 Yeah, this stock's called Stronger Than Fear, Mental Health and Developer Community. That's me at the bottom, I'm Ed Finkeler. That's my organization that started OSMI Help is the handle. This is elixir days, if you didn't know that. It is March, it is 2017. We are hashtagging those two right now. And I wanna thank Prom for getting us here. The Prom's an organization I've been involved with for about four years as one of the speakers that they've supported. For about a whole year, Prom was the only way that I got around to speak at different conferences. And now, we are sort of doing a little bit of our own thing too with OSMI, but it's a cool organization. I hope that you check it out. It's an opportunity to have people come and speak. So this is a new conference, so who am I? Who it is, talking about. I'm the CTO of a company called Graph Story. We do graph databases as a service, if you're curious about that, talk to me some other time. I'm a web developer for about 20 plus years. Mostly I do PHP, JavaScript, some Python, I do DevOps, I do some design, I'm not very good at it. Things like that. I'm a dad, I'm a husband. Local community participants served on some school boards, things of that nature. Now, I do have a question. When I asked, hey, would you like to come to elixir days and come talk, I was like, okay, yeah, what's an elixir, buddy? I think I picked up some of those, play in Diablo. I don't really know what you're talking about. And then I read out, and I said it was Erlang and I stopped reading. So it's like, this is not for me, it's not. I did not get into web development to have things with colons and semicolons and different things and the lines and I don't know what the hell's going on with that stuff. I don't know, I'm not into computers like you guys are. Now, during my career, I have sometimes been called a webmaster. How many of you have been ever called a webmaster? Raise your hand. All right, you're about as old as I am then, perhaps. I had that title up until like 2010, which is really pretty disturbing, but academia doesn't move that fast, so. And I found that I've been doing open sourcing mental illness as a campaign since 2012. I've been speaking about mental illness in tech since 2012. I'm the founder and chairman of the board of the OSMI non-profit, 511c3. We started that in 2016. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a medical expert. I'm certified in something called mental health first aid, but that's it, that's like a course you take for a day. So don't ask me to diagnose you or your children. I am here, though, to talk about what it's like to have a mental illness or a couple, from my perspective. And to talk about how mental health affects our community and our industry. So, everybody, oh, I picked this thing up and I didn't have it on. Now I feel like I really screw up the timing on that. So, everybody, who's ready to weep uncontrollably? All right, get ready for it, yeah! Come on! All right, because this is the uncomfortable audience participation session, so I'm gonna need y'all to clap for me. We're gonna clap in rhythm now. I got this microphone, so I'm gonna elbow it here and we're gonna clap together, let's do it, yeah! Come on, let's get together, we're gonna get pumped up, we're gonna do a lot of sales, we're gonna get out there, we're gonna sell those Glen Gary, stop, stop. I didn't, there's no reason for that. I didn't do it, I just did it to see if I could make you guys clap. I really didn't, there's no purpose to it. Thanks, buddy, I appreciate that. Keep going, keep going with your thing, man, I like that, we're gonna talk to you about volunteering. All right, but I do have some questions for you, so you're gonna need to wanna raise your hand, you're gonna wanna get that big big going here. Now I got a question for you, how many of you here wear glasses or contacts? All right, most of you here, there's some young pups around here who haven't yet felt the breath of death on the back of their neck yet and know that their body's falling apart, best indicator is that your eyes stop working correctly. Now I'm curious, have any of you, I want you to raise your hand, have you ever had an instance where somebody said to you, hey, have you tried giving up the glasses and just trying harder to see? Anybody? I can wait a little bit here if you want, if you still think about, okay, have you? I'm sorry for you, sir. I think the entirety has failed you, I think. Are any of you uncomfortable telling people that you wear glasses or contacts? Embarrassed that you have to wear them out in public? Any of that, anybody here? Maybe you should be, I don't know, depends on what kind of glasses you have, I don't know. No, that's fine. So we're pretty comfortable with that, we're comfortable with this idea of having an eye and ocular crutch that we generally, most of us have to use because in the good old days we would die by 30 and no one cared about our eyesight at that point and it also didn't matter if you read or could do math. So, okay, so glasses, not an issue, we're all comfortable with this, everybody has to do it, right? Everybody has to do that in order to cope in society to get by, to be productive, we have to do those things. All right, I got another question for you, something perhaps a little more serious, perhaps a little bit more morbid. Diabetes, my dad and my brother both have type two diabetes so I'm probably pretty much screwed in that respect, genetically speaking, but I'm curious about you. Now, let's talk about the workplace for a second. How many of you, no, you're not gonna go in there and tell them, hey, buddy, diabetes, but how many of you like you come into work and somebody's talking about diabetes, the topic comes up, would you feel comfortable discussing that? Not excited, not like this is, man, I haven't been waiting the whole time, talk about two things, that observer thing, an elixir, that I guess makes flow charts, and diabetes. That's not probably how that's gonna go over, but would you be comfortable if the topic came up? I would like you to raise your hand if that's the case. It's not the case I count you as not and I will give you an F. Okay, all right, so a lot of people, some people not, some people like that, it's kind of none of your business, buddy, I don't wanna talk about that. Now another thing, and diabetes is something that's common, but it can also be deadly, untreated, it can lead to people's deaths, it's a serious thing. Now, cancer, that's how I like to start off a lot of sentences. Cancer, I had a brother die from cancer the last two years, and I think a lot of us, maybe most of us have had cancer touch our lives one way or another, whether we've known somebody, whether we've had it ourselves, it's very serious. We've lost friends, family members to that. Now I'm just curious if you'd raise your hands. Again, maybe not excited about it, but if the topic, somebody mentioned something about cancer comes up at work, would you feel okay talking about it? I'd like you to raise your hand if you'd be okay with that. All right, so most people, all right, fair enough, fair enough, okay. All right, so how many people would be okay talking about mental illness at work? So a lot less, so I was under the majority, I would say, maybe we got 25%, 30%. It's interesting to see that juxtaposition. How about with your boss? Raise your hand if you'd be cool talking about that with your boss. Maybe about the same amount. How about a family, friend, something like that, somebody you're close with that you trust? More people, more people, not a surprise. I want you to keep thinking about that as we talk about this stuff. Talk about some of these very impactful diseases or groups of diseases and how we talk about mental health. So I want you to think about that while we're going through this stuff. Oh, I left my water bottle over there. PJ, this cable's not long enough, I can't get over there. Please retrieve it, thank you, sir. All right, very good, very good. I'm gonna take you home with me, you're gonna be like a little monkey, I gotta tell you to do stuff. I don't even have to get up anymore. Just type in this code. Now back to me is my favorite topic. So I have two things, I've generalized anxiety, so I've been diagnosed with two things, whatever it means. I've generalized anxiety disorder, that's the first diagnoses I have. So basically what I describe that as I have fight or flight reactions when it's not appropriate. Now it's appropriate to have a fight or flight reaction, a major stress reaction, as anxiety response in your body. If a lion's about to eat me, that's kind of what human beings were designed to do. So if there is an imminent existential threat, we gotta do something about it. Either I gotta roundhouse kick this lion or I gotta run like hell to get away from this lion, neither of which is going to work, but that's the one you're supposed to have this reaction. All right, supposed to have a reaction like that, that kind of case. Because your brain says, oh, something's wrong, there's a threat, feels like something's wrong here, I gotta do something, you start reading, ooh. And you start, in fact, different hormones go through your body, you get adrenaline going, you get all sorts of stuff going on. It's, your physiology changes in that. It's not just a thing, it goes just in your head. No, actually, it's everywhere in your whole body. Everything changes, blood pressure, blood rate, all that stuff, or your heart rate, things like that. Now it's not appropriate to have that kind of reaction. When you're walking in, you're supposed to be walking into a bar to meet your friends, it's a bar you've never been to before and you don't really know sort of like what it's gonna be like when you walk in, you don't know how big it is. There's, for some reason, two doors, both on the front of the building and you don't know which one to go in. And maybe it just seems like it'd be better because it is really scary to walk in there and you don't exactly know why, what's going to happen when you go in and you don't know where they're gonna be. Maybe you'll just go back to your car and sit there for like half an hour and eventually just drive home. I've done that. I've done that more than once. I've had that reaction. Because I got so freaked out because I didn't know what kind of situation I was getting myself into. It's not appropriate to have that when you're gonna take the bus across the way. I wanna go see some, I don't know, some ghost pirate or something like that around here, or something like that. You're gonna go dig up some treasure on the sand or something like that. I don't know. And you gotta take a bus to go over there and you're like, you mean like by myself? So how does this work? Do I just give them a 20 and they give me change? I don't know. What is this? I have to get a car? I don't know how this works. There's very poor onboarding for public transportation generally. And stuff like that really freaks me out. When there's like rules and I feel like I don't understand those rules and I don't know how to do that, it is very scary for me to get in that kind of new environment. That kind of freaks me out a lot. And I have a strong fight or flight response in a lot of situations like that. Not appropriately. I know it's not the case. I know it's not the case that it's actually a danger but I feel it anyway. And I also have something called, which you may have heard of ADHD. Maybe you've heard of that. And I think there's a couple things that traditionally, this is something that stereotypically is associated with developers a lot. I don't know if it is actually more prevalent or not, but I have some of those things that I think are common. I have sort of trouble focusing. I tend to jump from one thing to another a lot. I have a lot of avoidance of less appealing tasks. And avoidance is sort of a, there's a gradient there, right? There's like, I don't really feel like doing that. I'll do it tomorrow. And then there's, I'm just gonna leave that bill sort of piled over here. And when I remember to do it, I don't feel like I'm not gonna get up off the couch to pay it. And then I wait two months and my water gets shut off. It's not like I didn't have the money. I just avoided it and kept forgetting it. And that has happened to me before. What just like, or it's like, there's a task I have to do at work. Boy, I really don't feel like doing this task. I really don't want to do that part. And you know, maybe just for like two weeks, I just won't do it. Instead of like, I'll just push through it. So I do that. And then there's a couple of things that I think go along with that matter often commonly associated with ADHD that sometimes we don't think about as much or sort of in the common knowledge of the general populace is that I think a lot of people with ADHD have a really low frustration threshold. So if something is difficult, if something's confusing, things like that, some of us who have these, they're diagnosed with this condition, tend to get frustrated a lot more quickly. And our emotions tend to be more intense. So it means that when we get frustrated, we get really frustrated. Like ridiculously frustrated. There's no, it is in no way consistent with how frustrating this should be. It is not that big a deal, but we get really upset about it. And I'm really good with, this is sort of a fun combination of ADHD and anxiety disorders, is that I'm super good at constructing bad outcomes. Like I can make a connection between A to B to C to D to see these events and how they might play out. So constructing a hyper super bad outcome and then really, really focusing on it and just assuming that that is what is actually going to happen. And going forward with my life as if that's going to happen and being very, very, very stressed until something externally tells me, oh no, it's okay, everything's cool. Like, I don't know, some of us have probably always had that thing where say a boss or a manager or something has said, hey, when you come in on Monday to get something late Friday, it's like, hey, when you come in on Monday, we need to have a meeting. You're like, oh boy, that's a rough, uh-oh. That's a little tough. And that's not fun, but probably most of us have some ability to sort of distract ourselves from that and some ability to sort of take that away and say, okay, but what can I do about it? Well, that's a little weird, but okay, fine. I wish you would have told me what was going on. I will say, well, I'm losing my job. I'm gonna be homeless in two weeks. I will never get hired again. They've realized what a fraud I am. And it's just, I'm just gonna pack my bags, fill up the tank and go to Mexico. There's nothing else left for me here in this world. So, and it turns out you get there Monday and it's like, hey, so yeah, how was that project going? And you're like, oh, yeah, we actually finished that up. It went really well. Yay. And you're like, oh, thank God. Because you've been sweating the whole time and your whole weekend has just been a disaster because you've been anxious and depressed in combination of the whole time. So you're just in bed constantly, but can't fall asleep and it's just a living nightmare. And it turns out it wasn't a big deal. That's happened to me a lot too. So I take medication and every day I have to take some pills. That's what I do, I take, because I have these chronic things that don't, it's sort of like, well, we sort of adjusted things and things got better in my life and stuff like that. A lot of stress stuff that was going on was going away. No, I seem to be capable of just generating that internally. So that's been something that I've had to do for the last almost 30 years is I have to take some kind of medication every day. And I also see a therapist every month about now and I talk about how and why I do the things that I do and we talk about sort of what's happened since we last were there and challenges maybe we had, situations I was in where I didn't really deal with them the way that I would have liked and then try to come up with strategies to address those things. How can we maybe modify sort of my behaviors or some of the very quick responses that I have to certain kinds of things happening to me. And without going into great detail about it, generally I view my therapist as sort of a coach for my brain who helps me figure out how to maybe change how I react to things. That's how it works out for me. It could work out differently for you, but that's kind of how it works out for me. Now, one of the things to remember is that it impacts my work every day. My work as a developer, my work as a, I guess, a CTO, yeah. CTO, that's scary. It impacts my work every single day. There's not a day that goes by where I'm not quote unquote dealing with it because it is how my brain works and I try to modify that to make it more productive and less problematic through medication, through therapy, practice, through exercises, but it doesn't go away. And sometimes it absolutely gives me superpowers. There are certain aspects of the job I have, of the jobs I have had, that I am very good at because of the way my brain works. It is absolutely the case. You know, human being, people's minds are really, really good pattern-matching machines. We are very, very good at that. That's why we see faces on Mars is because of really, really good pattern-matching machines. So we're like, oh, there's a face right there. We're really good at that. I'm really good at that. I'm really good at making connections that other people often don't see. And so that, I just, there are a couple things that that helps with, it's good, I'm good at anticipating security issues pretty well, like, hey, if we do this on the backend, how does that impact, like, what a person's able to send into our system and how do we sanitize and validate that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how I behave and why I behave the way that I do. And that interests me, and it also interests me in then learning about what other people, why they do the things that they do, why human beings work the way that they work. And I often am very good at quickly empathizing with, say, how users will tend to interact with things, I think more so than people who are mostly backend developers, which I guess realistically I'm mostly a backend developer. I tend to empathize with users very well. I try to think about, can I put myself in their shoes and then I can say, okay, that thing, if they might want to do this, this affects this, this, this part of our application stack all the way up to the back. And a lot of people aren't necessarily as good of that as I am. I'm not necessarily a great programmer, in fact I'm kind of a shit programmer, but in general, I'm good at a lot of aspects of my job because of this. I really am, and I like that a lot. I'm glad, I'm really glad. It has been advantageous for me. And sometimes it absolutely ruins me. Sometimes it renders me completely unproductive and craters my day and I can't get anything done. One of the toughest aspects of dealing with mental health issues is feeling alone. You know, I've been to conferences with thousands of people and felt utterly alone in the middle of it, surrounded by all these people and felt completely unable to connect with any of them. Because I felt like I was incapable of acting and behaving normally. And I was the only person who felt like this and everybody else seems to be able to cope okay and I can't and I don't understand why. I felt incapable of living the life that I do of existing in this world that we live in. I feel, I felt like I often still feel like I always screw up and I always fail and everyone I love will grow tired of me and leave. I have often felt that way. And it's only in the past couple of years that I think I fundamentally started liking myself. I mean, I only needed 40 years to get there but that is fundamentally very difficult. And that is one of the hardest things that you deal with. And I think speaks not only to the nature of mental health and mental illnesses but also to the nature of how our society copes with it. There's a lot of people who feel this way. A lot of people dealing with similar things that I do or dissimilar but still things that separate them from communities. And we are social animals. There's no doubt about it. Now if we're talking about the worldwide community, just human beings in general and as we exist on this planet, one place we might start looking at is an interesting study called the Global Burner Disease of the World Health Organization. They conducted this in 2004, released it in 2008. And in that they stated that the burden of mental disorders is the largest of all disorder categories in North America. I'm gonna use my fun little pointer here. Greater than cardiovascular disease and greater than cancer. That the burden of mental disorders. When they talk about there's a metric they use to measure this called disease burden that takes lives lost and also time lost, productive time lost to a disease or a set of diseases. And in North America, the group that causes the largest burden are mental disorders. And this is a quote from there. In all regions, neuropsychiatric conditions, all regions worldwide, neuropsychiatric conditions are the most important causes of disability accounting for around one third of years lost to disability among adults aged 15 years and over. They are the most important causes of disability worldwide and a third of year productive years lost to disability comes directly from that group of conditions. That is a major impact, major impact. So we look at the tech community. Let's talk about the tech community for a second and we're all part of that probably would say that. Part of this tech community. There's basically no research done in it, essentially. There's very, I have looked at a couple, very small studies, social science studies that have been done, but there's essentially no work done in it. So, open sourcing mental illness does some of that. We took that upon ourselves because there wasn't good information. And we wanted to measure some of the things that sort of anecdotally we thought was going on. Well, what do we know about this stuff? So, we've done for two years in 2014 and 2016. We'll probably do one in 2017 too. We do something called mental health and tech survey. And this is data from our 2016 survey which is actually still open. And this is data that I just pulled down as of today. So this is up through March, is this March 2nd? I hope so. Let's say it is. And this just includes people in the US. And this just includes people who are not self-employed. There are differences in other countries about how medical care is provided. And primarily in the US, the workplace is your conduit for healthcare. You pretty much have to go through your workplace for healthcare for the most part. That's how our society has mostly set it up for most people. So if you're self-employed, it's a little bit different. That's how we have it here. Now even including this, that we still have about 700 responses. We had about 1500 responses in total in 2016. And these are, I want you to keep this in mind that these are opt-in surveys. So these are things that are gonna have some bias in terms of self-selection. Keep that in mind. But I think there's a lot of interesting things we can learn about this. So we've asked a few questions. I'm gonna show you just a few questions from this survey. Do you think that discussing a health issue with your employer would have negative consequences? And we asked about physical and we asked about mental. So with physical, 72% of people said no. Do not believe that there will be negative consequences for discussing a physical health issue with my employer. Maybe 25%, only 4% said yes, I believe there would be. Obviously that's gonna be very based on the physical issue they're thinking about. But it gives you an idea about attitudes towards those kinds of things. Potential fears, potential, we know what are you okay with discussing? Now let's look at what the results for mental health. Yes is about six times higher, 23%. No is about half at 36%. And maybe goes up to 41%. So only about a third of people could say no, there would not be any negative consequences. Two thirds of people said yes or maybe. That's a significant difference. Keep this in mind when we're talking about when we've learned about the impact of mental disorders, the impact that they have on productivity. Keep these things in mind when we're looking at these numbers. So a second question, would you bring up a health issue with a potential employer in an interview? I've been asked this question often about how do I deal with that? I'm somebody who deals, has a mental health disorder. How do I evaluate if a company is going to be supportive of me? There's legal protections that are in place that are supposed to help you, like the Americans with Disabilities Act. But how do you actually go about that, evaluating it without sort of playing your hand and somehow making it so you're not going to give people a reason not to hire you? Now with physical health issues, we asked about again, physical and mental health. Physical health issues, would you bring it up 24%? Only about a quarter said yes. And that's not surprising. Most people don't want to give a reason to not hire some. But a lot of these things you think, only no said 36% maybe said 40% depends on the thing. Some people are going to have issues where it's like, yeah, I got a bum knee, but I'm a programmer so it really doesn't matter that much. Some physical health issues that have nothing to do with their job are going to be impactful. Like yes, I might be interested in getting pregnant in the next two years. That's the thing that women have been taught not to say ever to potential employers because despite ADA law, there's a good chance they're not going to get hired. Now if we're talking about mental health issues, let's look at that and compare it. Only 7% of people said yes, they would bring it up with a potential employer in an interview. 68% said no, maybe it's down to 26%. Far fewer said yes, far fewer said yes. Now if we look at does your employer provide resources to learn more about mental health issues and how to seek help. A key aspect of the fact that the workplace is that primary conduit for healthcare and if people are going to seek out help, oftentimes the employer has to be in a position. What we found is the employer has to be in a position that they are providing resources, helping people, encouraging people to seek help. Yes, only 30%, no was over a third, don't know was a third. So two thirds of people over, two thirds of people said I don't know or know my workplace doesn't provide resources. And that is a key aspect of why people don't seek treatment. Another slide here. Do you feel that being identified as a person with a mental health issue would hurt your career? I think it's a really fundamental question you get to the matter of it. If you're identified that way, is that going to hurt your career? Of the people surveyed, only 12% said no, I don't think it would or no it has not. 88% said maybe or yes. Think about if that was a thing, if I was identified as a person with diabetes would it hurt my career in tech? You'd be like what the hell? That is absolutely incredibly discriminatory. It is also incredibly discriminatory in this case. But the fact is that most people are afraid to talk about it. And again, this is a self-selective survey but this is an interesting thing that we found. Again, self-selective survey, you have to keep that in mind with it. But of the responses that we got, and this is including US people who are not self-employed, have you been diagnosed with a mental health condition by a medical professional? And in the responses we got, we had 56% of our responses said yes, they've been diagnosed by a medical professional, with a mental health condition. To give you an idea of the baseline that most people, most studies put it at in say the United States, is 19 to 20% of the general population, is dealing with a mental health condition in a given year. I would suspect that the actual rate is lower than this but based on these kinds of numbers, it would also indicate that it's probably higher in the tech community than it is elsewhere. And more of a problem than the tech community than it is elsewhere. And regardless of that, regardless of that, that this is reported three times higher than the norm, at the end of it, sick workers don't work or they're significantly less productive. If you're sick, you don't work as well. It doesn't matter what you're sick with, you don't work as well. So it's in the interest of organizations to help these people. Do you want productive employees? Then maybe you should help them be healthy. If you don't help them or you contribute to their problems, you make it more likely that they're going to have mental health issues. You're in fact hurting yourself. And I ask that question, so what is the upside? What's the upside other than trying to change your workplace, trying to adjust those kinds of things, trying to change some of those numbers that we see, those fears that we see? What's the upside other than just being, I don't know, like a normal, nice human being who cares about people? Because it benefits your organization and everybody in it, because mental wellness means better employees, period, end of story. Employees feel valued and secure and work more effectively when employers demonstrate a commitment to their wellbeing. When I think about the jobs that I liked the most, it wasn't the work I was doing in general. It was the people I was working with. Did I feel like they had my back when I had theirs? Did I feel like I could trust them? Did I feel like they genuinely had my best interests in heart because they wanted me to be healthy and happy? Those are the jobs I love the most. I've always loved them most. The place I work right now, that's the kind of environment we have. And I will continue to do everything I can to make sure we have that environment as we grow as a startup. I think most people feel that way too. When we talk about jobs we liked, we talk about the people we worked with. When we talk about jobs that sucked, we talk about the people we worked with and what it was like. It's not, oh gosh, I had to do Java. I can do shitty work if I like being with those people. I can do work that I enjoy or don't enjoy or whatever. I have to, a job gets bad, Brad, anyway, but sometimes. But people wanna work with you if you put that kind of thing out there. More people wanna work someplace that respects them fully, that doesn't ignore their well-being. So if you demonstrate values, if you demonstrate values that your organization cares about the well-being of its employees, is genuinely concerned about it and takes actions appropriate to implement that, you're gonna get better employees. People wanna work for you, but change is hard. Change is difficult. We're scared, we don't know what to do because there's a lot of, boy, I really, I think most people in general want to do the right things in these areas, can see why you should be doing those things and have no clue about what to do because they have no training and we don't talk about it, so it's very hard to find information or resources. We might be afraid of endangering our workplace. I, as a CTO, I make a mistake, maybe that could really screw us up. Opens us up for a lawsuit, maybe. Maybe that's what HR tells us. A lot, especially when lawyers start getting involved, they don't want you to do that. I've heard plenty of stories about HR setting up policies that very clearly protected the company and made things more difficult for people to seek help and to feel trusted, or feel like they can trust their folks, but at the same token, we're also afraid of losing our jobs or not getting our jobs. Look at that, if I think that I'm gonna be labeled as, if I'm known as somebody with mental health issues, how many people feel like it's not going to impact them negatively, 12%. So at OSMI, we're doing a lot of work in that respect. Handbooks, things like that, but here's three things I can tell you. Right now that you can go, you can download right now to start changing things. The first thing is you can get our handbooks, as we know, I just talked about them. We have handbooks for employers and employees co-written by people who actually know what they're talking about, a mental health professional who works at, a psychologist with a PhD who works at a Silicon Valley startup, and also co-written by an organizational psychologist. Now, two of them are for navigating ADA laws that deals with mental health in the tech workplace. One for employers and one for employees. Then we have a third handbook that specifically is about how to create supportive workplaces that promote mental wellness. Nobody else is doing this kind of stuff and we're putting it out there as Creative Commons Licenses is available for free. So you do the work. You wanna make a change, you do the work. We've made those resources available. Secondly, speak openly about mental health. You have to fight that stigma. That does not mean that you go and you way, way, way over talk, excuse me, over share, like I do, my therapist says I have a confessional personality, she is correct. But you can talk about the subject openly, the same way that maybe you talk about, you might be okay talking about diabetes. Something like that if that comes up. It might not be your favorite thing in the world to talk about, it might be something that you have a lot of hard emotions associated with. But what I have found and I believe is absolutely the case is that my ability to speak openly about these issues, I have been told directly impacts people's willingness to discuss it and seek help on an individual basis. You have a great deal of influence on your social groups and the communities you choose to participate in. So you've got to use it. You use that influence you have. Even if you think you don't, you absolutely do because we are social animals. And if somebody demonstrates that they're not afraid, the rest of us are less afraid. I hit the wrong button. Thirdly, and I think this is just a key thing, this is not something that you'll find in a great training manual or something like that. Tell people they matter. Because lots of us feel like it doesn't matter, that we don't really matter. Tell them how they impact your life positively. How strong and how great they are. Maybe you admire them. If you think about Sitback, it's like, wow, just amazing stuff. One of the other speakers at the speaker dinner last night told me about some stuff that has to do with his life and how he's put together his family and some of the choices that they've made. And I immediately needed to tell him that what he is doing is very special and very important. And I told him that because I didn't know when I was gonna get a chance to do that again. I might not ever see him again in my life. So I needed to tell him right then. I needed to tell him because he needed to know. Because probably not a lot of people just go up and tell him that stuff. Everybody needs to hear these kinds of things. Everybody needs to hear that they matter. So often we feel like we don't. Well, what, I'm, and we think, you think about it, it just plays into everything, imposter syndrome, willingness to participate in the communities. I'm not that big a deal, da, da, da, da, da. Most of us tell ourselves those kinds of things. That's bullshit. You matter a huge amount and you have a huge impact in the groups that you associate with. Maybe that impact isn't in the place that you think is important, but I guarantee you the people around you think it's important, your family, your workplace, your friends, and the people who especially need to hear this are people whose brains lie to them. And my brain lies to me. And I've had to do a lot of work internally to do that, to tell myself that I do matter, but it sure helps when other people tell me too. And I guarantee you, there are lots of people you know who are in the exact same boat. They've probably never told you. They don't reveal it, they're afraid to, but they are in the exact same boat. Well, I wanna bring this back, talking about sort of what we do, how we do it, all this kind of stuff. We've only got a couple more minutes, I know. Communities are about people and not code. Sometimes you think to yourself, is that really true? Well, we're all here at this electric confere about this stuff. You know the thing that I heard that people are saying about what was so great about the community? Is that, I don't know, some dude never heard it. What's his name, Jose? That he's an awesome dude and he's really nice and he treats people respectfully. And that's what they really like about this community. That's what matters. It's not the code, it's the people. The code is a MacGuffin. The code is sort of the thing that brings people together, but the community is about the people and how they interact and how they support each other. So we're talking about our community here. We're talking about our colleagues and we're talking about our friends, our people, those people who work in tech who enjoy these kinds of things together. This community, our community, our chosen folks, our chosen families. And these folks suffer in silence. A lot of them suffer in silence and sometimes they disappear. Sometimes we lose them and we're left to wonder and regret and try to understand why that happened. And there's some that we can save and some we can't. But only fear allows this. The only reasons we allow so many to suffer in silence and the only reason we don't save more of our kin and more of our kids is because of fear. It's the only reason. So you've got to choose. We all choose. You and I and everybody in here chooses. We can choose to give in to fear. We can choose to hide. It's easy to hide. It is comfortable to hide. It is comfortable to be silent and it is comfortable to be quiet and hide from these things. I know, because I do a lot of hiding. I do a lot of hiding. This stuff is not for the weak. This is not for the indifferent or those who are content to be comfortable. But we can be in action with action and we can meet confusion with understanding and we can meet indifference with compassion. If we choose to be stronger than fear. Thank you very much. Thank you.