 Welcome to Pookie Ponders, the podcast where I explore big questions with brilliant people. I'm Pookie Nightsmith and I'm your host. Today's question is, how can technology help us to help people? And I'm in conversation with Jonathan Singer. I'm Jonathan Singer and I am the president of the American Association of Suicidology. I'm an associate professor of social work at Loyola University, Chicago. I'm the co-author of the book Suicide in Schools. I'm the co-lead for the Social Work Grand Challenge Initiative, Harness Technology for Social Good. And for the next couple of months, I will be the treasurer of the international organization HUSITA, which is Human Services and Internet Technology Association. I live in Evanston, Illinois with my wife and three kids. And I like to hang out on Twitter where I avoid tweets by Donald Trump. That is quite the bio. I'm glad I got you to introduce yourself because, wow. Well, so I asked you today to come and talk about how technology can help us to help people. And I think there's so much actually within what you're doing at the moment that kind of speaks to that question. But what you didn't mention in there was the one thing that brought me to you initially, which is that you, like, run a massive podcast. Oh, right. You mentioned that? Completely for that. Wow. Yeah, so... That little thing, yeah. That little tiny thing. Yeah, so in 2007, I founded the Social Work Podcast, which is, I think, the longest running. Possibly first, although some folks up in Scotland said that they had a Social Work podcast back in 2005, although I have not gotten confirmation that it was actually a podcast. It was definitely Internet audio. But anyway, so yeah, so the Social Work podcast, I started it as a way for Social Work students who were then transitioning into Social Work professionals to get practical information based on what I was learning in academia, based on the rich expertise of experts in the field. So they could learn on the go. You know, in between a home visit, they could say, oh, I really want to brush up on this and do that or just learn something totally new. It is, I call it an irregularly scheduled podcast because I get to it whenever I get to it. And because I started it in 2007, before there were any podcast platforms, I do everything myself, like I literally hand code the RSS feed. I have a server where I upload the MP3 files. You know, I do the blog. Just all those sorts of things and I'm sure there's a way that I could automate it these days. I just haven't had the time or energy to do that. I was going to say, you're making me feel super lazy with my little Buzzsprout platform where I just put it there and it does it all. Which is exactly what you should do. My advice to people who are starting podcasts or have started in the last couple of years is don't do what I do because it's ridiculous. And you should spend the time creating really valuable content rather than all the background stuff, which you don't need to do. I think one of the things for me that's been most amazing about the podcast is that it has given me an opportunity to talk with so many amazing people and to share ideas that I know some people would not have had access to. I wouldn't have wanted to, but just, you know, we're all busy and we, you know, we get tunnel vision, right? We sort of were in the world that we're in. And so this opportunity to talk to you right now is amazing. And I don't know that that would have happened without being on the podcast, which then prompted me to get onto Twitter, which then helped me get to know so many people. And tell me about some of the topics that you've covered that you think people might not have kind of found out about if it hadn't been for the podcast. Well, you know, I have an episode that I did a few years ago about identifying sex trafficking victims that are in your social service agency, right? So this isn't about sex trafficking or human trafficking, generally, or the organizations that specifically focus on that. But, you know, let's say that you're a caseworker and a community mental health agency. How should you think about is this client of mine, a victim of sex trafficking, right? And that's a little piece of, it's an important piece, right? And sort of like thinking about where are sex trafficking victims, sort of where are the public places where we can identify and then respond. I had another episode where I talked to Lori Holler and Stiker from UT Austin about recovery high schools, right? High schools where students who are in active recovery can go and be supported in their recovery from substance use. And again, that's the kind of thing where, like, unless there's a recovery high school in your community or unless you're involved in that, it's just not something that you would know because there just aren't that many, but it's a phenomenal idea. I remember listening to that episode, actually, and that was, it was really powerful, I think, because as well there were quite a lot of ideas there that could be quite easily sort of taken and used in general practice, I think, as well, weren't there? It was, yeah. Yeah, oh, that's so cool that you listened to that. Yeah, see, this is the thing, right? So, like, we have Lori who's sitting in Austin, Texas, and here you are, you know, listening to it. And even though our social service delivery systems are different in lots of ways, I try to talk with folks in a way that whether you're in Australia or Austin, Texas, or wherever, you can get something out of the episode. And why do you think podcasting? I mean, what drew you to podcasting in the first instance, and you've obviously stuck with it for a long time? So what's special about that as a medium? Yeah, so one of the things I love about podcasting, audio podcasting specifically as opposed to podcasting, is that it's intimate. Yeah, so I'm having a conversation with somebody else, but really it's like we are talking in front of one other person. You know, it's very different than doing what you and I do, which is, you know, we give lots of talks to big audiences, and there's something amazing about that. It's a different feel, and when you hear recordings of people who are talking in front of large audiences, they're not talking to you, right? They're talking to a ton of people. And so I love audio podcasts because there is an intimacy to it. You know, I love this American life with Ira Glass. And I feel like he's in my ear. Like he's literally in my ear. I feel like I know him, even though I don't. And that is very different than video lectures that I've seen or documentaries that I've seen. I mean, I have a lot of respect for Ken Burns and what he's done, but obviously he's not physically on screen, but I just don't feel like I have the same relationship with him. I mean, I don't have a relationship with Ira Glass either. It's just all in my mind. Do you get that? Do people find that with you when they meet you that they, if they've been listening to the podcast that they feel like they know you? Yes. In fact, I was testing out Facebook Live a couple of weeks ago because I was going to be doing, I was going to be moderating a conversation around the role of social work and policing. And so I just hopped on to Facebook Live real quick just to make sure that the technology was working. And on Facebook, it says, you know, the search work podcast is going live or is live. And I don't know, maybe 20 people popped on for those three or four minutes to say, to watch. And somebody said, like, this is so weird seeing your face. I've been listening to you for years, but it's weird seeing you actually speak the words. So yeah, it's strange. Sometimes what I do when I'm in conferences and sort of live, and I can tell that people are a little weirded out, I just tell them to close their eyes. That's great advice. I love it. I love it. What are you like most proud of in terms of topics that you've maybe covered or where you think you've had a real impact with some of the words you shared? You know, I did an episode on Prachaska and Declamenta stages of change model. And it wasn't an interview, right? I just, it was something that I was teaching in, you know, to the social work students and it was something where I was seeing a lot of resources around the stages of change model that were based on like substance use or from a psychological perspective. And I just wanted to have something that was more social work-y. And really for my own purpose, I created just this talking head version. And I thought it came out well. I was proud of it. And it downloaded like 150,000 times a year. Like that one episode is like, that is the go-to episode. And I don't know why. Like I don't know why, but I'm, I am proud of it because it does take a social work lens to the stages of change model. And I think, you know, I mean, I think it's a really useful model. And I think it's really helpful for social workers and others to think about stages of change. But so just in terms of like an episode and the reach, that's been one of the things that I've been really proud of. And is that kind of a key measure of success for you? Like how many lives you sort of touch with it? Or is it sometimes about, you know, the quality rather than the quantity of that response maybe? Well, you know, the number of downloads is one metric. And so there is something about, you know, we put these out there, and we want to reach people doing that. I mean, I could record the most amazing episode ever. And if nobody listened to it, then it would just me like wasting in 100 hours that I could have spent with my family, right? But there have been other things that I've heard that are incredibly meaningful. Like I remember I interviewed Barbara Jones again from UT Austin. I don't just interview people from UT Austin. So we talked about pediatric oncology social work. And it was probably a decade ago. And she told me that because of that episode, people around, not just because of that episode, I mean, she does amazing work and she's the past president of the Social Work Pediatric Oncology Association. I can't remember what it's called. So she's, she's definitely a scholar in her own right. But she said that she received emails from people all over the world because of that episode, inviting her to train on pediatric oncology social work, right? So it was an entree for her into communities that because it was audio, right, because they felt like they knew her because they were able to hear her passion and her excitement about the topic and her ability to explain things, which is very different than reading a journal article or even a book, right? That they were like, can you come hang out with us and teach us? And for me, that's amazing, right? That is really cool. Yeah, that's a gift. There's something about, like, I love listening to podcasts, and I do always listen to yours as well. And there's something there, as you say, about people bringing a topic that they're genuinely passionate about to life. And I think that doesn't happen so well in sort of more formal training and speaking, does it? But when you interview someone and they are actually having to just respond in real life in real time, you get quite a different quality of response there, don't you? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, and I've learned some things about interviewing. You know, when I first started, I was using my clinical skills, and I quickly realized that, you know, being a good clinician doesn't make you a good interviewer. Oh, okay. Tell me more. What did you learn? Well, so one of the things that I learned is that I was using a lot of verbal following. So somebody would say, so this, and I'd be like, mm-hmm. Ah, mm-hmm. Right. The sort of things that you might do in a therapy session that are fine in the moment because they happen and then they go. But in an audio recording, it sounds terrible. But the other thing that I learned is that I was really used to asking questions like, oh, so tell me more about that or, huh, so what was that like for you? Which is great when the focus is on the individual, and it's not great when the focus is on the topic. Yeah. And so I learned to ask questions like, you know, tell me about a, you know, depending on what it is, like, you know, paint me a picture of what that was like, or can you describe for us this or just more evocative, more journalistic questions rather than more therapeutic questions? That's interesting. Although I think you kind of, you step between the person and the thing quite readily as well, don't you? I mean, you bring the people to life as well. And I think that's one of the really nice things that your work does. And you don't shy away from tough topics either, do you? You just go there with everything. Which I love, I love. And, you know, we were talking before we started recording about your book Suicide in Schools, and I was joking with my husband about, you know, he's saying, oh, who are you interviewing today? He's saying, oh, Jonathan Singer, writer of that cheerful term, Suicide in School, wrote the intro to my self-harm book. So I'm interested to know more about that. Like what inspired you to kind of run towards those really distressing topics that other people would generally shrink away from? Yeah, so, you know, when I graduated with my MSW, my master's in social work in the mid 90s, 1996, my first job was working at the child and adolescent psychiatric emergency team, which we call the CAPE team. And our job was to do assessments and short term stabilization therapy for kids who are suicidal, homicidal and actively psychotic. And again, this was outpatient, right? So we would go to schools, we'd go to people's homes, we'd go to, you know, emergency shelters, things like that. And what I realized pretty early on was that it was terrifying in the beginning, because I didn't know what I was supposed to do. And I thought there was this like magic ingredient in this. And then after about six months of doing this, I realized that that first of all, working with kids who are suicidal is really about finding hope. And that all of the ways that suicide's been glorified or sensationalized in the press is not what it's actually like when you're talking with somebody who's suicidal. That especially a kid who's suicidal. And so part of what I wanted to do is I wanted to demystify this and say, you know, when you're in a school situation, there are going to be kids who are suicidal. There are going to be kids who are thinking about hurting themselves and all sorts of things. It doesn't mean they're going to kill themselves. And it's much less likely that they're going to die or even hurt themselves if they have people that they can talk to. If this is, if this is something that is not so taboo, or so like scary that nobody wants to touch it. So I, you know, I, I, I moved into that with my co-authors, Terry Urbacher and Scott Poland. And, and, and I'm really proud of the book. I've, you know, I've gotten phone calls from people who are the statewide suicide prevention coordinators, saying, Hey, so we, you know, we ordered like 500 copies of your book and, and, you know, we gave one to each school district in our state, and that kind of thing. And that to me is like, it's amazing. So what were your hopes when writing it? Was it about kind of informing or inspiring change? Or, I mean, because it's a big, like, I mean, it's not a big book, but there's a lot of information in there. I remember this reading, it's dense, right? I mean, a lot of work went into it. So, you know, it was intended to be a practitioner's guide. So we wanted, you know, I had this ideal reader, which was a mental health professional who's working in schools who, you know, has the training on sort of how to work with kids. They know the kids in their school. They, you know, they work with their colleagues and the staff and they do all these sorts of things. And they probably had, have had some experience with folks who are suicidal, you know, there's a continuum and they might have even gotten some training in graduate school. But in any given day, they're having to deal with kids who didn't eat breakfast, kids who are failing out of this, kids who are struggling with food issues or eating disorders or addiction or like all sorts of things. I wanted them to have a resource that they could pull off the shelf and be like, Okay, what do I do in this situation? Here it is. Here's enough information for me to either remember what I was trained in, or I've learned enough so that I can do this now and then, you know, move forward with it. We also wanted to have kind of a, you know, from prevention to assessment to intervention to postvention book so that administrators could say, Yes, we want to have a comprehensive suicide prevention policy in our school. What are the elements that we need to be thinking about, you know, a lot of schools in the United States. They respond for the first time after a kid dies by suicide. And they don't have a prevention plan. Right. And so we wanted that to be in there also. Just to clarify, an administrator is quite a senior role, right? Yeah, so I'm talking about, you know, in the United States, we'll call them the principal of a, you know, of a building or in a school district, you know, you'll have the superintendent, which is in charge of all of the schools. You know, for example, you know, we have school districts in the United States that have a million students, right in a school district. And then we have some school districts that, you know, have a thousand, you know, in, in 12 grades. And so, you know, it varies, varies widely. But yeah. Yeah, just here an administrator would be more like the person answering the phone or, you know, a kind of office based role. So I just wanted to check that. So then you wrote this book a few years ago now. Is there anything that you think has maybe changed or that you would add now? Anything that you've learned since that book came out? Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, we're in the process of revising suicide in schools. So, you know, fingers crossed, we'll have a new edition out next year. A couple things have changed. One, some of the programs that we've talked about like signs of suicide have had research come out subsequent to the public publishing of the book that have shown better outcome. So now there's research that suggests that high school students who go through signs of suicide SOS are significantly less likely to attempt suicide, which is pretty important finding. And it's one of the few programs that has been shown to have that. There was the, I don't know how you pronounce it, the SYLE study with YAM, the Youth Aware of Mental Health Program. Yeah, it came out of the, actually it was a massive study across several European countries. And, you know, so that came out. And even though YAM is not widely implemented here, it's a program that we wanted to include in our book, which there wasn't information about before then. I think one of the other things that's happened, and this was something that we were working on before George Floyd's murder at the end of May, but really addressing how particularly postvention, right, addressing grief and loss has to be understood in a cultural context, and that defaulting to sort of, this is how we do it, is really defaulting to this sense of what white people, middle class white people are doing. And that that is problematic. So we've integrated that into the text, as well as, you know, more information about LGBTQ suicide and things like that. Wow. Okay, so there's quite a lot of revision in your revision. And when's that coming out, the new version? Next year sometime. We haven't submitted the final manuscript, so I don't know exactly what the production schedule is going to be. I know everything is a little bit delayed or, you know, maybe off schedule because of the pandemic. Yeah, that little thing. Have you, did you look at all in revising it about kind of technology and use of apps or anything like that, and did that come up? Absolutely. You know, so there have been a couple of advances since, you know, we published the first edition. One of them is the rise of software that runs in the background of school districts. So in the United States, we have companies that create software that run on the Google platform like Chrome OS or Windows, that when kids are typing, it's able to track the keystrokes. If you're searching something, it's able to track that. And the idea originally, because it's the United States, is they were looking for kids who were threatening to, or planning to shoot up the school. Right, or bomb the school. But they quickly realized that, in fact, most kids do not search for those things. More so, they're searching for things like, how do I kill myself? Wow. Right, what's the fastest way to die? And so this software runs in the background, and when a kid has a search query, or, you know, it types something to somebody on one of these, like Google Docs, the alert, the system flags it, alerts, you know, the principal. And then the principal says, hey, we need to send this to social work and social work intervenes. And so, like that, there are a lot of issues with that. Right, so you've got the idea of surveillance or data valence as they call it. You have the idea that kids are growing up, knowing that this runs in the background, and learning, I have no choice. I have to be, I have to be surveilled. And then on the other hand, you have this idea that schools have always been a place where if you see something or hear something, you do something. And the fact that kids are doing most things in an environment where the adults can't see or hear doesn't mean that we don't have a responsibility to respond. And so, all these issues, and obviously we don't go into all of these issues in depth, but we do touch on them. We have a whole section on technology and suicide prevention. And that does touch on the apps, and most apps have safety planning in them. We talk about this general idea of is social media killing kids? And we've really come down to on the side that social media itself is not, but that when you have kids that are depressed and anxious to begin with, and they are spending a lot of time on social media, searching for either kind of validation or sometimes they end up finding reasons not to live that can be hugely problematic. And so we, you know, we talk about that. And did you see any benefits in social media for kids who might be struggling in that way? Yeah, so one of the things about social media that could be so powerful is is really finding community, right, or affinity groups for kids who are in home situations or schools or communities where they aren't finding other people like them. It doesn't mean there aren't other people like them in those communities. But because of, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe you are the only kid that you know of, whose parents are from another country and they don't speak English very well. And there's a lot of judgment and prejudice and bias because of the United States about what that means. And so then you're able to find other kids online that are like you, first gen, and struggling with those things. And so that can actually provide a sense of community, a sense that I'm in this, this boat with other people. And then of course you have the obvious examples of kids with families that are rejecting of their sexual orientation, gender identity, that sort of stuff. And that can be really powerful and life affirming. And I'll say that one of the things about the pandemic is that, you know, the crisis text line released some data that suggested that there was a significant increase in the number of people who are reaching out in crisis, but most of those were adults. And that the, the texts are the crisis texts that were coming in from youth. Increasingly, we're talking about how sources of support were coming from parents. And so there is, there's the possibility again that, you know, when we think about adolescence and distress that we have people who are disconnected from their parents during a typical time, but during the pandemic when everybody's locked in together, even though that can be really horrible for some kids, especially those in abusive situations. For other kids it can be a time of connection, because they are able to have those informal conversations with parents because everybody's together all the time. And that they ordinarily wouldn't have because everybody's over scheduled and doing this, that and the other thing. And so, and so the way that that relates to technology is that technology, like crisis chat line has suggested that there might be some in person connections that have been possible because of the lockdown that are also life affirming for kids. Interesting. And do you think that for our adolescents that there is a kind of protective factor for them during the pandemic because they were so kind of connected online already, you know they lived a lot of their lives virtually anyhow and we certainly looked to them for how do we connect when we can't go out. And I, yeah I wondered what your thoughts were on that. That's such an interesting question. You know in the states. One of the things that I've seen is that you know the kids that that tend to have the hardest time in school are kids that are identified as sort of behavior problems. Right, they act up in class they they're identified as the teachers as being the problem students even in their peer groups it's like, it's like dude why are you always messing up you know that kind of thing. And then you have, and these are obviously artificial binary categories but then you have the the other kids that sort of know how the system works, and it works for them and so they're getting praise from their teachers they're getting props from their peers. And when the pandemic hit. There was a shift. And the kids that were struggling at school because of behavior. They were doing really well in an online environment and those kids that were really motivated, because they would get props from teachers they get props from peers in real life were less motivated. Because they're like I don't want to sit in front of a computer all day. Like I feel like there's nobody around. You know I do my work but you know I only see my teacher once a week. Like I don't, and they can't like, tell me, thank you for doing a good job right so there was a switch. And I think one of the things I think this points to two things. One, our mental health system at least in the United States is really designed around responding to the kids that other adults would identify as being problematic. And in a situation where kids are required to be in school. It's those kids that are disrupting school. And so we have a lot of folks that are trained and working with kids with disruptive behavior disorders ADHD conduct disorder and we oftentimes miss the kids who are, they might be anxious or depressed but you know kind of aren't disruptive. And we've known this, I mean for a long time but our system is set up to address the behavioral problems and so this time, when you had kids that were the good students who were struggling people were like what's going on. How do we respond to this. I don't know what to do right it's because really the function followed the structure in the schools in terms of the mental health response and I think that that is a really important insight for us to, you know as we think about or to use an academic term as we interrogate sort of the basic assumptions of our mental health service delivery system, who is getting services and why. And do you think there are lessons there that will be actually kind of carried forward into our learning as we move into the next phase of the pandemic or do you think it will get kind of lost in the wash up. My hope is that it absolutely will get moved into the next phase I mean my hope is that the, I mean and I've, I've personally have talked with folks about this in schools to say, you know, all of the kids that you thought you didn't have to worry about. You didn't have to keep an eye on you want to make sure you're checking in on those folks because they might really hate the new online learning environment. There are kids that have been on your radar that teachers have been like oh so you got Joey again this year you know so let's keep an eye on him. Got to make sure he graduates, like, obviously you want to check in but if he's doing really well. Then one of the take home lessons is that maybe, you know in person schooling is not for everybody, and maybe this is a shift in our history where we say. You know online education isn't just the alternative when in person education has failed, but maybe there is a benefit to achieving a sort of a long term educational objective that we need to reconsider. I think it's a really interesting question. It's one that's coming up a lot in my teaching at the moment and a lot of families and schools talking to me about students who were not thriving at all prior to lockdown but who at home have really engaged with learning so some of these are children who have been sort of school phobic for many years maybe who are suddenly actually thriving and succeeding and also a lot of autistic children who have really settled at home. And there's this fear now because we move to the next phase in the autumn and schools will have kind of wider reopening and lots of people are worried about how am I going to get my kid to carry on responding in this really positive way that I'm seeing and yeah how do I not lose that progress. And I don't think we know the answers yet on that one which is the tough thing and but maybe moving towards perhaps a more blended curriculum might be might be part of the answer there perhaps but I think it's hard because we're having to learn so much so quickly about how to make this work and what's working really well for some is is you know really turning others off as well isn't it so. It really is and you know there's that classic picture I know you've seen this right they it's sort of like this is what you know like medicine looked like in 1890 and this is what it looks like today this is what transportation look like in 1890 this is what it looks like today. This is what a classroom look like in 1890 and this is what it looks like today like the only one that looks the same as the classroom. And I really think that this pandemic is the thing that could force it so that in 10 years from now people are like well no actually classrooms look very different, like educational settings actually do look different. And instead of it being a continuum of, you know, or not a continuum of saying in person classrooms are what we do, and then in extreme circumstances we do something different. I do think we have to think about it as a continuum, like there are lots of different places that people can learn and lots of different ways. And I know this is not an easy thing to do, but I think that we would really be missing an important opportunity to rethink education, if we were not learning these lessons. Yeah, and I think the other thing we found is that, and it'd be interesting to hear what your view is in your neck of the woods but but in the UK is that people have suddenly had this much broader understanding about the wider role of schools so for a long time, you know I've known in my work and the people who I work with that actually school is way more than just a place of education. But actually during this time, they've so very thoroughly stepped up they're providing food and care of all sorts of different kinds. Yeah, and kind of I think really stepping into the health and the social care kind of role as well as the education role and I don't know if that's reflected in in what you're saying as well but Oh, 100% I mean the conversations that people have had in the last, you know, six to eight weeks about how it's clear that we default to school as serving a childcare function, a nutrition function, a mental health function. As well as an educational function and a monitoring function, and that it's not actually designed for that. Right, is problematic, you know, we've been able to say in the United States like we don't need to provide any sort of childcare to speak of. And when I say child I don't just mean like little kids I mean what do you do with the 12 year old. It's done at three o'clock, and their parents don't get home from work until six. What do you do with them, right, like as a society what do we do with them. And, you know, because wealthy people are able to hire folks to pick up their kids at school and put them in activities. We default to well it's not our problem. We don't know that literally all the parents are like, I can't do this home thing again, like literally I please, please like I know, like we could end up killing millions of people but I just need my kid back in school right like there's this bizarre disconnect. It has really forced this issue of the fact that we do not have an economic system that allows for parents to be with their kids. We're parallel with the way that we've set up our educational system and our lack of childcare. It's yeah it's it's an interesting time I think for all of us isn't it I guess you're finding this you're a father of three right. How old are your kids. I have twin boys who are eight at the moment there'll be nine in October and then my daughter is 12 she'll be 13 in December. You found that being at home in this extended period is that kind of changed your relationship with them and you know how things are at home is that yeah that made a difference to you guys. I mean I think that in some ways there have been, you know, some really beautiful moments. You know, I think one of the things that it's done, you know, my, my, my kids say, why do you work so much. You know, because when they were at school, and I was at work. And so if, you know, if, if I had something to do for an hour or two when they were home, it was just an hour or two but now they see that, you know, I could be gone all day and we're in the same house. And so that's been challenging. There have also been a couple of times where we've just been like, okay midday movie party like that, you know, which is super fun and like you just wouldn't do that before so that's been, that's kind of been special. So how's it, I'm interested to know like, has that changed your perception of your work at all like having your kids scrutinize it like that. Yeah, I mean I, I wish I had less work. Which sounds really privileged. And I recognize that I mean I'm grateful to have a job where I can, you know, work from home and then I'm at a point in my career where, you know, people like you invite me to talk about things, you know, time but, but yeah absolutely I definitely has made me think more about, you know, saying yes to things or saying no to things and prioritizing things and how I have really fallen into, you know, a stereotype that I never thought I would fall into which is like the middle aged white guy that is all about his career and not about his kids, not that I'm not but like that in a very practical way it works out like that in this pandemic, because I'm like okay got to go. What are your kind of priorities moving forward. Like, you know when you went through your bio at the beginning there like you got a lot of titles you're doing a lot of different things what's important to you because I think this has been one of the great things about the pandemic it does make you sit and go, what really matters in my life where do I want to make a difference. What's that. I found that. So what's the priority for you what are you hoping to achieve for the next few years. I'm having a hard time thinking about the next few years. I think that's one of the things that's happened for me in the pandemic is that, you know, instead of saying okay here's this research project or, you know, yeah, like next summer we're going to take the whole summer off and we're going to go travel like it's hard for me to think about like what the future is going to look like. Because I am anxious that, you know, it is going to be fall of 2021, and there's still going to be a question about whether or not kids can go back to school. Right. That said, I said, you know, for a couple more months I'm the treasure I'm like, I was like okay I got to be done with this. I can't, like I can't do all of these things just too much. If I'm going to be looking at being at home with the kids over the next year or two years like a lot of the volunteer stuff which I love, but, you know, so it's sort of like saying no to those things and saying, and you know saying yes to my wife right spending time with my wife who and she's incredibly busy herself. She's, she's got this research on HIV, STI prevention with sex workers and it's really amazing powerful stuff and, you know, she's busy. And so it's like how do we coordinate that. Yeah. So you're not sure. No, I'm not. I, I, because really what I default to is like, oh my God, when the pandemic is over. I want to take a summer and just be able to hang, you know, which again is a privileged position. I'm a, I'm a professor. I'm literally I'm on a nine month contract so I'm not paid in the summer so technically I don't have a job in the summer. And so like why not. I've never, ever done that. Like I've never not worked, like 50 60 hours a week in the summer. So it's like, okay, now we got to do that. And one more thing I wanted to ask you about specifically was about self harm and suicide. So there's been quite a lot of contradictory kind of reporting and conflict in the media in the UK about whether self harm is on the increase at the moment and the feeling is generally that we think maybe it is. But I wondered about you know what what was your kind of take on it whether do you think you're seeing an increase over in the states or do we not know. So, as far as the United States in general we don't know. We don't have real time tracking of self harm, you know, suicide ideation suicide attempt, or death. What I can tell you is that anecdotally, you know I have friends that work in emergency departments at hospitals. I've looked at the, at some of the stats in cities, and it looks like there has been either a decrease or no change in suicidal behaviors amongst adults. And in these pediatric emergency departments, fewer kids coming in. That doesn't mean that fewer kids are having thoughts of suicide and it doesn't mean that fewer kids are making attempts it just means that, you know maybe as parents are like, ordinarily I would have taken to the emergency department but the last place I want to go is a hospital during the pandemic. They just haven't gone and because it's a low base rate behavior relatively low. You know if you normally would have 10 kids show up in a week and you had seven. You know, what does that mean so it's a long answer to saying I don't know. And this speaks to one of the biggest complaints or criticisms that we've had about suicide and self harm in terms of data is that, you know, I can go on to a map and I can see, you know, for a zip code, how many cases of COVID there were yesterday. But the most recent data I have for suicide in the United States is 2018. Wow. You know, I mean I can look at at individual studies that were about a city or something like that. But, you know, I don't, I don't know, like we just don't have it. You know, it's like in the dark a bit then really I mean that's, that's a challenge. And do you think that in your work around suicide specifically is there going to be any impact of kind of COVID and any need for a specific kind of recovery plan or supporting people coming out of COVID or is it just not specifically relevant. This is one of the things where we as a sort of a field suicide ology, we have not kind of come up with like, what does it mean. Yeah. You know, we know historically from the research that in times where there's, you know, massive unemployment where there's in the United States where people, people have been buying guns, like, like they're going out of style like more people have purchased firearms in the last, like three or four months I think that any other single period. And, you know, that's been recorded. And we know there's a direct link between firearms and suicide. There's massive violence interpersonal violence. You know child abuse and neglect, like all those things correlate and, and all of the indicators are that, even if in the short term those things didn't increase. Right, like unemployment or unemployment increase but like there was financial buffers so like people weren't getting evicted there wasn't foreclosures on mortgages. Payroll protection, but all that's going to end. And so the next wave of the pandemic is going to probably in the United States be paired with massive evictions. We're talking millions of people being evicted from their apartments and homes, people foreclosing on their homes the mortgages. We have, you know, we have a increased scrutiny about law enforcement these days and people are really questioning whether or not in situations with where there's interpersonal violence whether it is helpful or harmful to involve law enforcement and so there is sort of a sort of a rethinking about what that looks like. And all of these things we know correlate with increased suicide risk. So the question is, is it COVID, right, meaning like family members are sick. I can't care for my kid. I'm now depressed. I have post COVID symptoms, meaning I have memory loss I you know I'm unable to like all of those things and therefore that leads to a sense of hopelessness, blah, blah, like, so there's the COVID specific suicide risk but then there's a suicide risk for all of these other things. And I think that as a field, we're concerned that it is going to increase as a result. But we don't have a plan for how to do that other than to do more of what we've been doing which hasn't worked. Wow, that's bleak. Okay. So what's next. Oh, gotta go. No, so I think, you know, my hope is that, you know, if we talk again in a year, I'll be able to say so, you know, all of these folks who had been getting together and talking about what is our response, they were able to come up with something and once we got better data, and once we knew, like what the problems were what the risk points were what the intervention points were then we were able to swoop in and do something. But right now I don't know, you know, because like I said, you know, function follows structure like a lot of our responses. Intervention are face to face. Or, you know, if they are over the phone or over a chat, there's always the option of having somebody come visit you face to face and, and at this point that's people aren't doing that. And so we just don't know what this is going to look like. Okay, so we need to do quite a lot of learning quite quickly it seems. Yeah. But we're in a great position and time to be able to do a lot of learning quite quickly and internationally as well so there is some hope there and you said hope is really important. Yeah. Yeah. I think a really useful thought to leave people with would be if you wouldn't mind sharing a few words of wisdom about if someone listening to this might be concerned about someone in their life and they might think that they have thoughts of self harm or suicide like what can we practically do knowing that maybe there isn't some big infrastructure right there that's going to sweep them up but what can we do person to person to help if we're worried about someone. So if you're, if you're worried that somebody that you care about is thinking of suicide. I think that the most basic and important thing that we can do is to connect with that person and spend time listening to them and help them to really get a very sort of deep sense that somebody cares about them. Now sometimes that is enough. Right. You know Kevin Heinz who's one of the few people to survive a suicide attempt off the Golden Gate Bridge he often says you know if even one person had stopped and said how are you doing today. I probably wouldn't have jumped. And you know that's it's a nice story it doesn't doesn't cover everybody but but listening is really important and don't be afraid to ask the question, you know, are you thinking of ending your life or you thinking of killing yourself. Don't be afraid of saying, hey, I don't know if I'm saying the right things but I really want to let you know that I it's important for me that you're in this world. And, and, you know, tell me more about what's going on right so to have those conversations you can have them over the phone you can have them over zoom you can have them over text. Most suicidal crises don't last for a long time. It might feel like a long time, but you know if you have somebody that says hey I just want to call and let you know that I'm done I'm out of here. And that's the question. And, and in your brain think okay I'm, I'm probably going to be checking in with this person pretty regularly for the next three to five days. And I'm going to make sure I'm getting support and things like that but you know this is not sort of the new normal this is how it's always going to be. And I say that because sometimes people are like oh my god I can't. I can't do this right now right and that's a that's a legitimate response also. Yeah, so ask the questions, let the person know that they're important to you. If you have access to a crisis line yourself you can always call them and say hey I'm talking with a friend of mine who is talking about suicide they don't want to reach out to you but I would love some support and know what to say blah blah blah. And oftentimes people will say sure here you know let's triage this let's do this together. So I think all of those things are important supports.