 I was here last year, I got to talk in front of people and that was pretty cool. So I don't know if you were here last year, but that was neat that I got to talk about open sourcing mental illness, which is a non-profit that I started. I have to, you don't have to forgive me, I'm a little bit under the weather. So I might not be my normal, terribly dynamic self also. But this will make up for it, this projector, which is fascinating. It looks like a bad VHS tracking setup. Anyway, we'll do what we can with it. I'm going to practice radical acceptance and not freak out about that. And this is a talk called How We Changed the World with Open Source. And it's a talk about a guy named Grumpy. And you might not know Grumpy, but he works at Mozilla. He is a QA engineer there and does a lot of testing stuff. So writes a lot of tests, does a lot of Python stuff now, kind of comes out of the PHP world though where he is sort of known as a big testing expert in PHP. And then a guy named Funky, which is me. Some people call me Funkotron or Funky. And it's a story about a guy named Grumpy and a guy named Funky and how they changed the world. They didn't set out to do that, but they did. And none of it would have happened without both of them working together. So it's a nice, real nice story like that. And so in 2011, we started a podcast, my friend Grumpy and I. And it was called Development Hell. And it was great because we both like to hear ourselves talk and we're both sort of old, a couple of old web developers and remember when we were called webmasters and like to talk about stuff in a sort of Grumpy old way, the way that there was two muppets who sit up in the balcony complaining about stuff. And yeah, like we liked hearing ourselves talk and we had done a bunch of episodes and worked out pretty well. And then in May of 2012, I had just come home from a PHP conference called PHP Tech and it was the PHP Tech 12, there was a 2012 version. And it was one of my really like worst conference experiences ever and it was not because of the conference itself. I had forgotten some of my daily medications that I take. And I take a number of things for mental health issues. And I ended up getting also physically ill. I also take, I also have a CPAP machine, which I use for sleep apnea. And so didn't sleep well and didn't have medications that I normally take. And one of the problems with that is sometimes with certain kinds of medications, if you don't take them, you feel really goofed up and like messed up in the head. Not in like sort of like, I'm going to act out, but you physically feel bad or you have bad symptoms, physical symptoms for it. The whole experience was really a big struggle for me physically and mentally and emotionally. And I ended up going home early, which is one of the only times I've ever gone home early for a conference because I was really deeply uncomfortable and unhappy. I was just not in a good place. And after I'd been home for a couple days, I sort of felt, I guess I feel kind of compelled to talk about it, which is interesting thing. Not everybody has that experience of like, I would like to talk about how sick I got and all the stuff that I dealt with. And that's not, so it's not exactly the case that that's a common thing necessarily, but I felt that. But I'd been carrying a burden for a long, long time. And I was tired and frustrated at dealing with it privately. I wanted to explain what these kinds of experiences were like for me. As somebody who deals with mental health issues. And as somebody who works in IT and somebody who does a bunch of open source stuff and things like that. And I hoped it would feel a little less alone with it. I would feel a little less alone with it. And maybe other folks can kind of learn from it. So I don't know, that seemed like a good idea. And this picture that I chose was the one that I chose for the blog post about the podcast, which was episode 15. And I chose it because that's kind of when it's really bad, that's sort of how I feel. I feel empty and broken and worthless and alone, very, very alone. And that sort of summarized in a lot of ways sort of my experience about that. I just, I feel hopeless. And the thing is, is that I've really felt that way off and on. But off and on, often on, since I was 12 years old, really. And yeah, so what we decided to do was I go to Chris and I say, Chris, who is grumpy, so to translate to you. I go to Chris and I say, Chris, I would like to talk about this on our podcast. And he says, that doesn't sound like that would be very funny to talk about. And I say, yes, I know. And he says, okay, well, that's fine. And he didn't know exactly what it was like to deal with this kind of stuff. But he trusted me and believed it would be important to talk about. And I gotta tell you, boy, we did not know. We did not know. We did not know how important it would be to talk about this. So on June 18th, 2012, we released that podcast on that was episode 15th of our of our development help podcast. And boy, we got so much feedback from it. We got so much feedback and I want to show you some of that now. Some of the things that we got, I simply wanted to write and say that I've never been able to put into words how I feel as well as you all did. I find it jaw dropping how casual and straightforward you are about discussing this stuff. I don't talk about it with anyone. I'm casual and straightforward because I'm a little bit of an anomaly in that situation, but yeah. And somebody wrote us and said, it really sucks to have a brain that wants to continually sabotage you and keeps you from reaching your potential. Just so that there are millions and I do mean millions of people that understand what you go through. So some time passed and I did a lot of thinking about that. This episode 15, we've recorded now 91 episodes. And this 15th episode we did is by far the one that got the most feedback ever, like exponentially more than any other topic we've had than any other famous or infamous person or person we've ever had on as a guest, any other technical topic, anything like that. This is the one which by far got the most response from people. By far. And I knew that there was something there and I was in a lot of ways inspired and kind of energized and I wanted to do more, but I didn't really know what to do. I thought long and hard about it, but I didn't really come up with anything that seemed feasible and sustainable for me. So yeah, a couple of months later though at another conference, somebody who I admired a lot within the PHP community came up to me and told me that when I opened up on the podcast about my own issues that they had been inspired to seek help for their own similar kinds of issues. I was blown away that somebody I looked up to would have gotten some measure of reassurance and strength from what I was saying about my own stuff and that was significant and surprising and amazing. So I decided that maybe I just needed to keep talking. So on February 15th, 2013, I did this post on my blog about my intention to do a talk about mental health and tech and to do it as something that instead of the technical talks that I had given before, I talked about JavaScript and PHP and sometimes Python and things like that. Not really Python because I'm not very good at it. So don't ask me to give a talk on that. I can add numbers. You know, when I wrote at that time, I said I wasn't excited about it because traveling a lot sends to trigger my anxiety and I've gotten better with it because I've traveled a lot since then. But I used to get really freaked out. Just thinking about traveling would make me nervous about the plans I have to make about being in the right place at the right time and stuff like that. But I decided to try and submit this talk to several different conferences that year. And I asked people what they wanted to hear about and I got a lot of responses but this one really struck me knowing I'm not alone. That was what they wanted to hear about. And that was, I think, this primary but also primal need that we have. This substantive basic need that we have to know that we're not alone in our experiences. So I'm going to quote myself, which is ridiculous, but I'm going to quote myself. And I said if I could help them know that they're not alone, it's worth it to push through this stuff. If I can help people understand what it's like for people who struggle with this, then it's worth me pushing through my anxiety and pushing myself outside of my comfort zone. So in my community, the open source community, I think I helped so I'm going to try. So I decided to try and I called it open sourcing mental illness. That was the name of the talk that I gave in 2013. And I aimed to go to Ozcon, which is the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, and Open Source Bridge, which is another conference that's based in Portland, Oregon. So we did all that in 2013 and I aimed at doing talks with those two. And I started up a fundraiser on Indiegogo to help pay for that because a lot of these conferences, Ozcon and Open Source Bridge, they are not able, well, maybe able, it varies. They do not pay for people to attend if they're a speaker. So that means that, okay, you might have to come up with $1,500 to go and speak, right? Something like that. So I had a fundraiser and I did this fundraiser for everywhere on Indiegogo. And I had a goal of $3,000. So I just posted, I posted on Twitter about it because of course I did. And the amount of time that it took us to get to that goal was 19 hours, right? And so in total we raised $5,480, which was really cool, really awesome, right? And that year I did eight talks and I recorded the audio and video from those talks. Later I bought a dedicated video camera with some of the money that was left over from that. But I talked about what it's like for me and I talked about how it affects my ability to work and participate in Open Source and how it helps friends and co-workers, or how to help friends and co-workers get through this stuff and what are some things that you can do to be supportive. So it was a very basic kind of like an awareness talk. That was basically what I was doing. Okay, so that year went really well and it was really amazing and really cool. So then 2014 rolls around and I'm still doing my thing. So I didn't have to do a fundraiser that year because an organization called Prompt precluded me from needing to find money for trips. They basically organized it with something that Amon Leonard, who was at Engine Yard at the time, started to fund people to go talk about mental health at tech conferences, which was exactly what I was doing. So I didn't need to do a fundraiser and I didn't need to raise money that year. And I did that year 14 different talks. And in these talks I started introducing data about societal and economic impact and how severe the experience was for people with anxiety and depression and other very common mental health issues. And I added this line in there that sick workers don't work. People who are sick, no matter what they're sick with, they don't work or they don't work as well. And so I sort of ended up making the talk a little less about me and more about we as a community, as a group. And so that's kind of where I started going with that. Now I remember I was giving this talk at Pine Tennessee that year and I had this seat level guy, I think it was a CEO at a company. He said, he asked a question after the end of my talk and he says, okay, so I see what the problem is and how, so how do I fix it? And that's not an uncommon thing is people want to know, okay, I get it, what do I do? And I didn't really have a great answer for him at that time. But pointing me again in the direction of where probably I wanted to go, what would make sense to go. So that sort of started me pushing down this direction of figuring out, well, what's going on in the tech industry and how can we help? What resources aren't there that could be there? And so we did this mental health and tech survey in 2014. So what did we learn from that? We had about 1,200 respondents back in 2014 and we just distributed mostly on Twitter again because of course I did. But what we found from that is that most people are afraid to talk about mental health at work. That's not really a surprise, I don't think, to anybody. But we had some numbers to back it up. And we also found that most workplaces do very little to help those with mental health issues. Now they'll oftentimes help with people with physical health issues but they'll do very little discussion about mental health. I think primarily because they don't know what to do. So I started integrating this information into this talk, into my talk in Madison PHB in September of 2014. I started bringing in those numbers. Those numbers were significant because there really hadn't been research like that before. So that was kind of significant to start putting that stuff in there and start putting some numbers behind some of my assertions here. So in 2015 I came up with this slogan, stronger than fear and I sort of started talking about it in that way and I'm still using that one because that sounds tough. And I started doing some branding. I paid for a fancy logo to get made. I added the fire but I had a real designer design a logo. Not me but I used to pretend I was a designer for a long time and this expectation to the internet outpaced my abilities. So this is all 2015. I did a fundraiser in June and I started that because prompt was sort of the that had been paying for stuff was kind of ran into funding issues. Some of the stuff at NGDR had changed kind of what their focus was so they were in sort of a shift and I decided that I waited for a little bit and said, okay, I got to go do this myself again. So I did a fundraiser in June of 2015 and that goal I had there was for $5,000 to do probably three or four conferences to be able to pay for. And the amount of time that it took to get to that goal was two hours. I think I had given it 45 days because I was afraid we wouldn't be able to get to it. Not the usual 30. And in the end we raised $14,975. I did 12 talks that year so I'm doing these talks but the important thing that I started doing in addition to that was I was approached by a woman named Jennifer Akulian who's a PhD in psychology in June of 2015 and she's a psychologist who works at Keen.io, a company out in the, I don't know, Bay Area, San Francisco, whatever you want to call that place. And we talked about research and advocacy stuff and things like that and so we started talking about what are the kinds of resources we could create? What are the kinds of things that mental health professionals could do? What could we do about this stuff? And so we started creating handbooks and primarily Jennifer was really the person who drove this because of her expertise in this area and she created three different handbooks that we ended up releasing. Two dealt with ADA law. One was aimed at employers and one was aimed at employees and how you apply ADA law to mental health and in tech workplace. And the third one was aimed at companies, C-level executives, HR teams and things like that about how you create a supportive workplace, supportive of mental wellness. So 2016 was kind of the year that I got really ambitious. It's easy to do stuff when you know it's going to work. It's easy for me to go and give talks because I know how talks work. I know that you go in there, you give the talk, people say, hey, you're awesome for doing that. And it's like, hey, yes, I feel good about myself and that's nice and that's cool and that's great. And it almost sounds cynical about it and I apologize for that. That's not how I want to come across. But I know how the talk stuff works and that's an easy thing for me to do. And the stuff that's hard to do is to, like, start getting ambitious and doing stuff that maybe you're not sure is going to work. So what we did was we did a fundraiser in June. And by this time, I keep starting saying we because we started having a few other people who were kind of involved in helping me, people like Jennifer. We did a fundraiser in June and we had a goal that year of, and this was a big thing for $10,000 and the amount of time that it took to get to that goal was a little longer than last year but it was twice as much and it took 72 hours to get to that goal. And in total, we raised $22,481. I did 14 talks that year. We started having lots of people wanting to help and by lots I mean more than one or two like we got, you know, 10 or 15. We formed as a nonprofit corporation in Indiana where I live. And then after we filed, we got 501C3 status in three weeks which I was kind of surprised by. Some people told us that's going to take forever to do that and you should hire a lawyer and that's going to take a bunch of money and I don't know, we just filled out the paperwork and paid like the fee which was, I don't know, $500 or something like that and it worked. I don't know. I have no idea. It's a black box. Don't ask me how it worked. No idea why it went that well. I've been told that it went better because there were complaints. This was during the Obama administration. Some people had brought up, not like it was special to the Obama administration, but that it took forever to do 501C3 and that it was a really hard process to go through and that enough people raised a stink about it who could actually make things uncomfortable for people in the IRS that they started actually pushing through stuff quickly. That's what I was told. I don't really know if that's the case. But that was somebody else that a non-profit told me that. So we did a bunch of new things though. A bunch of new things. This is where I talk about being ambitious. We did e-books of the handbooks that you can go download at Lean Pub. You can pay some money if you want and that goes towards our funds, but you don't have to. If you want to, you can get it for free. We did a new survey in 2016 and that has over 1,500 respondents at this time. We took over, it used to be a forum called DevPressed and it's now the OSMI forums to host those because they've been down for a couple months. And they're a forum where IT professionals can talk with one another and sometimes mental health professionals to talk about what they're going through and get help and get advice. So we created a video presentation, a 20-minute video presentation aimed at HR teams and C-level execs and we started making inroads into talking with mental health professionals about how do we work together? How do we do these kinds of things? Are we doing the right kinds of things? Stuff like that. All of those were huge things we hadn't been doing it for and I could not do them by myself. So I needed help. I needed somebody, not somebody, but somebodies to help me with this. So with 2017, we're a non-profit now. This is like, well, let's turn this into something a little bit different and get really, really ambitious. And this was the biggest year, I think, in this organization whatsoever. And it's been kind of crazy and no pun intended. It's been interesting, let's say, but good. So 2017 has been a very, very ambitious year for us. So we changed from having a goal $10,000, something like that, and we did a whole new fundraising thing. We're using a different fundraising platform called Kindful, which is really like a fundraising platform in CRM for non-profits. You know, we shifted everything into being like, well, this is a really it's a volunteer driven, but it's an organization. It's not just some dude who goes around and talks at conferences and that you throw money at and just steal your money and buy a boat. So we set a goal, I set a goal of not $10,000, not $20,000, not, but $50,000 for that year or for this year. And we ended up raising and it took us a while and keep in mind, this is five times more. It was twice as much, the amount that I was asking for was twice as much as we had ever raised before. And we raised almost $60,000 at the end of it. And so our ability to fund is really significant. There's lots of things that we're doing. A lot of it is improving and addressing things that are you know, that we still need to work on in our work. We are doing new tech. We're doing a new survey that's actually being done by somebody who knows what they're doing with me. Just tons of different things. We're going to rework on handbooks, we're going to do more outreach. We've gotten sponsorships from companies like Automatic, the company behind WordPress, Github, DigitalOcean, the Laravel framework, that PHP framework. Imagine it's some Python framework you like and then just replace that and yeah. So I mean, it's amazing to see that shift. And it's incredibly humbling to see the amount of change and shift that we've had with this from something that really came from just a single podcast all the way through. All the way through up to this, deforming a non-profit, a volunteer-driven non-profit. And even something that I ended up stepping down for my job as a CTO and I'm trying to figure out how to do this full-time or at least take a large portion of my time to just run this organization. And I take a very small salary not enough of a salary to pay my bills but I take a small salary every month for paying for this stuff so that I can spend time on it. One of the questions sometimes I get about it when people ask about this is they ask about, why do you call it open source? What does it have to do with open source? What is it? Why do you call it open source? So I'll ask where's the code? I'll put my head down a little bit and sigh because I've heard that question a few different times. But I'm going to make an assertion in here which I don't think is too terribly controversial but I think it's significant. I think that open source culture and open source communities are not about code. I think code is sort of a MacGuffin code is a thing that brings people together but when you're together it's not about the code. It's about learning and sharing together and it's about growing together and it's about open arms and open minds and it's about an open hand to help the next person pull themselves up. Nothing that I've ever done has felt as good as helping other people and that's why I keep doing this that's why I've kept doing this since 2012 that's why I've felt like this is so significant because nothing else I've done in my life has felt this good and I'm able to do that because we follow basic open source community standards or expectations and values collaborative learning and sharing and helping one another community building those kinds of things. And one of the things that's really important is to remember that I wouldn't have done any of this without my friend Grumpy, without my friend Chris not without him, not without him and this is a picture of us when we were he came to my house, he lives in Toronto but he came down and we hung out and he does look very grumpy and I may or may not look funky but I wouldn't have known all this and I wouldn't be here telling you all these amazing things we've been able to do and what we're going to do without Chris Harches I wouldn't have done the podcast without him. I wouldn't have tried to raise funds without him I wouldn't have kept it with it without him even when I could barely hold on with all the other stuff I'm doing and this year has been a real challenge too with a bunch of family stuff that's come up with me and trying to figure out financially how I'd keep doing this and not lose my house family has a place to live, things like that. Those are sort of different things. None of this would have happened had he not only been okay with it but encouraged me, encouraged me to do it and I got ambitious about OSMI in part because I saw how it was possible to do those kinds of things because Chris does a lot of entrepreneurial stuff on his own. He works for Mozilla as his day job but he writes books and releases them on LeanPub about testing techniques and patterns and stuff like that and he does a bunch of stuff that's sort of so low entrepreneur stuff and I was really inspired by that to keep going on that and it was because somebody else was willing to help me with this that I was able to do it and that I think is sort of the essence of open source and how communities work together. Even on the tiny level just one on one that's still a community and that's still the kinds of values that I think we see we make the world that we live in that's the world that we can change we make that world sometimes we can kind of step back and it feels often like the world makes us and it has all the control over it but I would assert that we really do make the world that we choose to live in and we have a great deal of power and influence in the lives around us and that's a great responsibility that we all have. So I want to leave you with one basic question one fundamental question what world are you going to make? Thanks very much my name is Ed Finchler I founded open sourcing mental illness if you really want to check us out there's a patreon that you can help out with go to osmihelp.org to learn more about what we do and how we change things and how we ended up changing lives and I are still doing it via open source. So thanks very much I appreciate it. I think this went fairly quickly and we have some time for questions if you would like so please feel free to ask questions and I will yell them out embarrassingly so that they're on the recording so please feel free yeah go ahead so the question was in summary because I'm terrible at remembering what just happened was that have we had medical practitioners or people, mental health professionals or medical professionals reach out to us and work with us on that or is it sort of primarily just a grassroots thing I'd say it focuses more on grassroots but we have had medical professionals work with us on things I mean from the beginning we had a medical professional Jennifer Cooley in who helped us create those handbooks and really was the primary force to create the handbooks that are available and you can go on Lean Pub and get them right now or go to our website and you can find them under the resources so what we try to do is engage with the people who have expertise in areas that we need help in and figure out are we doing the right kinds of things what can we do here what can we do there and figure out how we make happen in responsible ways so it's been pretty grassroots but we have and do work with medical professionals in terms of informing us and helping us make good decisions and we're really trying to increase that engagement now and I think we have more and more opportunities to do that so yeah okay you had a question I see so the question was what differences do we see in the say the tech community versus the general population in terms of the kinds of problems that we have I think we're still trying to kind of figure that out some of the issues we have with the surveys that we've done are that they are self selecting that means that people choose to fill them out it's not like we got 300 people in a room who all were tech professionals from a random sample of the entire population of people who did it and then locked them in a room and forced them to take this test so because of that your numbers can end up kind of skewed there are anecdotal things that we can say anecdotal things sometimes are accurate and sometimes might not be accurate anecdotally there are stereotypes about programmers as people who maybe have higher incidence of ADHD or social anxiety or things of that nature I am careful about making that assertion because if it's completely anecdotally you don't have data to back it up I think you have to be really careful about that what we do find even though it's self selecting though the 2016 survey that we did we showed that the incident rate of was significantly higher than the general population quite a bit higher and I would probably say that that would indicate that the incident of the incidence rate of mental health issues within the amongst IT professionals is probably higher than it is among the general population there's a lot of caveats on that and I think you have to be careful with it but I think that that is probably the case whether it's a difference between from say 20% to 30% or 20% being generally what we look at in the general population say 30% or whether it's higher, whether it's a little bit lower I'm not sure but I do think that I could safely say that it seems likely that the incident rate of things is higher we didn't see a lot of difference in terms of what kinds of things people who are tech professionals deal with so it was still lots of anxiety disorders would be the highest lots of depression disorder disorders mood disorders things of that nature were the highest ones that were there and that was generally in line with what you see in the general population yes please sure asking about and trying to sort of make changes what are some of the biggest of things oppositional things that we had generally what I can say is well and good for my sanity I have not had lots of people say like you're full of shit Ed or things like that generally haven't had too much I get very little well just calm down and try harder or things like that and that's good that means that generally people see that there's issues I think that what are the largest things that are I think the biggest issue that you see in terms of making a fundamental change is that we don't talk openly about mental health issues we talk openly about diabetes relatively speaking we talk openly about heart disease we talk openly about cancer think about how much we talk about it in say popular culture and we have whole months dedicated to it and colors dedicated to kinds of cancer and things like that I don't know of any major public health issue that has been dealt with effectively by not talking about it I don't know one you have to educate people on the kinds of things to look for on taking it seriously on how to seek help on what to do if you have been diagnosed things of that nature that's how you deal with public health issues and there's lots of campaigns and PR stuff that goes into many major public health issues they don't, generally you don't see those kinds of things for mental health you can in your own social groups have a great deal of influence in that by choosing to speak openly about mental health that doesn't mean you have to talk about your own particular issues but the topic of mental health if you make it something that is okay to talk about amongst your friends they're going to, I guarantee you, you're going to suddenly see people coming to you and talking to you because you're the person who talked openly about it and you're going to find that there's lots of people around you who are dealing with similar issues or who are dealing with similar issues and so I would say that's the number one biggest issue with it and is what we would call that stigma and I think you fight that stigma by choosing to speak openly and I think when people see you speaking openly they will feel like that stigma is lifted for them that's what I see please go ahead sure so where do I give talks? I give talks at a lot of different tech conferences mostly in the United States so I'm based in West Lafayette, Indiana where Purdue University is so I drove here to give this talk but I've given talks kind of everywhere in the country from Florida to Seattle, Washington so that's a good question I don't know like this audience is pretty big for one of those for a talk that I've given I would guess I've probably spoken if I added it all up probably a few thousand people if I really added it up I've had chances to speak in front of hundreds of people and then I've had chances to speak in front of five and it varies sometimes based on a few different things sure I think typically most companies don't focus on it compared to they don't focus on mental health to the same degree that they do focus on what we call physical health issues yes I do in fact one of the things that goes along with sponsorship from companies like automatic and github is me talking to them about these kinds of things about this to their employees and to everybody who's involved at the company so yeah absolutely I have had a few opportunities previous to this to speak at companies and I expect that we will do more of that in the future thanks yeah go ahead that's okay sure so you asked were there particular things about the folks the things that we've encountered in terms of which kinds of mental health issues do we see in tech and then also what are things that we sort of advice that we've given for people in different kinds of scenarios whether even people say some students in college or in high school involved in tech things like that I don't have enough information to say that it's particularly different in the general population in the general population you see that anxiety disorders are the number one category mood disorders like depression and stuff generally secondary category how you measure that goes into then if you include substance abuse disorders things like that and if you're including that in there but generally we haven't seen that there's necessarily a significant difference we have seen that there may be a higher incident rate but we're sort of those numbers are a little fuzzy right as for advice I think it's I think it depends a lot on the situation but generally what I find is that if you are I guess there's two aspects I get a lot of questions about what do I do I'm suffering from a mental health issue and then I get a lot of questions on a friend of mine is suffering from a mental health issue and is reluctant to seek help the first thing I'd say is for somebody who is dealing with it themselves is that is to seek out a local chapter of an organization who can advise you on resources that are available in your area a couple organizations that are good to talk to and often have local chapters are NAMI or Mental Health America or MHA either one of those if you go to them and you look up local chapters for them they're going to have some kind of hotline you can call or just their regular office number and you call them up and ask who are some people that I talk to now if you are lucky enough to have medical insurance through your business or through your employment or things like that you should also go to your provider and get information on who's in network that does what they call behavioral health and generally feel like you can go and just get an evaluation done to start checking out and get help I think there's often times it's easy for me to say that there's a lot of stigma often times and fear about seeking help but what I try and I hope people view it as is that it's not all that different than going to a doctor and saying you know my knee's been acting up maybe we should check this out and there's no harm in it you can get an evaluation done and if you decide not to pursue it just don't pursue it you know so those are generally the kinds of things I advise on but I really I do suggest particularly if you don't have the options of healthcare through your work to talk with those organizations and see what local resources are available support groups things of that nature I would give similar advice to people who are looking to help somebody but I particularly say I tell them you may need to help out a lot you are probably almost everybody who comes to me with that question says I've tried to encourage them to seek help but they don't want to and that's a tough thing to overcome I think that in the end of the day there's a lot of patience that you have to have and you want to make the journey as easy as possible for the person and make it a shallow grind instead of a strong uphill battle so you may be like I have to say hey I'll make this appointment for you I will drive you there I will go with you and wait in the waiting room for you while you go in but I want to help you with this stuff but you can access the same kinds of resources you can say hey let's go over your behavioral health coverage that's getting there or hey let's call up NAMI and find out what's available the other thing that I'd suggest to everybody would be to check out mental health first aid that's a program that's taught in 22 different countries and the US is one of them it's an excellent program it's a one day course that teaches you how to interact empathetically with people who are dealing with things either in a crisis situation or not listen and respond in an effective way and help them seek help it's a really really good course I've taken it myself and I strongly recommend investigating it it's inexpensive to take so that's probably what I'd suggest and I think we're about out of time so that's it if you have any more questions I'll be around we have a booth here so I will probably be kicking around there for the rest of the day mostly and that's about it, thanks very much