Frank King is a comedian, 20 veteran writer on the Tonight Show, has 5 TED talks, and suffers from depression and chronic suicidal ideation.
Frank says, if you are thinking about suicide, call the prevention hotline – they are professionals. If you are having a bad day, call a crazy person. Then he gives out his personal number:
858-405-5653
National Alliance on Mental Illness
Foster Care: An Unparalleled Journey
Find All Our Links Here
https://linktr.ee/fostercarenation
Patreon
https://patreon.com/fostercarenation
Website
Connect with us on our Facebook Page
Connect on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/fostercarenation/
Transcript
foster care nation listen up this is foster care and online
strength for the powerless courage for the fearful hope and healing for wounded hearts
hello and welcome back to foster care and unparalleled journey but jason and amanda and today’s guest is frank king frank is here to talk about something super fun oh yeah something that we all just like love to talk about and i guess here’s a quick warning for the listeners there’s going to be some you know some conversation about some potentially sensitive topics for some people if you have little ears in the car if you might not want to have to answer those questions later this might be a great one to come back and listen to or slap some earbuds in because we’re going to talk about suicide today yes yeah right yeah and and if you have a curious six-year-old this might not be a conversation you want to have with them yet that’s up to you just want to give everybody a heads up how you doing today frank i am busier than a hooker at a four-way stop oh man that’s that’s busy well she hopes it’s busy so she can eat today
oh man well we were uh we were just looking up information like we always do we looking for things to help people one of the things i found is is just the the the prevalence of of this topic in the foster care system i forget the incident rates of suicide for the average population but attempts are at about three times that on kids who’ve been in the foster care system and actual um ideation is i think three times like ideation is three times rate and attempts are at four times right i think that’s the numbers that i looked up this morning and i was like that’s that’s a lot you know that that’s a high percentage so who better to talk about it than somebody who talks about suicide and manages to do it in an entertaining way a ted ted speaker with us here today so frank can you tell us a little bit about yourself and and maybe how suicide’s impacted your own life well i am a i was a writer for the tonight show for 20 years i’ve been a speaker and comedian full-time 34 i have five tedx talks actually i’ve been selected seven times two of them i couldn’t make because i had full fee speaking obligation the same day for the trailer together for my tedx coaching that i sent into the camera i’ve turned down more tedx talks than most people have amen yeah wow that’s incredible he said bragging i live with two mental illnesses major depressive disorder better known really is depression and something far more rare the chronic suicidal ideation and chronic insulin ideation means for me and people in my tribe the option of suicide is always willing to do as a smooth problem large and small let’s say small had a car breakdown a couple of years ago i had three thoughts on the bid one get it fixed do you buy a new one three i could just kill myself that is the title ideation which may sound odd to some of your listeners however every time i’ve spoken keynoted or trained in the last six years except for one time somebody in the audience had chronic suicidal aviation sometimes more than one person they didn’t know how to name they thought they’re just kind of free because the way their brain worked and all alone and i had a young woman come up to me after a college presentation and say thank you for your keynote i said you’re welcome she goes but it made me weak how did it make you weak she said you know your story about your car get it fixed by a new one kill yourself i know yeah she goes i’ve been having those thoughts all my life i i didn’t know how to name i thought i was just some kind of freak i was all alone and when i heard you say that out loud i realized for the first time in my life that i am not alone and i wept so there there may be people even clinicians that’s how i’ve spoken to clinicians i go i’ve got i’ve got chronic suicidal ideation and they stare at me like george bush at the new york times crossword and because apparently it’s not the dsm so if it’s not the dsm it doesn’t exist uh oh yeah so we may have actually saved a life today in the last 90 seconds because hopefully if someone has it now realizes it has a name they’re not just some kind of freak they’re not all alone my hope is we’ve steered them far enough off the path of suicide that you know they’ll live a normal life and hopefully they won’t speak to their therapist because i’ve had this happen before somebody comes up i go do you have a therapist well you need to make an appointment i think and tell them all you learned today and for god’s sakes tell them you googled it don’t tell me you learned it from a community so yeah those are my two middle illnesses i i it runs in my family more nuts in my family than in a squirrel turd my grandmother died by suicide my mother found her my great aunt died by suicide my mother and i found her i was four years old i screamed for days if you want to know the story i’ll spare you but my first tedx talk called a matter of laugh laughs a matter of laugh or death i i cover that story and and uh and i i myself in 2010 after speaking business dropped off 80 we found the chapter 7 bankruptcy i’ll learn what the barrel of my gun tastes like spoiler alert i did not pull the trigger which by the way gets a nervous laugh from the audience like should we be laughing at this and then i followed up with a true story a friend of mine’s in the audience he never heard me say that out loud that i didn’t pull the trigger he comes up afterwards because hey man how come he didn’t pull the trigger i go hey man can you try to sound slightly less disappointed so i myself and that’s that’s when i began to consider speaking on suicide uh as a keynote i’ve been a funny speaker from 1985 when i started in stand-up full-time to to that point in the recession of 2010 and i always wanted to have something you know significant to talk about something to teach people learning objectives takeaways action items i just had no idea what i what i had that i could teach anybody and after that close call look at my family history taking some some getting some education on suicide prevention and then doing that first tedx talk i did the first tedx talk so i could rebrand because everyone thought of me as a funny person so at age 56 i did the tedx and nobody knew my family my wife my friends nobody had any idea i was depressed and suicidal so i came out on stage on the ted stage as depressed and suicidal my wife’s getting ready to hit the button to play once it went up on youtube i said no hold on don’t hit the button i need to tell you half dozen things you’re about to learn about me and i just don’t want you to learn it there watching youtube really tell us because she had no idea so but that gave me these that was the beginning of my rebranding i could prove that i could talk about something serious and when i discovered preparing for the talk was that even though one person died questions not every 11 minutes in the u.s on average hardly anybody hardly anybody talks about depression thoughts of suicide however if you bring it up everybody’s got a story themselves a loved one a friend a colleague roommate so it i i realized there was a niche there just in which to speak especially being a maine men are notoriously shy about sharing things that are have to do with emotions
i was raised in the southeast and and you know big boys don’t cry yeah we don’t have emotions that’s the rule yeah that’s right you said well buy your bootstraps and you know it’s not it’s not just uh mental health and men i’ve had several friends die of prostate and colon cancer men and those are eminently treatable if you catch them but men tend to let their physical health go as well same reason you know no colonoscopy no psa test it’s it’s a shame but that’s just how and that’s one of the reasons by the way that my co-authors and i are putting together a series of four books on men’s mental health two of them are out the third will come out this year the fourth next year they’re anthologies 12 stories in each book 12 guys i like chicken soup for the tortured man’s soul and we asked man what kind of advice they wanted in the book and they said we want real men real stories real problems and real solutions how are they coping so that’s what we do because men tend to think advice from men my wife would tell you that she could give me a nobel prize winning idea and i would pooh-pooh it if the mailman told me the same thing i’m all over so sorry men are wired so that’s where we are i am did you hear that amanda that’s the way we’re wired it’s not like i heard it that’s why i throw bricks it’s yeah hard wiring when we first got together i had to explain to her once that it’s better for you if you will just write a note wrap it around a brick and then chuck it at my head yeah it’s as effective if not several bricks here she bought a pallet so that that’s my i started out i started comedy in fourth grade told my first joke everybody left the teacher was hysterical and i thought i’m gonna be a comedian and then 12th grade to the talent show one and then just by chance after college moved to san diego where there’s a branch of the world famous comedy store the long sunset and i went to mike night in five minutes i did my five minutes halfway through i thought to myself i’m home i’m gonna do this for a living i have no idea how but and then a year later my girlfriend now my wife for 33 years went on the road gave up our apartment jobs and just hit the road for 2629 nights in a row non-stop and your wife how long have you been married we’ve been married three or three years wow congratulations thank you that’s three comic marriages because you know living with comedians is not the easiest thing i’ve heard that yeah i got a friend who won’t shut it off and all of his three ex-wife love him to death i think he just wore them out when it happens i guess if i live with him i have to duct tape him to the bed and put a sock in his mouth cause he never shuts up
i like that yes we do so yeah that’s that’s um that’s my story in a nutshell part of the pond well i know you that when we talked before you had mentioned that your wife had some experience in foster care we obviously have have a deep amount of experience in foster care and you know that that’s something that that ties deeply into that system is all the trauma that kids experience you know most of these kids who come into care don’t come into care just because you know it was a thing to do this weekend well no life is sunshine and roses right but then you dig into their deeper story and you find a lot of scary stuff in there people have been through a lot especially at young ages and that seems to lead into a lot of the problems with mental health which can lead towards suicidal ideation all that sort of thing so you know we have a lot of kids who are dealing with a lot of stuff and so you know i think i think the question your friend asked is really appropriate you know when when you find yourself in that place when when you’re walking down that road what is the thing that that helps you decide that the trigger is just too heavy to pull at the moment oh uh well i i didn’t kill myself because i had a million dollar life insurance policy the problem is in that particular policy they have what’s called a two-year well it’s um the nickname for it is a two-year suicide call it’s actually called the incontestability cost meaning you could if you’re a smoker let’s say and you get a policy and you lie to the company and you go no i don’t smoke and if they don’t figure it out in two years at two years a day if you die on lung cancer smoking three packs of moral birth a day i’m sorry you have two years to figure that out and suicide same thing if you you know if you know you’re suicidal or if you did you had two you didn’t you had two years figured out so i don’t know if you guys are aware of this but in them in there’s a three-legged stool for suicide gladiator the first leg is withdrawing socially sometimes physically moving away the second one is you cross that middle barrier that you’re willing to take your own life regardless of the pain and the third is something called burdensomeness you hear people say that suits have to self-reject well from the outside looking in it is from the inside looking out oftentimes and i was included in this this this class of people i believe the world would be better off without me because we just filed bankruptcy and we’re on the verge of losing our farm and everything else and i had a million dollar life return policy however i’d only had 22 months not two years so i had to wait 60 61 days before i pulled the trigger otherwise they would just return the premiums to my wife and not the million dollars in proceeds so i felt uh you know i was literally worth more debt than a lot and i felt that burdensomeness she’d be better off she’d be broken-hearted but she wouldn’t be broke the benefit of suicidal chronic suicidal ideation is because i knew i could do it at any time waiting two months and a day was no big deal because i knew it two months in a day i could pull the trigger and so that’s but fortunately by about two months in a day i don’t even remember that day life must have gotten a little bit better the bankruptcy went through the phone call stopped and you know i guess i had i had broken the surface taking a deep breath and figured i could go on but it’s it’s and it’s it’s ironic in that my chronic suicidal aviation keeps me alive because i know if pain gets too bad i can end it and a lot of people don’t realize that many many if not most suicides are not about killing yourself it’s about ending the pain as with i’m sure foster kids if they’re in a horrible situation as my wife was physically and sexually abused verbally abused um you know a horrible father passive mother who also didn’t like her didn’t want kids you know where she never got married so you know that’s my lovely wife just wanted to end the pain that she when i remember when i met her she had scars on her wrist where she had attempted fortunately she didn’t attempt uh you know up the arm you know the wrist it’s kind of a mis uh misconception you cut your wrist not across the wrist up and down your arm if you really wanna that that’s that’s and i probably just as a young person she just heard cut your wrist so she cut her wrist and survived but then she turned up to drugs uh weed and other things to you know to cope and then fortunately at some point she got into foster care and had a series of foster moms and dads and you know i’m sure as with any business there were good ones and bad ones and fortunately one of our elementary school teachers got went to the foster care program said i want to be a foster parent and they said okay she goes on one condition what’s the condition i get i get wendy that’s my foster child and i said okay so and that was the first unconditional love she’d ever you know experienced plus there were rules she would tell you you know that family had rules but love was unconditional and that probably saved her life and they’re still friends to this day
yeah that’s that’s an all too common story that uh that a lot of kids have it’s it’s a danger that that kids are always always subjected to in the foster care system there’s always a moment of trauma happening at every every given moment around the world somewhere these kids have experienced so much and i i just i’m always wondering what the way to help a kid is who is in that place because some of these kids are young my um let me get this right my stepsister’s daughter yes my sister’s daughter we have a family with a lot like relationship algebra so i always have to think a little bit to make sure that the relationship family meth
she um my stepsister had a nasty disease called huntington’s and we lost her a few years back and then what was i think two years ago maybe three years ago her daughter was going through some serious suicidal ideation some some depression and eventually they she she hung herself and um and when we lost her to suicide as well and she was 13 or 14 i believe years old and it just seems like it touches every kid and i don’t i i don’t know that there’s a blanket answer but is there anything that that you can you can talk to that to help kids as they see this thing going in their life that looks too big to overcome well and it’s not just foster kids i have my best friend in north carolina attempted at age 4 age 8 and age 12. diagnosed mentally with living with bipolar disorder i believe i believe his mom is bipolar i mean just looking back um and i think hey it’s important people go what do i say to somebody who’s depressed well don’t say anything start by just actively listening uh b do not minimize the pain you know things will get better you’ve got so much to live for you know tomorrow’s another day that’s not about tomorrow wealth for those of us often times who are experiencing that can’t see beyond today they feel like it will always be as painful as it is today i think i diagnosis an evaluation a mental health day i always recommend the mental health evaluation to find out is it situational depression is it clinical depression is it bipolar disorder what is exactly going on second if medications indicated then i would recommend medication if the first recommended medication doesn’t work i would give the child a cheek swab dna test for psychotropics where they compare the young person’s dna with a long list of let’s say antidepressants pick the one or two that are going to work best with their metabolism so you get a lot less of the going on doesn’t work taper off going on doesn’t work wrong because that’s discouraging it’s painful it’s an awful process um yeah and then therapy if it’s you know if it’s indicated if it’s available i would say therapy and on the flip side of that i did a tedx talk called mental with benefits the evolutionary advantages of mental illness because i kept meeting people who were mentally ill and if they weren’t completely dysfunctional they always had some kind of superpower you know they were autistic musical great writers comedians dear lord a friend of mine’s got a joke about comedians the two kind of comedians diagnosed undiagnosed i think my comic ability imagination and and you know uh writing ability whatever it’s just the flip side of my depression thoughts of suicide it’s all the same why it’s the way my brain processed and you might say next time i said look here’s the deal what what if those of us living with mental illness are not living with a genetic mutation but an amazing evolutionary adaptation and what if you convince a child yes you have a mental illness but here’s what they never tell you you have a corresponding mental ableness that your peers can’t touch so the idea is you treat the mental illness certain medications whatever and then you wrap your arms around whatever mental ableist they have and celebrate it and energize it and that that hopefully will change the frame for the child and for their peers producing stigma and building and eventual suicide so if if it turns out they have a clinical illness there may be some sort of ability 30 fortune 500 companies in the us are now hiring people on the on the spectrum with autism for their special abilities and paying them handsomely i think that’s and i think each child’s iep individual education plan should be truly individual let’s say kids got ocd then why not make sure they’re in the stem program science technology engineering mathematics every one of those those disciplines every problem to solve in those has one right answer ideal for some ocd and then steer them in a career path where they’ll end up with an industry that values precision engineering math you know engineering banking architecture um where they really precision to detail is rewarded handsome now if they’re dyslexic you know stem is ridiculous because letters and numbers moving around on a page but um multi-level complex tasks the humanities the arts that’s that’s and i think that the curriculum should be adjusted for the child but the teaching method i got a friend from my time on the cruise ship who was a music teacher instruments brass and he said the best students you can were the ones with add adhd the problem was you strap them in a chair for 50 minutes first 10 minutes they get better next 40 minutes they’re spending so much energy just trying to sit still so on a whim he bought an egg time and he set up for 10 minutes and told the young person look we’re going to practice scales for 10 minutes and then we’re going to do something else so 10 minutes egg timer goes off now we’ll practice our breathing for 10 minutes egg timer goes off now we’re going to practice those two pieces you’re playing at the concert on saturday egg timer goes off it was amazing the child knowing that whatever they’re doing would come to within 10 minutes and they changed tasks they were able they didn’t have to worry about trying to sit still you know and concentrate so i think both the education plan in the and the way the curriculum is taught should vary by child some kids you know i don’t think every child is ready for first grade at age six why is eight six the magic number from first grade amen could be seven could be five who knows so yeah and you know i understand with large numbers of children it’s kind of like a factory system it’s got to be you know you can only do so much individually but i think the interesting thing in today’s world set in the middle of code stuff and virtual schooling i have a young boy he’s not been diagnosed he’s five and if you want a picture of adhd i can show you what it looks like yeah he he is he is wild and as you as you’re talking about that i’m sitting here thinking about our little guy frankie um he would probably really benefit from something like that because getting him to sit still for more than 10 minutes requires like more than a whole roll of duct tape we’ve had to upgrade to gorilla tape to get here well yeah i mean with virtual schooling so we our little ones are at home and i’m schooling them zoom meetings are just it’s a killer for him to get him to sit there so i mean we have a box that i have different sensory toys in and just different things and you know we have found over the years you know different kids learn differently they all need different things some kids are visual some are audi you know it’s just it’s different across the board and you can’t treat them the same because it just doesn’t work yeah that’s and and like i said and there’s an evolutionary element by the way i tell the audience look here’s the deal add adhd it’s now considered a you know a disability but back in the time of the cavemen and women having your head on a swivel was a survival technique survival skill you know it’s very funny here it’s intended to be funny squirrel but you know what velociraptor that’s important information well yeah shiny yeah so i figured i told you guys look if i back in the day if i was a caveman you know i’m running and running things i would have those people working as pickets and you know and scouts and you know all the way around the travelers who move from winter lanes to summer lands or whatever because their heads on the swivel they’re always looking for and by the way dyslexics have generally have better verbal vision and most of us see pretty much straight ahead we can see the stuff on the you know the exterior but we focus straight ahead dyslexics tend to focus a panoramic fashion and they also have an amazing ability to pick out the anomaly the joke i wrote was never play where’s waldo with a dyslexic for money because you’re gonna lose and if i was walking from summer you know grounds to wintergrounds my tribe i would have the dyslexics up front scanning the tree line because what looks like a bush to the rest of us is that ain’t no bush man that’s a guy with leaves stuck all over his body i’m telling you so these were all survival skills back then you know eons ago uh just like um bipolar anthropologists figured pretty much everybody was bipolar back then for a couple of reasons in four months in the summer to gather enough stuff for eight months in the winter so they were uber hunters and gentlemen they were hypersexual because you have to keep the numbers up in the tribe and they go all summer long just like 60. and then as the days were shorter and the nights grew colder they would wind down into a depressive state and just hunker down until you know the spring when days began to get longer and you know nights began to get warmer and they would repeat the process so those things that we think um many of them that disability back then were survival skills yeah yeah that but we call it a disability today yes and again i think we should treat the disability but if there is an ability a special ability then i think we should wrap our arms around energize you know encourage uh that whatever that that is you know because think of harry potter he’s a little weird half muggle half human and the lightning bolt whatever but he’s got he’s got us he’s got special powers what kid doesn’t want to be you know to have special powers like that i think that if we can convince them that whatever ability it is they have whether it’s artistic or musical or comedy or whatever you know that their peers can’t touch and i think we could go a long way and i think education should begin in middle school at age appropriate with age-appropriate you know uh curriculum and talk about depression thoughts of suicide you know uh bipolar you know do you like like they teach sexual sexual education i guess i don’t they still do that but you know teach kids about mental mental health and mental illness and for parents by the way there’s a great organization called
mentalhealthfirstaid.orgmentalhealthfirstaid.org have an eight-hour class there’s a youth class and an adult class and it’s kind of mental health 101. they cost anywhere from nothing to about 25 bucks for the eight hours and toss in lunch if you go to mental health first aid.org put in your zip code and 25 mile radius i’ll tell you where every class is within a 25 mile radius i’m sure they’re all by zoom at this point but but again almost costs almost nothing and and then you get a binder when you’re done so let’s say it goes anywhere from depression through non-legal self-harm like cutting biting burning all the way to suicide so a parent you got a binder and you you find out your child or somebody they know is cutting then you go and look and see what the symptoms are and what the solutions are because i think if we could teach young people about mental illness signs and symptoms of mental illness they could look out and convince them that they are in the in the uh mental health vernacular gatekeepers they’re looking out you’re looking out for everybody else you know see something say something if um and there was a young woman daughter of a friend of mine who noticed something about one of her peers in her class a young woman and the things she was saying posting on facebook she was really worried that the young woman was going to end her life so she marched she took it upon herself to march down to the council’s office and go look hey you know this is this is what she’s been writing in her timeline this is what she’s been saying and somebody needs to step up and you know get her some help and sure enough she was struggling i believe she ended up you know with clinical depression and suicide and she’s alive today because one of her classmates you know sometimes parents don’t want to see those kind of things in their children because a they feel like it’s their fault b they don’t want their child to be anything but perfect so they they go into something of a you know denial of things well in the foster care system a lot of parents come in with this savior idea when they first step into it and they think if i just love this kid it’ll be fine and it’ll all be better and we hate to see you know this kid struggling and that i can’t fix it and that’s another reason why it tends to be ignored yeah and you know parents are in the fix of business i’m a mom i can fix it uh so yeah i think education for the adults and education for the young people age appropriate and i think it should be a continuing you know that there’s a there’s a class in middle school there’s a class in high school um class in college i think it should be required because three college students today every day kill themselves three day every day why not require that students in college just like you gotta take gym to get your two credits to you know to graduate the state of washington by the way is now mandated that anybody in the healthcare business chiropractors dentist hygienists doctors nurses social workers have to have three hours of suicide prevention ce to renew their licenses in 2021 all of them because that way the chiropractor the doctor the dentist hygienists are all on the lookout for signs and symptoms i speak to dentists frequently because that occupation has a highway their food snack and i said here’s the deal if your patient comes in sits down the chair and you put a little bib on and you notice that their hair is you know not as clean as it usually is clothes are a little you know dirty and they haven’t been taking care of their dental hygiene as they would have done in the past one of the signs of depression is letting your personal hygiene go because you just can’t drag yourself out of bed in the morning to get the shower around the wash so you can you notice that you know again see something say something that’s sorry it’s i think it’s the more the more i think the more people who knew the science and symptoms of depression mental illness thoughts of suicide the the better there’s an outfit called qpr question persuade referral qpr institute.com it’s like cpr you know if if you’re going to have a heart attack have it in seattle one out of four people in seattle know cpr qpr wants those same numbers people be educated on the signs and symptoms and then what to do with mental illness and causes of suicide because you know if you have a heart attack the sooner somebody starts pumping on your chest and the sooner somebody gets the uh aed they’ve got a little bit of electronic paddles that are walking through the park and the sooner the paramedics and professional help arrives as soon as they get to the hospital where the cardiologists work on the better the long-term life expectancy same thing with mental illness as soon as somebody realizes that somebody’s in a mental health crisis the sooner they can get them you know to you’re basically a mental health first responder you’re not there to fix them you’re just there to make sure that they’re safe and then get them and turn them over to the professionals as happens with with um cpr you know you know somebody has a heart attack you do cpr you bring around you’re not gonna do a bypass right there we believe that i hope not yeah so i mean i’m sure there’s a youtube video we’ll teach you how to do it but that’s the idea behind qpr is that they that organization wants at least one in four people in the u.s to know i was at a function in the chicago area there were three or four hundred people there and and the table behind me a guy collapses fell right out of his chair and everybody freezes except the comedian
i would go running over i go hey man okay can you hear me yes can you see me yes uh do you have any pain down your left arm or underneath your chin because down the left arm is where heart attack symptoms present if he gets to your chin right here that’s there right there right there in the chin line jawline that’s really serious no no no pain uh actually i think he’s i said are you diabetic he said yes i’m diabetic i said i think he’s short on insulin so there’s everybody staring at the comedian diagnosing the guy who’s hit the floor but the fact that i i’ve had two aortic valve replacements double bypass heart attack three stents i’m very familiar with heart attacks and you know and and not so much diabetes but i figured it out and but if if if everybody had you know would a take the training it doesn’t take that long and b step up like i did get up over your ass get get to the person and get them stable and get into professional health um and i asked him by the way it was a very conservative group i said deferred cognition i said to hey man who’s president and this is uh in trump’s first target who’s the president he goes not hillary clinton i go okay you’re fine so yeah i think education would would uh save lives again because you know there’s a stigma surrounding mental illness and the whole separate stigma surrounding thoughts of suicide and people just don’t want to talk about it just you know it’s kind of where alcoholism was 50 60 years ago a lot of people still think mental illness is a moral failing and a character flaw as they did as they did with substance abuse disorder 40 50 there’s a reason that alcoholics anonymous started off anonymous because there was that that perception that it was a character’s law and moral failure you know and you could just you could just quit drinking and people say to me instead of me you need to choose joy if you’re not talking about liquid you know dishwashing detergent i don’t think that’s going to happen the only thing you know you think if i could choose joy i would have done that decades ago come on
and you know people did the comedy come first and comedy definitely came first but i was hardwired for the depression was that anyway i just use the comedy to make it more digestible you know they call it comic relief for a reason i mean that’s that’s and there’s a psychological principle you tell someone something if you tell somebody something really serious and you follow the little comically they’re mentally prepared for the next piece of serious business so and and if i can make them cry with my story because they get a little choked up and then make them laugh take them from pole depot the impact on them the emotional impact the the the chances are they’ll remember what they heard at least brought you know the broad strokes is far better than just having to sit through 90 minutes of morbidity and more talent so let me ask you this question i know you said that that your wife didn’t know anything about it until the tedx talk came out how did that how did that play out when when you told her your your story i mean did that did that strengthen you guys this relationship was it a difficult thing for her to digest uh no she knew i had been kind of moody on occasion but she thought it was just carbohydrate related you know you bring a glass of art um it actually strengthened the relationship because and i advise people to do this when they’re ready come out to people that love you and you know will understand and be there for you when things go bad the she now she knows that if i’m in a bad mood it’s not something she did she’ll ask me are you cycling down or i’ll tell her look i’m having a really bad day so she doesn’t get blindsided by it she doesn’t she doesn’t think it’s her and and and we’ve come to the point where he can joke about it which is very helpful for me one of the things that triggers my depression is disappointing her or anybody who’s opinionated about you so i’ll do something stupid and i’ll go honey mad at me she goes no no i’m not i’m disappointed so we can actually laugh about it which which helps take the edge off yeah and and i don’t always share with her when i’m depressed one day she was leaving for work and i was really depressed and i’m in the yard doing some yard work she’s getting the car to go and i’m thinking i’ll tell her and i’m like you know what if i tell her i’m depressed she’s not going to feel any better i’m not going to feel she’s going to feel worse actually and i’m not going to feel any girl so why so it wasn’t the point of suicide um and by the way the we should probably talk should probably talk about before he leave signs and symptoms of depression thoughts suicide what to say would not say what to do give you give your listeners their first lesson in mental health first day absolutely yeah that was going to be one of my questions yeah it’s yeah because here’s the thing here’s the good news 8 out of 10 people who are suicidal are ambivalent which tells me they want somebody to notice something and stepping and nine out of 10 people who are actively suicidal give hints that they’re gonna attempt in the last seven days before they do which again tells me they want somebody to pick up on the hint and step in so the trick is because you hear people say this all the time he never gave any indication why didn’t he say something i had no idea he didn’t didn’t didn’t there were no hints no evidence well it’s kind of like we train german shepherds and you hear somebody say the dog bit me never gave me any any indication he was going to do it oh yes it did first thing he did froze second thing he did their eyes go flat third thing the ears go back so the dog’s throwing signals like just don’t come any closer please don’t i don’t i really don’t want to bite you and then of course the hackles go up that’s the big one but they missed whoever got bitten missed all that so with suicides when people say never gave you an indication i’m guessing unless they were that one or two out of ten that wasn’t gonna you know was hell bent on dying there were indications you just have to know what you’re looking for and looking at and listen for yeah we um i talk about that just in the ability to communicate with kids and other people a lot of times it’s you know i i can speak korean to you and it’s not gonna be much you’re not gonna respond most likely and i actually one of the few people who actually know a little bit about korean i was in the army and they sent me to the linguist school to teach people that you know there’s there’s the secret is as i can know what it means but if i don’t know how to communicate what i’m trying to say to you if we’re speaking on a different plane then you don’t know what i’m saying and it’s the same thing there that if i don’t know what i’m looking at in a kid and kids are so challenging because especially in the foster system this kid might have been with you for a day or a month or or three years and so you have a different level of knowledge and experience with this kid and an ability to communicate and their willingness to communicate and so being able to read those signs and symptoms can be a real a real struggle so what what sort of things do you usually see that that come out that that are pretty decent indicators that we should at least you know raise our own hackles a little bit and start digging well and i should tell you that every keynote that i do i put my phone number on the screen myself i tell the audience look if you’re suicidal call the suicide prevention lifeline where now they have a text line text the word help 741-741 this kids are more forthcoming in text young people oh yeah we got a text so i i put my phone number on the screen and i said look if you’re suicidal call the suicide prevention lifeline if you’re just having a really bad day call a crazy person and here’s my number because like the korean is that the the person and i speak the same language we hear the same music i’m far less likely to be judgmental or to what they call should all over them you should do this and you should do that i’m just there to co-sign whatever bs they’re going through and listen and say like the korean i speak the language i hear you know they don’t have to explain to me what they’re going through i understand completely but here’s the here’s a couple of prominent sign signals of depression have trouble getting up in the morning rallies in the afternoon so if kid’s having trouble getting you know getting up and getting catching school bus or whatever but simply in the afternoon they’re full of beans that’s an indication um socially isolated it used to take a lot of joy in this social activity or that social activity back when we did social activities and they’ve withdrawn or they’ve withdrawn physically you know they just you know it’s either they stay in their room adults move and we already talked about one letting their personal hygiene go because they can’t drag themselves out of bed to get a shower level over watch by the way i think there’s a lot of situational depression happening in the world in the u.s because of the pandemic a lot of people who are neuro-normal neurotypical who’ve never been depressed are depressed because of the uncertainty of it all and what worries me is they’ve never been depressed they have no idea what that feels like they may not know why they can’t get out of bed in the morning i’ve been doing podcasting after part teaching neurotypical people how to survive you need a self-care plan you need to you know practice gamification you need to retain to you know send anything and get diagnosed you know it may be short-term situational depression you may need a little short-term med okay the question comes up what do you say to somebody who you believe is depressed after you notice these signs well anyway you don’t pull yourself home by your bootstraps turn that frown upside down are you trying to fish one put your big girl panties on exactly uh what you do say is i’m here for you and me i know you’re not lazy crazy or self-absorbed i understand the depression is a mental illness here’s the good news the time and treatment things will get better i’ll take the time to help you get through now here’s the tough one you have to ask them in no uncertain terms are you having thoughts of suicide if you can’t ask that question you find somebody who can’t and let’s say they’re not forthcoming about their thoughts suicide how do you know they may be suicidal talk about death and dying googling deaf and bad death and dying appears to the theme in their music their artwork their writing a friend of mine whose son took his own life he was a musician and he wrote original songs original lyrics and then a notebook in which you wrote you know the lyrics he would never leave that notebook anywhere his mother could find it and look at it he would take it to the bathroom with it and when he passed away she of course got the notebook and his music live the lyric fulfilled you know if you if you were looking for a road map as to why it happened it was all right there but he wouldn’t um give you your affairs in order and for a young person it could be something as simple as giving away prized possessions because they want to make sure those possessions go to the person they want them to go to when they’re gone the xbox or whatever and giving away a pet is top of that pyramid you want to make sure the pet is looked after and of course stockpiling medications or buying a gun by the way three times as many women attempt as men men tend to complete because they tend to use a gun and the last one that this is counter-intuitive and i think extremely dangerous is they’ve been depressed forever and then for no apparent reason they’re happy and lord you’re happy because finally they’re happy well it may be they’re happy because they’ve chosen time place and method and they know the pain there’s their word again you know the pain is finite now let’s say they are forthcoming they go yes i’m having no suicide what do you say you say do you have a plan and if they say they have a plan what is your plan if it’s detailed you need to get them on the phone with the suicide prevention lifeline if they won’t pick up the phone you pick up the phone you call the lifeline the volunteer will do what they can talk phone into the hands of the person who’s in crisis and if you know it comes up all the time when you dial 9-1-1 if they’re in immediate danger to themselves or somebody else you got no choice but 9-1-1 that will probably buy them an involuntary detention order in three days all expenses paid in the lovely gated middle east community with no belt or shoestrings but they’ll be alive anyway now this is something a psychiatrist and i added to that list of questions it’s not in this non-psychological text anywhere let’s say the plan is not particularly well formed they got a plan but it’s you know not really time-placed method they just kind of you know well maybe i would you know hang myself whoever the next question i believe you should ask is okay well are you going to kill yourself and if they say no then this i think is the most important question okay well tell me why not
make them give voice to whatever it is that’s keeping them here and in my case i would tell you i’m sort of like george bailey that’s a wonderful life after all those people come up to me after my presentations and i have i have let them know that what they have as a name they’re not a freak and they’re not all alone and perhaps steered them you know off the path to suicide if i were not here if i took my own life i would end up taking all those people with me who never had a chance to hear me assure them if they’re not alone a friend of mine goes you can’t live with that i go no man i can’t die with that so i just that that’s that’s one of my whys why i don’t kill myself right there well and amanda’s run off taking care of kids at the moment but part of the reason this is such such a topic that i think we need to talk about is we’ve had our own struggles in our family as most of our listeners know we lost our oldest daughter a few years ago to a nasty disease and in that process our two older sons are both teenagers right and you know through throughout time we’ve had kids who have struggled mightily with mental health we had one kid who we did take down and give him that 72-hour vacation because he was he was talking about suicide and here’s the thing is that’s a parent we think we know what we’re doing we’re thinking we know what our kids are going through here’s just being a teenager right and then one morning i get up from work and my phone has a notification that that my my youtube thing has a comment i reply to my comment and i’m like what i haven’t commented on anything i went look and somebody’s like don’t do it man you know you know talk to blah blah and this guy’s like encouraging me not to kill myself and i thought this is weird and a little bit of research and quickly i found that my son had gotten onto my youtube account and was making on a video somewhere and with some suicidal ideation and that threw us for a loop i didn’t know how to handle it and so we experienced that i struggled hard i you know we ended up walking the road taking him down to the hospital letting him get checked out and we had to do a lot of education you know fast forward a few more years i had one of my other sons who told me a story that i mean quite honestly today it’s it’s blown my socks off because he talks about having the plan having the place having the whole thing together and and as much as i’ve always been a guy who’s not about my kids doing drugs right i’m pretty hard against that whole idea of trying to keep drugs away from my kids and this is part of the reason i think this one really struck me was he told a friend that that’s where he was gonna what he was gonna go do he had the time he had the place he had a gun and his friend said well man before you do that i want you to try something real quick if it doesn’t work that’s you know do what you want and the man had him or the kid handed him a drop of acid and as much as i hate to admit that that’s what’s what saved him um he had some some experience that to this day he he we talked about it deeply he talks about i’ll never deal with suicide ideation again because of what i went through and what i experienced but these are kids who i knew were in hard times they weren’t struggling times for sure but i had no idea at that moment that they were that close to suicide and these are kids that i know who’ve been in my house since they were little itty bitty and they’re teeny they had both been in my house for for over 10 years at that point you know 10 15 years depending on which kid and we’re dealing with kids who may have been in your house for for six weeks yeah
well and i think the mistake businesses in some schools make is after a suicide oftentimes they sweep it under the carpet the person’s there one day gone the next problem is everybody’s got questions many people have survivor’s cure you know i plan to go so-and-so with them but i got tied up and i couldn’t make it you know if i’d just been nicer to him if i spoke with him in the elevator so it’s called suicide post venture anybody who is anywhere close to a suicide on the average suicides 25 people are directly impacted at least those people need a session of suicide postmention where you you take a look you ask everybody for their feelings and impressions what’s happened is everybody chances are i had a piece of the puzzle that when put together completely and you step back you can see it coming but not everybody had every piece of the puzzle it’s sort of like that movie in the book um the perfect storm the reader knows that the storms are approaching from three directions it’s going to be bad but the guys on a little boat have no idea but you know if they if you take a ten thousand foot view you can see the storms coming so that’s what a friend of mine said you could be puzzled together everybody backs up and you can see that this was probably going to happen she calls it a tyranny of hindsight but at least it answers questions and you can talk through the survivor’s guilt and you know i wish i’d been nicer to them you know just decode all that so that you can so there’s everybody can move on but if you don’t do that especially with young people they they fill in the blanks as best they can with what happened and sometimes you know it could be date it could be and with kids oftentimes the you know if one child young person does it you could find yourself in a cluster you know one person goes over that barrier or through that you know then you may have other ones in the in an area in their peer group it’s like cutting you know non-lethal self-harm a young person is more likely to be cutting themselves or somebody in their peer group is doing it as well so it’s a lot about education at the problem you know the proper point i think there’s also a lot of stigma that goes along with it too you know um we had well we still have him because he’s ours um but we had a child who was cutting and he was male and it was very surprising to see that you know a lot of people think that that’s just something that girls do yeah
i was kind of amazed by that anorexia and bulimia i mean i i’ve known some wrestlers in my time you know you’ve got to make weight yeah and so when people think anorexia bulimia they think women but there are a good number of men who have you know that just you know dysmorphia anyway have that body dysmorphia that sounds right yep there are the number of men who live with that as well but again it’s a matter of education one of the reasons that i think i have an impact on audiences a lot of people have an idea in their mind what mental illness looks at southwark you got a guy up on stage he’s a comedian you know obviously high functioning in a good mood you know i’m not what a lot of people would if you ask them to describe somebody with mental elements i’m i wouldn’t be there you know first they wouldn’t be describing me it’s a counterpart holding a sign we’ll work with food you know that’s fourth stage minimum the system has failed them all the way down the line they’re on you know probably on their way out um but yeah so it’s part of my job is to there’s actually something called stand up for mental health it’s a class to be uh it’s for people who have mental illness and want to write and perform stand-up comedy based on their mental illness and the and you have to have a diagnosis to get in the class you have to have a diagnosis to teach the class so it’s part peer counseling part you know comedy class and then they perform um sometimes for money but sometimes just community events to again to destigmatize to give people a different view you know public speaking terrifies people so not only are they public speaking but they’re public speaking after you know on things on mental illness their own mental illness i mean that’s powerful to see somebody get up on stage and you know come clean about their mental health and make and make jokes of it yeah i mean i just i remember you know it was like the world was stunned when robin williams took his life you know so many people well he you know he’s so funny and people loved him he had so much to live for yeah i believe he was living with bipolar disorder and then that’s probably why i self-medicated that’s why i was in you know rehab all the time and oftentimes and then he had heart surgery which can make you even more depressed i know because i’ve had two of them and then he had a parkinson’s life disease i think and his memory was going on top of that if you’re an actor in your memory even though he had millions in the bank and millions of people loved him you know i imagine he just wanted to end the pain yeah but i mean people looked at him and they’re like oh he has all these things going on for him what you know and it’s like we just we can’t see beyond ourselves well and i’ve said many times uh for me it’s hardwiring i’ve been most depressed and mostly silent some of the best times in my life always worried back then what’s going to happen when it gets the pain and i feel this way well we now know so
my situational in my case situation could trigger like a bankruptcy but not a situation so what would you tell
somebody’s wife like your wife you know how how does your guys’s relationship work how do how does she help you you know how do you guys communicate um so that she knows when things are are going wrong or you need help or what is support yeah what does support look like for you well i said i i tell her when i’m cycling down so that i’ll snap at her out of nowhere and she wonders what she’s done wrong so i yeah you have to open up the lines of communication and be honest about how you’re feeling and she does the same for me look i’m really tired today or whatever it happens to be so don’t you know we give what we say is we give each other amnesty for those moments you know don’t take any offense there’s nothing to do with you i’m just you know um that that helps a lot and in the books we’ve written book number two it’s all wrapped around automobile metaphors the brain and the car kind of you know back and forth like that and one of the things we say is you need a pit crew like they have when you’re racing cars when you pull into the pit you got an issue you get surrounded by all these people and they know what to do you know how to do it so you have to surround i believe you surround yourself with people that care about you and know what you’re going through are there so it’s set up in advance if there’s an issue it’s kind of like with a car you know you buy a new car and i always get aaa membership because i know it’s sooner or later even the car is new i’m going to have a flat tire i’m going to run out of jasmine keys out of my car or something so you prepare ahead of time there’s a spray on the trunk and a jack and a first aid kit and flares because you know and and you also have to have you know my wife is well aware that i have a self-care plan diet exercise good night’s sleep meditation medication and so that that i got an email from a guy somewhere in europe who had a lovely wife darling eight-year-old daughter 40 years old great job and said to me frank i can’t tell you the last time i was happy and he was writing me because he’d come across one of my ted talks because after that point he thought he was all alone feeling that way and he goes i saw your 10 eggs and i realized the first time in my life that i’m not in fact and so i encouraged him when time comes and you’re comfortable i think you should uh you know the proper setting come out to your wife and then eventually to your daughter when she’s ready you know what she in in turn she would understand so they can be there for you and then you know then your extended family been friends with them at that point my workout part is um you know he said to me one day how are you feel and i said i’m wretchedly depressed i said what does that look like he didn’t say you should do this we usually do that because what’s it look like i said well remember when you’re 18 he was yeah every other thought you had was about women yeah because what what’s what’s every other thought for you today going back home calling the bed binge watching netflix second season of mozart
and then you know because i could give voice to that we finished the workout i got all the way through the workout and i ended up not going home right away and crawling in bed i got the rest of my day taken care of and then i went home it got dark then i went to bed but the the mere fact that i can say here’s the thing i get tired of saying i’m good when people say how you doing every now and then when i’m tired my editor goes to sleep i got in an uber after two three hours since i prevented ce courses i talked i’m exhausted nice young kid our eyes locked in the rearview mirror and he goes how you doing man i go on depressed and suicidal how about you he goes we’re going to go to slater that i go you really want to know he goes yeah i said you’re supposed to ask me if i have a plan pause do you have a plan and then it a longer pause and he goes does it involve uber well brilliant yeah so yeah just just being able to say out loud to my wife i’m depressed or my workout partner i’m depressed or somebody you know that calls up how you doing if i can i can really tell them rather than having to cover it up you know it’s uh people with mental illness oftentimes great actors that’s why people don’t realize you know that they are because they we don’t i don’t want to burden anybody you know if if they got bad though you know i i we have two handguns in the house my wife has one i have one well how do you do that you know you know you serious up here’s the deal if i got to the point where that was an issue uh i would march them across the street to my friend randy go here take these and don’t give them back i’ll tell you because i’m in a bad way and i just don’t want to have these in the house so it’s you know it’s it’s all part of the process learning process um anyway that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s signs symptoms and you know and solutions oh and one last thing there’s an outfit called nami national alliance middle illness in ameri pretty much every county in the country they’ve got an office and they have um peer-to-peer counseling family and family counseling if your child is schizoaffective they’ve got 12-week course for the family on how what do you say what don’t you say you know how do you find resources a friend of mine who’s an insurance agent a friend in the chamber of commerce that saved his family saved his marriage because they had a child schedule affected so when they were at loose ends somebody told my nami took 12 week course i mean it’s not perfect but they’re the kids this is 10 years later the child’s still alive now a young man and the family’s still together but they wouldn’t survive without nami the best thing about nami is that it’s all free they don’t charge anything so i’m a big proponent free help is always amazing yeah and they they you know they raise money on the way yeah it’s all free all volunteer driven offering well yeah because i’ve heard so so often as you know we can’t afford this you know we can’t continue to for afford treatment you know if they’re a specialist so it’s a higher co-pay and yeah just had to let this go so that we can eat for the week or you know pay our bills or whatever and so i know that when it comes to mental health and substance abuse a lot of people cannot afford to continue treatment which is a crying shame in the richest country in the world don’t get me started i don’t disagree yeah at least with the aca they finally forced them to do parity between physical health and mental health in terms of coverages because before that if i had a heart attack covered 80 20 after my deductible if i have a bipolar meltdown well you get six visits with a psychoanalyst this year yep yep it’s a challenge for sure and i know people are struggling with with mental health across the world especially in the middle of this pandemic because you know people just don’t know how to handle this and i’m and i’m not surprised and you know it’s again free resources are amazing like having you to talk to people all over the place and coming out and finding yourself on podcast and being the guest places in the tedx talks helping people you know that’s that’s the thing that’s that that i wish there was a way to quantify the number of lives that that you and your story will will have impacted over time and and i i want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about that’s this here because it’s such a a deep topic in our in our in our little niche here of the world that most people are afraid to talk about and i appreciate you being willing to come on and tell your story and talk to people and give helpful things to people so that we can we can be more equipped to deal with with kids in trauma well and please put my cell phone number in the show notes and like i said if you’re suicidal call the lifeline of texas text live who’s having a bad day call it crazy because or if there’s someone you love is having a bad day and you have no idea you know resources what do i do or how do i speak to them or you know what don’t i mean so i get calls like that where it’s not the person but it’s someone they love and they just want to do the right thing the best thing so i just give advice like nami you know or your child’s getting so effective but listen nandi’s got a 12-week course one night a week i’m telling you it’s life-changing it’s free so yeah and to the people in the foster system we have lots of kids that are affected by lots of things that we don’t always know what they are up front so yeah educating yourself is a little game changer yeah i would say mental health first aid take the foster children take the youth version because it’s all about young people and the signs and symptoms that was mental healthfirstaid.org right yep i’m sure they’re doing it by zoomer nowadays but they’re if let’s say the pandemic wasn’t raging if you put your zip code in to put a 25 mile radius i bet you’ll find a half dozen classes in the next month or so all over the place yeah i’ll make sure i’ve gotten i think most of these written down i’ll make sure all these websites and and all these pieces get put into the show notes so that people can find that and for some reason i’ve had some problem with apple podcast lately and the links don’t tend to work on their show notes for some reason i don’t know what i’m doing wrong i can’t figure that out so if that doesn’t work there you can always go over the website fostercarenation.com and you know you can just click on podcast notes you’ll find a picture that’ll probably look a lot like frank king and click on that when the show notes there will work yeah all these wonderful wonderful resources well you know it’s like it’s a matter of speaking up and educating see something say something suicide is the most preventable cause of death on the planet and eight out of ten people are ambivalent nine out of ten give men so that tells me we can and this is what i say at the end of every kingdom uh we can make we can make a difference we can save a lot and we can do it by doing something as simple as what we’re doing right this minute which is starting a conversation amen because conversation is is the is the key to to all of it if we hide from it and we pretend it doesn’t exist it just you know it can take down a lot of people that way yeah silence kills i’m afraid and the more we speak out about it and if you live with somebody who’s struggling with depression i always suggest you and the person adult you know a child of a certain age because there’s disturbing things in my tedx you have to make that decision but sit down and watch my first tedx a matter of laugh or death because what i’m doing is i’m trying to decode for neuro-normal people my thought process in terms of suicide how do you get there how do you get to that point and i’ve had a couple sit down where one spouse is depressed and the other is and then they watch it together and a friend of mine said he’s neuro-normal she’s got the brain and he’s watching her watching me when it gets done she never told anybody outside the family that she was living with depression very quiet about staying home mom on medication but it wasn’t you know she turns to him after seeing her on the street she goes first of all i didn’t think anybody talked out loud and b nobody goes on youtube we’re going to be distributed around the world and so it was a game changer for it was an epiphany and i have a callback latch when you can do that kind of thing once a month get together with all my crazy friends they’re called the crazy coffee glass we take our game faces off you know the ones we show the world and we’re just ourselves for now and she joined in the group and i mean it was a it was life-changing for her i think to realize how many of us are out there and that people talk about it openly and you know it’s it’s again it’s silence it kills yeah and destigmatizing any sort of suicidal thoughts or problems depression destigmatizing that is the first step in in that conversation so i appreciate you being willing to do that and share your with the world man because you know that’s something i don’t know how many people mention it probably more than more than a couple mentioned it to you but the number of lives affected uh if if you could had a way to quantify that i think it would probably probably have to to blow your your hair back a little bit to a number of people there yeah you know because with youtube i mean uh i’m sure that people i’ll never know never meet that it had an impact like that on just seeing somebody else you know in the same boat especially if you thought you were all alone yeah yeah and you know it’s amazing that that that generational effect that happens when you’ve helped one one person who then has kids and and and past has had help on down the line so the world will be different in 100 years by a long stroke just because of what you’re doing well i got a dm from somebody the other day somebody reached out on twitter to connect with and she said something on the order of i can’t believe it’s you because i’ve had the worst period of my life last fall and i stumbled on your youtube and i thought well if he can make it then she gave me the courage to keep on and still get sabbatical from her job said the best thing i ever did got my you know together and went back to work and you know i i thank you for being vulnerable and sharing your story and you know and saving my life so that’s my why that’s what gets me out of bedroom sounds like you’ve saved more lives than the guy in the restaurant
that’s still fascinating by just staring at
well they either snare or they take out their phones and they record it yeah and that’s what shocked me was because i’m running toward him it’s 300 people in this venue you’re supposed to have one of those aed’s you know uh the paddles with the and i screamed at the uh whoever was working the room for the venue get the aed this is what i hear we don’t have one
oh yeah somebody get a car battery and a set of jumper cables exactly i’m gonna have to kiss this guy oh god anyway guys thank you so much yeah we appreciate you coming on and talking with us today and spreading your wisdom because this this is a conversation that we believe needs to be started well and i’m glad you invited me because i mentioned that the other cop my my wife was a foster child the number of foster and the one foster mother that she’s been in contact with probably stay for a while so she wouldn’t be here or not for the foster care i’m grateful for all that they do
you
Leave a Reply