• Joe Rogan publicly expressed fear for Theo Von’s mental health on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience
• Rogan referenced a shelved Netflix special where Von allegedly told the audience he was “trying not to take my own life”
• Von fired back, calling the characterization “mostly cap” and saying he’s “doing great”
• Rogan has also been pushing Von to stop taking his SSRIs, dismissing the medication’s effectiveness
• Von previously explained the Netflix incident himself, saying he had gone off his meds before filming and felt “mildly manic”

Theo Von is pushing back — hard. After Joe Rogan used a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience to air serious concerns about Von’s mental health, including a reference to comments about suicide, the comedian took to social media to set the record straight.

“This is mostly cap. Sad to see this kinda stuff,” Von wrote in response. “I’m doing great. Im a human being which is a rocky ride. But I’m doing fine thanks.”

The response came after Rogan, one of Von’s closest friends in the comedy and podcast world, spoke candidly about fears for his friend during a conversation with a guest who was considering going off antidepressants.

“Theo Von’s going through the exact same thing, and last time I was on the podcast, he was explaining it to me. It freaks me out,” Rogan said.

What Rogan Said — and What Triggered It

The bulk of Rogan’s concern centered on a Netflix taping that apparently went sideways. According to Rogan, Von was recording what was meant to become a Netflix comedy special, but the performance didn’t land — and the special was ultimately shelved.

“He had a Netflix taping, and it didn’t go well. It was like they actually never… they shelved it. They never used it,” Rogan said. “And you know, there was all these stories from people that were there saying he bombed. I think he just had a kind of a breakdown.”

What shook Rogan most was a moment during that show where, as the audience tried to reassure Von, he responded: “Thank you. Look, I’m just, I’m trying not to take my own life.”

“You hear stuff like that and you just go like, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ,'” Rogan said. “I’ve known too many people that I didn’t think were going to kill themselves and then did. And then he goes down these spirals where he starts talking about world events and freaking out. I’m like, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ. Like, I got to help this dude.'”

Von actually addressed that Netflix incident himself on his own podcast at the time, explaining that he had stopped taking his medication before filming because he wanted to “have more feelings during the show” — a decision he said left him feeling “mildly manic.” He was clear then that he wasn’t actually suicidal.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6jdaXp0iwtw%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26fs%3D1%26hl%3Den-US%26autohide%3D2%26wmode%3Dtransparent

The SSRI Debate Running Through All of This

The conversation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Rogan has been openly skeptical of Von’s antidepressant use for a while now, and that skepticism has been getting louder.

Back in April, when Von appeared on JRE and said “Satan is amongst us,” Rogan responded: “We got to get you off those antidepressants, son. You’re losing your f***ing marbles.” In his most recent episode, Rogan went further, challenging the foundational premise behind prescribing SSRIs at all.

“Here’s the thing about that chemical imbalance thing: that’s not real,” Rogan claimed, adding that SSRIs simply “numb people” and pointing to people he’s known who died by suicide while on the medication.

It’s worth being clear about where the science actually lands. FDA guidance does note an increased risk of suicidal thoughts in children and adolescents early in treatment — roughly 4 percent on antidepressants versus 2 percent on placebo — and recommends close monitoring. But SSRIs are also among the most studied medications in existence, with a major 2018 meta-analysis in The Lancet finding them more effective than placebo for treating major depressive disorder in adults. Healthcare professionals have consistently warned that high-profile dismissals of antidepressants can push vulnerable people toward dangerous choices without clinical guidance.

Rogan’s comments are landing in a broader cultural moment where skepticism toward psychiatric medication has been growing, particularly in right-wing and wellness spaces. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pushed initiatives aimed at reducing SSRI prescriptions, and a viral TikTok from Ella Emhoff questioning long-term SSRI research circulated widely — though Emhoff later clarified she was “very pro-SSRIs” and said they had “saved her life.”

Von has been open about his history with depression and long-term antidepressant use. After the April episode where Rogan pushed him to quit his meds, Von posted on X about his friend: “he just wants me to be healthy and feel cared abt.”

That grace is still there, even now. Von isn’t attacking Rogan — he’s just saying the picture being painted isn’t accurate. And for fans who’ve watched these two grow together through years of podcasts and late-night conversations about life, comedy, and everything in between, that measured response probably says more than any breakdown ever could.

The post Theo Von Responds After Joe Rogan Raises Suicide Fears appeared first on Cream.

• Billy Bob Thornton appeared on Howie Mandel’s podcast and shared a hilariously gross OCD story from the late ’80s involving a stranger’s blackhead
• The 70-year-old Landman star has AB-negative blood — the rarest type in the world, shared by less than 1% of people — which forces a severely restricted diet
• Thornton and Mandel, both diagnosed with OCD, bonded over their shared condition in a conversation both called genuinely therapeutic
• Thornton’s unexpected food discovery: white grapes dipped in spicy Dijon mustard, which he now swears by

Billy Bob Thornton has never been one to shy away from the weird, the raw, or the real — and his recent appearance on Howie Mandel Does Stuff was no exception. The 70-year-old Landman star sat down with Mandel and his daughter and co-host Jackelyn Shultz and delivered one of the more memorable podcast conversations you’ll hear this year: part gross-out story, part genuine mental health reckoning, part accidental food revelation.

The highlight — if you can call it that — was a story from the late ’80s that Thornton himself introduced with a fair warning. “You wanna hear a funny, but creepy, gross funny one?” he asked, before launching into it.

He was standing in line at the market pavilions in West Hollywood behind an older man with a “leathery, wrinkly neck” covered in blackheads. One in particular was enormous — the size of a pin head, Thornton said. And then the OCD kicked in. Not a desire to pop it, exactly. Something harder to explain. “You’re saying you want to touch it?” Mandel asked. Thornton clarified: he didn’t want to. He had to. His brain simply wouldn’t let it go.

So he used a nearby magazine rack as cover. He reached over, made contact — “I went ‘boink'” — and grabbed a copy of People magazine to play it off. When the man turned around, Thornton apologized, said he was just grabbing a read. Crisis averted. Compulsion satisfied. “So anyway, I got to touch the blackhead and get out of it, you know.”

Mandel and Shultz lost it. “Did you say boink?” Shultz asked through laughter. “That’s hysterical,” Mandel added. Thornton, deadpan: “I got over that a long time ago. I went to blackhead therapy.”

The Exhausting Reality of Living With OCD

The laughter was real, but so was the weight behind the story. Thornton first shared his OCD diagnosis publicly in a 2004 interview with Ann Curry, where he connected the condition to a physically and emotionally abusive upbringing. His symptoms showed up early. As a child in Arkansas, he’d count silently in his head while waiting for his father’s car to pull into the driveway around 4 p.m. “I would say if I can count to a hundred five times before I hear the car come in the driveway, everything’s going to be okay,” he told Mandel. He knew it was irrational. He couldn’t stop anyway.

“It exhausts you,” he told Ann Curry back then. “You’re constantly doing mathematics in your head.” Twenty-plus years later, sitting across from Mandel, the sentiment hadn’t changed. “It’s so emotionally and mentally exhausting that that’s one of the things that people don’t really say much,” he said.

Mandel knows that exhaustion intimately. His own OCD — he’s a well-known germophobe who famously won’t shake hands — became public in an unplanned way during a 1998 appearance on The Howard Stern Show. When he couldn’t get out of the studio because he didn’t want to touch the doorknob, the crew thought it was a bit and playfully blocked him. It wasn’t a bit. His panic attack was real, and in the moment he told Stern he saw a psychiatrist for OCD — not realizing the show was still live.

What brought the two together before this podcast was Thornton reaching out directly. Mandel revealed that Thornton had contacted him, noting they had a lot in common. “It was beautiful to be open with somebody about humanity and about struggling,” Mandel said. Later in the conversation, Thornton circled back to that — noting how rare it was to connect with someone in the industry who wasn’t just talking about projects and deals. They both agreed: talking about the condition itself felt like actual relief.

The Blood Type That Changed How He Eats

The health conversation didn’t stop at OCD. Thornton also opened up about the dietary restrictions that have shaped — and complicated — his life for decades. He has AB-negative blood, the rarest blood type in the world according to the American Red Cross, found in less than 1% of the global population. Along with that comes fewer digestive enzymes, which means his body struggles to process a long list of foods he grew up eating without a second thought.

“I’m allergic to wheat, dairy… can’t eat meat, like, you know, pork or beef or any of that stuff,” he said. No shellfish either. The list is long. For breakfast the day of the podcast, he’d had a bowl of blueberries. His post-show plan: gluten-free chips with dairy-free cream cheese.

The thing is, he didn’t always know something was wrong. Growing up in Arkansas and East Texas, he just ate everything — and felt terrible after every meal. “I just assumed everybody felt like s— after they ate. I didn’t know,” he said. He laughed about it, but there’s something genuinely striking about spending years of your life thinking misery after a meal was just… normal.

Mandel brought up a detail that got a good reaction: his son Alex, who is friends with Thornton’s son William, once came home and reported that Thornton had served him bagels with cream cheese and ketchup. Thornton didn’t miss a beat. “That’s a hillbilly bagel,” he said.

And then there’s the grape thing. Thornton was in a green room before a Landman Q&A event, staring at a spread of deli meats, cheeses, and crackers — essentially everything he can’t eat. The only safe option was a bowl of grapes. Resigned to a boring snack, he spotted some spicy Dijon mustard nearby and made an impulsive decision. He dipped a white grape in it and took a bite.

“It was one of the best things I ever had in my lifetime,” he said. “So now it’s become a thing for me.”

Thornton is currently starring in Landman on Paramount+ alongside Ali Larter, Demi Moore, and Sam Elliott — a show that’s already been renewed for a third season. But for one afternoon on a podcast, none of that was the point. The point was blackheads, blood types, and the particular relief of finding someone who gets it.

The post Billy Bob Thornton’s Wild OCD Story and the Diet That Changed Everything appeared first on Cream.

• Martin Short spoke publicly for the first time about daughter Katherine’s death by suicide in February, calling it “a nightmare for the family.”
• Katherine Short, 42, was a licensed clinical social worker who battled borderline personality disorder and other mental health conditions.
• Short drew a parallel between his daughter’s death and the loss of his wife Nancy Dolman to ovarian cancer in 2010, saying both were terminal diseases.
• The interview aired on CBS Sunday Morning ahead of his Netflix documentary Marty, Life Is Short, premiering May 12.
• Short has lost his brother, both parents, his wife, longtime friends, and now his daughter — all of it shaping a life he describes as defined by grief and resilience.

Martin Short has broken his silence. Less than three months after the death of his daughter Katherine, the beloved comedian sat down with CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Tracy Smith for his first interview on the loss — and he didn’t hold back.

“It’s been a nightmare for the family,” Short told CBS. “But the understanding that mental health and cancer, like my wife, are both diseases — and sometimes with diseases, they are terminal. And my daughter fought for a long time with extreme mental health, borderline personality disorder, other things, and did the best she could until she couldn’t.”

Katherine Hartley Short, 76-year-old Martin’s eldest child, was found dead at her Hollywood Hills home on February 23 at the age of 42. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner confirmed her manner of death as suicide. LAPD officers had responded to the scene around 6:43 p.m. after a radio call about a possible suicide attempt. A note was found nearby.

In the days after Katherine’s death, Martin’s representative released a statement: “It is with profound grief that we confirm the passing of Katherine Hartley Short. The Short family is devastated by this loss and asks for privacy at this time. Katherine was beloved by all and will be remembered for the light and joy she brought into the world.”

Until now, that statement was all Martin had offered publicly. The CBS interview, timed to the release of his Netflix documentary Marty, Life Is Short, marks the first time he’s spoken about Katherine directly.

“Dad, Let Me Go”

The most gut-wrenching moment of the interview came when Short drew a direct line between the two greatest losses of his adult life — his wife and his daughter.

“Nan’s last words to me were, ‘Martin, let me go,'” he said, referring to his wife Nancy Dolman, who died of ovarian cancer in 2010 after 30 years of marriage. “And what Katherine was just saying was, ‘Dad, let me go.'”

It’s a devastating parallel — a father twice asked to release someone he loved, by the disease that was taking them. Short described Katherine’s death not as something that came out of nowhere, but as the end of a long, painful fight. She had lived with borderline personality disorder and other serious mental health conditions for years, and she had dedicated her professional life to helping others facing similar struggles. Katherine was a licensed clinical social worker in Los Angeles who held a bachelor’s degree in psychology from NYU and a master’s in social work from USC. She worked at UCLA’s Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital and later in community outreach and psychotherapy, and she volunteered with Bring Change 2 Mind, a nonprofit focused on reducing the stigma around mental illness.

A neighbor who had lived near Katherine for more than a decade told Us Weekly that she “showed no indication of struggle” before her death. “Depression is often a silent and hidden killer,” the neighbor said, describing Katherine as friendly, outgoing, and a voracious reader who loved talking about books and kept “the nicest, most beautiful orange tree” in her front yard.

In 2012, Katherine had legally dropped the “Short” surname, filing under the name Katherine Elizabeth Hartley. She cited concerns that her famous father’s name could lead to harassment from future therapy patients — a decision that reflected just how seriously she took her work and her independence from the spotlight.

A Year of Staggering Loss

Katherine’s death didn’t arrive in isolation. Short told CBS that the past several months have brought a wave of loss that defies comprehension.

“If I wasn’t going to talk about this, then I would have pushed the documentary, because it is — listen, it’s called Marty, Life Is Short,” he said. “And suddenly, last October, I lost Diane Keaton on the same day I lost my sister-in-law, Nancy’s sister, to cancer. Then Rob and Michelle Reiner — my lifelong friends for 40 years. And then Catherine O’Hara and then my daughter. It’s been four months. Staggering.”

When asked how anyone processes that volume of grief, Short was disarmingly simple: “You can’t. You just have to breathe in, breathe out.”

He also revealed that he’s never been in therapy. Instead, he has his own method: “What I do is I dictate into my phone and then I transcribe it and look at it and rewrite it and put it away. You find if you’re repeating the same things, maybe you’re moving on a little bit.”

And even amid all of this, there was a moment he shared from the chaos of the Pacific Palisades fire — his own home survived, but his son’s was destroyed. As he was driving away that day, he said, he found himself wondering why he was still pushing forward at 75. Then he arrived at his destination and two grandsons, ages four and five, came running: “‘Papa! Let’s play giant!’ And suddenly you go, ‘Oh, that’s why. That’s why. Okay.'”

Grief Has Been His Lifelong Teacher

What makes Short’s composure in this interview so striking is the context behind it. Loss is not new to him. When he was 12, his older brother David — “the star of the family,” as Short described him at a May 7 panel at the Netflix Is a Joke festival alongside David Letterman and Paul Shaffer — died in a car accident. His mother was diagnosed with cancer at David’s funeral and died three years later. His father died the year after that. By the time Martin Short was 20, he had lost everyone in his immediate family.

“My older brother David died first. He was the star of the family,” Short told the Letterman panel. “Then my mother was diagnosed with cancer at his funeral and died three years later. My father died the year after that. So there was definitely a period where life changed completely.”

Yet even decades ago, Short resisted the label of tragedy. “There isn’t a period of my life that I don’t like to think about or wouldn’t go back to,” he told People more than 40 years ago. “It sounds like a tragic family, but it really isn’t… You learn some sense of priorities.”

That same perspective runs through his new Netflix documentary, directed by his longtime friend Lawrence Kasdan. In the film, when Ron Howard asks him about loss, Short replies: “What it developed in me was this muscle of survival and handling grief and a perspective on it.” He also credits his early hardships with giving him the confidence to perform: “If you’ve gone through that, an audience not liking you is really not that important anymore.”

Moving Forward, With Purpose

Short made his first public appearance since Katherine’s death on May 6, at the Hollywood premiere of Marty, Life Is Short during the Netflix Is a Joke Festival. His sons Oliver and Henry were at his side on the carpet, joined by their wives, with Selena Gomez, Kate Hudson, Billy Crystal, and Eugene Levy among the famous friends who came out in support.

In the CBS interview, he was clear about one thing he hopes Katherine’s story can do: move the conversation on mental health forward. He said he wants to help take “mental health out of the shadows” so people aren’t “ashamed” of talking about it — “not hiding from the word suicide, but accepting that this can be the last stage of an illness.”

There is life ahead for him, too. Another season of Only Murders in the Building is set to film, and Short has plans — tentative, but real — to return to Broadway alongside his close friend and now-girlfriend Meryl Streep. He even managed a joke about it: “We are trying to figure out something, we’re just not sure if the box office is gonna be there. It’s a gamble — you never know how Meryl is going to do at the box office, but let’s hope.”

He closed the CBS interview with something that felt less like a quote and more like a hard-won truth: “I think we all are in denial about our limited time on this earth. It’s very difficult to accept it. But the more you accept it, I think it does lift you and make you feel that this is a complicated little journey, life. And the more we approach it with wisdom, probably the happier we’ll be.”

If you or someone you know is in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. Crisis Text Line also provides free, 24/7, confidential support when you text 741741.

The post Martin Short Breaks Silence on Daughter Katherine’s Death appeared first on Cream.