A collaboration about a collaboration: Pagan Kennedy, left, and Karen Brown.
“The Great God of Depression,” the gripping story of the improbable collaboration between a brain scientist and an acclaimed author to come to terms with their shared mental illness, is a five-part podcast that can be found at Radiotopia’s Showcase page (or wherever you get your podcasts).
The series is itself a collaboration between two KSJ alumnae: Pagan Kennedy (2010-11), the main writer and narrator; and Karen Brown (2012-13), producer and editor. Here’s Karen’s account of how the story came together:
“Pagan and I met at a Knight-MIT food boot camp during her fellowship year, and then stayed in touch through my fellowship year and beyond. Pagan is a print journalist, nonfiction book author, and occasional novelist, while I’m mostly a radio reporter and audio documentarian. But I’ve done a lot of print freelancing and she is a voracious audio consumer. So it seemed natural that we’d eventually stumble on a joint project that would make use of our complementary skills and interests: a long-form narrative podcast.
“Pagan came up with the story idea itself, based on the experience of a neurologist in her book group named Alice Flaherty. Alice was a newly minted doctor at Mass General in 2004 when William Styron became her patient; he was suffering from a depression relapse, 15 years after the episode he wrote about in ‘Darkness Visible’ [a memoir that became the classic book about depression]. At the time, Alice was herself recovering from a psychotic break, sparked by the devastating loss of a twin pregnancy. Styron and Alice developed an intense friendship and doctor-patient relationship that lasted until Styron’s death from pneumonia in 2006. Before he died, Styron gave Alice permission to talk and write about his case publicly. As she never got around to publishing the story herself, she decided to trust Pagan with it — and fully participated in the podcast.
“When Pagan asked if I wanted to collaborate on the project as the audio expert, I was thrilled. We put together a podcast proposal to shop around different audio networks, and got a hit with Radiotopia at PRX; we signed a contract with the Radiotopia Showcase series. The executive producer put us in touch with a sound designer and studio assistants.
“From that point, we gathered archival sound of Styron and doing interviews with his surviving family, professional connections, and others to weigh in on the intersection of creativity and depression and Styron’s legacy around the stigma of mental illness.”
Karen is a longtime public radio reporter, print journalist, essayist, and audio documentarian, with a specialty in mental health issues. In addition to two decades at New England Public Radio, she has contributed to NPR, The New York Times, American RadioWorks, and other national outlets. Besides “The Great God of Depression,” her recent work has focused on the biology of stress and resilience, trauma-informed communities, and dying well.
Pagan is a contributing writer at The New York Times and the author of 11 books. She has been a columnist for the The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, and The Village Voice. She has won numerous awards including an NEA fellowship, a Smithsonian fellowship, and two Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowships.
Rebecca Perry (2001-02) has been awarded a 2018-19 Fellowship in Aerospace History from the Society for the History of Technology and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
“Energized after the Knight fellowship,” she writes, “I entered MIT’s program in History | Anthropology | Science, Technology, and Society, and in 2014 received a Ph.D. in the history of technology, with a focus on the history of computing and computer graphics.” A researcher at the University of Virginia, she’s writing a book on computer graphics researchers at NASA/JPL, and co-editing The Handbook of the History of Technology for Oxford University Press.
Here’s what alumni are writing: a compendium from Federico Kukso (2015-16).
Aleszu Bajak (2013-14): “The Dangerous Belief That Extreme Technology Will Fix Climate Change,” HuffPost.
Dan Falk (2011-12): “Why Some Scientists Say Physics Has Gone Off the Rails,” NBC News; “Enrico Fermi and the Chain Reaction That Changed Everything,” Undark.
Teresa Firmino (2008-09): “Portuguese Physicist Advances Explanation For Two of the Great Mysteries of the Universe,” Publico (in Portuguese).
Gideon Gil (2014-15): “Pioneering Surgery Makes a Prosthetic Foot Feel Like the Real Thing,” STAT.
Courtney Humphries (2015-16): “The ‘Global Chemical Experiment,'” Harvard Magazine.
Sascha Karberg (2008-09): “Lucrative Prostheses: Kneeling in Front of the Shop,” Der Tagesspiegel (in German).
Eli Kintisch (2011-12): “Why Atlantic Fish Are Invading the Arctic,” Vox.
Federico Kukso (2015-16): “200 years of ‘Frankenstein’: A Myth That Reflects Very Current Fears,” La Nación (in Spanish).
George Musser (2014-15): “What Is Spacetime?” Nature.
Valeria Román (2004-05): “The Argentine Scientist Who Studied the Brain of Albert Einstein: ‘Geniuses Do Not Exist, We All Have Some Talent,’” Infobae (in Spanish).
Angela Saini (2012-13): “Racism Is Creeping Back Into Mainstream Science — We Have to Stop It,” The Guardian.
Fabio Turone (2016-17): “Italian Research ‘Condemned to Steer by Sight,’” Research Europe.
Lauren Whaley (2016-17): “Q&A: Dr. Emily Dossett on the Disturbing Lack of Mental Health Care for Moms in the Safety Net,” Center for Health Journalism.
Mark Wolverton (2016-17): “Before Launching Probes to Venus, NASA Had to Figure Out Exactly Where It Was,” Air & Space Magazine; “The General Is a Robot: Artificial Intelligence Goes to War,” Undark.
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