“We're both oversharers, so opening up about ourselves happened naturally for us,” Hardstark said in an email. “Luckily people liked it, because now we don’t have to pretend to be perfect or experts or anything we're not.”

Murder is not instinctively soothing subject matter, but for many listeners, the podcast has opened the door to a virtual support group. On Facebook, a community of more than 100,000 fans—largely female—not only nurture each other’s enthusiasm for the taboo topic of serial killers, they follow the examples of their hosts and openly discuss their own mental-health issues. Some share how the podcast has offered the inspiration they need to seek help. In part, this is thanks to two charismatic hosts who aren’t afraid to talk about tough topics. (Hardstark and Kilgariff regularly get messages from people thanking them for talking about therapy and asking where they can find therapists of their own. They usually recommend the directory on Psychology Today’s website.)

Maitreme is from a small town where she says she was taught to be strong and act even stronger. Emotion was a sign of weakness. “I couldn’t believe how much they talked about mental health issues and how they were very open about seeking therapy,” she says of Kilgariff and Hardstark. “It was just amazing to me to see how many people [on Facebook] not only accepted these two women and their mental-health issues, but they loved them and supported them.”

On the November day when Maitreme met with a therapist for the first time, she had already made and canceled four appointments. “It took everything I had to make me actually go in, but I could hear Karen and Georgia in the back of my head saying, ‘Here’s the thing, fuck everyone.’ It doesn’t matter what people think. You have to do what makes you feel better, and I did.”

There’s a deeper connection, however, between enjoying grisly crime stories and opening up about mental health—it isn’t just that the podcast mashes the two together. My Favorite Murder exposes listeners to two taboo subjects: murder, of course, and mental health. At the same time, it empowers listeners by offering practical advice for survival and self-care and by using comedy to deflate the scariness of these topics. This approach helps listeners get up the nerve to address their mental health needs. But also, simply talking about murder in this context may soothe listeners’ fear of being killed.

The hosts have addressed this on the show. Hardstark, in particular, has said she’s interested in murder specifically because she’s afraid of it happening to her.

“It’s a lot like exposure therapy, where you have to confront your fear to prove that it can’t actually hurt you,” Hardstark said in an email. “Basically neither of us are willing to let our horror of true crime keep us from our fascination [with] it. Reading an awful story and then thinking, ‘We have to talk about this on the podcast!’ instead of, ‘I have to hide this from my Google history!’ makes all the difference.”