Dr. Paul Conti

Our mental health is getting worse over time.

And when you think about how we're conceiving of it, of course it's getting worse.

It just makes sense that it would, unless we bring this change and we understand and are empowered to build good mental health for ourselves.

Yes.

And I'm sorry to learn of your friend and his illness, but it is good to hear that you carry with you having done what you did in that time when you told him how you felt.

You were real and true and honest, which comes from a great, a well-grounded place in you and is, of course, was so good for him.

And you carry that forward with you.

So that part is good to hear about.

You'd asked about the tragedy in my life when I was in my mid-twenties, which was the loss of my youngest brother to suicide.

And...

What it showed to me is just how mental health was completely unaddressed.

He had a serious medical illness that had come out of the blue a couple of years before.

And I remember as he was going through it thinking, gosh, there's a lot of attention to his physical health, but you could see there were changes in him.

And I was off at school too.

There were things that I missed, but when I checked back in, you could see, gosh,

there are differences in him that I could see when I would go away and come back home.

And they weren't being addressed.

And there were some conversations about it, but nothing was really looked at.

And it's amazing to me that what ended up, the illness I think was part of what at the end of the day ended up killing him, right?

But it wasn't the physical part of the illness.