Neal Tricarico

feel this relief and saying i never want to do that again and my wife and i quietly had hoped like maybe in some way he was like scared straight or was like i don't want to do this but what he also said to us that was very scary was he said um you know i'm i'm never going to share about this with you guys again there's no help for me and that that that scared us tremendously even over the next

10, 11 months or a year between that experience and him ultimately taking his life, we were able to communicate about it with him.

And it was so important to him that we used the word, that we break the stigmatism.

I know it sucks for these capabilities where we want to spread awareness that we can't say the word, but it was important to him that we broke the stigma around suicide.

This mission is

I'm so grateful you've brought us on and that you're sharing vulnerably about your story too.

So one of the things that we've come to learn, Sean, is through some work and some experts that we've been blessed to interact with since then, and primarily this psychologist, Dr. Gupta,

um is there's no there's not there's nothing really profound we need to do what what he and others are doing that we found that's working is just sitting these kids down and helping them understand they're not their diagnosis even the word disorder so if we say autism spectrum disorder

we're labeling these kids as having a disorder.

And so immediately by telling them they have a disorder, now that the work that they're doing, the therapy is to become normal.

And it hurts my heart so much because after Anthony's passed, we found journals.

I have autism.

I'm different.

What's wrong with me?

I have a disorder.

And we just...

Not flippantly, but that's what they called it, autism spectrum disorder.

So we used the word too.

We used ASD.

We proliferated that.