John Miles

Paul, I believe that we all have defining moments in our lives.

And a lot of those moments, unfortunately, happen around time.

trauma.

Some of them also happen around joyful moments like getting married or having the birth of your child.

For me, one of those defining moments happened when I was 37 or 38.

My best friend had been diagnosed with colon cancer at the time.

And I remember he was visiting me at my home in North Carolina.

And I just had this gut feeling that it was probably the last time I was ever going to get to see him in person.

And so I

purposely took that time to really tell him how much he meant to me i understand in a different situation when you were around 25 you had a defining moment with a close family member of yours that really set you on this path of doing the work that you're doing today can you tell us about that incident if you're open to it and how that reshaped everything that you knew in your life

The topic of suicide is always a touchy one and being a veteran

It is so tragic that outside of the soldiers and semen that we've lost in war, they pale in comparison to the 150,000 veterans that we've lost outside of conflict to suicide.

And having myself existed in this system, at the VA especially, I have always found while I'm there that they're constantly trying to give you a label.

whether that label is post-traumatic stress or bipolar or this or that, we seem to get categorized almost as much as medicine is now categorized by the different compartmentalizations.

So I remember going through this process because I've unfortunately had childhood trauma and combat trauma, other things in my life.

And I was getting all these labels.

I think by the time they were done with it, I had 10 or 12 different labels.

And I didn't like the wording on many of them, and I didn't think they were accurate.

So it led me to start studying this DSM, which is the Bible for mental health, because I wanted to learn where are these diagnoses coming from?

And I'm going here because you're really critical on how the system is structured, especially the DSM being largely a catalog of problems.