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The Staying Afloat Podcast
ACT & Depression
Staying Afloat is a mental health podcast hosted by Morgan Piercy, LPC, exploring Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for depression, chronic depression, and passive suicidal thoughts. Through research, psychoeducation, and conversations with guests, we explore what it can look like to build a meaningful life without requiring depression to disappear first. We also make space for experiences that can complicate depression, including faith deconstruction, religious trauma, neurodivergence, identity, grief, loneliness, and the exhausting pressure to constantly "get better."
❋ Make Room for What HurtsACT offers ways to experience painful thoughts and emotions without making eliminating them the price of participating in your life.
❋ Get Some Distance From the ThoughtsInstead of arguing with every hopeless or passive suicidal thought, ACT can help you notice thoughts as mental events without automatically treating them as instructions or facts.
❋ Figure Out What Still MattersValues work can help identify people, experiences, interests, relationships, and causes worth making room for, even during periods when motivation and pleasure are limited.
❋ Build a Life Around Those ThingsSmall, values-based actions can gradually create more opportunities for connection, meaning, interest, and engagement without pretending depression is easy or promising that it will disappear.
You don’t have to defeat depression to have a life.
A lot of mental health messaging follows the same basic story: you are depressed, you get treatment, you work hard, and eventually you recover.
For some people, that happens.
For others, depression is recurrent, persistent, complicated, or simply does not follow a clean recovery narrative. When treatment is presented as a journey toward eventually becoming symptom-free, continuing to struggle can start to feel like another failure.
Staying Afloat takes a different approach.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy does not require you to wait until every painful thought or emotion is gone before asking an important question:
What matters to you, and how can we make a little more room for it?
Acceptance does not mean liking depression. It does not mean deciding nothing can change. And it does not mean giving up on treatments that might reduce symptoms.
It means we can work toward a meaningful life and continue looking for ways to reduce suffering.
Both can be true.
Depression can make life smaller.
We are going to talk openly about passive suicidal ideation.
That includes thoughts about death, wishing you could disappear, wishing you would not wake up, feeling tired of existing, and other experiences that people are often afraid to say out loud.
These experiences deserve to be taken seriously. They also deserve conversations that are more nuanced than either ignoring them or assuming that everyone experiencing them has exactly the same level of immediate risk.
ACT gives us one framework for having those conversations.
We'll explore concepts such as psychological flexibility, acceptance, cognitive defusion, values, present-moment awareness, self-as-context, and committed action, but this isn't going to sound like someone reading a therapy textbook.
The goal is practical psychoeducation about living with depression.
This is especially true for people who are rebuilding their worldview or their identity.
Depression does not happen in a vacuum.
Faith deconstruction can involve losing certainty, community, relationships, identity, rituals, purpose, or an entire framework for understanding your life.
For some people, leaving a high-control religious environment or reconsidering long-held beliefs also raises enormous questions:
What matters to me now?
Who am I without this?
Where do I belong?
What makes life meaningful if I no longer believe what I used to believe?
These happen to be questions that ACT is unusually equipped to explore.
Rather than prescribing what your values should be, ACT can help create space to discover what genuinely matters to you now.
This Is Education, Not Therapy
Staying Afloat is hosted by Morgan Piercy, LPC, and is provided for educational and informational purposes only. Listening to this podcast does not establish a therapist-client relationship with Morgan Piercy, any guest, or any organization associated with the podcast.
The podcast discusses depression, suicidal ideation, mental health treatment, trauma, and other potentially distressing subjects. Individual episodes may include additional content warnings when appropriate.
Nothing presented on the podcast should be interpreted as individualized mental health advice, diagnosis, treatment, crisis assessment, or a substitute for care from a qualified healthcare professional who knows your circumstances.
Acceptance of difficult thoughts is not the same as ignoring suicide risk. ACT concepts discussed on this podcast should never be used to discourage someone from seeking help, disclosing suicidal thoughts, creating a safety plan, or receiving appropriate mental health or emergency care.
If you believe you may act on suicidal thoughts or are in immediate danger, seek immediate help. In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department when immediate emergency assistance is needed. 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline
Support Staying Afloat
Staying Afloat is independently produced.
If these conversations are useful to you and you want to help make more of them possible, you can support the podcast through Patreon.
Patreon support helps fund the time and resources required to research, produce, edit, and publish episodes while allowing the core podcast to remain accessible.
Supporting the podcast does not purchase therapy, clinical advice, crisis services, or access to Morgan Piercy, LPC as a therapist.