Greg Lukianoff

I wanted to make sure that I had my head wrapped and everything.

So if all the drugs I was planning to take didn't work, that I wouldn't be able to claw my way out.

It had been a really rough year.

And I always had issues with depression, but they were getting worse.

And frankly, one of the reasons why this cancel culture stuff is so important to me is that the thing that I didn't emphasize as much in coddling the American mind, which by the way, that description that I give of trying to kill myself was the first time I'd ever written it down.

Nobody in my family was aware of how.

of it being like that.

My wife had never seen it.

And basically the only way I was able to write that was by, by doing, you know how you can kind of trick yourself if, um, and I was like, I'm going to convince myself that this is just between me and my computer and nobody will see it.

And it's probably now the most public thing I've ever written.

But what I didn't emphasize in that was how much the culture war played into how depressed I got because I was originally the legal director of FIRE.

Then I became president of FIRE in 2005, moved to Philadelphia where I get depressed.

And it's just I don't have family there.

There's something about the town they don't seem to like me very much.

But the main thing was being in the culture war all the time.

There was a girl that I was dating.

I remember, you know, she didn't seem to really approve of what I did.

And a lot of people didn't really seem to.

And meanwhile, like I was defending people on the left all the time.

And they'd be like, oh, that's good that you're defending someone on the left.