There’s something terribly wrong. And then second of all that everybody’s got the same access mentally, financially. And that’s just it just couldn’t be more untrue. And you have to learn to undo all the damage that diet culture and maybe your own eating and your own hidden beliefs have done to you and sort of find a new way. At every moment, we can sort of take a breath and assess what’s happening right now. Can we check in? Am I full? Am I not? Do I have a health problem? Are there glandular problems wherein I don’t get fullness cues? It just is so much more nuanced and varied than have a shake for breakfast, another for lunch and a sensible dinner.

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Gabe Howard: We’re back with award-winning actress Jenn Lyon discussing eating disorders. Ms. Lyon, one of the things that I think about and of course, I read the same tabloids, the same internet, the same comment sections that you do, is that Hollywood and television, you’re blamed for diet culture because you’re so pretty and because actors are so pretty. And of course, because of things like proper lighting and makeup, it creates this unrealistic expectation. How do you feel about being a part of that? Because I imagine that when you read these comments, you’re like, Hey, it’s not my fault. I’m trying to help, but it’s always painted with that brush.

Jenn Lyon: Yeah, I get a lot of like I don’t really have dudes in my DMs being like, What’s up? Send me a pic. I mostly get women in my DMs being like, How do you get your hair like that? How do you get your waist so tiny, blah, blah blah. And I’m like, It’s a wig on a wig. That’s two wigs. That’s not my hair. And also, I’m in like NASA-level shapewear that is squeezing me. It’s an illusion. It’s smoke and mirrors. And also a lot of times your photos get retouched, like it is endemic. But how do I feel when I get blamed for it? Hopefully, I mean, I’m trying to have an honest discourse about it. It’s not like I’m saying, Oh, I just diet a little bit and then I eat a cheeseburger, and that’s my real self. I’m trying to be honest about all the work that goes into it, because people that compare themselves to this online life or this TV world, you’re just destined for sadness. That’s just going to cause you suffering because I don’t look like that when I go into the hair and makeup trailer.

Gabe Howard: A trend that I like, and what I also like about you is that you’re honest about this. You know, I remember when I was a kid in the 80s, actors and actresses were just like, Nope, this is what I look like. Did you alter it? Nope. There was none of this talk about hair and makeup. This has been a discussion that has finally come out, probably in the last 10 15 years. So you can imagine 12 year old Gabe looking at all these famous people like, Well, yeah, that’s what you look like. Nobody explained it. I imagine that you think it’s a great trend that Hollywood is admitting, listen, it’s fantasy. We’re faking.

Jenn Lyon: Yeah, totally. It’s totally fake. There’s some people who are like, just naturally, effortlessly beautiful, and I just happened to not be one of them, you know what I mean? Like, it takes a lot of sparkle. And I don’t care. That’s the thing. I think I’m sort of trending away from body positivity and towards body neutrality. What if how I look is the least interesting thing about me? What if instead of chasing pretty, we chase compassionate? We chase well-read? We chase funny? We chase that we’re ambitious about things other than this little outside show? I think that might be just so much more interesting. So the standard of beauty is so narrow and entrenched that whether you adhere to it or rebel from it, it is still the center. And it’s still somehow relevant. And I’m interested in it being irrelevant. Like, like now I’m in this phase where I’m rebelling from it, but I’m still moving from the standard of beauty, so it makes it somehow a paragon. And I’m interested in eradicating it.

Gabe Howard: I could not agree with that more, and I say this in sort of self-serving, you know, I always joke, I don’t have a face for radio, I have a face for podcasting. So, the radio people are looking at me like, Oh yeah, you can’t be here. But all joking aside, all joking

Jenn Lyon: [Laughter]

Gabe Howard: Aside, the reason that I bring this up is because you are a really big believer in the importance of humor and finding laughter. I know that sketch comedy has been a great outlet for you, but my very specific question is some people think that if you’re joking about a subject, you’re not taking it seriously and you don’t feel that way at all.

Jenn Lyon: No, dude, comedy and joking about something, it’s like an air bubble when you’re drowning, you know what I mean? Like, Look. Shit is dark. And to me, jokes are a candle in the dark. It is a little bit of light to help you see the way. If I can joke about something, if I can find the lightness and the comedy and the absurdity of how painful everything is, then I can take a breath and then I can continue on the path of trying to figure shit out. The whole idea that if you joke about something, you can’t be serious about it, it’s ridiculous. Because if you joke about it, you’re actually smart enough to see it for what it is and then also subvert it. Joking about something to me heightens the conversation. It doesn’t diminish it.

Gabe Howard: A great place to find comedy is social media. I love a lot of the support groups and the memes that come up on social media, and I just want to say that because I don’t want to make it sound like social media is the worst thing that ever happened to our society.

Jenn Lyon: No, it’s the worst and the best.

Gabe Howard: You’re right.

Jenn Lyon: Yeah.

Gabe Howard: It’s the I love that. The seedy side, especially when it comes to the way that people see themselves because they’re comparing their lives to other people’s lives, and you’ve done a lot of work on this. Explaining to people that look, social media is like Hollywood, it’s not real.

Jenn Lyon: Yeah, it’s curated, man. And look, there’s a lot of accounts that are dedicated to not being curated who are being like, This is what I look like, this is what I’m dealing with today. I am differently abled. This is what it’s like. If you can find a lot of information on there about anything, it can be helpful. You can find your tribe, your community, you can find social activism. And then also it can be just paralyzing. You can lose hours of your day to the scroll. I have to take frequent breaks because I realize I’m living through my phone and I’m not looking out of my eyeballs. I’m like, There’s a whole world outside, and I’ve been looking at my phone for four hours? What am I doing?

Gabe Howard: I do the exact same thing, and it’s interesting because there’s now apps that pop up and are like, Hey, you’ve been on Facebook for an hour, you’ve been on, and it’s like, so

Jenn Lyon: Yeah.

Gabe Howard: We’ve got apps that steal our time and then we’ve got other apps that try to help us get it back. It’s all apps. It’s all apps.

Jenn Lyon: It’s because you’re looking at your phone, dude. Yeah, it’s tough, I have that app, too, that tells me my screen time. I used to have the one that would lock me out, too. But then I started to take like months long breaks where it just wasn’t an option for me to look at it. And I think that has helped me sort of reform my relationship with it. But the amount of times I said took it off my phone and everything, but the amount of times I would reach for my phone, it’s like you feel a little tingle. And instead of staying with yourself and maybe investigating what’s going on or what that sort of urge is, you just pick up your phone and you snooze it. We’re always like soothing, soothing, soothing. Yeah, man. It’s interesting. It’s a double edged sword, although I guess are all swords double-edged? Yeah, they are right?

Gabe Howard: It seems that way, right, we should just be like, it’s a sword.

Jenn Lyon: It’s a sword.

Gabe Howard: Somebody’s going to write in and this sincerely, this is one of the positives about social media. Somebody’s going to put a comment and tell us all the swords that are in fact not double edged. And I.

Jenn Lyon: Oh, right, I can’t wait.

Gabe Howard: Right. This is an excellent moment, and many of our fans do it respectfully and educationally, and that is another one of the areas where social media can be beautiful and the entertainment industry can be beautiful as well. I mean, we need

Jenn Lyon: Yeah.

Gabe Howard: Escapism. I could not survive without the ability to go to a movie with my friends, with the popcorn alone. I mean, the popcorn

Jenn Lyon: Oh,

Gabe Howard: That.

Jenn Lyon: The popcorn, everyone.

Gabe Howard: Right, and there is another example of where the diet industry sort of fails us, right? Because people associate popcorn and movies, I mean, I just did it and I bet nobody thought that that was unusual. Like, yeah, you go to the movies, you get popcorn, even if they don’t want it, they’re

Jenn Lyon: Yeah.

Gabe Howard: Still associated. And diet culture doesn’t often address that. It’s just this simple. Stop eating. You’ll be healthier. And that’s not a fully formed thought. If you were in charge because you agree that you know, being a healthy weight and, you know, diet exercise, I mean, these things are important to our well-being.

Jenn Lyon: Yeah, absolutely.

Gabe Howard: But what are some changes that you would make? Because I don’t want anybody to listen to this and think I don’t have to be healthy because that’s not the message that you’re putting out. You’re just putting out that trading one master for another is not healthy.

Jenn Lyon: Right. Yeah, and I also think that healthy like in quotes is going to be different for everybody, like what healthy looks like for somebody who’s struggling with type I diabetes is going to look different than somebody who is struggling, you know, with like hypothyroidism, like, it’s not going to be a one size fits all. I think for me, if I could redo the diet industry or whatever that I would build in from a very early age, and this is going to sound new-age-y or woo-woo. But it’s really changed my life for kids to learn how to watch their thoughts and observe them almost like a meditation practice. Because so very often we have these stories in our head and we live through those narratives, but we don’t know how to sort of zoom out and watch our thoughts come and go without attaching to them and believing them. A meditation practice has really helped me be able to like. Because you get caught in that loop, right, like I’ve got to lose weight, I’ve got to be different, I shouldn’t be eating, I shouldn’t do this, and I have like a switch now where I can be the observer and I can see the thoughts going around and be like, I wonder what’s happening for me right now, what’s going on in my body instead of being trapped in that sort of swirl? I can watch them and be like, What’s the next best thing I can do for me. And I need to say to myself, Have you been restricting? What’s your body telling you right now? Do you need to move around some? Like we’ve sort of outsourced our own agency to other people industries to tell us like how to be and how to live instead of developing from an early age, a way to listen to ourselves and watch our own thoughts and see what’s going on for us.

Gabe Howard: We need to listen to our bodies and find out what it wants, rather than listening to television advertising or even our friends in YouTube videos. I just I think

Jenn Lyon: Yeah, me too, like I was talking to my pal the other day and she’s doing keto again and I was like, I wish people knew. I wish they could get it into their heads that these ways of eating that are restricting, like once you make a carrot evil, you’re done for, like you’re going to go on this diet and it’s going to work, quote unquote. And you’re going to lose the weight. And then in a year, a couple of months, next week, you’re going to be back. Your body’s going to fight to get back to its set weight and you’re going to think it’s a personal failure instead of looking at the diet and going, these don’t work and they are hurtful. What I actually would love for people to do is to really cement that into their heads that they just don’t work. And then you think you’re to blame when actually the diet is doing what it’s designed to do. They make you obsessed with food.

Gabe Howard: And that’s the important thing to understand, right? That’s the takeaway.

Jenn Lyon: Yeah. Yes. It took me forever to learn that restriction and dieting was the flip side of binge because I’d be like, Well, I’ll just lose this weight, I’ll just go on a diet and then I’ll stop bingeing. And I couldn’t see that it was a direct line, just a direct line, or that there was also emotional restriction and dieting. Like, I wouldn’t let myself feel things. I would care for everybody else instead of myself. I was being restrictive in those ways, and that would lead to bingeing food and throwing up as well. It was all connected. The essence of it was learning to listen to what was going on in my own head and see what those signals were telling me. Instead of being like, I have to eat a sheet cake, I have to eat a sheet cake, I have to eat the sheet cake. What’s underneath there? What are you sort of unwilling to feel in that moment?

Gabe Howard: Ms. Lyon, thank you so much for being here, and it would be easy to say, Oh, clearly, you’re doing great, you’re on a successful television show. You get to work with other cool actors and actresses. But I want to hear in your own words, how are you doing?

Jenn Lyon: I’ve got to tell you, man, it’s up and down. Friday, just this last Friday, I mean, I was getting my period and that rush of hormones is always a very dicey time for if you have an eating disorder. But on Friday of this week, boy, I was doing some planning. I was doing some planning to lose weight. I was like huffing it around the park and I was like, really lost in a sort of a trance of unworthiness because I’m hustling for my next gig and I got caught in that story where I was like, You know, I’m probably too big. I need to lose weight. What I can do is I can just lose 15 pounds. I can do that in two weeks. If I don’t eat, you know how to do this, Jennifer. And it took me a couple of hours to like, wake up from those thoughts and be like, Hey, hey, hey, hey, what are you doing? What’s going on? You need to get on the mat. You need to lay down and see what’s underneath it. And what was underneath it was, I felt a lot of grief for some different things that are happening.

Jenn Lyon: I felt uncertainty about the future, my own future, the future of the country, the future of the planet. There was just a lot of things underneath, and I started to move quickly from I feel bad to I am bad, and this is how I fix it. I still struggle with the thought, but now I have usually in a couple of hours it used to take me, you know, I used to do it for years and then I could do it for weeks. And then it would be a couple of days. And now my turnaround time is just a lot quicker where I can wake up from that and be like, How can I best recognize what’s happening? Allow it to be here and then investigate and do the actual things that are going to care for me in these next moments? It’s a dogfight, man, and it takes forever, and it doesn’t mean the thoughts won’t be there, but it just means the space between the thought and the action. You get space there.

Gabe Howard: I think that it’s very honest, and the message that I want to get out there is, you know, throughout this episode we’ve talked about, Hey, Hollywood isn’t real, it’s fantasy, right? It isn’t real, it’s curated. And I want people to know that just because somebody is a famous actress on television doesn’t mean that eating disorders go away any easier.

Jenn Lyon: Yeah, I’m not sure why we think that actors and artists and stuff aren’t people.

Gabe Howard: [Laughter]Thank you, Ms. Lyon, thank you so much for being open and honest and for being here. And thank you to all our listeners. My name is Gabe Howard and I am the author of “Mental Illness Is an Asshole and Other Observations.” I’m also an award winning public speaker who’s available for your next event. My book is on Amazon, or you can get a signed copy with free show swag or learn more about me by heading over to gabehoward.com. Wherever you downloaded this podcast, please follow or subscribe to the show, it’s absolutely free. Recommend the show, send an email, a text message, or just post it on social media. And I will see everybody next Thursday here on Inside Mental Health.

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