The One You Feed - Insights on Mental Health, Identity, and Resilience with Andrew Solomon

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

In this conversation, mental health advocate Andrew Solomon challenges societal norms and explores the complex relationship between depression and identity. Andrew also strives to uncover the delicate balance between suffering and growth in his thought-provoking exploration of the complexities of mental health. In this episode, you’ll be able to: Uncover why resilience and personal control are integral to overcoming adversities Gain an understanding of the multifaceted nature of depression as both a medical condition and a way of self-perception Understand the profound implications of social media on the mental wellness of today’s younger generation Learn the necessity of a broader vocabulary to accurately represent non-traditional family dynamics Discern the interconnected impacts of neglect, poverty, and foster care on mental health To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

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Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep

themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Andrew Solomon, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and a past president of Penn American Center. He's a writer and lecturer on philosophy, politics, and the arts, and an activist in LGBTQ rights, mental health, and the arts. Andrew writes regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Times. His 2012 book, Far From the Tree, Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was chosen as one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2012. He's the author of other notable books, and most recently, he made an award-winning film, Far From the Tree, available on Hulu and an audiobook called New Family Values.

Hi, Andrew. Welcome to the show. What a pleasure to be here. What a pleasure to be here again. Yes, we are sitting in New York and have the pleasure of being in person. I've been so excited to meet you. And as I said to you beforehand, you were a very, very early guest of ours. And I've just always been thankful for that. It was, as I said, sort of a wind in my sails that someone I respected as much as you came on early. So thank you. Well, I was glad to be on early and you are such a good interviewer that I'm excited to be on again. Great. We're going to be discussing all of your work in a broad sense, The Noonday Demon,

Far From the Tree, your recent Audible audiobook on families, some of the work you're doing now on childhood suicide. But before we get into all that, let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, and they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent, and they say,

well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I think that in an era in which genetic determinism has become a fashionable part of our language, that the extent to which people make these decisions has been very much undersold, that in fact, you can choose to be a kind person. Some people who have had a very difficult childhood or difficult early experiences or perhaps to some extent who have a natural predisposition away from kindness, have to struggle more to do it. But I'm a great believer in the idea that there isn't really predestination, and that we do make this decision, and that we do choose which

wolf to feed. I mean, all of us, of course, have moments of greater kindness and moments of being the bad wolf. So it's hard not to feed both of them a bit. The more that I've done the work that I've done and the more that I've interviewed people and talked to people and looked at people often in experiences of extreme difficulty and suffering and trouble and woe, trouble and woe, the more I've come to feel that people make a choice and that there is a level of quiet heroism that's available to almost everyone. I love that quiet heroism. Yeah, I'm often intrigued by the idea of choice because it does seem that there can be differing levels of choice available to us. The example I often use is, you know, when I was 24 and a heroin addict, the amount of choice I felt like I had about using or not using felt like just a sliver of choice. It was really narrow. Now it's just not a problem. I've been walking around

New York City. I used to love marijuana. I mean, you cannot walk three steps in this city anymore without smelling it, right? It's just everywhere. Once upon a time, that was kind of triggery to me, but now I just kind of, all right, there it is again, right? So that choice sort of grows, I think. And as you mentioned, there's things like our difficult childhoods, our trauma, the support that's available to us that we can find that I think influence maybe the amount of choice. But I think what you're speaking to is that we can find that I think influence maybe the amount of choice. But I think what you're speaking to is that there always is some. And I'm talking about the choice to live as moral a life as is available to you.

There are some people for whom it's possible, you know, to be Zelensky and try to save the notion of democracy in a society, annihilating it. And there are some people for whom it's possible to be as good a mother as they can under very adverse circumstances. And all of it, it seems to me, has some heroism in it. But the larger question of whether one has a choice about everything, I mean, no one doesn't have a choice about everything. One doesn't have a choice about having a mental illness. One doesn't have a choice. Often, you know, people will say, oh, I can't believe that person died by suicide. That was so selfish. And I think, no, that person was at a stage at which there was no choice. I don't think I had a choice about being

gay. A lot of the rhetoric, the kind of homophobic rhetoric that's in circulation now has to do with a smug way in which people sort of say, well, I'm not gay and I don't see why you should be. And I feel like, OK, but you're a different person than I am. So it's not that I think there's choice everywhere. Right. It's that I think within the sort of confines of the choices one has, one can feed the good wolf. Yeah, that's beautifully said. A few years ago in the Metropolitan Museum of Art magazine, they asked some people for their 2021 wishes. But you wrote this lovely little

piece and there were a couple of lines in it that I felt that I wanted to pull out and talk about. And the first one, I think, certainly for me is a big part of why I do what I do and what I hope for. And I think it is in your work too. And you said the ability for me and everyone to learn from human suffering. Say a little bit more about that. Well, people ask me a lot why I've written about such difficult and dark subjects when I'm mostly a reasonably cheerful person. I mean, with some very difficult moments and some very difficult experiences. I think growing up as a gay kid was very hard. And yet I was aware that I had a very lucky life. I had a loving family. I had a school that was a good school. I wasn't so happy there, but it was a good school. I had a certain amount of ability and talent on my side. We lived comfortably. And the sort of guilt that

I felt about the struggles that I experienced and the ways in which I felt they weren't fair, given how much people were struggling who were in desperate situations in other more problematical circumstances. I was very interested, I think, always in the question of suffering and what you do with it. And I thought, well, I need to try to do something positive with this suffering because in a way I felt unentitled to it. And then I found myself increasingly drawn to stories of human pain because they seemed to me

to be more vivid and more real. I think it was Nietzsche who said that only that which is painful is truly memorable. And that was a principle that I remember learning in a literature class when I was in my freshman year and thinking, oh, oh, yes, that really makes sense. And then eventually, I came out. And when I came out, I had a sense of enormous anxiety around doing it and also enormous relief around doing it, and also enormous relief around doing it. But I decided when I finally managed to be fully out, that the secrets I had tried to keep had been the basis of my own agony, and that I wanted to be a person who didn't keep secrets anymore. I mean, I can be quite private in my way, and there are plenty of

things that I have experienced that I may not mention on today's interview, but that I didn't want to have a sort of major secret like that again. And I saw that there were so many people around me who were suffering because of the secrets they held. And then I happened to fall into my original first book, which was about a group of Soviet artists and the way their lives changed during Glasnost. And what was astonishing to me was that these were people who had suffered so enormously and so profoundly and had been inspired by their experience of difficulty to make art, which, some of it really good art, but all of it morally extraordinary. And at the same time, my mother developed cancer and was dying younger than I am

now. And she initially was very angry about being sick. And then in the final year of her life, which happened to coincide with the year when I was finishing that book, she took the occasion of her death and turned it into a moment of extraordinary dignity and even nobility and great generosity. And somehow it was the confluence in my early 20s of coming out, of ending up in Moscow and what was then Leningrad, and of watching what was happening with my mother. And I thought, this is where meaning lies. And when I went back and tried to interpret my own life, I felt like there was, you know, kind of a double narrative. I had this really lovely childhood, and I had this unbelievably

difficult childhood. And I thought, well, how do you reconcile those things? And that reconciliation has been my topic. Yeah. Recently I heard you talk about, you know, being gay and you were talking about the extraordinary lengths you went to to try not to be gay. I think you called it, was it sexual surrogacy? Yes. Treatment? Yes, I did go to extraordinary lengths. I had the idea, which was then a relatively current idea, that this was an illness that could be cured and that could be addressed. And so I

tried to cure and address it. I pursued an ad in the back of New York Magazine and went and had what was euphemistically called therapy with women who were somewhat euphemistically called surrogates. And they were really essentially exercises, which did allow me to get over a lot of anxiety that I'd had about the idea of having sex with women and led, in fact, by having some relationships with women that were very wonderful and very rewarding, but they were not very honest and they were not very authentic to who I really was. Part of it was that I desperately wanted to have a family and to have children, and at

the time it seemed like gay people couldn't do that. That's obviously no longer the case. But partly I think it was also just a sort of perfectionism in me, and a perfectionism in my parents, too. And I felt as though I had all kinds of accomplishments and achievements. But being gay, I was going to be a terrible disappointment to everyone. And I was going to live at the margins of society. And I had a very narrow vision of what life was supposed to be like when I was growing up. I mean, I grew up in New York. My parents' friends were almost all doctors or lawyers or

business people. They were mostly Jewish. I mean, they were wonderful, wonderful people, many of them, but they were all kind of the same. And I didn't know that there were other routes to having a meaningful or rewarding life. And I thought if I couldn't reproduce my parents' life, I was going to end up with something terribly inferior to what I had grown up with. That sort of leads into a central concept in a lot of your work between illness and identity, right? So we could talk about being gay in that way. Originally, you might have thought of your work between illness and identity, right? So we could talk about being gay in that way. Originally, you might have thought of it as an illness. Many people might have thought of it as an illness, but now it's more of an identity for you. In the book, Far From the Tree, you show people who are different than the rest of us, many of whom claim that

difference as an identity, not an illness. So if we think of dwarfism, right, there's some beautiful scenes in the documentary, right? And in the book, but the documentary is more recently in my mind of these people really claiming like, this is who I am. This is who I want to be. I don't want to be fixed. And I wanted to see if in any way that has been able to apply or what ways it does apply to you when it comes to your own mental health. Because there's an idea of depression as an illness, and it certainly is something not good when it gets to the stage that you had it or that I've had it, right? And then there's also the idea of a thoughtful melancholy temperament. And I, as I get older, am finding it harder to tweeze

those two apart and go, oh, well, I thought this was this really bad thing and it had some bad points in my life. But in some ways, some of this seems perhaps to be temperamental, perhaps to be an identity as to the way I orient to the world in a thoughtful, compassionate, slightly melancholy way. I'm curious what you think about that. Well, it rings very true that that's the way that one experiences it. And I think when I was working on Far From the Tree, both the book and the documentary, the narrative that I primarily had was, how do you get from an illness model to an identity model? And that remains,

I mean, it's become much more of a general conversation in the years. Since then, there was a piece in The Times a few days ago by Ed Hirsch, who's going blind, that was all about how he had come to love his blindness. And now he's thrilled to be going blind and all the things he's learning from going blind. And it was quite an inspiring and exciting piece. But the reality is that it is an illness and an identity. And trying to say, oh, I used to think it was an illness, and now I think it's an identity is very reductive. So, who would I be if I weren't melancholic by nature? I would be somebody else. I mean, I don't know who would I be if I were a Norwegian fisherman. I would be a different person.

You'd probably be a great one. You'd be a great one, though, I think. I think it would not be a grand success. But anyway, you know, just the sort of sense of it being sort of somebody very different. So there are aspects of my experience with mental illness that I could have done without. And there are experiences I had that I would be thrilled to those particular moments of extreme anguish. That's been really the basis for whatever I've learned or whatever perspective I've had, and I've become particularly aware of it. And I don't mean this to sound precious, but since becoming a parent, I think I look at the suffering of my own children and at the people around them, and I have a gentler relationship to it than perhaps my parents had to some been so inspired by those artists in Russia or even by my mother's death or by any of the other things that have inspired me by the work I'm doing now on youth suicide? Would any of it have spoken to me if I hadn't had those struggles and if I didn't have that perspective. So I wouldn't want to give it up. But the fact that I wouldn't want to give it up, and the fact that it's become my identity, doesn't mean that it's all been

dandy-o and that it's all worth it. I mean, how can you say worth it? You know, I don't have the option of giving it up. So there's a level at which I can't imagine what it would be like to give it up, because it's unfeasible and unimaginable. Yeah, I think there's an interesting narrative around human suffering that has emerged, which is that it can always be beneficial. Like, oh, it's a chance to grow. And I feel like that is also reductive, right? That idea of, you know, people say, well, you know, everything happens for a reason or things happen for the best, you know, which is not a thing I believe, right? I tend to be more in the, well, I think I can make the best out of the things that happen.

Right? But to your point, not that I wish they would happen, right? You know, you hear people who've lost children and we'll talk about that with youth suicide who will say, have I grown as a result of this? Sure. Would I trade it all in a heartbeat as a result of this? Sure. Would I trade it all in a heartbeat to have my child back? Yes. You know, and so I think it's holding both of those things. And it's also, I think, holding the things that are tragic because of the society constructed around them and the attitudes they attract and the things that are inherently tragic.

So I grew up feeling it was tragic to be gay, but I didn't think it was tragic to be gay for reasons that were really endemic to the idea of two men being in a romantic or sexual interaction. It was tragic because people didn't like you, because you were a laughingstock, because it was stigmatized. I mean, there were a million different, because you could get murdered for it, because AIDS was blossoming at the time and affecting the community, because there were so many people who had been rejected by their own families and were full of self-hatred. I mean, there were a million different things that were problematical, but they weren't central to it. If you're looking at mental illness, you know,

being depressed is not a pleasant experience, and you could erase all the stigma in the world, and that would not make it into a pleasant experience. It is inherently an unpleasant experience. Now, some level of melancholy may be sufficiently rewarding so that even though it's unpleasant, there's something else that counterbalances the unpleasantness. But part of the reason that I've been interested actually in trying to write about this problem of youth suicide is that, you know, some people have sort of said it was transformative and it helped me to grow, but there's nobody who ends up saying, oh, I'm really glad my child died by suicide. And I'm interested in trying to look at something where there just, there isn't an upside. I mean, even, you know, I think that's a problematical argument, but there are people who would say,

well, dropping the bomb in Hiroshima saved so many other lives. And you say, well, I don't know, nuclear bombs are not so terrific, but losing your child to suicide, there is no upside. And I want to look at the fact that that's a reality and get away from this slightly mawkish idea that, well, you know, whatever has happened, you'll sort of, you'll grow from it. I mean, some things you don't grow from, some things you just regret. Yeah, yeah.

And some things crush you. You know, I've been very interested over the years in that question of why do some people come through difficulty and emerge as having grown in some way? Again, even if the difficulty is still lamentable and tragic, they carry on and they carry on in a way that eventually starts to look a little bit like thriving to the best of the ability under the circumstances. And then other people are utterly crushed by it, become bitter, defeated. And what is the secret sauce in that? And it's the same thing I've often been like, well, why do some of us get sober and others don't, right? There's not an answer. There's not a single answer anyway. And there's answers that might apply to this person in this circumstance. And we might be able to see some patterns here and a few things here, but there's no ultimate answer. But I get letters all the time. And I think you said that you get parallel ones from people who write to me and say, you appear to have gone

through a depression that was catastrophic, that warranted hospitalization in which you were utterly paralyzed. And now your life seems to be essentially okay, which, you know, it has some really tough moments, but it's essentially okay, at least for now. And they say, why is it you were able to do that? And I wasn't. And when people write to me and say that, there are some factors that are obvious. You know, I had access to excellent therapy and psychopharmaceutical care. I had very supportive people around me. I had grown up in a loving household. I had all of these advantages. But a lot of it, I think, is actually just the nature of one's personality.

And my concern about the model of resilience is that you want to encourage people to pursue resilience, but you don't want the people who really can't do that to feel as though they've failed. So that in addition to being depressed, they feel like they've somehow flunked the test of how they were supposed to recover and get better. I just think different people have different capacity. You know, I can't play tennis. I'm just, I took a lot of lessons. I'm really bad at it. And I mean, I took a lot of lessons. I'm really bad at it. And I mean, I took a lot of lessons when I was a kid, not in a long time because I gave up completely, but I have bad hand-eye coordination and bad depth perception and all kinds of other things.

I think resilience also is a thing one is fortunate to have. And that leads into a sort of larger question of which it is a part, which is the notion that a meritocracy is somehow more fair than an aristocracy. And I spent some time once in a diamond mine in South Africa, and I thought, oh, this idea I have of sort of, if you're only willing to work hard enough, you can have a terrific life. Those people were working harder than anyone I know has ever worked, and their lives were a living hell. And the idea that somehow, if they only really devoted themselves, and if they only really persist, that some people have skills and advantages and are able to thrive in

Americocracy, and other people don't. And it's a question of what you're born with. And if you're born with resilience, you're going to do better. That doesn't mean it can't be cultivated. That doesn't mean that you don't have to make an effort to achieve it. But we aren't all dealt an even hand in any regard, including that one. No, absolutely not. And I think what's interesting about that idea, and I actually agree with it to be true, is this balance of it's not good to embrace fatalism either. And you said somewhere that you wish for a new generation dedicated to equality, but also respectful of merit. And

there's a balance there, right? And this is the balance we're talking about, which is like, not everybody has it in them to recover. You say elsewhere about depression, that the best treatment for depression is belief, which is far more essential than what you actually believe in. And I think part of it is the belief, maybe somehow I can find my way through. And so when we say some people don't have it, I sometimes worry that the people who believe they don't have it, then take that and go, I don't have it. But to your point, we also don't want to make people feel bad for not having it. It's this really delicate thing. I mean, a topic that you've addressed, but I've known people who are addicts and who have recovered or who are in recovery or whichever phrasing one wants to use, but who have managed

to emerge. But I've also known people who didn't. And I sometimes think, gee, if you just really worked at that program and if you really threw yourself in. But I also think people have different capacities. So it is a balance. You want people to do their best and to insist that they try as hard as they can, but not to punish them if when they try as hard as they can, they don't succeed. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

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bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I think to do their best is more their belief in their ability, but I agree. It's why I've often said, if I get a chance to sit down with God after some pretty foundational questions, I'm going to move on to this very question. Why do some people recover and others don't? Because I went through treatment with people and there are some patterns I can pull out. Like you, I was relatively fortunate, right? Like I got arrested for a bunch of felonies and was given a diversion program instead of going to jail. Why? Because

I was a suburban white kid, right? Like it's just obvious. I had that advantage. When I, after driving my life into the ground, climbed back out of that a little bit, I had a reasonable high school education that I was given in a decent school to fall back upon. I mean, I had resources that a lot of people around me didn't have. So there are some factors I can certainly look at and be like, well, I had that advantage and I had that advantage and I had that advantage. And then there are people who had all those advantages I did who are dead today, you know, and it looked at one point like they were trying as hard as I was. We were in the same treatment centers. We were going to the same meetings. And then you see people who've had nothing, the worst hand in the world dealt to them that end up winning the tournament.

And you just look at it and there's a certain amount of just like, well, I guess we can name some things that we know are more predictive in one direction or the other. And then there's just, to me, a certain mystery, you know, which is sort of what you're talking about, something innate. Yes. And it's not measurable, and it is mysterious. And I think it's often not predictable, though, to people with a lot of experience, it's more predictable than it is to people with less experience. I mean, when I worked in a prison in Minnesota for a while, I really, it was juvenile felons, and I formed pretty close relationships with a number of them. And I remember one of the people who worked at the prison, there was one guy who was particularly, he was charming, and he was brilliant. And I thought he could have gone to an Ivy League

school and he could have run a major corporation. And the guy who worked at the prison said, he's a psychopath, and he's going to spend the rest of his life in jail. And I thought, that's a horrible, defeating thing to say. But it turned out to be true. He is a psychopath and he's going to spend the rest of his life in jail. And I thought that's a horrible, defeating thing to say. But it turned out to be true. He is a psychopath and he's in a maximum security prison now. And it's his sort of third imprisonment since then. And he's in for a long time, this go around. But others of the people I met, some of whom I didn't automatically warm to as much, have actually made really good lives for themselves and have not gone back to jail. And so, the program that I was working in was focused on rehabilitation rather than simply on punishment. And what I realized was that I

started off thinking, well, we have to rehabilitate everyone. And I ended up thinking, okay, if 20% of the people who are here who might otherwise have gone on to a hollow, empty life of criminality and destruction instead go on to positive, productive lives in which they're able to do terrific things, that's a triumph. You don't have to have it work out for everyone, and it won't ever work out for everyone. You can't rehabilitate all the criminals or all the addicts or all the people with mental illness or all the whatever other category you want to propose. But there is no category I've come across in which you can't find some people who manage to pull through. through. I mean, there are Holocaust survivors who somehow survived all those years in the camps and who then came out and became great moral philosophers. There's nothing that's so bad that some people can't find resilience in it.

Yep. So, let's turn to youth suicide because we're kind of right on it a little bit because there's something you said about it that I think is really interesting, and I think applies to what we just said. You're describing the research you've done on it. You've written a very extensive piece for The New Yorker. You're writing a book on it. And you said, I really would have loved to discover a guiding principle in which I could say, terrible things happen to these families, but they'll never happen to me, and they'll never happen to you. This is how you steer clear. You know, I came up with a certain amount of wisdom that may be helpful to some people, but overall, I felt like people are probably going to go on dying by suicide and there's nothing I can do to make that not happen to anyone. Well, that's absolutely true. I mean,

the impulse to end your life exists in a lot of people, and it actually exists in more and more people as we move into this period of climate change and political extremism and all of the other, the social immobility, all of the other problems that are affecting us. information overload. And, you know, to some extent, though I myself am not religious, I think the movement away from a certain kind of mainstream faith has been devastating for many people for whom it would have served as a protection against suicide. You aren't going to be able to make it all go away. But there is a lot that can be done to reduce the rate, especially of youth suicide. I mean, that's what I've been primarily studying. And we aren't doing it. And nobody in power seems to be very interested in doing it. And mostly, I think people in power aren't very interested in doing it because doing it would entail admitting the vulnerability to this possibility that exists in every family in the world.

And nobody wants to acknowledge that vulnerability and the force of that insistent denial results in social policies that are destructive, damaging problem, and that are leading to enormous numbers of unnecessary deaths. So you can't make the problem go away entirely, but you don't have to indulge it the way that we do and face up to the fact, A, that you're afraid of it, and B, that actually it could happen to you. I mean, let's hope it doesn't. It doesn't happen to most families.

It doesn't happen to most people. But it happens apparently out of the blue to many families that are good and loving and whatever else it is that families are supposed to be insightful, generous, whatever families are supposed to be that one would hope is protective. None of it is foolproof. Yeah. Do you think that this increase is cultural and the factors that are at play in our culture? You say that certainly if you've got a terrible childhood and you're traumatized and all that, you're more likely to do it. And I think we can all see that. I think that's more commonly understood now, right? Bad things happen to you as a kid, you're much more likely to have challenges as an adult or even in your youth, right? But you mentioned, as you said,

families that it appears like everything is going right and still a child wants to die. What's going on? Some of it is just an organic quality that may exist in that child. As we were discussing before, different people have different levels of resilience. Some of that, I think, has to do with the relationship that kids now have to social media and to the Internet. It used to be that you were bullied at school, but you came home and it stopped. And now you come home and it doesn't stop. And it used to be that if you were paying attention to what was happening in the world, perhaps your father read the paper in the morning and you all watched the news for half an hour in the evening. Now you have an alert on your phone every 45 seconds telling you about some other hideous

disaster somewhere or other. I mean, there are a million factors. I could spend the next hour listing what a lot of them are. The problem, I think, is that we don't make any attempt to notify people of what those dangers are and to prepare them to negotiate those problems. So there's a lawyer with whom I've had some interesting conversations who's based in Seattle, who for many years worked on asbestos claims. And the issue with asbestos was not so much that a product had been developed that turned out to be carcinogenic. It was that nobody was told that it was carcinogenic, that the companies tried to hide the fact that it

was carcinogenic. There was a great deal of damage that could have been prevented, and it wasn't. And he now is representing families who have lost children to suicide because apparently of their experiences on social media, which I could detail, but in any event, the case is quite convincing. And what he said is, you know, people need to be warned. They need to know what are the algorithms, what are the dangers of those algorithms, what is it that you're getting into when you sign up for these different platforms? What's going on? I mean, I think TikTok is responsible for an enormous amount of despair among American youth and that many people have ended up dying by suicide in part because of the way that the TikTok algorithms

feed people who have clicked on one thing about suicide once so much material that they then come to think that this is what everyone is doing and end up forming an identity around the group of people contemplating suicide because they don't have a strong enough identity elsewhere. The debate that's going on in Congress right now is about whether TikTok should be banned. And I don't actually think anything should be banned, but that's a separate topic. Whether TikTok should be banned because it might be used at some hypothetical point by the Chinese to spy on American citizens and collect. And I thought, okay, but it's killing children. TikTok

is killing children. Shouldn't we be having a conversation about that? You know, okay, but it's killing children. TikTok is killing children. Shouldn't we be having a conversation about that? You know, obviously, it's preferable if national enemies don't have extreme amounts of information about one another that could be used to cause damage and chaos. But the level of hysteria about the, I think, very remote possibility that TikTok could somehow be weaponized in a war is so tremendous. And the lack of interest in what it is about TikTok that has caused it so particularly to lead children down a path toward despair and self-injury and self-harm and death through a variety of sort of weird challenges and things that are

on TikTok and ultimately toward suicide, that's barely discussed at all. It's a very distorted system of values. So when you're referring to social media being, sounds like the lawyer you're talking to would use the phrase responsible for, or we could say contributing to. It's not just the way we normally think of social media in that, well, you might be on it and you might get bullied. You might be on it and you might negatively compare yourself to other people. You might be on it and it keeps you from relationships in the real world. You're talking about actually people who are being fed suicidal ideation by the algorithm because all the algorithm is essentially doing is saying, if you like this, I'm just going to give you more of it. If you like just a little of it and you like a little more of it, I'm going to keep feeding it to you.

That's the very direct link here. Until you finally get to the point at which, as happens more and more frequently, people are live streaming their suicides to a group of other people who haven't been able, for one reason or another, to fit in adequately in their own opinion to whatever their general social context is, school or someplace, then they find an identity in this and they follow through on it. And it could be regulated. I mean, we do regulate, back to what we were talking about earlier, but we do regulate certain substances of abuse. We do regulate, back to what we were talking about earlier, but we do regulate certain substances of abuse. We do regulate certain dangerous medications. There would be ways to regulate it without banning it, without saying that you can't look up this material, without trying to bowdlerize texts. You could just say, okay, but, you know, this is a dangerous direction.

You could have alerts of various kinds that came on. I mean, there also are many people, I should emphasize, who find community on social media in all kinds of other ways, and it can be very rewarding. It's not that I think all social media is terrible or that we should be getting rid of social media, which we couldn't do anyway. But it's just that I think that it has a dark side, and that dark side needs to be acknowledged. There need to be warnings about it and then it needs to be regulated. Yeah. I mean, one of the things about technology that's so challenging at this point is obviously it does an enormous amount of good. It can also do an enormous amount of harm and it is changing so fast that our systems of thinking about regulation, ethics, all of that are like

Stone Age speed and technologies like computer speed is just, even just with AI, it's just crazy how fast. But a friend of mine pointed out that every time we have a breakthrough in communications, there ensues a period of chaos and horror before we really figure out how to control it. So you had the invention of the printing press, and then you had 100 years of religious wars in Europe immediately following. You had the invention of broadcast technology, and you had fascism and communism. And now we have the invention of the internet, and we're once more in a period of, I think, quite a lot of horror. And hopefully we'll eventually be on top of it. But you're right.

Technology is now proceeding so rapidly that we no sooner get on top of what seems to be problematic two years ago than something new has come along. Yeah. We're still figuring out what to do with Twitter. And now we got chat GPT to worry about, which is going to start, you know, how do I commit suicide? Chat GPT, right? Like, I mean, one of the things from your work on youth suicide that was startling to me, and I know it was to you, was this idea that obviously those being bullied are at a higher risk for suicide, but so are the bullies themselves. That's actually a correlation that goes to both of those.

I thought that was unusual. I was struck by it. I hadn't really stopped to think very much about the experience of bullies because we, as a society, are sympathetic to victims and not sympathetic to perpetrators. Bullies are mostly not very happy people. Very happy people don't become bullies. I had also worked a lot on the experience of families of people who commit crimes and therefore looked at the experience of criminals. They're also not mostly people who are having a really great time. They are people who are suffering. We may be unsympathetic to their suffering because

they cause so much suffering to other people, but we shouldn't forget that they are suffering. And people, for example, who are school shooters almost always die by suicide. And even if what they've done, what's remembered is the people they killed. Part of their impulse was a suicidal, remembered is the people they killed, part of their impulse was a suicidal, desperate impulse. And so the fact that bullies have a very high rate of suicide made perfect sense to me. Bullies are not happy and nobody likes them. Yeah. Except, I suppose, Donald Trump, but that's its own whole separate.

We're recording on the day that Mr. Trump is being indicted here in New York and the city's a little interesting today. It's always interesting in New York. I know. I mean, I think it makes total sense. And I do think that question of how do we relate to people who do awful things, who almost certainly have had awful things done to them or have been the victim of some difficult circumstance. How do we relate to that? I think it's a broader question about how do we relate to people who make mistakes and what do we allow for rehabilitation? When I was little, I remember having a conversation with my mother that didn't particularly strike me at the time as extraordinary, but does in retrospect.

particularly strike me at the time is extraordinary, but does in retrospect. There was a kid in my class who was bullying me quite badly, bullied other kids too. And I was talking at the breakfast table when I was, I think, in second grade. So I was maybe seven or eight years old. And I said, you know, I just, I can't deal with going to school and having to interact with Kenny. And it's just, my mother said, well, she said, look, she said, you know, I just I can't deal with going to school and having to interact with Kenny. And it's just my mother said, well, she said, look, she said, you know, Kenny's behavior is horrible. She said, and I've talked to the school and I'm trying, she said. But, you know, she said, Kenny does not come from the same circumstances you do. She said, Kenny has a single mother. She works incredibly long hours.

They have a lot of financial problems. They live in quite a violent neighborhood. She said, Kenny is not having an easy time. And at the time, I mean, obviously it stuck with me because she said it to me when I was seven and I'm now 59 and I'm talking about it still. I'm amazed you can remember anything from seven, but I'm impressed. I do remember it very vividly. But when I was older, I thought, oh, that idea,

she didn't say it's okay for Kenny to bully you. She didn't say you shouldn't be upset by it. But she did say, you know, everyone is a person. And so I guess if the work that I've done is partly about compassion, I think that was the attitude that formed it. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's interesting, as we were just talking, I just had a memory of me being in elementary school.

And I realized that I was both bullied and a bully to one particular kid. And when I think back on the way I was a bully to this one kid, it's forget all the crime I did when I was a heroin addict. That is my deepest regret, was a real unkindness to him. But I'm able to see, you know, sort of your point, like I was both. Right. You know, it's like, well, it was coming downstream. So I passed it on through. Right.

Which is the way a lot of hurt works. Right. A lot of hurt works that way. And the people who are both actually have the highest rate of suicidality. Higher than either the ones who are just bullies or the ones who are just bullied. I highest rate of suicidality, higher than either the ones who are just bullies or the ones who are just bullied. I think I made it through. Yes.

So that's good news. Let's turn our attention a little bit to families. You've done a lot of work on families. You've got the Audible audiobook. Is that what you call it? Audiobook. All right. We'll call it an audiobook.

All right. About family, the different types of families. This is one of the current projects you're working on. And I'm curious, what do you think a family is? Wow. Well, that's a huge question. people who are committed to one another, even in moments when they don't like one another very much and who negotiate the world collectively to some degree. That's a good one. You talk a lot about the diversity that families take today. And you

made a point in the book that I really loved. You were like, you know, all the words we have for sort of extended different families are like modifiers put on existing words, stepfather, stepbrother, right? Like we take a word like father, brother, and we modify it. You're saying that you think given all the different forms that families can take today, like you've mentioned, you've got six parents for what is it, three children in four states, right? Four children, yes. Four children in three states. All this diversity, you think that we may be using impoverished language to be able to describe all the different ways that families take shape today. We use a very impoverished language. You know, we all know 12,000 words that we didn't know 20 years ago that relate to the

expanding field of technology and, you know, what a tweet is and what a PDF is and what I don't know anything else that you can come up with. But there are many of these words. And yet the words for family remain the same small group of words. And so people will say when we talk about my husband's biological children and my relationship to them, they'll say, so you're sort of like a special uncle. And I feel like, well, I'm sort of like a special uncle, but wouldn't it be good if we actually had a word for what I in fact am? And it caused a lot of chaos in our lives that we

didn't have words for what we were. So those children called us daddy and papa, but they were being brought up by their lesbian mothers and we weren't actually their parents and didn't make any of the decisions about what was going to happen in their lives and had very little influence. And yet we're deeply involved and love them enormously and cared from the bottom of our hearts. And I guess it's like an uncle. It's like a godparent. It's like, just let's come up with some more words. If we could come up with so many new words for expanding technology, why not for expanding family? And I think the reason why not is essentially that there has been a consistent insistence

that all variant models of family essentially ape the original and ideal model, which I think was never really so consistent and is certainly not necessarily so ideal. But that in the quest for equality, we've had to make a lot of false claims of equivalence. And so, you know, it's okay that my husband and I have a child who lives with us all the time because it's really our family is just the same as another family. And I think to myself, well, actually not. Our son is having a different experience with two dads than he would have if he had a dad and a mom. I mean, he would have a different experience with one dad and mom than with another dad and mom, too. There's a lot of variety in humanity altogether. But I think this sort of absence of vocabulary is because people keep wanting to shove everything

back into the relationships that have been recognized for a long time, and the nature of and complexity of relationships has enormously expanded in the last, you know, 50 years, more or less. And our refusal to come up with a way to talk about all of those relationships presents, as a principle, the notion that those relationships are only acceptable or valid insofar as they are really essentially the same. You know, it's okay for gay people to have kids because everyone wears polo shirts and they go to church on Sundays and they drive station wagons and they join the PTA or whatever it is. And you get some gay people who are playing that to the hilt in a way that's actually quite unnatural because they keep wanting to prove that they're the same as everyone else. You get some people who feel like they failed because they can't pull that off.

You get some people who just aren't interested in it and are annoyed by the supposition that they're supposed to conform to it, but who then worry, am I traumatizing my children by not playing that? You impose a lot on people instead of saying, we as a society celebrate diversity. And if we celebrate diversity, we should really celebrate diversity. And we should say, there's this thing, and there's that thing, and there's this other thing, and make a celebration of it. Yeah, I've often wondered about gay marriage from that perspective. And I'm wondering that from the outside. So I'll be clear than that. And I recognize there are legal reasons that marriage is really important. But it was sort of a little bit of

feels like maybe are we shoehorning a concept like we want equality and yet also difference. You kind of get the drift of where I'm going. It's very tricky territory. When John and I got married in 2007, the most radical thing that we could do was to have an extremely traditional wedding, because the idea that that was happening with two men at the center of it seemed so much to challenge the social norms. And so, I mean, not to mention the pink tank. Well, yes, I was going to say we did. We did add some flourishes. But, you know, we had a minister and a rabbi and we had dinner and there was dancing. We had a rehearsal dinner. We did all of the stuff that's kind of associated with a certain kind of American wedding. five years, I would look at people who are having a wedding very much like ours. I mean, everyone should have whatever kind of wedding they want. But I would look at them some of the time and think, oh, come on. I mean, that's kind of silly. I mean, why don't you come up with something that's fresh and new and that's original? And so I think the reality has shifted quite rapidly.

And of course, in 2007, we weren't legally allowed to call what we were having a marriage, and we weren't legally allowed to call it a wedding. And when all of that shifted, that was very meaningful. On the other hand, we're living in this moment when the rights of gay people and gay families, and particularly of trans people and trans families, are coming under really grotesque and hideous attack. And I feel like, okay, but if you allow too much of the othering, then you become a group that's easy to victimize because people don't relate to you. And if you don't allow enough of it, then you're being shoehorned into an artificial life. And it's a very complicated balance. A lot of nuance in that. I mean, even in my own life, and this is just a minor example

of everything you're talking about, like my partner, Jenny and I are committed to each other, like as committed as we could possibly be, but I don't think we're going to get married. And yet, you know, partner is sort of a word, but it's not exactly – it doesn't feel like what we are. A lot of times when I tell people my partner, they assume I'm gay. Right. And so there's not even a word for that sort of like, what are we to each other? Oftentimes I'm like, maybe I should ask her if she wants to marry me and she just become my fiance because that's a term everyone understands. Because to say she's my girlfriend, well, that really isn't it. No, I agree. And, you know, and I think girlfriend and boyfriend always sounds a little bit juvenile.

I mean, there was a point at which I was calling John my boyfriend and we were sort of, we were just too old to be going around saying that. And I knew some people would say lover. And I just feel like that's kind of really getting carried away with particular aspects. Old people will sometimes say my lady friend. Yes, exactly. My swain. But there again, intimate relationships that are not marriages have gone on forever, of course. But they have gone on as a kind of established social norm for a long time. And why don't we have a word? I mean, I find that I say partner,

we had a hilarious moment, actually, at my Christmas Carol concert at my son's school, we were sitting down, and somebody came along. And he said, Are there two seats available at the place in a church? And we were in a pew. And he said, Yes. And he said, Oh, good. he said, are there two seats available at the place in a church? And we were in a pew and he said, yes. And he said, oh, good. He said, because he said, my partner is just coming. And if you see him, he said, and he gave a description. And my husband brightly said, oh, he said, I thought we were the only gay parents at the school. And he said, my law partner. my law partner. And I just said, well, let's have a word that doesn't mean all these different things. It sort of makes it clear what we're talking about. Yeah. When you're talking about families, and I love this idea, you said any model of family can

work and any model can fail. What matters is the integrity, lovingness, and purposefulness of the people who participate. That makes me think of when my son's mother and I were divorcing. I was just really terrified. And I didn't want the divorce at the time. And so I was like, divorce is not good for him. And I remember the therapist said this. And at the time, it wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear because I kind of want somebody to shame her into staying with me, right?

But they said, you know what? What doesn't matter is whether you're divorced or not. What matters is whether you can effectively co-parent the child. And that's true whether you're married or not married. And it was a revelation like, oh yeah. And so I love that you're making that point about it's not the structure of the family that matters. It's the intent and friend from college, and they live in Texas. And John and I have a son who lives with us in New York. So I don't see my daughter as much as I see my son. I've had to be kind of self-aware about that in the way that I think anyone who has divorced and remarried and had a second family has to be aware of, okay, what are the ways in which I have to make a special effort for the

person whom I don't see as frequently and whose day-to-day life I'm not as enmeshed with? What are the things that I have to do to make that work? So it's not that it's all the same. You have to figure out in each situation, how do you deal with making a divorced family work is different from how do you make a, whatever it is, primal family work. But there are ways to do it. And I mean, goodness knows, we've all seen families that are structurally absolutely of the mainstream and that are a total disaster. There's no shortage of them, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I just love that. And I love the words you chose integrity, lovingness and purposefulness. Right. Because I think that gets to everything you just said. Like, yeah, I had to be very purposeful about how do I parent my son now that we're not, I think you just called it a different units in different ways. I've got to be very purposeful about this. But I should be just as purposeful when I'm married, right?

Like, you know, it doesn't matter the scenario with children. It's, you know, all the things you're saying. And there are so many ludicrous assumptions that get made from the mainstream, including particularly as I've worked on the subject of foster care, the assumption that parents, in the first place, that they can't learn the skills that they perhaps don't have because they didn't have easy childhoods themselves. But in the second place, that children are really often better off being taken away from a supposedly dysfunctional family and placed with the supposedly functional one, children mostly would rather be with their parents of origin. And while there are some

instances in which the foster care system has worked out incredibly well, and there are some people who really can't parent, most people, either themselves or in their larger extended family, there are people who can help take care of children. There are ways to make it work. And ultimately, most children who are removed are removed not for abuse, but for neglect. The symptoms of neglect are often actually the symptoms of poverty rather than the symptoms of neglect. The amount of money that's spent on a foster care placement would be sufficient to alleviate that poverty and to allow the children not to be neglected in the ways that they are. And the assumption somehow, which is essentially there, that growing up poor and uneducated means that you are unhappy and growing up in a sort of more advantaged environment is going to make you happy.

I mean, it's nicer to have more advantaged environment is going to make you happy. I mean, it's nicer to have an advantaged environment. I'm not for a moment suggesting that poverty is not an enormous problem and that it isn't incredibly difficult for families and children. But there is a tendency to think that there is a way that's better. And it's often wrong. This is kind of close to home right now in that a good friend of mine and his wife recently brought in a child that had been taken away from her sister. Her sister has severe drug abuse, severe schizophrenia, you know, and real delusions. And she's not a fit mother right now. Right. Right. But what's interesting is that, you know, when I got sober early on, right, I was around a lot of mothers who all they wanted was to get sober so they could get their kids back.

Right. And so I'm in this weird spot of like, well, it's a family member. They brought him in. They're good parents to him. They're a good family. And so, of course, I'm pulling for them in their, you know, like they're stepping to the table and being great parents. But then there's the mother and like, well, wouldn't it be great if she got better and could take her child back? And ideally, there would be a way that they all

cooperate. Bingo. Because that's the problem is that we tend to say we will take the children away from the problematic situation and put them in this other situation. And, you know, which is an issue that's been discussed in adoption for a long time, but needs to be discussed much more broadly in foster care. There has to be a way of negotiating a complicated family. And maybe the person who is the biological mother can't actually take care of the kids all the time, but can hang out with them some of the time. And maybe there are people who can figure out when and when not. And there should be systems to make it work. And there are gestures toward those systems, but they don't really exist.

Yeah. Yeah. And you don't have to look very far into all sorts of classical literature to find the constant example of foster parenting gone wrong, right? I mean, there's just awful, there are stories out there that are hideous. We're nearly out of time. And I didn't even get to get into many topics that I wanted to. But maybe we will end with something that you said in the Noonday Demon, I believe. And we were talking about, you know, who gets better, who doesn't, right? You say sense of humor is the best indicator that

you will recover. It's often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope. I was impressed when I was in Moscow in the 1980s by how much of a sense of humor all of the people I met had about their experiences of being shipped off to the gulag, put into prison camps, pushed to the edge of society, not having enough to eat. I thought, this isn't funny. This is horrifying. What do you mean about being funny? But your sense of humor is sort of your final defense. And I've quoted sometimes a Burmese writer named Ma Thanagy, who I spent time with when I was in Myanmar. And she had been Aung San Suu Kyi's personal assistant, a job she had taken knowing it would send her to prison. And then she was put into a prison with a lot of women who were sort of prostitutes and drug dealers and I mean, who were in for other reasons.

And I said to her, what was it? What were your years in that prison like? And she said, I had the most fantastic time. And I said, what do you mean you had a fantastic, you were in a horrifying prison under a sort of hideous government? And she said, the purpose of the government in sending us there was to make us miserable, she said. And if we could go on having a good time while we were there, then they had failed and we had won. And that point of view, I found was incredibly instructive. And I remember being at an exhibition opening in Berlin some years ago. It was a Moscow Berlin show. And you walked through. It was about the period of the sort of around the Second World War.

And you walk through the rooms full of Nazi propaganda. And the Germans were blushing as though they had found their mother, you know, sort of dancing naked on the kitchen table and looking on with horror. And the Russians were looking at the propaganda and saying, how ridiculous is it that anyone ever believed that? And they were laughing and laughing about it. And I thought, okay, I mean, there is a reason why not that Russia has been a more successful experiment than Germany has, certainly in this era. But I thought there is something that keeps people going about being able to see the absurdity of their situation and to see what's ridiculous about it. And I find over, I find with my own children, if we can get to the point of laughing, then we can address the

other things. And when you do public speaking, which I do some of, if you get people laughing, When you do public speaking, which I do some of, if you get people laughing, then you can make them cry. Because once you've laughed, you actually open up emotionally. And as long as the laughter is held at bay, so is everything else. Well, that is a great place to wrap up. Andrew, thank you so much for coming back on the show and for traveling over here to join me in the studio. Well, it's been a great time. Thank you so much. It's a privilege to be here. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits.

It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor. What's in the museum

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