Beyond Diversity: Shadows Upon the Light of the Mind with Andrew Solomon

0:00 Parts of the following conversation may not be suitable for young children. Should young listeners happen to be around, we kindly ask. An average of one person every ten hours dies in this city with a fentanyl overdose. It's easy to get rid of social media if we really want it, but not so easily by which I mean the full range of cruelty and intolerance and rudeness and self-interest that have come to dominate So much for our children.

1:04 they don't know what good thing is. The good thing is not particularly esteemed or rewarded. They're suffering with the question of whether their life has any purpose at all. There's been this loss of upward aspiration. Reading and art, music And all these areas of humanity. Allow you a kind psychological sophistication in self-awareness that serves throughout your lives.

1:34 I can't travel tonight in century Russia But I've read all of Tolstoy, and it took me there. And what are the things that really keep people alive and going? What are the places of joy? they're in the knowledge other? take care of you. Love is not just helping others but being fully present within their lives.

2:15 Welcome to CC The podcast where you see what others see. Hi there, good morning! So today uh... What are we talking about? Hello hello Can you hear me? Ceci here? Is anyone there? Hey my name is Ceci I'm based in Berlin and i want to welcome you to Ceci the Podcast Where You See What Others See This season it's all About the Mind.

3:42 Our guest today is Andrew Solomon, a writer of extraordinary brilliance and vastness. whose work across politics, culture medicine and psychology has shaped how we understand identity suffering. And the human condition. He is a professor of clinical medical psychology in psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center an adjunct clinical Professor of Psychology at Weill Cornell Medical College A lecturer in Psychiatry at Yale Medical School a distinguished associate of the Center for Family Research at Cambridge University, and the former president of Penn America.

4:22 His book Far From The Tree, Parents' Children And The Search For Identity received the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction along with more than twenty five other national and international awards has been published in twenty four languages and was listed by The New York Times as one of the hundred best books of the twenty-first century.

4:48 His book, The Noonday Demon An Atlas Of Depression revised and reissued in two thousand fifteen is a landmark exploration on landscape mental illness published thirty languages honored with national Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Drawing from his New Yorker essays of two-thousand twenty-two and two thousand twenty four, Solomon's upcoming book Gone Tomorrow on Youth Suicide is a meditation on the science of self destruction.

5:22 And The Larger Crisis Of Purpose & Identity that underlie the modern devaluation our shared humanity. That His Ted Talks have been viewed over twenty five million times comes as no surprise For it is through compassion and intellectual rigor that Andrew Solomon illuminates with candor the hidden corners of the mind, its shadows Its depths And its sacred odyssey for meaning.

5:53 Mr.. Andrew Solomon what an honor sir. Thank you for granting us your time today. welcome thank You What a pleasure to be here. It's an honor from me. Culture has very thin skin. A dear friend and mentor once told me during a conversation about culture. Bruno Schlägerberger, etheologian and professor emeritus at the Freie Universität Berlin is ninety years old.

6:21 each time we meet he either presses a great book into my hands or leaves me with a piercing one liner of wisdom. his moral compass is unwavering humane to the core And... He's an expert in pre-Columbian cultures has spent his life encountering otherness, living among indigenous communities learning from them and witnessing different worldviews firsthand.

6:50 He's a true traveler one who immerses himself in the unfamiliar and allows it to transform him. You Mr. Solomon are such a traveler. Your books far and away. twenty-five years of travel across seven continents Far From The Tree parents and children, and their search for identity. And the noonday demon an atlas on depression all three books our journeys outward and inward into equally remote and foreign territories of The world Of the mind and also of those of the soul.

7:26 Mr.. Solomon I'm curious. Did you become a traveler of worldviews by purpose? And if so which was your first journey of such kind? The first journey, in some ways was when I decided to do graduate work in England. There was the matter of my being a few years later assigned an article about A Group Of Soviet Artists which turned into My First Book About Those Artists And How Their Lives Changed During Glass Nose.

7:56 But In Many Ways i think the exploration began with my sense of the fragility the gradual understanding that I was gay and some of the difficulties I had encountered sprang out. It started early on, when we were six years old talking to my father about this in a foreign way. he told me about the Holocaust.

8:24 When he began describing what happened why didn't they all leave? They had nowhere to go. and I remember thinking, I will never be in that situation. I will always have somewhere to go. And so In some sense the exploration began as a matter of self-defense and To some degree it began out of great curiosity.

8:54 I mean even as a child. I loved Indian fairy tales. I love books about China unusual kinds of food. I loved all these explorations and my mother love travel, we did a good bit as a family And i was so interested in the ways there are for people to be people The way they're there is for them to construct themselves To imagine their place in this world.

9:24 As someone who's own place felt uncertain at first I imagined that if i did enough exploration, I'd be able to figure out where I fit in and were could be safe. And think those are two things which was curious about but also curious all of these other people who found it interesting when they came home from school talking with me.

9:52 the experiences had been long conversations with my mother in particular, sometimes with my father as well. About why do you think that person did it? What are the reasons they're like this?". There was no subject who held me more than trying to understand WHY people were the way we used them. back to Bruno I once interviewed him and asked what he thought about the linguistic homogenization of Latin America through the Spanish language.

10:25 He said every time a language is lost We don't just lose a culture but an entire worldview and with it, A chance to better understand one's place in the universe. And then he took his insight further by saying sometimes It is precisely the foreign The encounter of something outside ourselves that gives us the mirror we need.

10:50 He referred me to the extraordinary story about Rabbi Isaac. If you allow I love to play an excerpt of a shortened version. When the dream occurred a third time, he prepared for the journey and set out to Prague. But The Bridge was guarded day and night... ...and did not dare start digging. Nevertheless, He went to the bridge every morning….

11:49 …and kept walking around it until evening. Finally, the captain of the guards who had been watching him asked in kindly way whether he is looking something or waiting somebody. Rabbi Isaac told him of the dream which had brought him here from a far away country. The captain laughed, and so to please that dream you poor fellow wore out your shoes to come her!

12:12 As for having faith in dreams if I'd have it…I should've got going when a dream once told me go crack off dig for treasure under the stove in the room of a Jew Isaac son-of-yekel. That was his name? Isaac Son Of Yekle?! I can just imagine what he would be like. How I should have to try every house over there, where one half of the Jews are named Isaac and the other half?

12:36 Yeah cool. And he laughed again. Rabbi Isaac bowed, traveled home dug up a treasure from under the stove and built The House Of Prayer which is called Reb Isaac's Shoal.". There's another element in that story we should highlight that the rabbi had was under his own bed. You know, he went searching for it elsewhere but ultimately its added in his own home.

13:06 There's a story from the Sufi tradition of Islam about the Sufis Saint Nazreddin and Nazreddin is this great Mullah, this great saint. And there's a stories about him when He lost the keys to His house. and he's outside looking under a lamppost, so they're digging in the ground. And people come by and say, Mulla Nazardine what are you doing?

13:31 I lost keys to my house.". They said oh let's help found them! Then their getting on the ground there all digging into the lamp post... People came by ask about what were they doing or asking for Nazardines' keys. It just gets more and more people can't find it. Finally someone says where do think you dropped them?!

13:50 He says Oh i droped him at home. And they say, well why are you out here under the lamppost? He says that light is better out there. The keys whether you call them salvation or enlightenment or wisdom whatever it is...the keys always in our house but usually in a dark place of dreams and unconsciousness.

14:17 But humans like to go into the Light. Our religions all about going into the light But the light is not where. the answer, it's... The answer as you go to the dark place. The shadowed place like Jung would say and oftentimes You can't go there directly! You have to go out And see the other culture of the language or spiritual tradition.

14:39 That helps you then return To your own house See in a new way When traveling far away. What were they keys that you were searching for? And which encounters with the foreign led you back to discovering something within your own self? I'm going to begin with one high-culture reference and once somewhat less high culture reference.

15:03 There was a Malian linguist in the early twentieth century, Amadou Honkdoba who said every time an old man dies it's like a library burns down and he was talking about the disappearance of languages, in a way that as these languages began to disappear there were not merely loss of a particular syntax but also view of world.

15:28 And how terrible it is! The other one is that in The Wizard Of Oz, this famous movie where everyone seems to quote endlessly Dorothy Gale from Kansas has gone off into the land of Oz and seen all those wonderful things And in the end, she realizes that she just wants to go home and she can click her ruby slippers three times to go there.

15:52 She says to Glinda The Good but why didn't you tell me that right at the beginning? And Glinda the good said with a rather sugary voice You had to discover it for yourself. So I think this is an idea not only in Sufi texts But over again This question of what It Is That's At Home In the first place, a sense of what is universal?

16:40 What is it that everyone I met has in common? and what are things specific to gay people. The universal things are mostly not changeable because they're fundamental to the nature of being a human-being. But you don't know what. it's easy to opt into, but why and in which context? these various things I think in a way the revelation when i got to Russia and it had.

17:39 you know, some ways are very sophisticated and privileged upbringing but like many or even most privileged upbringings there was also very provincial. And really brilliant people have gone these great universities. all of this great qualifications positions and titles within such great universities or other bastions of the intellect.

18:05 And I got to Russia, and I met all these people who were living in squats at the outskirts of town making art that had no opportunities or privileges as a way for me to find them at all... Who are the brightest most interesting people i have ever met! It really shattered my worldview. it was both the delight of discovering these remarkable and brilliant people, And the breaking down of that idea somehow because I had done well on a series of exams over a period time.

18:40 It has various opportunities That i actually knew more than most other people in the world. I wouldn't go so far as to say As far too many do was better then others but I thought i had all kinds of advantages and I discovered that, I did have some advantages. Had a lot of disadvantages too. there were a lot experiences to which it has been closed in the night couldn't understand.

19:07 And I think going into talk other people at more and more a sense. I guess ultimately up human equality and also over the randomness of everything. an in this period in which United States as And unspeakably, I think dark and evil government in which so much of Europe has succumbed to various forms of autocracy or at least found it popular among the electorate.

19:35 In which things are in some ways falling apart There is somehow an idea among many people that The only solution is for us to look inward? And i think actually there's a great deal That we can learn by looking outward at other people about those other people about ourselves, how to be kind to one another.

19:59 There was a sense among those Russians that they had so little. their relationships with each other were actually what defined the work and art but also their mode of survival. it gave me such an incredible risk. the art they were making. I mean, people I knew at home said that they are making political art.

20:24 That meant it had some slogans in and they sort of you know possibly wrote an essay In which they challenged them. These people risking their lives to make The Art They Were Making And THE ART THEY WERE MAKING DID IN THE END PLAY A ROLE IN AWAKENING PEOPLE TO THE SHIFT FOR DEMOCRACY THAT AT LEAST BREAKLY SEEMED TO TAKE PLACE IN THEIR SOCIETY.

20:44 AND I THINK I CAME AWAY FROM THAT EXPERIENCE. BELIEVING If you could understand the world from different perspectives and communicate those perspectives lucidly, You can change the world. Not so much. I mean it would be nice to be able to transform The World beautifully into all that It should Be or might be Or one dreams of but One at least Would have the perspective To bring about some small shifts.

21:09 And that faith That people had in one another In their own minds A faith was not hampered with the kind of glorious focus on publicly defined success, and I suppose materialism that have so dominated for many cultures. It was all a revelation. now i don't want to suggest that I don't like success or that I'm not interested in the material world.

21:35 um That would be a fiction. but The idea that isn't inevitable So much. what people say is important Isn't important everyone? That was a constant series of discoveries. And in the end I felt, you know... ...I reported from Afghanistan during The Invasion to Afghanistan…. …I spent time on the Solomon Islands with people who had no contact with the West for decades.. ..I have all these experiences many which are in that book and they left me kinder.

22:11 among other things They made more open They made me more willing to encounter the other, not as a threat but an expansion. And they allowed my generosity of mind and spirit that I would otherwise have had... ...and they make incredibly grateful for all those people! Also it was clear that American myth is nothing but a myth that I did work hard, I have worked hard.

22:47 People I know who've worked hard. my father worked hard. the fact one is where he says a matter of luck and happenstance and it's random. And if you're in any position which can do anything there is moral obligation to try make things better. It not just i deserve be were am these other people. they haven't working as hard as I remember going into diamond mind South Africa And I thought, I think that worked pretty hard.

23:17 But i do not work as hard as these people do and they aren't getting way ahead in life. They are staying way behind in life. So there was a whole moral structure That came out of all this encounters with other people While I had grown up among people who were compassionate and kind. There is great deal.

23:36 it's impossible to know if you don't know more about the world And that's why I proposed in the book, and it proposed over-and-over again. But if everyone in this world were required to go live another country for a month at some point before age of twenty five no matter what other country or whatever they did there two thirds of the worlds diplomatic problems would be solved because our ignorance of one another transmutes into fear... ...and fear is ultimately basis most conflict we encounter And once you get to know the world, it's much less frightening than it was.

24:14 You don't make people safe by protecting them... ...you make people save by exposing them. Beautiful! I really appreciate what you said about fear because fear is an essential ingredient for antagonism and as you say The more we distance ourselves from those who are different from us or whom we perceive to be different humanizing them and seeing them as a threat.

24:48 Speaking about this transformation that you went through for visiting all of these ninety-five countries, I think in the book opening their eyes to new worlds... The next excerpt we're going play will complement your words. This is composer and pianist Vijay Ayer on precisely opening these doors and these treasures through music.

25:18 B.J. Ayer is not only an extraordinary musician, but he's also the Franklin D. & Florence Rosenblatt Professor of The Arts at Harvard University.". Someone who had been a kind of mentor to me, Muhal Richard Abrams was a composer and pianist. He passed away in twenty seventeen And you said...you know You play a concert and talk with five people.

25:41 They all say something different afterward Like they all had a different experience. and he says the purpose of music is to excite All these different experiences, but we're just to say it's not meant to be heard in one way. It's meant To Open up a world for you that you can then experience on your terms.

26:04 So travel is of course a luxury But there's journeys that we couldn't do with our minds without imagination like reading a book like hearing music different to what we were used to, or doing social work. What other kinds of travel? Would you suggest could help people experience otherness?". Well I would begin just by saying that i was fortunate have worked and caused me go all these places into be sent them.

26:34 so there where people who are sending around the world it's not like spent my whole time taking a holiday here their everywhere but still somebody paying for happen. I meet so many people who haven't operated outside of their immediate community. And often in terms of travel, you can travel to some place that's twenty miles away or someplace that is half a mile away where people are thinking differently.

27:00 Or go into school other than the school which you've attended and listen whether they're there speaking differently... ...I had good fortune going around the world but encounter with difference very seldom requires This can be a pleasure and an illumination to do so. There's also the reading of books, there is as you've just said The Listening To Music... ...there IS THE DECISION TO OPEN YOUR MIND AND TO THINK.

27:31 I find such-and-such grotesque or awful. It gives someone else pleasure! I wonder why that is? There is going someplace in thinking. people here are so warm But the rate of violence is incredibly high. What is it that's motivating these violent people? And there so much of that can be learned through The Art, this leads to one or other issues I have with society we live in which is that In a post-enlightenment era We've placed such an enormous emphasis on the ostensible truth Of things are experienced Through numbers and statistics and graphs.

28:11 If they're shown scientific and I use that word sort of semi-ironically, then it's true. And if its a matter story an anecdote than just a foolish self indulgence There is reason. the Bible was not written in flow charts but rather in parables. It has shifted toward the numerical, with the anecdotal assumed to be self-indulgent and unreliable.

28:51 There are perspectives. you can understand by looking at a painting... ...by reading a book…. …by listening what someone else had to say…. By listening before you speak which is very basic skill that seems eluded many members of my own and even more subsequent generations. all those things can be ways of understanding other ways of thinking.

29:16 We live in this social media era, In a very low-information high opinion society... ...in which people decide to have opinions about things they know absolutely nothing about and presume that their uninformed opinions are as valid as those with people who know thing. we could just value knowledge! We could say oh someone must know more about THIS.

29:40 whatever this is than I do, i'd love to hear their story and look if you're willing to spend enough time. You can find their story. it's online or its in a book they published. that was published recently... Or It is In A Book That Was Published Three Hundred Years ago! Or Its In Play By Shakespeare!

29:57 Or It Is In A Play by Someone Who Lived At Another Time And Whom No One Else Has Ever Heard Of Anymore But That You Dig Up Somewhere. IT'S ALL OVER THE PLACE AND A LOT OF IT HAS TO DO NOT WITH WHAT IT IS YOU ENCOUNTER but with how open you are to what you encounter. And the work that I've been doing more recently, there's a very unfortunately named procedure or intervention called The Good Behavior Game in which children when they're six years old and beginning at school as they come into the classroom each day see three rules on the blackboard—I think they change once a week.

30:35 At the end of the week whoever hasn't broken, The Rules gets a little prize. at the beginning the rules are very straightforward and everybody wins but as year goes on the rules become more difficult. And one that was most striking to me A lot is organized around. it Is can you listen To what someone else has to say before You say What YOU have to Say?

30:56 Can you try to reconcile with what YOU Have to say With WHAT THAT PERSON HAS TO SAY? Now these are six-year olds so The insights may not be complex and deep, but just that practice of doing that results in those children when they get to be twenty-five having a fifty percent lower rate of suicide. And at forty five percent low rate of encounters with the justice system.

31:23 I think really lost art. our time is just listening while i had fun listening people Libya or in Rwanda, or in Kazakhstan. You can just listen really if you really listen to whoever it is who lives down the block and try to incorporate that into the unbearable lightness of being. Milan Kundera describes I think its this one.

31:53 It's one of his books, but it has this description of what conversation is like. And he says the conversation consists entirely Of a person saying something intimate and The other person saying that's just Like me I...and then the Other Person listens and Says oh That's Just Like Me i..And actually we aren't all the same?

32:14 And it isn't just like you. and when You're Talking about Something to Someone Else and They Say that it'S Often Quite Annoying and yet Your Tendency Is To Say Back to the Other person Listen for the part that isn't just like you, and take that first person pronoun to some degree. Obviously I'm using it a lot because i am being interviewed right now but try put in box of time so we can hear what other people say.

32:38 Exactly! I was at dinner recently when my husband said he had an interesting point But apparently when he was born, He wasn't given any question marks in his little box of punctuation. And I felt as though i had learned quite a lot from him... ...He could have learnt quite alot for me and he didn't. It doesn't matter In this particular circumstance As an overall practice Though it does Matter Find your Question Marks!

33:11 Find them and take them out as often as you can. Absolutely And you know, I think we've all sat next to that person and perhaps... ...we're all become the person ourselves at times too. In fact, Kundera whom you just quoted beautifully keeps circling back into this problem in many of his books…. …and by a beautiful coincidence.. ..I wanted to play the passage you just alluded from Kundera's book The Book Of Laughter & Forgetting.

33:40 So let us listen. Tamina serves coffee and Calvados to the customers. There aren't all that many, The room being always half empty And then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a bar stool Trying to talk to her. Everyone likes Tamina Because she knows how listen people.

34:07 But Is She really listening? Or is she merely looking at them so attentively So silently? I don't know. It's not very important. What matters is that she doesn't interrupt anyone. You know what happens when two people talk, one of them speaks and the other breaks in? It's absolutely the same with me I... And starts talking about himself until The first one manages to slip back end with his own.

34:35 it's Absolutely the Same With Me I! The phrase It's Absolutely The Same With ME. I seems To be an approving echo a way Of continuing. the others thought But that is an illusion. In reality, it's a brute revolt against brutal violence... ...an effort to free our own ear from bondage and occupy the enemy's ear by force Because all of man's life among his kind Is nothing other than battle to seize the ear Of others.

35:08 The whole secret of Tamina's popularity.. ..is she has no desire To talk about herself. She submits to the forces occupying Heria, never saying it's absolutely the same with me. I... We've been speaking about experiencing otherness But what about when we ourselves are the ones who feel foreign? Even Professor Vijay Ayer Who is a prolific and influential shaped shifting presence in The twenty-first century music Who has be nominated for various Grammys a Harvard professor recognized with so many prizes, even someone like him has experience feeling foreign in his own country.

35:54 Let's listen! I think what it is to live in the West and be marked by difference... ...is always treated as somehow other. You know i've experienced this my whole life being a child of immigrants from India In The United States And I thought A lot about My father who passed away in twenty-twenty one, that India he knew was not the nation of india we know today.

36:32 Because he was born in nineteen thirty three. so his first fourteen years were actually living all over south asian subcontinent and his father was stationed at a different place every six months. So he wound up living everywhere including what's now Pakistan even close to F what's now Afghanistan, and all over North and South India.

36:58 So he had to embrace difference on a daily basis. And I guess the other thing is that kind of coexistence was quite normal before The nation was divided by external forces Which would say people lived alongside eachother with different faiths. Even ethnic backgrounds were around the subcontinent. As a matter of course, it was just like something that had been happening for centuries you know?

37:31 The concept of nation which is actually relatively new in human history. It's only a few hundred years old because we think Of those as fixed identities rather than as constructed ones and were born into them. so We are indoctrinated Into this way of thinking...we think of difference to be conquered rather than something that's just a normal part of heterogeneous human life.

38:05 In this feeling of being foreign is something many experience even within their own families, in your book Far from the Tree Parents Children and The Search for Identity you portray this clearly. Professor Eyre was also speaking about the construction of identity And... versus horizontal identities. Would you mind talking a bit about this?

38:32 I'm glad to talk about that, i have some other responses as well to what he just said. within that book i defined vertical identities as identities that are passed down from generation to generation. so in general one's ethnicity is a vertical identity. frequently ones Religion is a vertical identity.

38:53 Often one's level of intelligence or privilege can be a vertical Identity, then I identified all the ways in which children Can be born very different from their parents. so Children with a variety of differences and disabilities are different. Most deaf children are born to hearing parents, most dwarfs are born two parents of average height, most people with autism or born to non-autistic parents.".

39:22 And I began from the standpoint that most gay or queer people were born to parents who're not themselves gay or Queer... ...and at a matter shared identity From generation to generation is usually positively reinforced. You know if you are a black person and you have Black children, you don't say to them.

39:44 Oh it's terrible To be black. I wish we weren't black. life would be so much easier If you were in black. maybe i can help you'd be less black. That's not ordinarily the way that people will respond? If you have Jewish parents they don't tend to Say It's too bad We're all jewish ,you Know. if only we weren' t jewish .We'd Have A...It's..You Say Instead This is who we are and take some pride in it.

40:06 If you're the queer child of straight parents, or if your'e deaf child hearing parents Who You Are often seen as a misfortune And if ure going to develop a sense Of Pride Or Happiness Or even Joy In The Identity That U Have You have To Figure It Out For Yourself And From A Peer Group. So Thats Why I Say Horizontal other queer people.

40:32 You meet other dwarfs, you meet other people with autism...you meet other People who are dealing with the challenges of schizophrenia....You meet. as one of my chapters emphasizes other people were musical prodigies because your parents though they might like music don't understand where Your abilities have come from.

40:49 if you're extraordinary in that or many Other ways that are construed both positively and negatively. That difference is something that has to be bridged In response to what was said about being Indian American, being Indian and changing India. I think of that famous line. And now can't remember who set it but the past is a foreign country.

41:14 So all us just on some extent have this question of identity. i look at my own children Who are now sixteen and eighteen. On one hand they understand The life we had in common very well. On the other hand, they're having experiences that I didn't have. You know at the most obvious level... ...I didn't a computer or cell phone when i was their age.

41:36 Those are obvious differences. but also lived in world where people were relatively optimistic about progress and not one of which felt everything falling apart. I lived in a world with terribly afraid of a nuclear war, but I was not afraid that the whole planet was being destroyed by the careless and willful practices of self-interested human beings.

42:02 There are so many profound and fundamental differences that automatically always exist." And it's hard to share them...I mean i was incredibly close to my parents! I adored my parents. they knew everything about me Except what I would say is probably the most basic fact about me that. I was gay which they didn't know until i was in my early twenties and So, I was going through all kinds of experiences many of them agonizing And My parents would have been utterly shocked if They had found out What?

42:35 Was suffering through because I've got quite a cheerful affect and I didn't seem like someone who was Struggling and I don't want to overemphasize the struggling. I mean, i essentially had a pretty good childhood And it's not that it was you know secretly a horror. but There is this gap. there's the gap between parents and children and there's The gap Between experiences.

42:57 My son has just completed A term as a senate page Senate page program Is immensely demanding? And I won't go into all of its complexities. he's sixteen. When he arrived they have thirty pages each term. There were sixteen Republicans and fourteen Democrats. And he said, they all said right at the beginning that partisan politics are destroying The United States as there is I think much of the world.

43:25 He said we decided even if had different philosophical beliefs. That was no reason why couldn't be friends. They all were friends. George who leans quite liberal. His closest friend was a Republican page from Kansas who was obviously much more conservative, and George started going to church with his friend because he said I understood that religion had a huge effect on his point of view about the world.

43:52 And then I couldn't understand that point-of-view without going... The situation they were in where other things it's five months when there is no access for phones all the time which meant they really have to be interacting one another. but this situation thinking Hmm, I don't understand why you believe such-and-such.

44:11 Maybe you can explain it to me instead of saying... ...I Don't Understand Why You Believe Such and Such And YOU'RE WRONG! Let Me Tell You Why You're Wrong & Let Me tell You Where You Have To Change & Believe The Same Thing I Did. It's Not That They Necessarily Came Away With Utterly Changed Beliefs But If You Understand Why Someone Else Thinks Differently You Can Be In Conversation with that Person if Your Closed To the Different Ways That Other People think You Can't be.

44:37 And that occurs across generations. It occurs in the lovely description just now of what it's like to be an Indian, a person of Indian background in United States as opposed someone who is travelling around and India than some ways has little do with India today but other way very much continuous. we're all constantly encountering difference.

45:01 I wonder why. I wonder if i can understand it. and even if you disagree with something, If you understand that... You could perhaps persuade someone to shift their point of view slightly especially if your open to shifting YOUR point-of-views lightly. The darkest things in the world have come out a fundamentalism Fundamentalism being the belief what YOU believe is true And what everyone else believes IS NOT TRUE.

45:37 It exists in every religion, but it exists to some degree... ...in most families and most situations. And its very hard to shake it because is the cultural norm. If you can reach a point at which say Everything that I believe seems work for me But there are other truths that co-exist alongside of it.

45:59 Maybe part what i think should be more flexible about. You know? I'm not saying I've achieved all this I am describing as an ideal to which I aspire and many, many other people aspire but many people haven't thought of it. If you can reach that set of aspirations... You can live in the world better And you can figure out ways to reconcile But appear to be irreconcilable points-of-view.

46:24 So if YOU hear something In The Music And someone else hears Something Else In The music Don't say.. But no! It really was because it Was in B flat or It really was about war and suffering or whatever it is that you projected onto the music. Don't even say, The acoustics are great in this hall And That's why You could appreciate... Say what wasn't YOU heard?

46:47 ...and then think I wonder if i listen to it again If-if I Could hear THAT too? It might not be What I primarily hear! It Might Not Be What I Really Think Is There. But Let Me Listen To Music Over & over Until I Understand Why Each Of These People Heard These Different Things and see that they are in fact all there, in some way.

47:07 In the music? And in listening?". I wonder where George got his brilliance... ...and openness from! And speaking about horizontal identities… …in your journey into riding far from a tree as you immerse yourself to the world of deafness The reality of how most deaf children are born to hearing parents and many discover science in the Deaf community, only in adolescents becoming a kind of liberation for their kids as you said struck you arrestingly familiar with gay experience.

47:46 And here you write about what we call the permanent question. There's resistance in the deaf community, in the dwarfism community. Even among people in the autistic spectrum to the idea of being fixed. and then comes the question how much what we call a disability is actually identity? And I'm thinking particularly about timing not let us say a cochlear implant which was decided by parents before they can wait.

48:22 I'm not saying that because it's a different conversation, but rather what about someone who has already built their life? A sense of self around this disability. That difference? in this regard could you delve into the ethical considerations of enhancement?". I had a stroke at the beginning last summer and i've lost about one third my eyesight .I can see straight ahead quite well.

48:48 ,i have peripheral vision on right. I can't see on the left anything except what's directly in front of me. I've been given a white cane.". The primary function of a White Cane, so far as i can tell is that if you go through an airport without one and you keep banging into people on your left they say... What the hell are you?

49:10 If you have a White Cane And You bump into People On Your Left They Say Oh My Goodness! Can I help you? Do you need it? Could I get to do this? And It Causes People To Understand why it is that you've done what you have done. And yet, I had an identity as someone who can function quite well all my life and i can function really pretty well now!

49:32 I turned to the left. a lot in crowded busy rush situations like airports. It's not adequate or sufficient...I just returned from a trip to Brazil. when I was there I arrived at airport. There are separate lines for people with any kind of disability And I thought, I could get in that line. I guess... ...I felt like I was cheating and other people can't see it all.

49:58 They're the ones who belong to this line. But then I bumped into a number of people who were kind of annoyed. Oh! In this regard i'm lingering between. I've become disabled. It's not very pleasant if you are accustomed to functioning dealing with the ambiguities and uncertainties of being in a completely different situation.

50:26 If you're a deaf person, And you live in an incredibly rich culture as people who sign... ...and are part of this world where other people share these experiences with you… The idea suddenly abandoning them all! And having a different set of experiences. It's stressful it is confusing It can feel as the white cane does for me, like you're cheating.

50:52 it feels inauthentic...it's difficult and its not necessarily that much easier. I mean..I'm used to being able see completely. having lost a chunk of my eyesight is very inconvenient but i know people who have got vision problems. The difficulties they have are mostly because world constructed around people seeing a particular radius.

51:18 My radius is now narrower than it was. But nobody has expected to see what's behind their head, because nobody can! If everybody could and I couldn't... ...I'd be the disabled one even if i could see all of what is currently considered normal for people. Normality isn't real. It's a matter of consensus A matter of majority vote.

51:45 So we experience deafness, for example as a lack. It's an absence of hearing but from any deaf people it is actually the opposite – its presence! Its' the presence of deafness. and that deafness has defined their experiences with interactions in this world. so... A lot of people don't want to be cured.

52:07 There also the matter that cures by enlarge are. they're sort-of partial And they're traumatic as an experience because they pose all of the life that came before them, as being inadequate. So I went through conversion therapy at one point The attempt for a gay person to be straight. It was an unbearable experience and...I think back on it- I mean like the time.

52:39 Of course i couldn't have imagined I would be talking about in any public forum now I do willingly, but the attempt to turn me into somebody else which was my own initiative. i Was not forced into it by My parents. But It was in keeping with what appeared To be The psychology or psychiatry of the day?

52:58 um...was a hideous awful experience and it came out Of my sense that i was inferior And diseased and bad imperfect and not what anyone wanted or hoped, that I was going to have this tragic terrible life. And you know what? That's when i was in my teens...and now I'm sixty-two years old! ...and I am still shaken by it.".

53:36 mostly reasonably good time together, that sense still of there's something wrong with you. It startling to me where it sort-of wells up in various places how unshakable it is if you set out to cure deafness. You send a message to everyone who's deaf about how inferior they are. If you say to people...if being Deaf is meaningful to you go ahead and be Deaf!

54:02 You don't have to cure it. See which identity works better? stick with it, if you don't like it and want to change it. You leave people in the sense that they have options but not one option is automatically necessarily better than other options. then thats a different matter. If I had been able to change myself i would've thought for long time about trying live under false pretenses being married into woman who has this conventional life which looks alright.

54:35 Myself was the most difficult of my life, and I would have been miserable had I gone the other way. Which is not to say that i'm not occasionally miserable even now but... ...I'd be miserable in a whole another way under those circumstances And I am relieved That didn't get cured To the point Of denying who actually I am.

55:01 And sad for people who have autism and have a way of seeing the world, are made to feel so bad about it all the time. Because their problem by-and-large... And I'm not underselling difficulties that can be associated especially with nonverbal autism but they're problem by in large is They are different than other people don't like them or want to deal with them Don't understand why they don't act more normal.

55:26 Their problem isn't mostly an internal problem It's mostly a social problem, and society should not do that. It's. it's not any better than racism—it is no better than the other forms. or feeding Christians to lions or murdering Jews.". I understand this as kind of treason in discovering your own self.

55:52 Talking about the pursuit for enhancement —the optimization of the better child If there's someone that explores these crossroads in the dystopian world he creates through his writing is Casuo Ishiguro. In Clara and The Sun, a novel I have been mentioning often this season, parents have their children lifted genetically enhanced for intellectual advantage but the procedure carries a terrible risk.

56:26 some children become gravely ill and some even die. Parents no only gamble with their children lives very competitive edge. Mr. Solomon, given everything you've learned from these families From the deaf community... ...from parents of children with Down syndrome or autism Or dwarfism What does this tell us about where we're heading?

56:49 In an era of embryo screening, gene editing and The pursuit for a perfect child what might be lost? And what is this pursuit of perfection reveal About Us? So Yes, because we should grow and I have a godchild in common. So i've talked to him occasionally about some of these things And I think that what is most interesting?

57:16 In human beings an in life often it's Imperfection. Harold bloom who was for awhile at least considered the great American literary critic, wrote a book called The Anxiety of Influence in which he said that what writers essentially do and I'm grossly oversimplifying it is to imitate other writers imperfectly.

57:40 And in the imperfection of their imitation of someone else emerges Obviously, there are lots of errors that are errors and one doesn't want to make. And I'm not suggesting every time you miss fellow word or at the brink a glorious discovery but... The notion of perfection is very pernicious. Perfection will always remain unattainable But also There's need for a breadth experience.

58:18 Yeah, absolutely. I mean take Horowitz as a wonderful example of this. Schumann, Chopin...I don't know! I think they would all have been delighted to hear the originality he brought to his playing because at the end it has never been about playing perfect isolated notes or writing words on a page. It's about the melody and story And its precisely what someone like Horowitz is one pianist of all times was able to do, to bring his originality forward and... ...to do it with extraordinary sensitivity and genius.

58:58 We just talked about the variety of languages…. …and a variety of cultures—the variety in everything else! The notion that we can standardize everyone and somehow that will be better is, you know it was the eugenic idea and I think it reached its apotheosis in The Holocaust. And i think that was not by any stretch of the imagination a positive thing.

59:23 Where does this wishful thinking of perfection being attainable comes from? The attempt to...the word perfection really began in two different domains It began in mathematics where it represented the ultimate solution to a problem, and it began in medicine. Where it represented The normal typical an average thing And there was a point at which the two merged... ...and the ideal and the AVERAGE were united In the word NORMAL!

1:00:00 And.. ..the average isn't THE IDEAL. There's no reason why the average should be the ideal. It's convenient in an era of industrial mass production to say that everyone is the same, or at least can fit into a small medium large or extra-large of any given thing. But it isn't consonant with reality which means people have different tastes and shapes and ways of doing things and attitudes – all of them shift!

1:00:31 Also… The idea for perfection is constant flux. What we think of as being glorious may seem very inglorious to another era, as you see with this constant ripping down of statues that happens now. Which by the way I think. judging people up-the-past while they're standards at present is a ludicrous fallacy for our time.

1:00:52 But judging people in other culture but standard your own culture it's also a ludacris fallacy and part. when talked about travel what i discovered was It sounds sort of awful, but it was part of a typical American childhood in the nineteen sixties and seventies. to think Really almost everyone would really like to be living the life that we're leading.

1:01:14 They'd like to Be Like Us. Then I went off And I met these Russian artists then. they didn't want To be like me. they wanted to be like themselves and even though their lives looked unbelievably difficult for Me um i realized That those were The Lives they had. There were things they would have liked to change about them, but they valued who they were and the way that they lived.

1:01:37 And I recently did some interviews with um... The band who had previously been the search in general of the United States up until the Trump administration came in. Who's quite a remarkable man? He said he traveled around the country and talked young people What do you most want out-of life?". fairly consistently, but they wanted wealth and fame... ...and success.

1:02:08 And he said then we'll talk to the people of their parent generation. He would say do you really think that the path for happiness is wealth? and fame.. ..and success? The parents will say no But were so afraid our children might fall behind if they are distracted from those pursuits And then their whole lives might be disastrous, that we don't discourage them from those values.

1:02:35 What does it mean to have a society in which parents see their children's values as flawed and never say That is not what life is about? You know the problem Is this culture of success so ingrained and tangled up with our insecurities Our own sense of self-worth. There are Spanish saying Words may persuade you, but examples will sweep you along.

1:03:03 So I guess children see those behaviors in their parents how they measure their own worth and that becomes the compass by which They come to measure their on inner-worth as well. It's almost like osmosis The theologian Robbie Penoir. That said we have substituted at the notion of success for the notion of inherent worth.

1:03:29 That inherent worth exists in every human being, that success exists in a relatively small number and I in my experience would say... ...that the idea of success means that ninety percented people feel unsuccessful And ten-percented people are successful and discover it doesn't give them the fulfillment meaning they want.

1:03:51 So i think we've narrowed what the ideals are for humanity, and that in doing so we gain nothing... ...and lose an enormous amount. I'd absolutely agree with that! And as i was listening to you.. ..I thought of a scene in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov which is really about a memory of Tsushima-the old monk who remembers being a little boy when his older brother lay dying at seventeen, I think.

1:04:24 And their mother is sitting on the bedside crying and then he's brother tells her don't cry mom life is paradise! We're all in paradise but we just refuse to see it.". As you were saying how even people that achieve success do not feel fulfilled by it. what was said about passing those values for next generations?

1:04:48 I thought, how sad it is that we only recognize the paradise that Dostoevsky writes about through his characters. When when we face difficulties or loss Or when we feel death is near and It's sad though We can't teach our children to recognized it And its so sad and discouraging for them. Well following with this idea of perfection and success The changing of ideals through time and history.

1:05:28 I like us to go and travel to the Ice Age, so one of the world's foremost authorities on archaeology and historic art Dr. Paul Benn and psychologists and researchers specialized in prehistory El Clifford have been looking at evidence from The Ice Age suggesting that physical difference may once had been valued even sacred.

1:05:51 And they want to ask you The question for Dr. Andrew Solomon, this is Ellie Clifford and Paul Barnier. In the last Ice Age surviving burials are very rare but among those that have been found a high proportion of people who seemed to be anatomically special in different ways most notably the world's earliest known dwarf A teenager buried on an adult female In the absence of DNA tests, we do not know if or how they were related.

1:06:30 Do you think that such unusual individuals may have been treated as special people within their group? Or even venerated? at what point in human history do you think such attitudes changed? I Think such attitudes Have Changed and then change back And then changed and then changed back. so i don't think it's just the Ice Age was a kinder time in that regard than later times are.

1:07:02 I mean, there's still many tribes in Africa for instance who hold people with albinism as being sacred and special. There're other tribes where people of Albinism were killed And their bones used on ceremonies. You know...there is now great movement of dwarf pride which i attempted to amplify what i wrote.

1:07:25 but there are people who think well of those who are different. And certainly the ongoing, I wish i could say it was pleasantly resolved. but in this country and much of the world black people were enslaved and we're seen as lesser and many people eye among them would say that the best president of this century was Barack Obama an electorate that is largely not black.

1:07:55 So I don't know if he was exactly venerated for being Black, and whether this dwarf—the one who's in the burial situation —was venerating to be a dwarf? But... ...I think it's back to this question…. …and comes out of the Enlightenment and industrial revolution where we've standardised things. And prior to doing so There was a sense that people who were extraordinary, you know the people with what we now might classify schizophrenia.

1:08:27 We're seen as visionary. I had psychosis at one point. it was an unspeakably awful experience. What really most awful is coming out of it and discovering crazy things That i have said and done. It's a psychosis caused by medication given to me after some surgery and it lasted for about three weeks, so It was a tiny miniature version of thing.

1:08:51 I also when i look back at the stuff that I wrote much of it is terribly painful! I had insights That would never otherwise have had And I came to clarity About things that I'd Never Had Clarity About? I don't want To do it again...and if I had never had to Do it..I Would Have preferred never-to-do-it But it had A lot Of Meaning.

1:09:12 And when I did Far From The Tree and talked to people with all of these differences, I learned so much from them. Now... ...I have someone who has done some work for me that has autism…. …and I recognize he is able do things they can't do but connect it to his autism. It's not being afraid or horrified repulsed by difference.

1:09:42 It's really a kind of disgust that set in at some point, so I don't know enough about the Ice Age and uh...and i can comment on there being a moment. you know it all changed in the year twenty eight hundred BC or something. um but i can say That this question whether we value Difference And how? We value difference and weather were willing to learn from difference is one that has woven in and out of human experience.

1:10:14 And thinking about the difficult conditions extreme weather can bring, I want us to go a chapter you titled Populations Of Your Book Noonday Demon In which you write about Greenland and their Inuit culture. Remember whenever flying over Greenland looking down on the window or on the monitor's flight route that I always thought about how would life be down there, all white and so remote?

1:10:45 And the fact you'd go to visit shows a lot of your curiosity and character. So... ...I want ask if you're kind in sharing with us this experience. Iceman! a good bit of time in Greenland among the Greenlandic Inuit when I was researching depression and Greenland. Um...I'm going back to Greenland this summer, which is the most un-talked about place in the world.

1:11:20 now it's horrifically been in news as President Trump has made his idiotic claims on that And you know though i won't go into all with right here but any event. But When I Was With The Inuit I realized not only that they had all kinds of circumstances that were dictated by the ways that they lived, but also what they valued and what they achieved was different from what i did.

1:11:48 And so far he could tell gay, Inuit in the part of Greenland that I was in and he came to visit me in New York. And I remember when he came... He wanted to walk around with my dog the whole time! ...and i kept saying we should see The Statue Of Liberty We Should See The Empire State. No But what's interesting for him Was being at a place where so many people were there.

1:12:19 Whether one building is the tallest or one statue Is sort-of famous. It was completely irrelevant. And I also remember he's saying one day, when I was still reckoning with that different point of view. He said you know your civilization built these great cities.". But mine in the climate that you visited and did now about.

1:12:45 we survived for thousands years? That might have been harder than building Rome perspective on everything, and I was left with an admiration that i had not anticipated. I mean...I met lots of people I liked in Greenland. it wasn't that I was unadmiring but I thought wow! That is an extraordinary and remarkable achievement.

1:13:11 And what was in your mind as you were heading to Greenland? What was interesting to me in Greenlands was not seeing necessarily every single thing that someone who was Greenlandic would have wanted to see. It was seeing what it was like, to live in this sparse population... ...in this unbelievably forbidding climate and to see you- What is was like?

1:13:31 To inhabit a land of ice and refraction A land sadly now in many ways being destroyed as it melts. I remember how you described the toughness of surviving that kind of cold in Nunday Demon, and how such difficulties led to a culture not talking about personal problems or feelings so as not too overwhelm others who had their own problems.

1:13:58 And i was just thinking about how transformative this experience would have been for these people allowing him open up his innermost thoughts. I mean, to shed your own cultural conditioning. it's almost like going through a metamorphosis. For you what was the effect of these exchanges? Um...I just thought oh its different It wasn't.

1:14:27 You know..it is not that he was at war for something but The interactions with him first in Greenland and then New York. They were transformative for me. And I also think when we look at people from the Ice Age, um... The ice age reminds me of Greenland because there's a lot of ice in Greenland and that is pretty thin basis for it.

1:14:47 But who do you respect? Whom do you venerate? Whome do you disparage or castigate? It's very conditional! A lot of time those thoughts come out of ignorance. They come out of ignorance and they came out a sense that the people who are different don't have anything to tell you. That's as valuable is what you have to tell them, And that's not true.

1:15:19 Dr. Solomon we had been speaking about being judgmental about difference About remaining close to experience about fear and As your were speaking about the fantasy of the search or the longing for perfection and success. This reminds me about Thomas Mann's Spudenbruchs, a book about four generations of the wealthy German merchant family.

1:15:45 Successful respectable admirable but at the same time each of them struggles and suffers. The thing is that no one in these characters none of them seem to be able to see others pain or suffering clearly. And there is a moment near the end of The Boonbrooks in which Thomas Boonebrook, the head of family exhausted from carrying this immaculate public image picks up almost by accident.

1:16:18 For Thomas it's an enormous realization that he understands that separate self is an illusion and will go on living with everyone who says I So, then it fades and he puts the book away in a drawer and tells nobody. Thomas Mann said later that this was his own experience as young man in Munich where he was reading Schopenhauer which he describes an intoxication... ...and gave to his character in this novel.

1:16:53 Thomas Bundbruck. This insight is onto what Schopenhower builds compassion on. boundless compassion for all living beings he wrote is the surest guarantee of pure moral conduct. Dr. Solomon, are we still Thomas Boonebrook choosing composure over compassion? How does today's culture understand suffer compassion and empathy?".

1:17:23 I'll start with a Thomas Mann part which It's very easy to sympathize with people experiencing suffering you have known. it is Very Easy To sympathize With People Experiencing Suffering That Is In The Back Of Your Mind. A Lot of the Time There Has Been a Conflation in The English Language Increasingly Between, The Word Compassion Which Is To Be Moved By Someone Else's Pain and Wish Who Could Help?

1:17:55 And Empathy a word that is now rotesquely overused, which means to feel someone else's pain as though it were your own. Empathy is very difficult—it happens very seldom. Compassion... ...is the virtue which has preached in almost every faith and which is required of us. It really means to say I don't know what its like-to be In this situation you're in But i can see how much anguish You are experiencing.

1:18:26 Let me look at that. There's also, because of this focus on success a kind of mix of people thinking well so-and-so as you know rich movie star. they must be happy which is not really usually true. I mean some rich movie stars are happier than others but it's not as though that's the recipe for happiness.

1:18:47 there's a tendency then to show certain striking when for example Robin Williams killed himself. But there was also a good bit of glee from people who seemed to feel like, you know look at that. You think you have all that stuff and your so great-you still... There's a kind of cruelty that surfaced around his death And the deaths of various other people Who've died by suicide or who've died in miserable circumstances.

1:19:17 So The business of recognizing these things is difficult And when I thought about it. I was talking to Illya Kabakov, who is perhaps the greatest of the artists that come out of The Soviet Period. He moved to New York and he and i had become very close And I was complaining some things were going wrong in my life.

1:19:42 Then suddenly stopped myself and said oh Illya but given what you suffered as an underground Jewish artist from Ukraine In the soviet period in Moscow. So I said I shouldn't be complaining And he very gently put a hand on my arm and said, Andrew. The suffering of the world is a constant quantity... ...and we each get our share.".

1:20:04 It was such a kind thing to say! He didn't feel like I suffered more. so that's why i'm not interested in what you're going through. We were friends.. ..and he WAS interested In What I had To Say Even if I sometimes thought I am suffering over things that aren't worth suffering over. That there was suffering involved.

1:20:25 I mean, i'm someone who's dealt with depression and mental illness and so on And even people haven't dealt with those particular things. There's they're suffering everywhere and We tend to think I have these problems and that person doesn't have these Problems. So that person must be okay without understanding that that person probably has other problems?

1:20:50 I Have a very beloved friend whose daughter, at the age of eighteen died very suddenly recently. And she wrote something very beautiful that she posted. She said people keep asking me how are you? I'm going to give a parable instead of trying to answer it. There was an old story from somewhere else. There's a king who has been deposed, and he is running through the woods.

1:21:25 And it comes to a Woodsman's cottage... ...and when we get into The Woodsmen's Cottage- He's in rags! And just runs in and says I'm being pursued.. ..and ummm....he said please can you hide me? And the Woodsman says well okay get under the bed. Then he gets onto the bed for a minute later. The opposing forces come in and they attack the cottage and stick swords into their beds but somehow don't get... this man, and the-the...man survives.

1:21:53 And when they've all left—and The Cottage is destroyed! —and a man comes out…. …The Woodsmen says,"Who are you? Why were they chasing you?". He said,"I'm the king!". This was what happened.". He's then restored to power,…. ...And The Woodsmen come see him. And he says to The Woodsman, "'You saved me!'.

1:22:11 I'll give you anything that you want.". The Woods men say,"Well, I'd like it be the master of the forest…". And the king says, yes. I will make you master of the forest. He said that he would like to have my cottage rebuilt because it was destroyed. The King said so course they were. rebuild the cottage.

1:22:28 and the woodsman said and i'd Like To know how You felt while That Was all Happening? And They King Says that Is arrogance. I am the King. You Were a mere Woodsmen. How Could We even ask such A question? You Will be in Prison Today and You'll Be Executed Tomorrow and the Woodsmen is thrown Into prison and the Woodlands Fence the night hanging from a wall, desperately trying to figure out whether there's any way out in the state of complete agony.

1:22:55 And then next day he is let-out and put on an execution block. The executioner raises his axe... ...and as it comes down someone says, ''The King has pardoned you.''. The Woodsman steps aside and goes to see the king. He said, ''I thank You for the pardon''. You wanted to know how I felt.". He said, there was no way that i could tell you in words.

1:23:23 But now you know! There are a lot of experiences that you can't have... ...that other people have.... That are agonizing and it's arrogance to think you know The idea. this child who I knew has died is heartbreaking To me..I feel loss about the child but my deep sense of lost Is on behalf of parents whom I adore.

1:23:46 But my deepest and most profound feeling is that while I understand a lot about psychology, at all kinds of other things. My children... And i'm knocking on wood even though im not terribly superstitious but my Children are alive! ...and.. ..I can imagine what it would be like to lose them? It's NOT the same as losing them.

1:24:09 So one has to be open to saying this is suffering. I don't know The suffering, I don't know. And we all know losing a child entails suffering but for somebody else something that doesn't make any sense to us entails suffering. Don't suppose your idea of suffering is suffering Your idea of sufferings merely window into larger problem.

1:24:33 I love your depiction here because it's sort of the window as you say in a landscape that remains unknown and toward which we need an attitude of respectful humility. And I would like to come back to Thomas Mann's Bootenbrooks. This book was written at the end of the nineteenth century, At a moment when established certainties were beginning to crumble... ...and this book in many ways captures The quiet collapse Of An Entire Worldview!

1:25:10 Man returns to over and over again, which is the weakening of a way of life that once felt stable... ...and purposeful. And I want to peek on this subject in terms of building an identity. There's another book called Embers by Sandor Marais published during World War II in Hungary about an old man who received his childhood friend Konrad at his castle, a friend he suspects of having had an affair with his late wife Christina.

1:25:45 I think it's the name of her and almost entire novel is The General's long smoldering monologue over dinner And its very much an elegy for the vanished of the Austro-Hungarian world Imperial officers code of honor friendship and loyalty. everything all crumbling A whole set of values dissolving and all these slipping into the past.

1:26:14 And I can help feeling that we too are living through a similar threshold, an era in which what we once assumed to be settled no longer holds... An Era presenting us with enormous challenges one of them being a renewed and urgent search for meaning. So thinking about our children as parents of children, how do you think personality cohabits now?

1:26:42 are the personalities that are being built? Now for the Children Co-Habit with identity and How would you differentiate them from From The True Self? Well in the first place. As You mentioned In the incredibly kind opening remarks. I'm writing a book about youth suicide. Youth Suicide has escalated enormously And everybody wants simple solutions to complicated ideas.

1:27:10 So there is a book that has been runaway bestseller in the United States, it's all about how social media is what destroying our children. and really escalation of youth suicide began at point when cell phones developed two-way cameras allowing people to do selfies they post over internet. Social media is a disaster, for many reasons.

1:27:34 For children and adults but especially probably the two-way camera I'm sure has had its effect. But it's not as though if we took away all of social media We would solve that problem. It was an attempt again to make a mathematical problem out of narrative proposition. The time when that two-way camera was introduced is also the time, When the terrible incivility that characterizes politics and this modern era And public life came into its ascendancy.

1:28:27 I mentioned a few of them earlier, they're suffering with the question whether their life has any purpose at all. i'm not particularly in favor of returning to religion as it existed but we gave up moral structures that guided humanity and we haven't come up with new ones. there is the question of weather.

1:28:47 the planet is being destroyed or whether our children's children are going have anyway live on this planet. There is the problem of why there's so much migration, which has to do with climate change. The vast economic inequality. In the... I don't know, in the nineteen fifties certainly many people perhaps even most believed that we were making steady progress and life was essentially going to get better over time.

1:29:20 And now a belief Life isn't getting better and that we aren't making progress. And if anything, where... We're slipping backwards or going into a darker place. There is the sense of knowing why things worked. I never really understood Why our old car worked But i could have understood it If i'd spent enough time on It!

1:29:41 I could never understand why my current car Which has got all kinds of computerized Things in it works that I can see you on a screen right now, and you can see me. And we have this conversation even though were undifferent continents.". I know it's true but the mechanisms of it are unknown to me. The world is so bewildering and threatening.

1:30:03 children are having to reckon with them. they don't have structures which would guide them. They really do not know what answers there are. neither do we their parents. i dont' have the knowledge. This is how you should deal with artificial intelligence and your own intelligence, the relation between them.

1:30:25 And I certainly can't say this what artificial intelligence will look like in twenty-five years on how it's going to affect our life.". the technologies that are being developed. It's worth having these skills, I don't know which skills they're going to be necessary or not necessarily in a couple of decades.

1:30:51 and this sense that...I don't have enough information to guide them in those ways. The enormous pressure on them, the sense of confusion And the sense ...of licensing cruelty is huge. An idea of a lecture on youth suicide awhile ago. It was for a fairly large audience, mixed audience of experts and people who were just interested in the subject.

1:31:23 I suddenly got a phone call from the university that was sponsoring it And they said we're just sending the program to press when you don't have a title For your talk. They said We need a title right now So i had no time To think about it. What came out Of my mouth Was youth suicide and Incivility. It's easy To get rid of social media if we really want to.

1:31:47 It's pretty easy, to get rid off those two-way cameras on phones. And it is not so easy... ...to get rid incivility by which I mean the full range of cruelty and intolerance.. ..and rudeness and self interest that have come to dominate So much of the world. That' s not something where you can just pass some laws and get all fixed up.

1:32:11 People don't wanna hear. But what is the despair of youth today? It comes from such complicated, immensely complicated bases. And it also comes out in a sense that there are... There's less and less information on the basis to which we make choices…. …and fewer and fewer choices can be made. While an enormous amount of choice over well-being….

1:32:36 The basic choices—the choice being good person which lots of people now feel they don't have because they don' t have enough time. That choice is a very significant one, I always think about the final lines of Paradise Lost in which Milton having described the expulsion from The Garden ,which was of course the terrible tragedy then has this final turn at the end .The world lay all before them theirs to choose as hand-in-hand made their solitary way and that's such A moving idea.

1:33:11 What is the real change that came with The Expulsion of the Garden? That good and evil existed, And every person has to choose all the time. Am I going do a good thing? Do i know what's the good things? How can we figure out what it is And am I willing To pay for this Good Thing? None of us does the Good Thing All the Time.

1:33:31 We're all very broken Very flawed Exactly! I'm also thinking about Milton Who just cited writing about this in the seventeenth century, and now us posing that very same question. And how confusing these times must be for young people? For children? if we just consider what you said so brilliantly earlier... ...and I wrote it down here i have it here on my notes….

1:33:59 This notion to be strong is brutal! People asserting their kind of thinking actively seeking power and achieving through every despicable means. How does all these translate for our children? I feel like, for our Children? they don't know what the good thing is. The Good Thing Is not particularly esteemed or rewarded... ...how do you live in a world like that?!

1:34:25 There was a bizarre survey and i'll close this answer on this but.. ..I mean- I think it's really a bizarre Survey That Was done A few years ago In which the researchers called Thousands And thousands of people And said to them how Who are you feeling at this moment? I don't want to use the word happy, and i don't think they did.

1:34:44 It's a word that has come to be damaged by overuse. The people who were in the highest spirits Were once we're in the middle of having sex. Why they were answering the telephone has never been clear to me But thats what it was! The ones who felt the second best... ...were those doing something And its very broad range for someone else And then one who felt worst We're the ones who were doing things only for themselves.

1:35:13 This is not a moralistic thing, this was scientific study. these were tabulated numerical results. Let me compliment what you are saying Dr. Solomon with what Richard Mollica experienced regarding building of real strength and happiness in people's lives to point that these behaviors or actions make healing from trauma possible.

1:35:40 Richard Molica is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, Massachusetts General Hospital. Over more than four decades professor Molica and his team have cared for over ten thousand survivors of extreme violence worldwide. let's listen In our research on resiliency in survivors of mass violence Four things emerged Social relationships, people are more resilient and less affected by serious mental health problems who had good social relationships.

1:36:25 They had altruistic behavior they worked or went to school. And finally...they have deep spirituality. So spirituality was a major part of their resilience, and is also. those four things play a major role in self-healing. And I think that whenever you patient we saw who's deeply damaged by mass violence torture rape etc., We focused on these four things very effective especially altruism.

1:37:06 Altruism it's very important. What people don't seem to understand now is that selfishness, by and large doesn't serve your self-interest. I could say it was noble and heroic of me to go all these different places And try tell the stories with people there... ...I learned so much. It gave me so much better life.

1:37:31 its given me So much pleasure. i'd like To think That I've helped People But also know that I Helped other people. The consequence Was a great deal Of help for myself. make any fiction out of that. And I just wish the people understood, The value Of That and we're living increasingly in a time In which really very little Value is associated with it.

1:37:58 How do you change that? how Do You get back to A world where People understand the value of moral behavior? i'm gonna let YOU figure that out. Don't Get Back To Me. Hi! We would love to hear your comments and learn about what you see. Share your input at www.ccpodcast.com, And follow us on social media.

1:38:33 Oh! I almost forgot To accompany in this season's journey. Don't forget the subscribe button. Now let's continue with CC our true self rather than inside the constraints of our own personality. This is Rudolf Tansy, Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at MacKens Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital and Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.

1:39:20 The circuitry in a brain where we live every day that creates who we are personality-wise that allows us to make judgments with observations, it allows us contextualize the world in a specific way that matches our personality. It's called The Default Mode Network and interestingly Alzheimer's pathology travels specifically through the default mode network circuitry of the brain.

1:39:48 And when you use the default node network which is where not being creative improvising, you're not focusing on a task whether it be a sport or hobby your music. The default mode network is where amyloid forms with neural activity most earliest in the disease. How do you turn off? A hobby focuss on a hobby of tasks could be gardening a sport.

1:40:12 anytime You are mindful and engaged Your not just persevering thinking about future maybe anxiety I think about past maybe with some obsessiveness. You're not judging yourself or others, the default mode network is turned off. That for me it's like that is medicine. anytime you can do anything just creative and mindful.

1:40:37 where we are escaping to default-mode Network doing things that take you out of your self Where you're not thinking about the future in a moment? We're in the present. I'm not judging when you're focusing And if free of everything they would otherwise control your personality. Professor Tansi speaks of transcending personality constraints, but in the case of depression which we will now deep into Your work reminds us that for those who have known depression and I quote you The self becomes a complex negotiation between Who We Are?

1:41:12 And What We Carry. Could You Tell Us How Does This Interaction Work? Also what role does Personality place In the Overcoming Of this Illness? Personality plays a crucial role in our interaction with everything. I've said a lot of what sound probably like high-minded things, In the course of this interview... ...I have a personality to which those things appeal and an upbringing.

1:41:44 they were emphasized. To what extent are we our personality? To what extend are we something else? I mean.. ..I take antidepressant medication every day. I met with someone yesterday, the son of a friend who has been taking medication and is very unhappy about it. There are lots of lines that get used to make people feel better about taking medications.

1:42:07 you know? Diabetics have to take their medication every day. they suggest somehow That The reason You're depressed Is because there is this chemical imbalance in your brain. We've identified And Your fixing It. As Someone i Know One Said Its Like Saying We put out the fire near house by pouring water over it.

1:42:27 what you need to do is just have more Water in your house, and then he won't have a fire again. It's not the way. It works. The things that fix something aren't Compensating for something that was wrong with it in the first place. I'm different if i am NOT on my medication And I mentioned That I had Medication induced psychosis and The medication changed who I was, it changed my personality.

1:42:55 It changed my values... ...it also had the effect which is famously part of psychosis Which i've studied for years and yet couldn't identify in myself.. ..I was crazy And I was absolutely certain that I'd arrived at a moment of transcendent truth and That I have been crazy all of my previous life and everything I was seeing Was completely true.

1:43:18 Well, thank you Dr. Solomon and we actually had planned to play a clip later on about how literature has depicted psychosis but now that you have so generously opened the window for us into your own experience of it. this feels like the right moment Now. most unforgettable depictions of psychosis in literature don't describe madness from outside But rather they hand us their narrator's own transformed reality and that is lived inside it.

1:43:49 Shakespeare, Edgar Alambo have done this and there are many examples countless examples such as Ken Keezy's one flew over the cuckoo nest Sylvia plaits the bell jar in Janet's frames faces into water. And for these excerpts I chose one of the earliest and most hauntings of these depictions, which is Charlotte Perkin's Skillman's The Yellow Wallpaper published in eighteen ninety-two.

1:44:18 And we will listen to two moments. And no wonder, the woman behind shakes it. Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind and sometimes only one... ...and she crawls around fast.. ..and her crawling shakes it all over! And she is always trying to climb through but nobody could climb though that pattern It strangles so.

1:45:18 That's why it has so many heads. I've got out at last, said i. In spite of you and Jane And have pulled off most the paper So You can't put me back Now. why should that man have fainted? But he did...and right across my path by wall. so That had to creep over him every time. Besides all its symbolism about women and society, what makes this brief novella so powerful in terms of mental health is that the prose never announces itself as delusion.

1:46:08 The narrator reports her unraveling world with total calm and conviction. So we experience the altered reality from within rather than observing it from a safe distance. And here, I would love to ask you after that brief experience of psychosis. You were telling us and perhaps more interestingly After your experience with depression What did you come to make?

1:46:33 Of personality of your own personality. what is my personality? Is it who i would be if i didn't take any medication If i went natural? i don't know. But what does it mean to be just a natural self? i mean You know, those people in the Ice Age I think probably didn't brush their teeth and they've probably lost them relatively early.

1:46:57 And that was more natural than it is for me to use swiss dentic-stream toothpaste That is supposed be good for the enamel of my teeth. I mean none Of It Is Natural. then when i'm sitting in isn't natural because i'm wearing aren't natural? My contact lenses are at natural naturally? I would have all kinds of limitations that I don't Have by education does not come out of nature.

1:47:19 So, personality I think is a very... it's a word that is used to refer to a point-of-view about the world or way of interacting with their old and new ways being. there are parts of it that seem to me genuinely to be personality. as i said ,i've suffered from terrible depression but ima fairly upbeat optimistic person.

1:47:42 in my overall day today functioning I also keep writing about suffering, because there is a big piece of me that is liberated into being joyful by investing enormous amounts of sadness and pain in something else. And my personality is also quite variable! I mentioned i came back from Brazil this weekend... ...I was at Carnaval dancing on the streets with Millions and millions of Brazilians in Salvador did by here.

1:48:19 The personality that was doing that, the personality they will spend this afternoon trying to write about suicide... They're different! In many ways I feel nobody really knows all me.. They know these different personalities that emerge not because I have some illness in which i'm split, but because I have a complex life and different parts of me manifest in different places.

1:48:45 I've turned it back into a conversation about ME! I think altogether this idea that people have... That you can get to the real YOU. who is THE REAL YOU? There IS no real you. there's A very fragile construct And medication might change It. or going to Brazil Might Change IT Or The weather might change it.

1:49:05 OR losing your child. as I just talked about my chain, it all affects and changes that. And you're personality is in constant evolution.". I was tremendously close to my father In his final years whose personality changed Presumably because there were some degree of brain decay going on. We have quite a tense relationship for this final five Years.

1:49:29 if he had died in his late eighties i would've said we hadn't almost perfect father-son Relationship. By the time he died at ninety-four, I felt like it was an incredibly stressful difficult relationship. And his death liberated me to return to thinking really for my whole life... ...I was incredibly lucky and who He was!

1:49:48 But there was a temptation to think what had happened was that the restraints in the pretense have been lifted.. ..and that the real person is emerging. And oddly My own experience of psychosis was very helpful to Me In understanding My Father because after I had gone through that, I thought nope. It's just who you are is actually really fragile and it can suddenly be changed by something.".

1:50:16 And for me was the combination of opioids and benzodiazepines with a lot of agonizing pain? For him having whatever changes were in his brain. so what is your personality?". To return to quote from earlier You know referring to Dr. Tansy's excerpt right about turning the off-the-default network? Yes, I'm currently doing work To try to help with recovery from my stroke.

1:50:43 that involves mindfulness and Really bad at it so i hope That doesn't mean i'm accumulating a lot of amyloid. My mind is always starting between The past in the present In the future But the present for me includes like concerns About the Future and it includes my recollections of the past. And to just be in the moment, though I think its an admirable goal is something that by-and-large eludes me –I can do for a few seconds– and then my mind is starting off in another direction.

1:51:17 So... ...I understand why being at this point and the act of creativity are important but certainly when creating it casts constantly into Old fears or hopes and into dreams of what might be. And if I weren't thinking that, when i'm writing my you know for one Or two people in some way change the way they think about something In the future?

1:51:41 When They get to reading What i'm Writing I wouldn't Be able To write. i mean The writing is an active communication. i'm not just writing a diary For myself. so That's A very tangled set Of questions and there's Some reality in the idea of trying to emphasize the present But it's also rather self-involved to emphasize the present.

1:52:00 The present is yourself, past and future are other people.". There's a reason why Thomas Mann, who has been keeping us company throughout this conversation once said that... ...a writer is the person for whom writing comes harder than it does to other people. So there you go! Dr Solomon Now that were speaking about personality and asking yourself the question what would your personality be without medication?

1:52:38 And I'm thinking also about the stigma you were talking about before, how medication carries a tremendous burden. Why do think we accept insulin for diabetes without question but still treat antidepressants or medications for bipolar disorders and so on? So differently! Also want to ask what would say people afraid even try medication with proper guidance from specialists?

1:53:06 Well, that part is easy. I would say that people suffer under the misapprention That they will try medication but it will change them and that they will never be able to return To who? They were before they tried at. Try the medication. if you find it helpful stick with it. If you find It not helpful or if you think i'd rather Be the way i was Before i started taking it then stop Taking it.

1:53:29 its Not as though You've sort of lost your virginity And you'll Never get it back again. I mean, it's a world full of experimentation. And in the same way that you figure out... You know? ...I can't stand fried eggs but i know because I tried them alot and on other hand there are foods that I initially didn't like.

1:53:46 that now absolutely love It. just try it. Psychiatry is in so many ways decades behind rest medical science. partly because the brain is much more complicated even than The heart or the kidney, Or the other parts of the body and we don't understand it very well. Partly Because there Is this constant idea that people have That what is possible for them should be possible For everyone else.

1:54:19 so I just had a kind Of to me annoying conversation A few days ago About a friend And the person i was talking To said yeah but...I mean He lives in a beautiful house. He's incredibly talented, he is really good at listing all of these actors.". I mean...he was just not pulling himself out of his depra- And i said..He can't!

1:54:40 Possibly because of traumas that he had on his childhood which did have traumatic childhood or perhaps because the way his brain has built but....I cant give the physical evidence for it. if i say he has a heart arrhythmia We could measure it, and we can show that. And I would say look you see his heart does this thing... ...and other people's hearts do the same things.

1:55:02 if they said he is mind doesn't go to the same place where your stuff. but why doesn't? It just doesn't! A lot of psychiatry feels borderline at edge for religious faith rather than like its really medicine. so that frightens people And it also frightens people, I think. Or not on medication? because as soon as you say my personality... My soul..my spirit....my experience.....My being in the world doesn't work very well and i'm doing something to try to fix that.

1:55:43 other People have to think is everything okay with me? Is Everything Okay With The Other People Around Me? Was Everything OK With My Mom? Is everything Ok With My Kids? It Opens Up! the possibility of what's wrong with everyone. There is a lot wrong with every one, we can't medicate it all away... We don't want to medicate at all way!

1:56:02 We started off talking about value errors and figuring out. this needs be fixed? I mean..we were talking in children but its true oneself too. This need to be fixed And this needs to be accepted. It not only question you ask how bring up your children Its also asking yourself. It's a very difficult question, and people mostly don't want to ask it.

1:56:22 And they don't wanna think about it? If you talk to them the fact that YOU have chosen to be on medication then...it often is upsetting for them! But my big message to people who are dithering whether or not to try it is life is really very short. As we get older this shortness of us becomes more evident.

1:56:44 You DON'T GET REWARDED for fighting something without using the tools that are available to you. You aren't more likely to go to heaven because you didn't take medication, you're not more likely going to have them because he didn't get vaccinated either. whatever it is that people or mistrust a lot sees everything to have.

1:57:02 the best life that you can possibly have however it is you define the best like but see said and grab at and do what. i'm run with it because the time you lose Thinking no, I just want to deal with know. I don't wanna get. Noah that time is lost. you Don't get it back It doesn't return. so i didn't like.

1:57:22 nobody likes figuring out they need today medication? I went off at repeatedly. it's not as though this was all evident To me. immediately took a long time um to find your dosage Everything right fine the dosage but also to keep thinking well i feel better i should be alright now and then i would Be Alright for A little while And Then Not All Right mm-hmm.

1:57:39 and At some point i thought I'm not accomplishing anything by putting myself through this over and over again, And i stopped doing that. My life has been a lot better than my standards because of it.". Someone else's standard can be their own! They might make different choices but at least be self-aware in the choice you take to make your decision which is the right one for them.

1:58:01 For children or parents... or other conditions that require balancing chemistry. Most of what I've heard also from friends, is they fear their child might calm down but would lose their personality and joy perhaps become over-medicated. Do you have any words for those parents? Well the first thing is as i said before You can try medication.

1:58:35 If you feel like your child is losing his or her their personality, You could discontinue it. I mean we have to taper off and so on...I do think that many children are over-medicated now. The existence of the medication results in the identification of this syndrome that medication treats. And there's a lot people who're trying make their children perfect parents happy.

1:59:05 and it's not making the children happy, And It is Not Making Life Better For Anyone. I also think that developing brain Is very different from The more or less developed brain Though the brain goes on changing across a lifetime. But That Giving treatment to someone who is five years old Is going To have Different effects On their way.

1:59:24 Their Brain Builds itself In A Way They are giving something to Someone Who is thirty-five Years Old. That Changes Aren't Going Be So Intractable. I think it's a very case-by-case question. There are children who desperately need medication and they're enormously helped by it, so lucky that we have them!

1:59:43 And there are children for whom its really not suitable... ...and they don't want to take it.. ..it makes the feel bad about themselves because of their needs. They develop a model as being sick people. A study came out few weeks ago the iaprogenic fallacy, which is essentially that children are told you have these eleven conditions and we're treating for this eleven condition so your going to feel better.

2:00:11 What happens? The children have a sense of themselves as damaged incapable and sickly. they don't develop very well psychologically because all of them sometimes medications are absolutely crucial And they've saved children from being suicidal or from being unable to function at all, in school and life.

2:00:31 They have done great things! Sometimes it's a total disaster... ...and you really need to think through what is right for this child,... ...in this family, society & circumstance.... ...and try to do so with an open mind but also considering the specific circumstances rather than just... Even the idea that what everyone needs to do is go-to therapy.

2:00:56 I mean, a friend of mine who was a psychiatrist read an article recently that said feeling terrible maybe you shouldn't go to therapy That there isn't a universal answer To anything! You perhaps like fried eggs which i don't care for. There are all these things in which Things will work for me won't for you.

2:01:14 Things that worked for you don't For me...I found therapy and medication helpful? I think other people would find them helpful But by no means do I think everyone has to have therapy and medication. You have to figure it out.". Well, thank you so much for speaking about this with so much compassion because this is exactly what people need to hear in order be able to relate... ...because experience as you say is individual and should be treated that way.

2:02:03 A guest in this season's mind is global mental health leader Vikram Patel Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, whose research applies policies for equality to reach everyone's mental health. And he talks about their relationship between poverty and poor mental health –and a key role played by inequality in social disconnection!

2:02:29 Let us hear... There is very large body of science that has sought to ask this question…. What Is The Relationship? between poverty and mental health problems. In a nutshell, this entire body of science from around the world in different populations has shown that there is very strong association or correlation.

2:02:53 People who grow up or live conditions of poverty have much higher burden on mental health problem particularly common mental health but also substance use problems and psychosis. We now understand that the relationship between poverty and poor mental health is bi-directional. What this means, is that circumstances associated with living in poverty such as for example people who are living in Poverty have poorer physical health.

2:03:24 they often experience much more harsh early life experiences associate with neglect. They're more likely to live in neighborhoods where there's a higher level of violence. These are known risk factors for poor mental health, but also when you suffer from a mental health problem. You're more likely to slide into poverty because mental problems interfere with your educational attainment and as we all know education is the very important predictor of economic success in later life But also because mental health problems are associated With greater healthcare costs.

2:04:01 Let me say on this point another key question in much of the western world and sadly also, in much developing worlds. We're seeing that even as absolute poverty levels are falling inequality is growing And recent research I have been involved with we demonstrated more unequal societies or communities have worse mental health affecting both rich and poor In those communities tantalizing new evidence demonstrating that when people are living in unequal societies, they experience more stress related to social comparison.

2:04:44 Related To being more socially disconnected from one another and That might be also an important form of I would say poverty but relative poverty driving poorer mental health In everyone in the community. you advocate for the treatment of depression in order people to be able to alter or break their vision cycle between poverty and poor mental health.

2:05:17 And we've spoken about medication, and this is when we explored how different cultures approach healing dance ritual community practices. but I keep returning a fundamental question For someone who has lost connection with others. How can that connection be regenerated? Not individually, not just through therapy or medication but community-wise.

2:05:44 What would it look like for a society to rebuild the conditions for belonging? do you have any ideas about how we might begin? I wish that i had more ideas About how he might not only began but continue. But I think The first thing is well. the First Thing which alluded To in mentioning poverty Is That Throughout the developed world and the developing world too, really throughout the world in general.

2:06:11 The quality of mental health care that is available to people who are privileged or advantaged And the quality of Mental Health Care That Is Available To People Who Were Impoverished Are Totally Unrelated. So the desperately poor... I mean healthcare all together. It's unevenly distributed But mental Healthcare More Unevenly Than Anything Else.

2:06:32 When People Ask About Resilience part of my resilience was that I Was able to afford good help. I knew how to find a good Help, I knew what constituted Good help and i had people around me who were involved in That process And assisted Me along with it. and when I was getting help there wasn't so good?

2:06:50 I could say or others Could Say you need To Find something different Or this needs to go differently and switch It Around and if You are an Impoverished Person In Any Culture that I spend time in you do not have any Of those prerogatives. So that's a very crucial matter. But in terms of the society as a whole, I think we need to be more tolerant of people's diversity—I mean there has been the neurodiversity movement among people with autism which is an attempt to get different ways of thinking to be accepted —we need to accept different ways.

2:07:31 You're a failure. Why aren't you functioning the way the rest of us function? The sort of cruelty that's directed at people who are suffering, by the people who were not suffering in the same way is so oppressive and so bleak.". We need to address that. we need also say to people what they're going through and that there is no reason to be ashamed of it because the shame is unbearable.

2:08:06 And here i am, I'm so outspoken about all these things! I've mentioned several times this episode of psychosis. in a period afterwards when I realized what had happened... The letters of apology. I have to write people saying.. But I had to write to a nephew who might have written something completely insane.

2:08:26 What did i say? my daughter with whom? I had picked ridiculous or it was all of this stuff and the cleanup is so terrible, everyone's nice about that...I'm very lucky people are understanding. they were understanding what we're trying make up for but.. It doesn't go away. you know if your drunk can beat them up when he's drunk She's still covered in bruises.

2:08:54 And what you say when your psychotic bruises people, but if those people could understand it comes out of this other place and It comes out at this thing that had... If they Could say well Of course You were psychotic and forgive it Or you were depressed, or did those things because they just couldn't manage it then.

2:09:13 If there was more openness to them and again I'm not saying that i always have that openness so can get very annoyed at people who aren't pulling themselves together You know? I spent enough time in England to believe in pulling up your socks from getting on with things And some people haven't placed enough value unresilient.

2:09:29 So the need is for people sick. But also having this understanding where This person can do things this person. Can't actually one of the most influential Things that happened. in a conversation with a very close friend of my parents She was in what has always seemed to me to be a gloriously happy marriage or she and her husband are old family friends And she and I were having lunch, and she told me that she had actually left her husband for I think it Was a year-and-a-half fairly early on their marriage.

2:10:02 they've been married for i think fifty years now And I said, why did you leave and go back? She was talking to her father. And I said, what about now? She said some of the action you know he can do. The ones that he cannot do...I just knew they couldn't and it's fine if we could get to a point at which she was saying something like this or had no real will in not be so judgmental.

2:10:57 Not judgemental! The minute Nick Reiner whose parents were Robin Michelle Reiner who Um, uh who I knew was um he stabbed his parents to death. It's an unbelievable hideous awful tragedy. There are all these people saying you know He needs the death penalty needs and they should do this. And they have two of it.

2:11:16 i said his parents weren't Vengeful. don't be vengeful on their behalf. yes We can't have them going around stabbing anyone else to death? I've never met nick reiner. I don't know him. I Don't know all the circumstances but These people who have no had less knowledge than I do Leaping to these judgments.

2:11:34 It terrifies the people who go in and out of illness. And it's a socially endorsed sadism.". And a couple of days after the operation, I just fell into this low. There was no desire and nothing to look forward too... Just this profound emptiness! Now i knew it was chemistry something happening in my body because of the endocrine shift.

2:12:28 but the vacuum went so deep. thinking about how depression drains vitality reminded me A bit in the way historian and non-fiction author Philip Matyshak, also known as Dr. Matty explains how romance understood death itself. Let's listen to see if we can identify some parallels with depression. Very, and bear in mind the underworld is not hell.

2:13:08 There are no flames there are no demons. Basically because your mind is removed from your body You lose your passions you lose the hormones the adrenaline The testosterone whatever that powers your emotions. so you were stuck In this cool shadowy passionless place with nothing but to enter back. Where you then sit?

2:13:30 Think through your life work out where he went wrong. He worked at what she did right. And eventually, you move across the underworld away from the River Styx to the other side where there's a little stream called Lethe. There...you drink and forget your memories but not what you've learned in terms of moral development…and are reborn.".

2:14:01 Do you find some parallels Dr. Solomon? No! In first place while I'm no expert on Roman religion I doubt that the issue of testosterone was playing a huge role. In The Second Place, one of our tragedies is disembodiment! We didn't have these headphones on our heads and so it would be a different conversation.

2:14:40 It's not that this isn't wonderful technology, but I think disembodiment is actually a terrible tragedy And i don't think That its what happens in depression which Is A Different Terrible Tragedy. Um...I Think Online we Have Two Of The Five Senses. Its Pretty Inadequate. Its Like A Partial Spectrum Light.

2:15:01 Its Kind of Ugly. I Agree And I don't think that depression really is, it's certainly you don't get to the River Lethe and move into forgetfulness. But i also think what you lose Is The sense of will & purpose Which is to say all those things That used give you pleasure. Don't really give you a pleasure anymore.

2:15:29 You've lost THAT emotion. It doesn't mean you've lost all of your passions. You have lots other passions that are still there, people who were depressed can be full of rage and they're often experienced sadness but no longer has the energy or wherewithal motivation to do anything with it. Please tell me more about the tragedy of disembodiment.

2:15:58 I've been trying to write about this question of body and soul, and disembodiment. We have all been with people or at least many of us had been with who died And you see a body without something that was there when they were alive. That's the documented fact. There can be a body with no spirit. From that fact we think made up the idea... ...that there could be a spirit with nobody!

2:16:24 There is not evidence for it AT ALL though there is a lot of religious doctrine around it, and its reassuring to think that whatever the thing is suddenly departed from someone we love has gone somewhere doing something. There are different constructions in every phase for what's going on. When you're depressed but often wish for... You could just get away from your body, and away from your passions.

2:16:51 And away form your memories because all of it feels so burdensome... ...and so heavy.. ..and so difficult ,and so overwhelming .And so terrible! But that's not what has happened. It is what you are wishing would happen. So the clip we played on the Roman afterlife Is almost opposite to depression Because there The mind is taking out off the body Whereas in depression, the mind and body are both still there.

2:17:24 The passions are there too as you said. but what's missing is... ...the will right? You have no energy even to die! You just had this sense of each second being such a misery And such a burden. I mean, i've said that word burdened about eight times in the last two minutes. but That's The Sense. It's being alive is burdensome it's not a sense of Neutrality But The Sense Of Being Alive Is Burdensome Is The Opposite Of Vitality Which Essentially Is The Sense.

2:18:07 That Being Alived Is A Privilege A Relatively Brief Joy And One You Should Run With And You Should Go Dancing Out Into The Merry Fields Full Of Daffodils. Thats What's Banished And that's why I say the depression is opposite of flightality. He'd written two masterpieces in the history of literature, War and Peace.

2:19:06 And Anna Karenina. he had a remarkable wife an incredible companion to him A growing family... ...and a large state. But for him it was time when his life seemed to have no meaning. How does one argue with- With a mind that is certain? its despair Is truth? What did you hold onto? How does something like resilience came about?

2:19:49 So it's a discipline, and its the discipline that you can learn. It is choice... The world lay all before them there to choose who have do at some level say I'm going try or not gonna try but for some people trying more successful than others. There are people whose mental illness is intractable. There're people find life too difficult.

2:20:23 There'a ppl who cant do much.. Therere people don't function very well and a lot of that, I think is just innate. And some of it was learned in childhood... ...I was lucky to grow up with parents who were really very functional.. ..and they gave me a lot sense of that! But the other factor that's important to consider is the external.

2:20:46 There has been a tendency not to acknowledge the significance…. …of people or their love for one's emergence from depression because There are people who can't emerge from depression, despite being extremely well-loved. there's no way to tabulate all of the people that would have killed themselves if they didn't love and encouraged them.

2:21:17 I read a lot in my book about depression back to my father's house, which was to me humiliating as something to do the stage when I did it. When I think of his thirty. but he was there and took all this time off from work. He was a very hard working man. It is very unusual for him to that And sat by bed saying you're going be okay This is temporary.

2:21:46 i'm here with you. Come on get up put some things You have got to Get Up. I will help you get out All Of That Stuff For any second, no matter how darkly I saw the world think. No one loves me and no-one cares Which is one of things that depressed people tend to think. And it was his physical presence.

2:22:06 because when he was twenty feet away... ...I could lapse into That. It's part of depression. Then you would come back in To The Room.. ..and i woud've sort of thought that for a third There'd be like NO actually You know there is this. love As they say won't save everyone In anyway wanna suggest who don't get better, are unloved or that they would get better if people were just nicer to them.

2:22:30 But love makes such a huge difference. and being open too and conscious of other peoples' love which is something you can learn in practice when your not depressed sees through an awful lot. And I was so lucky That i never lost sight of it...I was just Lucky. like so many things it's locked. I mean, was unlucky to get depressed?

2:22:54 It was lucky to get pressed under those circumstances. Oh well thank you very much for sharing that because That could be in the world For people experiencing depression or People being with people depressed right now that they know that it makes a difference To Be there and say i love You Know about A year ago My Teenage Son Was Obsessed With A Serious Cold Stranger Things.

2:23:21 We're watching this together and there's a scene where our girl grieving her brother, deeply depressed is trapped by the villain who prays unguilled to despair until people give up. So it's basically a metaphor for suicidal thinking. so Her friends play her favorite song And suddenly she remembers The People She Loves and realizes that she wants to leave!

2:23:46 So I asked my son what he thought had saved her and he said, Mom it was friendship. Her friends literally pulled her back And listening to you talk about your father standing outside the door when were at a very difficult moment The parents, the partners friends and children standing outside so many doors simply saying I love you.

2:24:24 And...I love that idea of love being true infant. So let me close this segment with a scene from Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go about human fragility and the strength we draw From Human Connection In Never Let ME GO. Tommy & Kathy are clones raised to donate their organs until they die. In this moment, They have just learned there will be no reprieve... No deferrals, no exceptions…no future!

2:24:59 What Ishikuro captures here is the fragility of Their existence and how human connection becomes The only anchor when everything else has been stripped away. He shows us that these clones possess Everything we consider essentially Human Love Grief Hope despair. And yet the society in the novel has decided they don't count, The wind trying to blow them away becomes almost literal.

2:25:27 They are beings that world wants use up and discard But hold on each other. This is Kathy speaking I could make out. at mid-distance Nearer field began fallaway Tommy's figure Raging Shouting flinging his fists and kicking out. I caught a glimpse of his face in the moonlight, caked in mud... ...and distorted with fury.

2:26:09 Then i reached for his flailing arms And held on tight. He tried to shake me off but kept holding on until he stopped shouting.. ..I felt that fight go outta him. then I realized....he too had his arms around me! So we stood together like this. There's a quote by Abraham Lincoln that I found quite striking.

2:27:18 He writes, I'm now the most miserable man living. If what i feel were equally distributed to the whole humanity family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.". As I say is simply shocking because it comes from someone history remembers as strong and resolute. And with that...I want to say There's the stigma The world places on depression But there's also the stigma we place on ourselves.

2:27:51 That inner voice that says you're still functioning so it can't be bad, other people have real problems. and in your research of suicide You had been able to identify a fine line The one between an accidental overdose or delivered one Between driving too fast and wanting to crash between reckless behavior and death wish.

2:28:18 And I wonder about something that it's perhaps even more hidden than, the self-destructive behaviors that masquerade as functioning? The person who works eighty hours a week... ...the one who drinks just enough.. ..the ones who stays in relationships that diminish them. is this a functional depression maybe form of disguised suicide?

2:28:43 It´s very Very significant and interesting question for, you know official purposes. For who gets buried in holy ground? For all of these other distinctions. there are people died by suicide And they're people who died buy something else. but There are people Who really don't care that much about whether They live or die and their people who care a lot About Whether They Live Or Die.

2:29:11 And there are people who, in their caring about whether they live or die end up engaging in behavior that doesn't necessarily conduce to their living. In which if you're so cautious and become completely isolated then make themselves miserable at the caution ends-up being basis of them being completely dysfunctional.

2:29:32 So it's not as though I mean people were suicidal People who are driving too fast when they're really drunk and know that's what their doing, our people were taking a big risk. They've decided to go ahead take the risk at some level. but there is lots of people as I say especially if you think your being cautious or don't realize how unhappy they make themselves.

2:30:02 quite possibly everyone around them certainly children How destructive Consciousness is. there's someone I know who when we get together and i leave instead of saying oh have a great day or you Know our osu soon says okay be careful. And I think no, I'm not going to be careful all the time. I don't like being careful all that.

2:30:25 I Don't think it's good for you To Be Careful All The Time. stop Being Careful. always want to say in response? They try to hold back um but uh. So what are the modes of self-destruction? I mean, yes. If you work eighty hours a week there are people who gain enormous pleasure from working eighty hours every because especially if they're working eighty hour.

2:30:43 so we gives them something that they want. it give some sense of accomplishment or fulfillment or creates an enormous wealth for it does whatever else at all. There other people were doing that to escape Self awareness and that's often a mode of self destruction. I think most people engage in some degree of self-destructive behavior.

2:31:05 You know, the gamut there's a wide range between biting your fingernails and killing yourself but they're sort of on a continuum. And The question is how self destructive as the behavior? How aware of it are you? at what point do you recognize What the real damage can be? so i think all that falls into this realm Of its part of conversation about suicidality.

2:31:29 Dr. Solomon, you've written about youth suicide extensively first in your twenty-twenty two New Yorker piece The Mystifying Rise of Child Suicide and more recently In Your Investigation Of Social Media's Role. You've interviewed dozens families who have lost children some as young at four or five years old.

2:31:52 And you are now, I believe, immersed in the writing of your coming book entitled Gone Tomorrow and The Rise In Youth Suicide. Is there already a foreseeable date for when this book will be published? Well...I have promised to turn it by December. Um…I keep getting distracted uh..by life um but i hope that'll happen.

2:32:17 then The ideas that have become clear, the structure is clear. There's a lot of work to do. turn it all into an actual book but I'm beavering away at as they say.". Well this is a book the world is looking very forward reading speaking about suicide young adults and children happening everywhere not only in US.

2:32:40 rates among young people has been climbing for years. In India, suicide is now the leading cause of death among those aged fifteen to twenty-nine. We see it in Europe and Latin America across cultures and economies everywhere And I would love us hear what Richard Mollica Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of The Harvard Programme in Refugee Trauma at Massachusetts General Hospital says about dramatic risen of suicide amongst young people About lack empathy and about who is in need of support.

2:33:33 I think that we live in a broken world, In which emotional intelligence especially with the internet And everything else Is on to decline. That's why We have an epidemic Of suicide and depression In United States With young people Epidemic! The worst situation we've ever had In history of our country Of young people killing themselves.

2:33:59 It's the worst it's ever been. What does that tell you? These are our own children, Our own loved ones...our own family members. Every day I hear of some young person who tried to come self in my area. Motional intelligence is not considered a priority In societies. How can we live in world without empathy?

2:34:27 and also as like great Italian professor who passed away recently, Franco Papparo said everyone is in need of support until the day they die. Everyone has a need to support till that day they died.". I don't think this is an usual attitude in society. In your writings you trace several factors that converge on adolescent suicide.

2:35:08 One of them is social alienation that slow withdrawal from the world, a retreat so to say to the margins. An example would be Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter who gradually stopped speaking to his own mother even though they were living in the same house. and you also talk about resilience closely related with the personality factor which we've touched throughout our conversation too.

2:35:35 but there's another element the impulses that the adolescent brain is simply not yet able to regulate. Can you help us understand what is happening in a fifteen-year old brain? That makes them more vulnerable to acting on a momentary impulse.". Well, the... The brain develops in stages so parts of it are emotional and have come into uh full function before the prefrontal cortex which is not really fully developed until about age twenty five though it varies from person to person.

2:36:13 Prefrontal Cortex's the seat of reason and consideration. so i have an impulse to do something extreme, but i'm very oversimplifying because the brain regions interact in so many complex ways. essentially my power of reason comes in and says, yeah but that's a really bad idea. And so I don't do the thing that i had momentarily felt emotionally like doing...I mean yesterday got an email from someone that I found unbelievably irritating..and I really wanted to write an angry note back!

2:36:44 But I thought that would be stupid and destructive. this is a good friend. I'm sure she didn't mean it that way....i'm gonna leave her for a couple days. then ill write to her when im feeling more collected. But that impulse, which is pretty natural in me at this stage doesn't exist in an adolescent brain.

2:37:01 You have the feeling of sort-of I'm furious and what you do? You explode with fury instead of thinking let me hold back for a moment then... What's it going to accomplish? all those reasonable processes don't come in. but i also want comment on uh.. That idea of emotional illiteracy as call because going back to this question of education and the point that I made earlier.

2:37:27 The emphasis on STEM subjects, mathematics and reason has left us not very well-equipped in dealing with all things that are not mathematical or reasonable. so the British theorist of artificial intelligence Anil Seth said at one time comforting though also illuminating You can acquire an enormous, indefinite amount of intelligence with the technologies that exist and are being developed.

2:37:59 But infinite intelligence is not humanity. Humanity involves other processes for which there's at the moment no artificial model. That seems very powerful to me. and there was a lovely, lovely book called All the Beauty in The World that was written by a guard who worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

2:38:22 And he had lost... I'm not trying to remember but i think it was his brother perhaps? He'd had a terrible loss in any case over quite awhile ago. But he described how we would go from gallery-to-gallery working as a guard there and see these paintings and feel like no one seems to understand what im going through.

2:38:42 But that painting, I see what i'm going through represented and how much comfort it gave him. And how transformative he was for him to find echoes of his own emotional life in all those things. So there's now this notion studying art... ...and studying literature.. ..and studying the philosophy. That is a self-indulgence of a leisure class It's not.

2:39:07 If you really engage with these things, you learn a lot. I'm not saying if read Anakarenana then it'll have good life and if don't you're going to end up in the throes of gang violence. but overall... ...the process of looking at. why does that look like this? Why did The Writer do this? What's Going On In This Book?

2:39:29 Why Did That Character Do That To That Other? Encountering All Those Kinds Of Lives? We Started Off Talking About Travel. I can't travel to make in-century Russia, but i've read all of Tolstoy and it took me there. You don't have to read all about. maybe you didn't even have to eat any event... ...you don't need to be interested that particular thing?

2:39:48 But reading! And and art, and music which we talked about at some length earlier. And all of these areas as human...and then sitting down having a philosophical conversation or theological conversations saying what is right? What's wrong? How have people defined that? Why do they think you're in it this way?".

2:40:07 All those things allow for psychological sophistication self-awareness to serve throughout your life. I'm glad i learned the math & science idea. now I'm in three medical schools and professorial roles, i would say that in terms of my understanding and the knowledge that informs me and the work I do within the field of psychology.

2:40:32 That the books I read there were not anything to do with saying it... The novels I read are things had the biggest effect on me....The novels I've read and conversations they have with parents which by-the way we're many instances about the novel I was reading. Yeah, I agree with you because reading books and hearing stories connects to these communalities.

2:40:53 To this meeting points of humanity And as we said before they help us mirror ourselves in others... ...and find the other's in our selves which is opposite social media Which offers comparison and alienation. If u have language within wich describe what you're experiencing. This is why psychotherapy can be so helpful to some people, if you put it into words You can reach the point at which you feel in control of that.

2:41:23 If you don't have any way to put it Into words or images or sounds Or whatever It Is you Put it into. That is controllable. Then it is out Of control within you. So I Can Feel a lot of rage and write about it And gradually think What is The basis of this? Where's it coming from? I can feel a lot of rage and read books, And think oh that's how other people have felt the same thing.

2:41:51 You know it saves me from having to be involved in violence. That might otherwise be only way To get out what is within me... ...and I'm just gonna quote this one of my favorite partitions ever but The Gnostics when they created the book that were then excluded From the Bible as we haven't included St.

2:42:10 Thomas, which has the line supposedly from Christ. if you will bring out what is within You What Is Within You Will Save You. If He Will Not Bring Out What Is With In You What As Within You We'll Destroy You. And The Way You Bring Out WHAT IS WITHIN YOU Is Through A Communicative Medium Language Art Music Whatever Else The Philosophy Whatever Else It Is.

2:42:36 and If You Don't Give Those To People then what is within them destroys them and everyone around him. Speaking about social media, how these adolescent brains are wired for impulse or immediacy... I don't know if we've handed them a technology that exploits precisely those vulnerabilities? There's the German word which i keep thinking of which means validation.

2:43:14 Adolescents have always longed for acceptance, but now there's a machine that delivers it and hits every like. Every view is small rush of dopamine immediate quantified an addictive when the teenager risks their life? or social media challenges? Or first well what are they seeking? And if we know that their brains are wired for impulse for immediacy for social reward How much responsibility lies with the people who designed these platforms?

2:43:45 The programmers, the owners of companies that understood psychology and built it into a product. A lot of responsibilities lie in those people because what they've done has been extremely deliberate Because this relentless pursuit for profit at any cost is an unbelievably destructive model for people to see but also is an undistricted, unbelievably destructive behavior.

2:44:15 There have to be limits placed on peoples' pursuit of profit especially because a lot of the people who are reaping their biggest profits really don't know what do with all this money. It's it's number that makes them feel good about themselves But its not as though they wanted the money have a nice house, or to save starving children.

2:44:37 Or whatever the things that collect are... Whatever it is people do with money. I mean with that kind of money. But uh i think The real issue in the world of social media and so on Is That It's So Hard To Distinguish What Is True From What Isn't True. And Truth Has Become Relative Again. I think for a long time, people heard the same news and they had different points of view about it.

2:45:10 But now... People hear different news! And crazy conspiracy theories!! They buy into all kinds of lunatic propositions because All this stuff is being thrown at them. and again Of this dearth of valuing an expertise You know there are people. if someone said to me right now, what do you make of what's going on in Iran?

2:45:33 I would say...I have never been to Iran. You know it looks a certain way for me but i don't really know who are the people that understand what is happening there and how they actually are. not particularly biased. There was research process which was part my education An opinion at the end, or in order to say it's so complex I don't really have an opinion but this is what seems to me true.

2:46:06 But if you log on social media which i generally do not and occasionally they are all these people saying we need bomb Iran, save the people... And its based of wild generalities that would be pushing it even at the dinner table, but are certainly pushing it to be projected out to lots of people who The um uh poster doesn't even know or doesn't have any interaction with.

2:46:35 and so I think this idea that opinions warn of ignorance really. Um because Everyone has an opinion about everything all the time. I mean, i don't know you probably have an opinion About my shirt but whatever it is people just have opinions automatically. The idea that those opinions are valid instead of thinking well?

2:46:54 I have these passing things and they're just My point-of-view when I really should find out about That And part of it has been in social media played a role In this. the destruction if the attention span because to understand something takes Time and You Know in the same way that I think Friendship and love take.

2:47:12 And the idea that you can sort of go through a lot of images and think, okay That's the person I want to be with. You know here there are five characteristics. Exit? We all have met people who we wouldn't have thought we would be drawn too when we were. and we've all met People who sound great and turn out to be annoying and tedious.

2:47:29 It takes time for them to engage in some complexity. The disappearance is terrible. There's no shortcuts for experience. Tony Morrison once said it was a wonderful interview. she was on many, many years ago and one of the big talk shows And The person interviewing her said so. he said. can you just before we begin explain in a few sentences what the book is about?

2:47:59 Before We talked About It and She Said if I could Explain it In A Few Sentences i would not have Written the Book And I Just think a lot Of The Time Now. People sort of They only want a few sentences, and you know there are uses to a few sentences but they're not a book. And I'm using that metaphorically it doesn't have to be a book whatever it is.

2:48:19 It's not an investigation...it's not engagement..it's no principle Exactly! Even if you think about loneliness itself How its being experienced today? When were in your worst depression You could, I think at least escape into solitude and found in a way of intimacy with despair as you began recuperating.

2:48:46 But today's teenagers carry their bullies there. comparisons they're failures in their pockets. ii-I Think that changes the experience of despair. The profoundity of despair has changed Well... ...I think the process of Yes, the process of real solitude is incredibly important and meaningful. And I think it then causes you to value... ...the opposite of solitude — love and friendship and so on— but also its a time for reflection….

2:49:27 …and i feel like you have to pay to go into meditation space or something in order just sit quietly think about things. and you know I'm as guilty. is the next party in my children have set for years that they said it could describe by computer. is my third child so. It's on too much of its not social media thing.

2:49:49 so i'm always having things coming into deal with all the rest stuff. but So we all fall prey to it. They inherited not only your intelligence, but you're sense of humor! Well yes that too... But a friend of mine who's a cartoonist did wonderful cartoon I wish had been published at Josh Leib and It shows these two gates And one is Mark Heaven.

2:50:11 One is Mark Hell. The one marked hell says Free Wi-Fi Endless Streaming. The one mark heaven says No phones allowed Everyone lined up to go to hell. then nobody is going into heaven. We've chosen this, we've chosen it and could choose otherwise... ...and its not good for any of us.". That's genius! And I can already picture that cartoon in the New Yorker.

2:50:37 so hopefully only a matter-of-time to open this difficult part our conversation? I chose a poem by someone you surely know due your former presidency of Pan America. I'm referring to poet and president Emerita of Penn International, Jennifer Clement. And this is a poem part-of her book Gun Love A novel that uncovers America's fascination into the deathly world of gun culture.

2:51:12 One day... ...I was so sleepy.. ..I just put my head down on the kitchen counter In my half awake dream…. …I heard guns speak. The guns told me about a seven year old girl and a twenty-two year old man shot in the drive by shooting. Two teenage boys fired at by cops, A two year old boy shot on gang related shootout in park.

2:51:45 Twenty school children killed on a school bus. mother dead in supermarket. Two women shot to death in parking lot. Twenty teenagers gunned down at movies. A ten years old girl shot at library. Five college students slain at a football game. Nine people shot at church prayer meeting, A mother and daughter shot in the car.

2:52:12 Four nuns gunned down on bus stop. Eight eight-year old girls shot at ballet class. Two policemen shot their cars And nine year old girl shot in playground. Shot again and again Bullets breaking trees to shreds. Ninety holes in the sky from a machine gun. Gunshots, In a rainstorm killing raindrops. Twenty bullets for the moon.

2:52:44 Words broken by gunfire. Words pierced by bullets. So the alphabet became A-B-C L-R-S-T X Y Lovers fallen Tears and bullets on the floor. My dearest My one and only, my little one. One of a kind. We are all...one-of-a-kind And All Lonely And All Afraid And All Looking for Love Bullets. Everywhere Jennifer says we're all looking for love bullets.

2:53:40 One of the most devastating chapters Of your book Far From The Tree Involved Children Who Took The Lives Of Other Children. You interviewed the parents of one of the teenage Columbine shooters and later you spoke with Peter Lanza, whose son killed twenty children in six adults at Sandy Hook. And his conversation was later published as a freestanding volume called The Reckoning.

2:54:05 I mean just think about this horror...the horror of it Children taking their lives off other children. It breaks me and my heart into millions of pieces from what you experienced talking to these families. What did you come to understand? Is this hatred, is it a kind of self-destruction that takes others with it?

2:54:30 Did you see patterns? perhaps not explanations but patterns That might help us see what we keep missing In the first place. I think there's fantasy. We should be able predict whats going and we can't predict it. It's like, We can really predict tsunamis... ...we sometimes figure that at a short time in advance but lots of people die in tsunamis.

2:54:52 Lots of people are going to die. In these circumstances The solutions I think again Are big social solution. At the moment We often lionize These shooters We make into A big sensational media story. We make them unbelievably famous in ways that then are often appealing to other people. In the United States, we have a ridiculous absence of gun control laws and people don't know what the dangers are of not having better gun control.

2:55:27 there are many factors coming together. In spending time I also worked for awhile as i write in Forth from The Tree prison for juvenile felons. There are a lot of people who commit minor offenses with whom it might have been predictable. They have a disordered personality, they have untreated ADD or in almost every case... ...they have various incredible difficulties of childhood and development And they've gone through a lot trauma and loss that was never identified and ever treated When the acted up at school.

2:56:05 there were sent not to get help but to the principal's office, to be reprimanded until the point when they gave up on their schooling entirely. But aside from all of that... The people who commit these very extreme crimes. I think it is mostly pretty unpredictable. There are some people who have what's diagnosed as a specific mental illness like schizophrenia and then people say well this other person killed all those people but didn't have a mental illness.

2:56:34 And i think you know There are crimes that we don't commit because... ...we live in a society that doesn't allow them. I mean, i might walk into-I dunno-a museum and think, ooh! That's a nice painting. I'd love to have it on my wall at home.". I didn't take off the wall partly cause' I know what is wrong but also partly because you know.. ..the police would come, get arrested or go to jail.

2:56:54 It wouldn't work out very well for me. The reason why I've never gone and shot thirty children elementary school, is not because I hold myself back or because i learned to do it. It holds no appeal for me at all! It would be an awful thing to do-I'd feel horrible doing that and before after during the whole thing... ...would be a nightmare.".

2:57:17 So somebody who actually decides to do this in wantstodoit has very disordered thinking.. ..and is that disorder thinking categorized as illness? I mean, the whole idea of the way we sort out mental illnesses really has to do with medication treatment and insurance. It has very little to do With what is a disordered mind?

2:57:38 What is not disordering my everyone's mind as disordert elements in it. that Is a level of disorder. however That is Very very extreme at the sort of refusal To identify it as Really an illness is just. there's just foolishness. And i also think Haven't grown up as a gay person whose parents didn't know that kids who want to hide something can hide things very, Very well.

2:58:07 And I have seldom met anyone Who has not said you know yeah my parents had no idea That i was whatever smoking joints behind the burger king or that? Was having...I mean they're usually relatively minor Things but the secrets are kept pretty solidly And I always think my advantage as a parent, having been sort of queer kid is... ...I don't know what my children's secrets are but i presume that they have a bunch of them.

2:58:33 Even though I feel very close to them. So in these cases These were parents who loved their children. They're not children who were unloved. The Children then did this unspeakably horrible things and the Parents had try to reconcile the children they had known and loved with a person who did these terrible things.

2:58:58 And what I was examining is really, What The Parents' Struggle Is.". But he also had a dark side that almost nobody saw. He said, but that doesn't mean That the delight in joy. and the world wasn't also The real Terry. it just wasn't all of the real Terry. I was close to my parents. there Was a thing they didn't know?

2:59:38 But we were really close And it was really meaningful for them and me and Dylan Klebold the Dillon Klebold who when it was raining brought his mother an umbrella, there's a anecdote about that I wrote about. The Dylan Klebold who did all of the other things that his mother talked about was also real and he had this terrible dark secret side to him in which she did this unspeakable thing... And for his mother to go on loving the child she knew even though she discovered there was more to him than that seems to me.

3:00:16 We are so unforgiving by it as every single person who ever had thirty seconds of contact with Jeffrey F. Steen is now suddenly held up as a suspect, some of them appear to have been exploiting underage girls and that's an issue. but the fact that someone exchanged messages with him and found him pleasant-to-talk too lots of people are pleasant talk to you also do terrible things.

3:00:42 I mean Now, there are people who appear to find Donald Trump pleasant-to-talk do and I think that the policies he has have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. And yet nobody says but you exchanged a message with Donald Trump then so You Have To Be Removed From Your Job An Exiled And Pushed To The Edit.

3:00:59 People Are People Are Complicated! Everyone Does Good & Bad Things And everyone Has All Of This Nuance. It's A Very Extreme Situation When You Have Children Who Are Actually Murdering Other Children But the idea A that you could know it, or B. That you have to... It's a cancel culture idea! You then say this was an evil person.

3:01:23 I mean occasionally my point of view would be Hitler and Stalin appear to've been evil people but in general i think people are disturbed And they're thinking he is distorted. They had some strange position. I feel sorry for them. For these children who, by the way almost always kill themselves as well... ...I feel sorry that their minds were so disordered.

3:01:52 they did this thing. That doesn't mean we should just let them run around. We can have it going on in our society and do all of us to stop It. But there are ways to stop it. but offer different kinds of support, therapy, attention Above all, actually different kinds of control over the possession of weapons.

3:02:13 But not to sort-of say this family is shameful. these people should have known. These people are responsible for all that. by and large There was no way to know And we don't have enough insight To understand why The apparently pleasant Dylan Klebold did these unspeakable things We don't know, and that brings me to this huge question which I've been writing about now.

3:02:39 Which is the question of the word why? That we want? when you talk about how do we prevent it? The way you prevented us by knowing Why It Happened And WHY Is a Question That Haunts Humanity. Little Kids Asked Why, Why All Time Most Things We Don't Know. Why? Why Was I Born in United States Not To A Native Tribe In Amazon Basin I was.

3:03:05 Why is it going to rain later this afternoon? We can talk about weather systems and so on, but at some larger level... ...I don't know why anything! Why does the world exist?! It goes back into these great existential questions And i would put The behavior of people who have done unbearably awful unspeakable things In that category Of WHY.

3:03:30 That Is Unanswerable rather than saying, at least for now that it's a why to which we can with science arrive in some sort of solution. Hearing you speak about the disordered mind with all its different behaviors distortions and manifestations I'm struck by how Difficult it is to contain all of that within a sole diagnosis or many diagnoses, if you will.

3:04:01 It's almost like trying to stuff hundreds and hundreds of different objects into one small box. And in the case of Sandy Hook Adam Lanza had been taking out-of school and was being homeschooled. I believe he had received an autism diagnosis and his mother seemed to take that label as justification for a lot of the measures she took with her son.

3:04:26 The question is, how often do you think a diagnosis Adam Lanza, I think there were a lot of issues with his mother's parenting in him. But since he murdered his mother... ...I didn't get the interviewer and talk to her about it but from everything that i've been able to put together She made a lot decisions that I think we're wrong?

3:04:53 I think she made them with good intention.. ..but I think that There are other decisions than might have worked out better. But- I don't know! There is no double blind experiment. so We can't know whether if she had kept him at school And if she has done various things different But people talk about, well he had some kind of autism and he killed all these children.

3:05:12 Which to me just seems ignorant because how would Autism explain any of that? I mean i now know a lot of people with autism who have never for a second considered murdering a lot Of Children And I think it's It's A kind of abuse To say He Had this diagnosis and That it was responsible For what happened.

3:05:35 having said I also think, you know for years i wondered to myself and i talked with people do i have unipolar depression? Do i have bipolar two? is there in it. And then at some point i thought these cat-i would like them to be neat categories. the way you can sort of actually find out if you have food poisoning.

3:05:54 Is that bacteria? which bacterias? oh look this is the bacteria that shouldn't be there. that's there and we now what it is. We cant' do that with mental illness. These categories are an artifice. I have a problem. These things seem to be helpful, this is how i get through the day. but the specificity and all of these diagnoses in many ways result in more confusion than they do help.

3:06:19 They're hopeful as I said...they are helpful for getting treatment And their helpful for having that treatment paid for. But thats really about it. Now you were talking about Adam Lenz's mom. Do you think that some of these parents and other parents have. children who turn towards self-destruction might themselves be struggling with their own undiagnosed pain, they're on quiet self destruction trying the best to be loving and present but carrying there own suffering underneath it?

3:06:53 I mean sometimes um, you know I can't diagnose Adam Lanz's mother because i never met her and uh... And I'm not a diagnostician in any case. It sounds like she dealt with some depression. it sounds like he had a child- I mean if my child behaved in the ways that he behaved ,I might be terribly depressed.

3:07:14 also whether there were ways to deal with her depression what effect they would have had on him. all of that is very tangled. But I think often, and it's one of the things that makes me feel like categorizations are sort-of foolish. you have someone who has unipolar depression. they had a child to as bipolar illness.

3:07:31 They have another child who has schizophrenia. There's a sense that brain disturbance runs in the family but if not there isn't disease specific that's passed out. sometimes their is sometimes theirs isn't. Often i think parents who suffered or struggled alot um, have children who then are disturbed.

3:07:50 Especially you know it's very-very hard work if your dealing with extreme depression to remain fully there and present for your children And children are much wiser than people give them the credit for when they pick up on it. It frightens them and upsets them. Then nobody is really talking about that.

3:08:13 There a lot of interlacing in this. Overall, my feeling is that I mean abusive parents tend to have children who are very disturbed and abuse of parenting is a big problem. But the idea that the problems we have so many of them are attributed to poor parenting It's just it's wishful thinking because what it really says Is?

3:08:34 The reason your child did That is because you were a terrible parent And i'm a good parent So my job won't do that and I don't Have to worry about having that problem. I certainly hope it's not the case, but... ...I adore my children. They have shown no signs of any particular violence. But having interviewed so many of these families And The Lancers and The Cleabolds are only two!

3:08:55 i've now talked to a lot Of families because people call me after their Children do These things and ask Me for guidance. when i've spoken To the families of Many-many other um uh children in these situations? I feel like.. ..i don't think My children Are ever going to Do Any such thing?! But i can't guarantee you that they won't I don't think anyone can guarantee.

3:09:15 And that's a very unpleasant thing to face, and lots of people... How could you say that about Richard? I'm not saying it about my children! I am thinking about PEOPLE. I'm thinking about people and my children are people…. …and people can keep secrets – and people can be unknowable– and people have the dark side which is invisible— all these things are true OF people —and people includes everyone.".

3:09:40 Absolutely. We were talking before about guns and the lack of education, you gave us this brilliant concept emotional illiteracy which we used to describe a culture that pushes towards STEM subjects, artificial intelligence. everything can be measured and recent treats humanity as pastime. notwithstanding music or literature are things a life.

3:10:11 So staying with this idea of promoting these kind of culture, I once interviewed David Cantor the father of investigative psychology professor emeritus at The University of Liverpool and one of the world's leading applied social psychologists about what he thought were the main causes behind two characteristic criminal phenomena happening on an alarming scale in the US which are the prevalence of serial killers and teenage shootings.

3:10:43 And this is what he answers.". That's a huge question, some people have written books about it. to try give you very quick answer. One reason clearly the ready availability of firearms are not just personal pistols or simple guns but military level assault rifles are readily available. I mean...I throughout my actual eighty years have never ever held a weapon, a firearm.

3:11:15 A weapon of any sort. I've never held the gun whereas in The United States to my horror you can walk into supermarket and buy a firearm so... ...the reasons for that are huge unfolding we can argue about forever. but clearly in Britain serial killers Rarely, I can't think of a serial killer in Britain who's used the firearm.

3:11:42 They will use knife or poison. but if firearms were available so readily available then you would without doubt have more serial killers. that one reason. The other reason there is Without any doubt our culture of violence and United States always like to point out difference between Rambo in films goes in and shoots up at great length anything that is getting his way.

3:12:09 And James Bond, who's the English gentleman... ...who typically only kills when being attacked and then only in a very limited-and focused way. I mean so there are these different cultures of violence That support activities. So yeah those have got to be key explanations, as well is a whole range of other things about the way mass media operates and aspects of education.

3:12:41 Your own research shows that the presence of firearms in households dramatically increases the likelihood of death by suicide. You spend your career arguing that depression has been talking about biological psychological and cultural roots. So in this context, given the ready availability of guns and a promotion for culture violence.

3:13:05 How much of youth mental health crisis do you think is cultural at that point? First, there are so many of them in the United States because they make themselves safer. The likelihood of losing a child to suicide is five times higher in the household where there's a gun than it isn't. So, like what I was saying before about self-interest you get this gun to make yourself safer which are most likely doing is exposing yourselves to potential tragedy.

3:13:50 that don't. very often, unless you're in an area where everyone has guns and there are fights on the streets. And so I actually at nine eleven a lot of people i knew got gun licenses. In New York City. You can only have a gun license if you ever gotten I Got a gun. So I could get a gun licence? I never used the gun it was just in a safe.