 And so our conversation today is one related to much of what you had brought up about, you know, how we've been doing as a Muslim community for this period of time. And what I thought might be useful is actually to go stepwise over the last, you know, six years or so, I think is what I'm going to walk us through, particularly since today, masha'Allah, this is co-hosted by, you know, or hosted by CARE and all the great work that CARE has been doing, kind of really working on helping Muslims in the US and in Western spheres to really, you know, do better. It's really part of our wellness as we think about how the Islam community are coping with everything that's been happening. So allow me, inshallah, to walk us through a little bit of, you know, short term history lane, but then eventually towards the end of the talk, I'm going to go really into history of our history as Muslims and mental health. So with that, I'm going to share with you the first resource, which is the lab. My lab at Stanford University is called the Muslim mental health and Islamic psychology lab. And so much of the work that happens in this lab is directly, so much of what I'm going to present today is really directly derived from the work that happens in the lab. It's a very bustling lab with a lot of wonderful researchers and interns and junior clinicians and junior researchers who are kind of working on becoming, inshallah, experts in the field of mental health. I'm very excited that there are many more Muslims entering into this field and working on it in a way that just wasn't the case a decade ago, certainly not two decades ago. And, you know, even myself, I have to say, and I know many people and this was touched on in the introduction today, there is still a good bit of stigma around mental health. But I'm hoping today's conversation, not just in how we're doing as Muslims and our mental health, but also as we talk about our history and our heritage related to mental health. I really hope a lot of this, a lot of that stigma will start to just crumble because I believe that as we start to know and understand more about our own heritage about this field as Muslims. More and more of that goes away. And so let me first to walk you through to South 2017. Let's start there. These images are ones that I'm sure you're well aware of. And everyone has seen some of these pictures, especially some of the ones on the bottom are directly from actually our here in San Francisco Bay Area where I'm located. And the airport, you know, when the travel ban was announced, which of course all of us refer to as the Muslim ban. And so, you know, 2017 in the mark of the last administration really kind of marked a very explicit Islamophobic atmosphere. And that carry with it quite a bit of angst, particularly from members of the Muslim community that were affected by the ban directly. And all the others who really felt like will we be next or what's to come is there a Muslim registry as was being called for at the time, and so on and so forth. It's very painful to even walk down that memory lane, but it's very important to name and to really say that that was, you know, that and in many ways this pain has not fully resolved. So we add, right, we're kind of going year by year and kind of adding different key mark, key landmark, if you will, incidents that have happened and really contributed to how we are doing today. Now, many of you, I hope know who this person is. Masha Allah, one of our Shiro's, of course, in the Muslim community, if Tihaj Muhammad, Masha Allah. And you know, the previous Olympics, you know, is of course a medalist for the US, the first hijabi representing the United States and came home with a medal. And of course, here she's holding up her Barbie doll that's made in her image by Mattel some years ago. And this, the date doesn't say here, but it's actually 2018. It's the following year. I put this picture here as we reflect on the year 2018 and how, you know, we're still in the midst of this angst, you know, in the Muslim community and there's so much, you know, really demonizing Muslim communities. And here comes a very special moment for us to celebrate, right. And we're very proud of this moment. And for any girl who grew up in the US or really honestly in the world, Mattel has, of course, a global reach and who played with dolls, particularly Barbie dolls. This, you know, this was a win. This was something that was very exciting. This was something of saying, wow, you know, a Barbie doll with a hijab on, not just an ordinary doll, but somebody who's a real Shiro in so many different ways. And it was, it was a really neat celebration. Well, the day I saw this picture, I was scrolling through and kind of saw this picture and went, whoa, this is so cool. And my daughter, who at the time of the story is about 10. And she kind of peers over my shoulder and she says, what is it, mom? What is it? What is it? You know, and so I kind of, you know, turn my screen and show her very excitedly show her dad's like this is really cool. And, and she's like, wow, is that real? You know, as I'm sure many of us have had similar reactions when we saw this news announcement. And I sell her yes. This is real. Let me tell you about this. And later in time, I'll show that she had actually the opportunity to meet. She's a straight to the edge in person. But as I was scrolling, and this is why the picture, this is why the story is relevant as I was scrolling to see the comments. Of people as they're commenting on this, right? Muslims and people who are not Muslim are both writing and there's much praise and much excitement. But then there's also this and remind you, my daughter is still, you know, peering over my shoulder. And this is what shows up next in the images to the point that I literally like gasped, right? And kind of like pushed the, you know, the screen away from my daughter and she's like, what is it? What is it? And I remember at that very moment, needing to take a moment and really think about, you know, on your feet as a parent. Do you bust a child's innocence right then and there and tell them that this is how many around us think about a hijabi Muslim woman? You know, a visible Muslim woman. This is the image that conjures up in so many minds. And the comment under this particular picture that was posted was, well, if Mattel is going to make hijab wearing woman, this is how the next one should be made. Because this is how Muslim women really are. And, you know, I couldn't even think about how we were just celebrating a success and almost immediately it was kind of like a whack-a-mole like boom, you know, kind of like over your head. There goes the celebration, right? But nevertheless, of course, it's very much still a celebration. But in that moment, trying to make a decision, split-second decision, what do I say to my kid? Do I just sort of say, nothing, nothing, don't worry about it? Or do I actually sit her down and say this is the reality of what so many women who are visible as Muslims who are often, as you know, the brunt of all Islamophobic attacks, the majority happen with visible Muslim women, followed, of course, by other Muslims who are visible in our identity? Or do I just allow her to go about her, you know, innocence for a little bit longer, right? And these are the decisions that many of us have to make on a day-to-day basis. And, you know, kind of like leading up, I'm kind of leading up, of course, on the story of how the mental health of so many of Muslims in our communities have been facing. Let's go on to 2019. And the issues are not getting any better. In fact, in many ways, they're getting worse. And I put here a couple of publications from the lab in which I wrote about, and I'm going to give a trigger warning here because I'm going to bring up the topic of suicide. And it's actually going to come up more actually in a couple of slides coming forward. And whenever I give a trigger warning, I like to say to folks, if the conversation I bring up here, because it is about mental health and some of this is heavy. If it is triggering to you or difficult for you, please give yourself some space, take a step back, you know, and join us again whenever you're able to. Now, this particular publication, and this mind, it was all before the pandemic. This is still 2019. And I was tracking in the lab a series of deaths by suicide that I had been made aware of in our general area here in Northern California that were all Muslim and who were all immigrants or asylum seekers. And the news around this topic and around the charge is some of you who are in kind of the policy and the legal field know is a policy that's not new to the Trump administration, but definitely the Trump administration really bolstered it a whole lot more. It was the policy called inadmissibility, you know, on public charge. So it's called the public charge policy. And what it means is that a person who was deemed to be a public charge, meaning they kind of took up resources from the general public. They would be deemed inadmissible for full US citizenship. And this alarmed so many different people in different communities, particularly people who could not read or understand English very easily. And there's so much red tape and, you know, nuance to this policy of who is exempt from it and who is not. And it turns out, you know, that refugees and asylum seekers are in fact exempt from this policy. But that's not was not easily understood. And as you know, so much in the last administration, things would just get blasted on social media with very little explanation. And it put a lot of alarm for so many communities, because when it means when you are a public charge, it means that you're somebody who's using public resources such as, you know, food aid, right, such as, you know, public medical resources, such as mental health resources. So these deaths by suicide that I was tracking were all one after another had to do with folks who had accessed the public health and public mental health systems, right, to get help and care. They were needing that, of course, as they came from places of trauma and sought out asylum, and then heard, you know, and without very little with very little explanation and lots, no, not much nuance that they would possibly be exempt. Sorry, it would not be be inadmissible for receiving us citizenship. And they thought here they are kind of escaping from, you know, violence and trauma and difficulty for what they hope to be the land of opportunity and stability, only to be told you cannot be a citizen here and we will extradite you back to your country. Well, this is what they assumed or thought. And so many of them said, Well, that's a life not worth living. I don't want to go back to where I came from. And I sought asylum from. And so there were multiple deaths by suicide. And that was very unfortunate, because as you see here, the story that I'm kind of telling and painting is kind of different pockets of our Muslim communities that are being affected by so much of that very explicit Islamophobia, and also by rules and policies that affected even people well outside of our communities, but also affected us to and in very detrimental ways. And so, you know, we continue to kind of add and add to the story. And of course, as you all know, once we enter into, you know, the following year, the pandemic is going to come and that's going to really, really kick up even more kind of mental health considerations. But we'll pause for a second and talk about this concept of Islamophobia that I know many of you are well familiar with, particularly those who are familiar with the good work of care. And to think about what it means. When you have this very anti Islamic hatred, that's widespread and a distrust of Muslims that's become widespread. And it kind of, you know, goes beyond age, education, partisan affiliation, right, it's kind of widespread throughout the society, regardless. And we felt that there really needed to be a documentation on how Islamophobia was affecting the mental health of our communities. And there was no such thing. Most clinicians you spoke to could tell you anecdotally that there was a direct effect between Islamophobia and mental health. But there wasn't any proof. There wasn't anything in the literature. And as you know, in modern day kind of, you know, science and practice, if it's not in the literature, if you cannot cite it and point to it there, it's as though it doesn't exist. So we took on an endeavor to actually, you know, write a full comprehensive, in this case a book, we actually wrote an entire book on the topic of Islamophobia and psychiatry. And I was one of the editors of this book, and there are many, many, you know, contributors, and really to document the direct link between the two. And this was very important because until you can document it, and it can be cited, right, you're not going to be able to change policy, you're not going to be able to change actual work related to even clinicians who are doing this kind of care, right, it needed to actually, you know, happen. And if you take a look at how Islamophobia was winning, it wasn't just because of that particular administration, we're talking about decades and decades and decades worth of policies that have had Islamophobic tendencies towards them, right. And I won't, Andy, we have to be able to very clearly speak and say that even in care reports, which I really appreciated because there was that documentation, not in academic literature yet, but just the general documentation on how so much of these policies, so many of these policies had had effects on increased anxiety, increased hate crimes, increased trauma, right, for so much, for so many members of our communities. And it's on so many different levels, everything from individuals, so either you have personally, some of you here have personally experienced this or have no other individuals have experienced this. Also, in her personally, you know, other people in either our jobs or our social networks, and depending on what kind of social networks and supports that we have really played a part in whether or not we were doing okay. Then there's community factors, whether you think about like, you know, image on the media and media outlets or whether you think about kind of resources or the lack thereof in our Islamic community centers in our schools and universities, right. There's a lot of there where you say, okay, we understand there's this Islamophobia, we understand that there is an effect of it. What is actually being done to help remedy or heal our communities. And then of course, on the policy level, which we spoke to just a little bit ago. So this is all the way, right, we kind of went through 1718 2019. And now we enter into the next stage 2020. And the pandemic of course hits and you know, lockdown in quarantine and all of the mental health ramifications we often speak of the pandemic, which we are currently still in as that there are going to be in there has been a significant portion of our of all people in all communities that have been affected, you know, by this physically, medically financially. But even more of us, probably the majority, if not all have been affected on a mental health level. And if the pandemic has taught us anything. It's how much we have probably been dealing with various mental health considerations, and not actually doing much about them, either because of barriers or stigma, right access to care, or just our own, you know, brushing it off I can do this I can do this I need to be strong. Or sometimes also relying on faith. Now, speaking of faith what we decided to do is a very large study what became a very large study on Muslims and COVID-19. Very interesting study in fact it's probably the glow the largest study done on this topic. And globally we were able to recruit about 10,000 people to be part of the study it's a huge study with partners with the Ukraine Institute. And what we found was some really interesting things. First of all, as you all remember we went into the pandemic in 2020 was right before Ramadan. You might remember right before Ramadan of 2020. And Ramadan as you know is a very communal month. It's a month where there's a lot of, you know, gathering and breaking fast together and praying together and so on and so forth. So there was a lot of angst, you know, with that to even on a spiritual level. And so we tested and sent out these in the survey in multiple stages. One was right before Ramadan. One was right after Ramadan and we did some checkpoints later in the year and even into 2021. What I can tell you from this very large study is that Muslims like every other group, interestingly enough, including communities of no faith actually increased their levels of religiosity in the pandemic their reliance on either we say God, others might call like kind of a higher power. The Pew Research Study did something very similar and found that in April of 2020, 24% of Americans felt their faith had strengthened since the pandemic. Now we compared this in our own study with Muslims and found that nearly 70% of Muslims recorded having a improved relationship for the last kind of time, which is really interesting because that number is drastically higher than the general population, which really makes us think there's something very special about, you know, the faith, as a sum as it is, and the kind of protective factors that I can give, right, to communities and people who hold on to that, right. And certainly, there's so much uncertainty that came up in the pandemic and holding on to faith has been a very important factor for Muslims. Now this concept of uncertainty that I just brought up brought up another really interesting finding in our study, which I'll share with you briefly, and that is a direct clinical correlation. If you remember I said, almost everybody has been affected mental health bias by this pandemic, either because of the isolation, or because of close quarters during the quarantine, or the transitions to having to work from home and for a long time for a long time kids were schooling at home, needing to feeling distanced from your relatives, whether they were elderly or others who were ill and couldn't be with them. There are so many different reasons why a person could be suffering from this anxiety that comes with uncertainty. What we found is that the more people had uncertainty, intolerance, the ability to, you know, not be able to handle uncertainty, the more likely they would develop major depressive disorder or MDD by 60%. And there's a direct clinical correlation with if a person had more tolerance for uncertainty. And when you ask, where does a person get that more tolerance from? For many, it comes from the faith. They're relying on this concept of telekul or relying on God, realizing that certainty is only in God's hands. And because Islam gives that very clear messaging, right, it turned out that that was actually very protective for people. And so and those who didn't quite have that, their chances for increased major depressive disorder went up by 60%. So that's really kind of striking and important of this whole story that we're going to tell. Because it's a story of a community, us as Muslims, as communities that have suffered quite a bit. As I was kind of outlining from 2017 onwards, but really the reality is decades onwards. Lots of difficulties, lots of, you know, demeaning us as a community and so on. But there are also positives and there's also strength that comes from the faith itself. And that's why tying this discussion of Muslim mental health becomes a very important part of the discussion. And you see here when we asked about Ramadan, the COVID-19 kind of Ramadan experience, one of the most amazing things we found in the study we totally not expected was that we thought, you know, so many people were complaining of angst, right, for that Ramadan. And now we've had two in COVID, heading into a third. But interestingly enough, we found in that first study, that first Ramadan, that 73% of Muslims reporting having a better Ramadan than they did the year previous. And that was really, really striking, you know, something about being able to turn inward and be more introspective and not have, you know, the ideals of Ramadan, like the actual point of it, right. And being able to do that and really taking a lot of that uncertainty and channeling it into prayer and channeling it into du'a and charity and so on, was actually very protective for so many and actually reported a better Ramadan overall. So we're kind of holding on to that point and thinking about it, insha'Allah. Now, I said before that as we continue kind of going through the timeline here, I would bring up and now for the next several slides, I have a trigger warning on a very difficult kind of subject that continues to come up and the subject of suicide. And the reason for that is because our lab and myself have done quite a bit of work around the topic of suicide in particular. As I mentioned, this is something that has been striking actually more recently in the Muslim community. So as we enter now into 2021, a few months into the year earlier this year, there was an incident that I'm sure many of you were well aware of it kind of caught national headlines. And it was very, very tragic and very difficult for so many of us to process, but it brought up some very, it almost kind of hit the hit the head on key things that were happening in the community, and not very much spoken about, at least not clearly. And this is a story or a case, as you may remember, that came out of Texas. And it was a very tragic murder, suicide that happened for an entire family that lost their lives. Two brothers who had mental illness, under treated and not having good support systems, who made a pact together and according to their note, they decided to take their lives and the lives of all of their family members. And it's very important to make the note that there was not the kind of mental health support and help for these young men. And one might wonder if that was in place of a tragedy like this could have been avoided. But it's important to say because what happened next in the broader kind of American Muslim sphere was a lot of discussion points that came up. And in years previous to this incident, I had been called in by many other Muslim communities to do what we call postvention response, which is basically your crisis response in the aftermath of a suicide in a person's location. And to do this for a Muslim community. So of course, in this case too was called in kind of within 24 hours had all of the Dallas imams kind of on the line was training them, and also the local Muslim mental clinicians training them, and others, you know, leaders to be able to help the community process this very difficult incident, and also to process the grief that comes with this and really the questions that all come up with this. So this corresponds with some work that we had been doing in the lab actually for a number of years for about five years prior to this incident. We had been working on research on Muslims and suicide. The reason we did this is because I mentioned, I had, you know, for many years now had done all these postvention response trainings for various communities, usually on the quiet and on the down low, usually not quite as, you know, a headliner as this particular story. But it became very, very clear to me that this was just happening more and more and more. And there needed to be a manual, literally like a training manual for how it is we can train our imams, our community leaders, our youth directors, and so on and so forth in appropriate suicide response. And in general, and more, that's more particular, and then in general, a mental health response for our communities. And so you might have heard that later in this year as we go into July of this year, we published a very important study. It's published in JAMA, JAMA is the Journal of American Medical Association. It's one of the highest level journals similar to our previous Lancet publication. And it was focused on also on the topic of suicide, but this time we did something which really kind of provoked a lot of attention, I think. And it's essentially a cross-sectional study, which means that we compare Muslims to other faith and non-faith communities. Christians, Jews, atheists, agnostics, Hindus, Buddhists, basically folks of all these other faith or non-faiths. And we compared attempts, lifetime attempts of suicide of Muslims to these other folks. And we were really, on one hand, surprised. We did not think it was going to be this high, like clinically and anecdotally. We had a sense, because as I tell you, all these cases that I was dealing with and other clinicians like me have been dealing with, but didn't quite think it was this high. And other, but in other ways, it did make sense, given all the story I just shared from the beginning of the talk till now. That there's so much stress on so many people, members of this community. And we found that when you compare to some of the faith groups, sometimes it's nearly double or more suicide attempts of Muslims compared to other faiths or non-faith groups. This was alarming. This really rung, if you will, alarm bells for so many. There were so many discussion points around this topic. Of course, the question comes up all the time, why? Why is this the case? And what is to be done about it? And it garnered enough attention that I can share with you kind of like a little bit of the actual survey, because people would often ask, what is this particular study? Our lab does a lot of collaborative work. I mentioned Yaqeen Institute earlier. This particular study was done in collaboration with the ISPU, the Institute of Social Policy and Understanding, part of their annual Muslim poll. And I should also mention to you that this data was taken pre-COVID, pre-pandemic. And we are now in the chat on the text, you're kind of launching the next level or stage of the data to see are things the same or worsened since the pandemic? And as you probably can guess between you and I, what we think is probably we're going to see. May I respond to that? I protect all of our communities, but it is a very difficult thing, but a very important thing to study and analyze. Also, as I mentioned here, you can see the different faith groups, some of them that we studied, and you can see how the numbers are larger in the Muslim populations. Now, this conversation garnered a lot of attention. JAMA actually ended up sending us data on how far spread the conversations went. This map actually shows kind of Twitter demographics, if you will, of folks who were tweeting and talking about this particular topic. This next slide shows you that there were 77 news stories on 72 different news outlets about this particular study. And in terms of the research and the academic side, this article hit kind of 5% of all research studies because it was such a large finding, if you will. And this all then brings up the topic of why? How come? What's happening? Well, some of it I've already shared, which is basically two main things that we need to think about when you think about suicide. And one of them is a thwarted sense of belonging. When a person doesn't feel they belong. And the other one is increased sense of burdensomeness. When a person feels that they are a burden on their family, their friends, the society, if that's what the media keeps telling you, right? And the thwarted sense of belonging, the not feeling belonging can happen, of course, on a family or on a friend level, if you will, school level, university level, but can also happen on a society level. And these are two very important things that need to be continued studied and to kind of really look at. And that's exactly what we're hoping to do next. We're hoping actually, we have a grant that's just come through from the John Templeton Foundation, which is one of the foundations interested in religion and science, one of the few I should say. And we said to them, look, everything we can see from the pandemic and that research that we did and other studies that we have done about Muslim communities, we find that there's a lot of protective factors. In fact, even on the topic of suicide, and this is a very important point, we find that deaths by suicide, which is not a study we did. We did suicide attempts. You could see how they're connected, but they're not the same. And when you look at deaths by suicide in the literature by other people that have done that work, you find that Muslims are always at the bottom of that list, meaning the least to die by suicide. But we were very alarmed that if you have twice the number of attempts, you will eventually translated to deaths by suicide too, right? But still, there is something that we need to explain the discrepancy between the two things. And that's where we said, look, we need to have a study that looks at what are the preventative factors, the protective factors that are Islam inspired. And that's our research study that just started this past September. Actually, we're two months in. And it's a very important work that's underway on that very topic. But we also decided we actually need to have other than the academic work, which is very important to explain the how and the why and the mechanics. There needs to be community responses. And we launched a website that I hope all of you will visit. The link is at the bottom of this slide. And it's a new nonprofit organization called Madison. And Madison is I'll just share with you the meaning of it because people often ask, what is the Madison? What does it stand for? And it's the shortened word of the Madison. Now, for many of the languages for those of you who speak Farsi or Urdu, you know that be more is the person who is ill, someone who's sick. And Stan, of course, is the place of so historically in Muslim history, which I'll talk about very soon in more detail. The be modest. Stan is the place or location of where an ill person would go to get healing and treatments. And in Arabic, the word is daughter ship. Same idea, the place of healing, right, an institution of healing. And we decided to call a new organization, Madison, which is be Madison shortened in English. They often use just the Madison. And to launch this new website in order to have mental health resources for Muslims developed directly by our lab at the Muslim Mental Health and Islamic Psychology Lab, but actually give very helpful and practical advice on what to do. And we have a whole page dedicated just to the topic of suicide in Muslim communities where there's articles like the ones we published in Muslim Matters on the do's and don'ts of suicide response and postvention and prevention kind of response. We also created hutbas, like full hutbas that Imams and other Khatibs can read at the Juma hutba for suicide prevention, such as September suicide prevention and Awareness Month. We really recommend Massajid and community centers make sure that they have talks on this topic, particularly if none other part of time of the year than at least in September. And then if there is an unfortunate aftermath of the suicide in someone's community, that grieving and response, there's actually hutbas we've written for that as well. This is all free and downloadable on our website, which I hope all of you will look at and more resources to come. Now, we also launched something called the 500 Imams Campaign, and I won't click on the link, but it's an awesome video. I hope you go to the website and take a look at this video. It's very short. It's just three minutes long, but it is powerful. And it's the faces of so many Imams that you probably will recognize some of our more famous Imams and Ustadas, and who all at some point or another attended a postvention training with me and came together to do this campaign that is currently running. But I hope all of you will support each other because we do need the funding to be able to support this campaign to train our Imams, our community leaders, our youth directors, our MSA leaders, any board members, anybody who interfaces in a point of leadership with the Muslim community, and how to train them with appropriate suicide response. So what did we do? We took the manual. I was telling you about that we took many years to write and create, which is evidence-based. It is directly connected, the most up-to-date scientific, you know, your cutting edge kind of methods in working with suicide. But married that are coupled it with Islamic ethics, morals, and techniques. Why is that important? Because everything I would find out there was either too secular and our religious leaders were not interested in it, couldn't relate to it, or felt it wasn't Islamic, or didn't have kind of the right responses. It was either too secular or it was made for other faith communities and it wasn't exactly adapted for Muslims. There are things that are very, very unique and specific to us. The way we, you know, the whole end of life kind of writes and rituals that we do are very specific to Muslims. However, khutbahs, how we pray the janazah prayer, how we bury a person, praying for a person, all of these things are very Muslim-specific. So, Alhamdulillah, we took our manual, which is over 100 pages, and inshallah, once it's completely published, it too will be free and a resource on the website. But then we created trainings. And the trainings is part of this 500 Imam campaign that I'm telling you about that I hope you'll support. And it's full day-long certification training for imams. We're hoping that in 2022 that we train at least 500 imams, religious leaders, community leaders. And then our five-year goal with the new data ISP came out with saying that there's 3,000 messengers in America, many of whom are your own messengers that are listening in. We hope to train all of them in our five-year goal. So please, inshallah, make du'a for us and support us because I feel so strongly about this topic. As you see, it's a major theme. It's deciding to play. There it goes. Yes. Thank you so much. You can watch the video, inshallah, on your own time. I won't take this talk for it. But we'll really think about these kind of lessons and takeaways, right? What is this research that's important that needs to happen? Well, we need to know what's happening to the mental health of our communities. What do we need to do after that? The actions really take quick actions to really make sure that our families and communities are helped. And then prevention work because I have to tell you this since we talked about suicide of all the mental health considerations we can talk about today. Suicide is one that is 100% preventable with the correct support and measures. So I want you to hear that clearly, that if people know how to respond, right, intervention, or even better, if they've put preventative measures in place, you know, we don't have to get all the way into the unfortunate aftermath. But that too will continue to happen because life will continue to happen in that way. And we have to be ready for postvention response. It shouldn't be a scramble, you know, to be able to figure out how to help our communities or how to help our individuals within our communities that are having a hard time. And that's where the customized trainings come in. And I hope that, inshallah, you'll kind of take a good look at those very soon. So the question comes then as we kind of close the gap of this particular conversation. And I have, you know, for a few more slides here to kind of share, because then the question comes up, how do we bridge this gap? What do we do? What next? Okay, we heard you, Dr. Rania, this is all these troubles and all these difficulties, and the very terrible news around even the topic of suicide. What now? Right. So here's what I want to say. Number one, the important thing is there's three steps. Okay. The first is understanding mental health. If we continue to have this stigma against mental health and lack of wanting, it's kind of like, oh, that's nice. But when it comes to you or your own family members, it's like, no, no, no, no. We're not going to go there. We don't want that on your records. No, no, no. Those people don't know what they're doing. Or better yet, I often hear this. Muslims don't need that. I just presented all this data and we still get people saying, no, no, no, Muslims don't need that. Or coming from a faith perspective, people will say, well, if you just had strong enough Eman, you don't need to go to a therapist. You don't need to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist and so on. Discounting completely that there could be biological factors, environmental factors, genetic hereditary factors, hormonal factors. You know, all of these things are the same factors we talk about for heart disease, for diabetes, for strokes, for any other medical condition. Yet when we come to hear a mental health, people go, they kind of just put the blinders on and go, no, no, not relevant tests. Or pray more, make do not more, have better in none. Yet it's the same. Sometimes it's literally a genetic hereditary thing and they're saying the same things. I'm the last person to tell you don't pray more. You know I'm also a religious leader, right? Like I'm the last person to tell you don't pray or don't pray more, right? But I have to tell you that sometimes, you know, you look squarely in the eyes of somebody who has themselves or their family member dealing with a clearly, you know, either, you know, let's say environmental mental health condition. Let's say there was no biology or history of family, anything, but they just came from a traumatized situation, either some trauma that happened to them personally, or maybe the country of origin from which they came from. We have so many immigrants to the US here from our Muslim communities and they experienced so much trauma and nothing is dealt with, nothing is processed and they keep on carrying that from generation to generation. Why? Because there's such a thing called intergenerational trauma. So even your kids who are first generation Americans here or even second can have that trauma too or portions of it when the parents have in process their own because of this concept of intergenerational trauma. But they can do genetic markers and actually find that. Can you believe it's a panel? Anyhow, this kind of concept of denying that there is mental health a concerns in our community, which I hope I've dispelled in the first part of the talk. And also denying that Muslims have anything to do with mental health is majorly problematic because the first thing it does is the slide right here. It denies our heritage, our history, the fact that Muslims were the very first people in humanity to our knowledge. To create matastans, hospitals, healing centers that what integrated mental health into the topic. People are often amazed when I say this, but you have to know, I hope you heard this talk clearly, that the first psychiatric wards in the world to our knowledge. Were built and designed in Muslim lands, and that's not a coincidence. It's part of the holistic understanding of healing and health that Islam brings this concept of mind, body, soul. And this is not a new age thing. This is something our scholars and I'll show you some of them in a moment here wrote about extensively. And you can answer that when they created healing hospital healing hospitals and centers, they didn't separate mind, body, soul they built institutions that were holistic and had all of them in it. And that meant you weren't just going to go to the healing center if your leg broke, but not be able to go there if you had some depression or anxiety. You see why now Muslims were the first to have the first psychiatric boards because they had a holistic understanding of healing and health. And it comes directly from the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ and from our Islamic understandings. Because there's a hadith and it's very famous hadith and I love it so much and I remind people of it where the Prophet ﷺ says, seek out treatments, O servants of Allah. As in to say, if Allah gave you an illness, part of doing your Tawakkur or reliance on Allah, part of that is tying your own camel first. And part of tying your camel is going to seek out the treatments that have been designed and created for this. Fast forward to 2021 here we are. And the COVID vaccines have come out and people in our communities are saying, no, no, no. And it's like, this is part Allah has sent us a pandemic, but he's also sent us knowledge and science to figure out how to protect ourselves. Anyway, back to historical understandings, same concept. Right. That the Muslims were very interested and inspired from Islam directly to seek out cures and to create amazing institutions that probably talk on for a whole hour. But I'll spare you for a different day on a different time to be able to treat all types of illnesses, including mental illness. And I remind you that this is the same period of time in Europe. And I don't like the concept that the terms Golden Age and Dark Ages, they're kind of, you know, old terms that are misused. But generally speaking, this is a period of time in Europe where across the way in the same time period, Muslims are having this amazing flourishing and these beautiful institutions and hospitals being created. The matter stands that at the same time you have in Europe, the mentally ill are being burned at the stake as witches are sent to monasteries because understanding this is purely spiritual. Right. And Muslims are light ages ahead of them, you know, leaps and bounds ahead of them. And to think this is our heritage. And why have we gone backwards? Right. From what we used to have. And you have to understand that today, this concept of modern psychology, which people get very upset about what they think about modern psychology, what they're thinking of is Western psychology. They're thinking of Freud and the rest, which is very much outdated now. What they're not realizing is there's a whole movement on Islamic psychology that's now emerged slowly, but surely in Hamd-e-Dina. And this concept is integrating Islamic principles into therapy, drawing from the Quran and the Sunnah and our Islamic intellectual heritage to help and heal our psychological needs. Hamd-e-Dina, excuse me. Masha'Allah. And when you think about how that kind of relates to modern psychology, you see that there needs to be more than just what we call their empirical or rational studies of psychology. And Muslims were really great in bringing in the empirical and the rational, yes. But also the metaphysical and scriptural kind of relying on Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and his revelation to really help fully heal a person. And this is why for so many Muslims, when they go to therapy today, they say, okay, fine, I'll go to therapy. But it seems very, it's very secular and it feels very distant from me. And this is why, because it doesn't tie the whole story in. But I'll tell you, something is better than nothing. Masha'Allah, professional is someone who's trained to help you. But even more so, why it's so important that we have Muslims who are trained and their Dean who are, you know, bringing Islamic principles in to be able to be the therapist for our community. Because there's a cultural and a spiritual relevance that they bring that's important. And very quickly, I'll show you just a few, it's always a wowing kind of factor. When you look at the number of people who wrote from our heritage and tradition on, on this topic of Islamic psychology, whether it's the philosophers, like al-kindi or Ibn Mishkouay or Farabi Ibn Rushd. Right. And how much they wrote, whether it's something like Kindi's work on, you know, repelling sorrows and depression, for example, which is amazing. Right. Or whether you look at the theologians, Imam al-Ghazali, Zahra Wendi, Ibn Zaymin, Ibn Qayyim, all of whom wrote extensively on understanding the human psyche and what makes us tick. SubhanAllah. Or you look at the physicians. Right. And I'll tell you something about him. I have some papers that I wrote about him that became really kind of landmark in our field. Because what was so amazing to me is that you have scholars from our Islamic heritage in the past who not only recognize mental health conditions, wrote about it and then did what I call the proof in the pudding created healing institutions. To heal those who are dealing with mental health issues. But in addition to that, what they brought forward was so, you know, this word, precocious genius, really, way ahead of their time. And Al-Balkhi was somebody who I really spent a lot of time with in my work, early in my research when I was first training at Stanford, who was a fellow. I, you know, I did this research study about the early scholars to see what they were all saying and came across Al-Balkhi and I was blown away. This is before anything was translated about him. Before you even found his name in English literature, nothing really about his name was even very much known. And I came across in his book where he talks about different illnesses. And I'll just say very briefly to you the illness today that we call obsessive compulsive disorder OCD. And also the chapter of what he writes about phobias to me as a moderate as a modern day trained psychiatrist. I'm reading this going, oh my God, Al-Balkhi figured it out in the ninth century. And our books of the history of psychology that you read when you take psych one on one tells you said OCD is a new illness only fully fleshed out in the 19th century. And attributed, of course, to some European person. And to me, this is a very different story. And look, this I'll show you exactly what I mean. This is about his book now translated by Dr. Malik Badri Malik have mercy on him. He just passed away this year. Assistance of the body and soul. He did the sole part. The second half of the book. So please take a look at that when you have a chance, inshallah. Look at this paper. This is taken directly from my paper. Look at this. I put the criteria Al-Balkhi. Used to diagnose obsessions and the criteria that today as modern day psychiatrist, we diagnose from something called the DSM. The DSM is the diagnostic statistical manual of psychiatry. And all clinicians have to take these criteria to say whether or not a person currently has OCD. And as I'm reading ninth century old, old worker. I thought to myself that Allah, he has exactly what we have in the DSM. I pulled out my DSM and did a cross by cross comparison. So you can look on both sides of the slide here and you'll see what I mean. I was amazed blown away because we're not talking about just a few decades off or a few centuries off. We're talking about a millennium off. And this needed to be rewritten. History needed to be rewritten. And in short, long story short, when I submitted this for publication, it took a very long time because they called it unorthodox. Here I am trying to turn over history, right? But eventually they had historians of medicine review this paper. And when they finally finished their review and they wrote back to us. They said this work. Overturns the history of psychology and psychiatry. It proves that Muslims contributed immensely to the field of mental health. And so much so that it's the same kind of treatments of youth today in the modern era. When you look at something like obsessions or on phobias, which are the two papers I wrote on al-Balkhi. And to me, this was a very long time ago. But it was a clear, you know, firm grounding in what it means for Muslims to reject the concept of mental health. Or they say this is not for us. Or it's not part of our heritage. And I say, no, no, no, no, no. It's very much part of our heritage. And the early Muslims didn't have an issue or stigma with it like we have today. Right. They had issues. We have issues. But they also took a very long time. Seek out treatments, right? Get treatments. Get cures. And figure out how to treat the ill, right? Subhanallah. So I hope, inshallah, you are inspired by this like I have been. And this research continues in our lab. You know, one of the lines of research continues to be the historical understandings of Islamic, from Islamic past and heritage and reviving it. And our logo, of course, our tag, our tag, our tag line at Maristan is to, right? Revive our legacy. We'll reclaim our heritage and to rewrite the narrative. Right. Around mental health. So that's one, one key thing. I said there were three. Very quickly here. Number two is trainings. And I mentioned this already. It's going to be really, really important that there are clinicians, whether they be Muslim or not Muslim, who help, who learn and train specifically on how to work with Muslim communities. We developed multiple resources. Many of these are free. They, for example, this is one I co-wrote on the American Psychiatric Association. Called the stress and trauma toolkit on working with US Muslims. And really went through the number of issues that I already talked to you about today earlier. And it's a toolkit for clinicians of what they can do to help. Right. And we created kind of all kinds of treatment recommendations for them to think through. And even now. Also writing completed as CME for those of you familiar with the medical system. And, you know, the system, there's continuing education or continuing medical education. Just completed a whole training reporting for this kind of training. On Muslim mental health for non-Muslim clinicians, but also Muslim clinicians can take this as well. And a number of books that are coming out very soon. The APA has also asked me to work on a textbook on Muslim mental health, which is hopefully coming out in the coming year. And a number of resources that we've been able to complete with the lab or with partnerships with other folks. Like the suicide training manual that I was referring to. The suicide response training. But also to think about, you know, how do you integrate Islam into psychotherapy. So this is a new book we've just published on applying Islamic principles to clinical mental health care. I always like to leave folks with resources of what they can do and where they can go next, inshallah. So this is an image of just the number of different books and resources we've either published or are in process, inshallah, for publication with your du'as and your support. And lastly is access. Where do you refer members of the community who need help? How do you know where to send people when you listen to a lecture like this? How do you know where to send your friends and your family or yourself? And Alhamdulillah, there's many more resources than there have ever been in the past now. If the pandemic brought us anything, it has brought us telehealth subhanallah and tele mental health. And there is a website. If you access maristan.org backslash resources, you'll find a list of directories, a whole list of directories. Some of them are state specific and some of them are general across the country. On Muslims who are professionals in mental health, therapists, psychologists, counselors, social workers, psychiatrists. So I encourage you to visit the website and check out the directories if you're ever looking for particular resources on this. And, you know, we can drop this link for you in the chat as well as the maristan.org backslash resources. And then I encourage you, inshallah, to access the link for you in the chat as well as the maristan.org backslash resources. And then I encourage you, inshallah, to stay in touch. So we put some of our contact information here for both myself, the Stanford Muslim mental health and Islamic psychology lab, and of course, Maristan. And also encouraging you, inshallah, to reach out if your communities want to be trained, for example, like the suicide response training certificate training, or, for example, general mental health, Muslim mental health trainings. If this is something you're interested in, you're welcome to be in touch with us at infoatmaristan.org. And then in general, just kind of supporting the campaigns and the work that's happening. And at the very least kind of accessing the free resources that are on the website in order to really better help your communities, inshallah. And with that, I'll close and see if there's any discussion or questions. Okay. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Dr. Raniya. I'll jump in until Striduria, as to Christine, jump in. We have quite a number of questions that came in both in the chat here in the Q&A and also on Facebook Live. So I'll pass to Christine and Striduria. So we do have a question from Facebook. And the question is, would spiritual treatment like roqya heal mental illness? And what does the historical data say on that type of treatment? Good question. So definitely the roqya is something that is well known at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, that was used. And for those who are not too familiar with what roqya means in short, kind of a long story short, it's the use of Quranic verses either indirectly that a person could directly do, or they go to somebody who is more learned to be able to put together verses for them to read for themselves or upon themselves to heal themselves, basically, from really any illness, not just the mental health illness. So in this, what we would say, just like when people ask, can a treatment like this be used completely alone? So I kind of turn the question back and say, look, would you do roqya on your diabetic grandparent completely alone? And most of the time person says, no, we would take him to a medical doctor and make sure their blood sugar was not of control. As you know, it's deathly, right? Literally, a person could collapse and completely die if their diabetes out of control. Same thing if a person had a stroke. Then I say, OK, can you use the medical treatment that the doctor gave you? Maybe they told you to take insulin or not form it in some other form of medication, along with roqya. And most people say, yes, sure. And my answer to that is, this is exactly what I would say for mental health to use the spiritual considerations along with the scientific and medical treatments that Allah has made for you. It is part of our being literally to take the means and measures that Allah has actually put in our place, right? And put in our resources for us. So I hope that kind of clarifies things. I will never be the person that says, don't do the roqya, right? But at the same time, if somebody says, is this the only thing or should we do this alone? Well, now you know my answer to, right? Shala. Thank you, Dr. Adnan. This is Durya. Thank you so much. You touched on so many important themes. And I feel like I learned so much from this talk today. So thank you so much. There's one question that I think you did address, but I see it on the chat here. How can the Muslim community leaders get the training that you had mentioned? Right. So Shala, the best way to do this is if a person goes to the website, maristand.org, and we can probably put the link to the exact place on the suicide response trainings. And what they would do is they would get in contact with us. There's a form that you can fill on our main site and be in touch with us or directly kind of email the info at maristand.org . And what it would require is that a person, it would have to be a group. Usually I would mention like a group of Massajid or a group of community centers come together because there is a minimum requirement for the trainings for one of, for myself or any of the trainers to kind of fly out and to be able to do the training. And we require that a third of those participants be imams, religious leaders. So usually it means kind of working with your local, let's say shooter counsel or imams, group counsel or something like that to pull in several of the Muslim leaders. By the way, when I say imam, I mean male and female. So I also mean Ustadas and women religious leaders and Shalva. And then your other types of leaders in the Muslim community, whether they be youth leaders or board members or teachers, Sunday school teacher, anybody who's interfacing directly with Muslim community members can be part of the training as well. So that's what they do in Shalva and we can put the link here shortly for folks. And Dr. Wad, how long is that training for school day training? It's an eight hour school day certification training. Yes. I actually had one question. So, you know, you had mentioned suicide attempts and the misalignment that the data is showing us between the suicide attempts and the actual suicides. So I was very intrigued by that. Is that because you had done the research as a Muslim on the suicide attempts and what happened with the suicides? Was it because somebody like you had not done the research? Is that why we had that misalignment? No, not at all. The research has been done on deaths by suicide. I think that's what you're referring to global research that's been repeated multiple times over in global settings. Nothing like as recent as this year, but in the recent past, the studies have been done and when they do interfaith comparisons or cross faiths, they find that Muslims have the lowest so far as we know deaths by suicide. The worry and the concern is when we see this massive increase in suicide attempts, it is, you know, sometimes when people attempt, it might take multiple attempts before the unfortunate death by suicide. So we worry when there's such a massive spike in attempts, it could also mean translate over to there's that consideration to worry about. But there could very well also be very protective means. Something about the Islamic belief system and theology that may prevent people from dying by suicide. So the attempts are still high, but the deaths are okay, maybe we need more research. We absolutely need more research. That's exactly right. Research and resources are not easy to come by. So if anybody is listening to this and is inspired, we are more than welcome to, you know, either have people who are interested in helping with the actual work and research or even just if they're not themselves scientists or researchers to, you know, sponsor this kind of work, inshallah. I don't see any other questions. Ahmed, do we have any other questions on Facebook? There is a so Christine, do you want to commit a question from our listener who is tuning in from France? I actually have a, I see a question that was actually put into the chat. This is Asalaamu Alaykum. My ex-husband committed suicide. He was a Muslim and many in the community felt the need to tell me what a sin he had committed. Can you please share the Quranic or Islamic understanding of suicide as it relates to mental illness? I know that his illness led to his decision to complete suicide. I think this is a big part of why it's still taboo and misunderstood. Thank you very much for your wisdom. Yeah. I'm really, really sorry for your loss. The person who's writing this, I'm very, very sorry for your loss. And this is exactly why we felt very strongly actually that we needed to have this training that I'm referring to that is evidence-based but also very much grounded in Islamic morals, ethics, and understanding why it's precisely for questions like this. Because you're going to have community members who are looking at things very, very literal as in to say, and I'm not going to mince words. Let me be very, very, very clear. If somebody asks the Islamic ruling, that is directly written in the Quran. However, what the Quran and Islam in general also allows for is understanding every individual's personal circumstances which only Allah alone knows. And that's very important. This is why we did the trainings the way of the manual and now the certificate trainings, the hotbaz or sermons. This is why we created them because we found exactly this kind of sentiment that this individual mentions where, you know, people are either it's really suicide is like a taboo within a taboo. It's a taboo within the broader kind of mental health taboo. And so you find people just shun it completely. They say, I don't know sin, sin, sin. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And sometimes you find that even the very last rituals and rites of a Muslim like being, you know, washed, buried the prayer for them, the janazah prayer that people asking, could I even make du'at for them? All of this confusion and it's unfortunate because the deen or the religion itself is very clear understandings of yes absolutely, the last rites of a Muslim are 100% given to a person even if they died by suicide. Right? And what happens is and this is why we had all these kind of post-divention measures of how should a community members deal the articles, if you look at our articles on the dos and don'ts of suicide response you'll see like what should I say? What should I not say? How do I help? How do I you know, how do I talk to somebody who's a lost survivor like yourself the person who has had a family member loved when died by suicide what do I even say to them? So we wrote guides. All of this is available on show on our website at the link I just put in the chat box to be able to help educate our community because there's a lot of misconceptions and a lot of strange ideas we hear about people even this is very upsetting when I heard this actually more than once now that a family would take their imagine they're intensely grieving because of the loss of their family member and it's done in this way and it's very jarring and difficult and then on top of it all they're going to try to bury them in the Muslim cemetery and the Muslim cemetery says no we won't take them. All kinds of strange ideas and confusion so we really needed to set it straight we have a paper coming out to very large paper on the ethics the Islamic ethics of suicide to answer exactly these very questions and here we brought together our scientific team along with our religious leaders to really give clarity to exactly these kind of questions so I hope and Shala these are resources you can all benefit from in the future but I hope it also speaks to the importance of why these trainings are so key. Thank you for your response there's one more question that I see I'm from France and it is difficult being a Hijabi and a Muslim here what advice would you give us should I expatriate to another country who accept Hijab or do I have to fight for my rights even though it would be hard this is a lady from France I want to make it easy for you honestly the Samaphobia levels of France and other countries have talked what they are in America and we deal with things here but there are so much more in so many other countries I cannot answer your specific questions sister because this is something that's you know personal to you and you will need to make your honesty for guidance prayers for and to really make the best decisions for yourself and your family and your safety but I do pray for you inshallah that ease comes your way and that you're able to kind of practice your Islam fully and with pride and with full ability and hopefully maybe even kind of enter into a field or have the kind of support similar to Mashallah this group here at CARE who are every day fighting for you know the rights and ability to identify clearly and visibly as Muslims here in the US I hope something similar is already happening in this place in France or really comes to pass soon inshallah that will help you in guiding inshallah I mean Dr. Ragnan there is a question in here about those who live outside or reside outside of the United States and our foreigners is there any training available online or anything that they can get? Yes thank you for asking that question in fact I completely forgot to mention this that one of our goals for 2022 inshallah is to convert our trainings into online trainings as well to give you that option for online trainings it's not quite ready yet right now we're having these in person live trainings but hopefully very soon our modules are completed and done to kind of make them available as an online training and as soon as that's ready please do follow us inshallah and make sure you're on our newsletters for Maristan because as soon as they're ready we will announce there and that way it will open up to folks who are international and even just folks even nationally who would like to take part but maybe it's too far away to go to their particular location. Thank you Dr. Abad I see one more question if somebody is prescribed for PTSD and is scared of taking medication for the fear of getting addicted to drugs can you please describe how you can help in this situation? Yeah that's a great question PTSD is translated as post traumatic stress disorder and shortly by call this trauma and the person who has PTSD has often been through a traumatic event usually actually more than once often and sometimes it's personal or sometimes it's environmental like the country in place where a person is and there's maybe some sort of trauma or upheaval or just even a personal thing like a car accident or a mugging or rape or something to that effect and the gold standard treatment for something like PTSD is two part. It is medication but it's also therapy and some people will do therapy alone depending on their level of trauma which by the way we say we kind of have a way to test it this is why I ask and really recommend people get their psychiatric evaluation because you will be able to tell after you do your evaluation whether it's mild moderate or severe and depending on the level of trauma either you will be told you'll need both things medication and therapy or it may be to a level where therapy alone is sufficient whether or not you take the medication depending on what like you said your own fears upon a lot or whether it's because of the maybe you have a mild condition doesn't warrant medication therapy is going to be so so key and the type of therapy we do is a very specific kind it is a form of exposure therapy which is a gradual very careful but slowly careful that should slowly kind of gentle kind of exposure until the very things that a person has been traumatized by they kind of master and are able to eventually overcome by the way I have to just kind of put in a historical little caveat here and say in Belchi's writing that I talked about the 9th century scholar he talked about can you believe it he talked about exposure therapy and when those historians and medicine read this but in my work they actually wrote back and were amazed they were kind of blown away that he actually had written on not just the concept of therapy but actually exposure therapy specific so panel this is how amazing our scholars were I love it but anyway speaking of him and speaking to your question here he mentions three imagine this is 9th century he's writing about three part for any mental health condition three parts the treatment he talks about medications and believe it or not they had medications then they were kind of compounded herbal cockments and so on but medications he talks about therapy as I just mentioned and thirdly he talks about the spiritual treatments reminding yourself that Allah's in control reminding yourself and doing more prayer and more the kid and more do I so imagine this is his three part technique which absolutely applies even till today to your other question about getting addicted this is a very common question people have about medications and sometimes they also ask about side effects and the reality is you kind of have to you won't know if you have a side effect to something until you actually try I think even some people have side effects to simple things like Tylenol that you take for a headache right but I understand that there's always this fear that some medications could be addictive well these medications that you use for something like PTSD are not addictive in and of themselves what people worry about is what happens if I have to stay on this for life but only a trained professional can really tell you that because it might be something where you take a course of treatment for a period of time and you do really good work in your therapy and we call it work because it actually takes work to do therapy and you do that and then Alhamdulillah you're able to lean off and get off that medication completely and now you have techniques and tools in your toolbox to be able to help you through whenever you're triggered again by the trauma and it may not be something you have to take for life so but again you won't know until you actually get that evaluation and you put some trust in your care provider your professional who can help you through this so Mela is proud to grant you Shifa and really do seek out the treatments because they are there to help you in shalom Thank you doctor about that that was a very valuable response thank you so we have somebody else called Nabila who has a query for you I think she wants to get in touch with you so I'll read her question I applied to be in the Muslim Social Worker in 2018 but the grant would not allow my LPC to be transferred from PA to California I wanted to work there and enroll to earn my PhD so I'm still on my quest in Philadelphia at Drexel wish I could have worked with you may I contact you as a mentor in my degree program Nabila Masha'Allah the one place that I do mentor folks is within my lab the Stanford Muslim Health and Islamic Psychology Lab there's of course very strict criteria of who is able to be part of that lab so a person can always send something like a CV and a letter interest letter to see and if there makes sense that their space and their person has some research background there might be able to be a mentor there I encourage sister Nabila to keep on trying Masha'Allah because I hope that it means that you're able to sounds like you started already and you're trying to transfer so hope the transfer goes through for you inshallah to Ana so we just had one more question how can I help somebody diagnosed with schizophrenia yes Masha'Allah today we did not cover kind of distinctions of different kinds of mental health illnesses I kind of refer to things like depression or obsessive compulsive disorder and so on schizophrenia as many know here is a condition that we consider on the more serious of the mental health mental health spectrum and it definitely will require a person to seek out professional mental health care it really is important because it is more serious in nature and the kind of disruption to a person's life could be much more you know invasive than perhaps something you know more mild if you will and so how does a person help the first thing to know when people don't like when I say this it's very important is that you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped it's often very hard to say this especially to a family member who wants their loved ones to get care but if they are not a child and they're an adult and they refuse that kind of care it is really hard to see your family member going through a difficulty and you know that there could be help but they're refusing and so one thing I would encourage you to do is inspire them maybe if they were to listen to talks like this or understand more about our history or you know more about the heritage you never know what could click for a person and kind of inspire them to get that care but you keep on trying and you inspire them to get care but remember you can't ever force someone to get that care because they have to kind of want it for themselves if the question was different and it relates to whether or not a person gets a phrenia treatment in and of themselves because of the more serious nature of the condition it often does require medications and I'm not the person's doctor so I can't say you're a particular loved one needs medication I'm saying in general this condition typically requires medications and it does require the consistent observation of a mental health provider so I hope you do as I mentioned earlier the resource was if you're looking for a Muslim mental health providers and generally anybody in your locale who is trained and competent inshallah can also be a good start to help you inshallah I see some requests for the links to various things so I'm going to go ahead and write them here in the chat so people know because they're asking about things like where are the trainings and where are the links inshallah you're very popular we have somebody else who is also requesting to be in touch with you her name is Bushra Alharak she's a former registered nurse from Morocco so she sent her email and her address so I recommend I recommend that folks who are interested to getting in touch with inshallah look at the follow I think I put all the handles which I'm happy to share again kind of follow the various handles those are probably the best ways to get in touch with us inshallah wonderful I think maybe we can have Jacob do the give the closing remarks Jacob is here Jacob we cannot hear your current sir now as executive director of care Philadelphia I would like to extend our deepest appreciation to Dr. Wad for taking time out from her incredibly busy schedule to spend this evening with all of us she reminds us that the mental and physical well being of each individual soul was at the core of Islamic medicine especially during the great age of Muslim civilization taking place around the Mediterranean Basin and later the Middle East and later in Mughal empire and then Ottoman Sultanate medical knowledge flourished in the lives of such geniuses as Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and Ibn Maimun at a time when the American public officials of at the highest level openly question scientific data and belittle the findings of the scientific community on both the COVID pandemic and the climate crisis listening to her brilliant defense the therapeutic intervention and her courageous dedication to open discussion of mental health and suicide in the Muslim community was akin for me to listening to the great Muslim physicians throughout the history of the ummah. So thank you Dr. Wad not only for speaking for to us tonight but for all you do for the Muslim community and the general public Thank you Thank you It was an honor and a pleasure to spend this evening here in Philadelphia I see all of you are here together and I very much appreciate giving this space and really this very important conversation on mental health and our Muslim communities, not every organization is ready to take on this conversation and I really appreciate you taking on this conversation my luck except from all of us are good deeds and work Thank you so much