Uh, tell us about the wisdom you share in the book coming out on the other side of all of those difficult things.

Well, I think that for me, um, the...

I sometimes teach a class called Money, Medicine, and Morals, and this class would often have as many as 400 students in it, a mix of pharmacy students, meds, pre-med students and med students, and then regular undergraduates.

And eventually we come around to the topic of mental health and suicide.

And I'll ask them, you know, "Hey, anybody here struggle with depression? Anybody here struggle with anxiety? Anybody struggle with suicidal ideation?" And, you know, get a few hands here and there in this huge auditorium.

Then I'd talk a little bit about my own experience, having gone through, you know, struggled all my life with anxiety, but also having had a couple major depressive, uh, episodes, and, um, struggling with addiction to alcohol most of my adult life.

Um, really a pretty acute struggle.

Yeah.

Uh, tell us about the wisdom you share in the book coming out on the other side of all of those difficult things.

Well, I think that for me, um, the...

I sometimes teach a class called Money, Medicine, and Morals, and this class would often have as many as 400 students in it, a mix of pharmacy students, meds, pre-med students and med students, and then regular undergraduates.

And eventually we come around to the topic of mental health and suicide.

And I'll ask them, you know, "Hey, anybody here struggle with depression? Anybody here struggle with anxiety? Anybody struggle with suicidal ideation?" And, you know, get a few hands here and there in this huge auditorium.

Then I'd talk a little bit about my own experience, having gone through...

You know, struggled all my life with anxiety, but also having had a couple major depressive, uh, episodes, and, um, struggling with addiction to alcohol most of my adult life, um, really a pretty acute struggle.

Yeah

Mm-hmm

... someone who we'd love to have commenting on the Book of Genesis for us.

And in that interview, she's talking about what John Kaag was just talking about, which is-- and what you were talking about with the diamond and kind of getting rid of the clouds, you know.

The, the sun and the moon are always there, but the clouds sometimes obscure them.

And that way of thinking about devotion and, um, religious experience, and that way of thinking about Genesis that like, look, when we're talking about, um, es-estrangement from paradise, getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden, we're not talking about, um, original sin in the way, say, that maybe Augustine thought of it, where, you know, we all were boys and we're visiting an orchard and one of us steals an apple, and he doesn't even eat the apple.

He just throws it away, and you think, "Oh, there's proof of original sin," because he didn't even want the apple.

He was just stealing it for the fun of it.

You talked about relationship.And I'm curious if in those times when you were much more actively suicidal or had suicidal ideation, was a part of that because you were cut off from relationship of different sorts, that you were not available to relationship of different sorts? How would you put into context what I'm saying here?

You know, this idea of it being contagious is real.

It, it's very real, yeah.

The contagion of suicide, the so-called Werther effect, um, after Goethe's Bildungsroman, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

It-- suicide contagion is a real thing, and the romanticization of suicide is a real thing.

So I had to be particularly scrupulous about this when I was writing the book and, and tell people, "Hey, you know, if you're in a, if you're in a perilous spot right now, don't even bother reading this chapter because this chapter, um, these people, uh, whether they want to or not, they wind up making suicide seem more attractive, seeming like a good idea rather than, than seeming like a bad idea." Even Nellie Arcan, who so clearly thought that suicide was a terrible idea, winds up kind of adding this strange luster to suicide.

And, um, so we do have to be really mindful of that.

There is an oppos- uh, an effect opposite to the Werther effect.

It's a, it's not the, it's not a simple issue.