Gilmartin has put feelers out for interviews with serial killers, pedophiles, and rapists in efforts to push the limits of our understanding of one another, no matter our thoughts or actions. However, he says he won't interview someone who is planning on hurting someone, nor will he interview someone if he feels it's the wrong time—if they're in the midst of a breakdown or a relapse, for example. This, Gilmartin says, would be exploitative.

Between the hundreds of interviews he's conducted, the thousands of listener surveys he reads, and the extensive email correspondence he maintains with his listeners, Gilmartin finds that depression and anxiety are the most common ailments suffered. In fact, it was Gilmartin's own depression—or rather his emergence from it—that inspired him to create The Mental-Illness Happy Hour podcast in the first place. It was the holiday season of 2010, five months after he had stopped taking Wellbutrin, Celexa, and BuSpar for depression and anxiety, and darkness had descended over his life in a seemingly permanent way.

"When I realized, 'Oh my god, this is the depression!' I went back on my meds and within three, four days was feeling fine," he said. "I was like, 'I have to talk about this. I have to get the word out there.' Because I've been in therapy for years; I've been [going] to support groups for years; I've been seeing a psychiatrist for years, and I was [still] fooled by it. I thought about all the people who have never had any of those things, and what they're up against—thinking that [depression] is reality."

The first episode of The Mental-Illness Happy Hour aired in March of 2011, and it featured an interview with Janet Varney, Gilmartin's former co-host on Dinner and a Movie. She, too, suffered from depression and anxiety, as well as panic attacks and a habit for soothing herself with sugar.

The Mental-Illness Happy Hour now serves as Gilmartin's full-time job, though not one that pays very well. Between listener donations, podcast advertisers, and speaking gigs, he makes the equivalent of what would be a minimum-wage job—but according to Gilmartin, it's the greatest minimum-wage job you could ever imagine having. His wife works as a sitcom writer and takes care of most of the bills, allowing him to keep the podcast free for whoever needs it. Gilmartin says he also gets more fulfillment from producing the show than he ever did while making a name and money for himself in the world of entertainment.

"I don't come to this out of a sense of altruism," he said. "Maybe I started it because I thought I'd be good at it and it would help people. But I wouldn't be doing it three years later if I wasn't comforted by it. And I love that people say it helps them. I love it, love it, love it."

The Mental-Illness Happy Hour is not all healing tears and recovery breakthroughs. Gilmartin wades through people's gnarliest thoughts, compulsions, and confessions day in and day out, and he sometimes gets triggered and overwhelmed by the volume and intensity of it all. He can only get through between 10 and 20 responses to his abuse-focused "Shame and Secrets" survey in a sitting due to their heaviness, and he currently has a backlog of about 100 responses to sort through before he reads them on the air.