On Our Social Venture – Our idea

BASICALLY



We’re going to create a program that will make people addicted to doing things they can be proud of.

THIS WILL



Help people build an emotional resume that people can draw strength from in times of difficulty.

We hope a fundamental realization will hit them – you have enormous potential.

And through hard work, persistence, and the opportunities to pursue your passions in an environment that encourages constructive failure and embraces imperfection, you can unleash that potential.

HOW IT WILL WORK



Each participant will work with a mentor to design a “program” based on his/her interests and passions. Starting from simple concrete active baby steps, and eventually moving towards the miraculous, participants will develop real skills and gradually build a sense of self-worth by actively engaging in their passions.

WE WILL PROVIDE



The Opportunities: We’ll show you what’s out there. We’ll help you (re)discover your passions and help you design your “program” around those passions.

The Connections: We’ll bring in the talented cool people who will teach you what you want to know and help you do what you want to do.

The Community: We’ll give you the environment you need to succeed. We’ll push you to achieve, and encourage you to fail and learn from that failure (and each others’ failures) in the process. We won’t claim to have all the answers. We won’t do dogma.

FOR EXAMPLE



All your life, you (and three of your fellow participants), have wanted to try playwriting.

For whatever reason, you never got around to trying it. Maybe you didn’t feel you had the time. Maybe you didn’t have the money. Maybe you didn’t have the sand to ante up – you were intimidated and afraid to fail. Who knows.

Now we give you your shot. (And it’s just one among many – if you find you don’t like it, you can try something else, or try multiple things concurrently)

We bring in a local playwright (someone legit), and they work with you. You start simple – just a character sketch. Then you write your first line. Then you move on and write a scene – just one scene. Then you write another…and another…and another. And then you rewrite each scene over and over until it fits your standards (your new standards after you’ve worked with the playwright). Etc.

Until you realize you’ve finished your first short play.

Then you get together with your fellow participants – those who have the shared interest in playwriting – and together you write another short play, using what you’ve learned. Again, the playwright(s) guides you.

At a certain point, you guys find you’ve written a cool play. It’s not necessarily brilliant (maybe it is), but it’s not half bad either. Hell, it’s pretty damn decent, if you do say so yourself.

Then we bring in a group of local actors (legit people). They perform a show for you – maybe their own play. And then they perform your play. For you.

You could not be more thrilled to see this happen. You could not be more proud. You never in your life imagined you were capable of this. No one ever knew. You never knew.

But now you do.

And there’s no turning back.

***

Do you see where I’m going with this? The possibilities are endless. As exciting as they are to me, I won’t risk boring you with them.

I firmly believe that if you do enough things outside of your comfort zone – things you are passionate about, but perhaps never got to try – and you persist (w/guidance) through the stages where you inevitably will suck a little, eventually you will succeed a little at some of them. That fuels your confidence more and more, until you realize the immense potential that exists w/in you. In the right environment, this blossoming sense of self-worth can propel you to accomplish miraculous things, whether miraculous on a personal scale, or on society’s scale.

It’s a long gradual process, but it’s real.

Yes, we have kinks to work out. There’s a hell of a lot of stuff we have to work out.

Yes, we are young, and inexperienced, and lack “credibility.”

Yes, the stakes are high. Potentially life or death.

Will we move forward with our venture?

Absolutely.

I believe our venture will revolutionize the way depression is treated. If it doesn’t, oh well. We’ll learn so much from having tried it. And we’ll try something else, using what we’ve learned.

While I am rather fervently against therapy and medication as long-term solutions to depression, I recognize that they are useful to some people. In fact, my team often berates me for being so aggressive in my critiques of traditional interventions.

Let me make it clear once and for all – if therapy and medication work for you, stick with it. And to all the psychiatrists and psychotherapists who also are sympathetic human beings, and who devote themselves to helping their patients -  I have the utmost respect for you.

But there is no reason whatsoever not to have another option available.

Fundamentally, that is what we are – just another option.

You should know: This iteration of our idea is only ten or so days old. I only met my team 2 months ago. We’ve only been brainstorming for that long. We have so much to learn.

We would love nothing more than to hear your feedback. Be as harsh as you will, or as generous as you will. Above all, be genuine – that will be most useful of all.

You should also know:

If you’re gonna hate on me w/o providing constructive criticism…

Well, I listen to Chamillionaire (car radio) and very much identify:

"I admit it, I'm really 'bout to show you how I do

If you know that you a hater, this dedicated to you

You hatin' my last move, I'm way on my next move

See they hate to see you be successful"

-Chamillionaire in "Good Morning"

So there it is - our gift to the world. It's pretty simple, really, but elegant in its simplicity, I think.

Let us know what you think! And I wish you all the best for the coming new year!

-David

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On Our Social Venture – Core beliefs

Before I tell you our idea, I’d like to get down a few fundamental beliefs I hold in the arena of depression/depression treatment.

And just to be clear: Although every member of my team (Dan, Hari, Colin, myself) played a crucial role in creatively synthesizing our idea (I didn’t even come up with the core of our idea – Dan did), and although lines fuse and blur when it comes to who came up w/what (we’ve talked over so much and I’ve read so much there’s no way I can hold all the sources in my head), the views I put down here are mine alone to be responsible for – only I can be held accountable for them. In general, this goes for anything on this blog, of course.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m giving all due credit to my team and to anyone else who may have influenced me, but if you have a problem with anything on this blog, you have a problem with me. Don’t judge my team by my writing.

CORE BELIEFS (in no particular order)

1 Depression should only be thought of as an illness if it helps you to think about it that way. Given that depression operates on a spectrum, and that nearly everybody has experienced aspects of it at one point or another, things are already very imprecise.

Do NOT let a doctor’s (or your own) diagnosis trap you in a box. Do NOT rely on and cling to an identity as a “depressed person” unless it helps you to frame it as a struggle where you will ultimately win.

2 The human spirit is stronger than you know, stronger than any medical expert knows, stronger than anyone ever to have existed knew, and stronger than anyone who ever will exist will ever know.

You can (sometimes) thwart death through sheer will. There are medical annals that attest to this.

3 The medical industry and all medical/health professionals serve as means to an end, not as ends themselves. The same goes for medical (and all types of) credentials. Credentials are only useful in terms of the experience it took to acquire them.

I said experience – not time, not running through administrative hoops, not going through motions.

If the time it took to get your credentials proved useless, or you failed to learn from your experiences, or the world changed such that what you did learn became obsolete (this happens), then those credentials become entirely useless.

Even (and especially) the established professionals should hear out new ideas. After they hear them out, they’re free to dismiss them. I hold myself to this exact same standard. It may sound harsh, but we cannot afford stale egos amidst the crisis of now.

4 There should be a separation between person and idea. When I critique people, I try to focus on the merits/flaws of their ideas, or at least of their actions and how those actions represent them. I try not to attack them personally or make assumptions about them. Please do the same for me.

5 Root causes of depression (and the inability to defeat depression) must be addressed, not symptoms. I believe root causes include, but are not limited to:

-Lack of opportunity to express one’s unique self – to develop one’s innate genius (see my earlier post “In Defense of Individuality”)

-Stigma (more on this later)

-Lack of a sense of self-worth

-Hopelessness/sense of futility

-Perfectionism

-Fear of failure (goes along w/perfectionism)

-Inability to find and connect with “your kind of people,” whether because of physical/geographic barriers or mental/psychic barriers. “Your kind of people” meaning people who are passionate about similar things, who support you, who challenge you, etc. Think Robin Williams’ definition of “soulmate” in the movie Good Will Hunting: Someone who challenges you.

Etc.

6 The idea that chemical-imbalance-correcting miracle drugs or passive therapy will provide a long-term antidote to depression is pure horseshit. It mocks human agency.

And this is true even for the best psychotherapists and psychiatrists. Yes, talking and learning about yourself can be life-changing, and talking to wise intelligent people can provide eureka moments of clairvoyance for us (so the old saying goes, “10 minutes w/a wise man is worth 10 years of books"), and medication may help some people to some degree, but at a certain point you need to take action to change your life.

7 People have a fundamental desire to embrace their passions (Hari’s words, shared idea).

8 There is a disastrous stigma associated with traditional interventions, especially for young people (or at least some of them…or at least me). I know there is a distinction b/w stigmas w/identifying yourself as depressed, and stigmas w/seeking help – I’m going to focus on the second one here. So, aspects of this stigma/things that contribute to this stigma include, but are not limited to:

-I personally have felt condescended against by many psychotherapists and psychiatrists (and even by MD's who generally have very little training on the matter yet had the nerve to impose "help" on me in a definitive tone of voice), and in general I believe intellectual snobbery is a huge barrier to treatment.

-Many medical professionals seem to believe they have the solution to depression sitting right in their minds, extrapolated from piles and piles of textbooks and years and years of study and observation. Bad news for you guys: you’re wrong. We’re humans, not math riddles. There’s no one solution (nor one set of solutions, nor combination of pills/exercise/talking) for all people – there’s no panacea.

-When I go to a therapist, there’s just this horrible stuffy and lame and passive feel to the whole thing. I just get the wrong vibe.

-I don’t particularly like carrying around therapists' cards and appointment reminders in my wallet.

-If you’re going to set aside time during your day to fight depression, why not spend it doing something you like, rather than sitting in a therapist’s office? Yes, it’s still hard work, but you can focus your efforts where you want them to be, rather than where someone else tells you they should be.

Etc.

9 Traditional interventions were designed top-down. For example (and I know this is an extreme and outdated one), professionals used to diagnose people with mental health illnesses based on how they responded to medication…what a strange reversal…

Why not have college students design solutions for college problems?

Alright, that’s enough for now. I’m sort of hesitant to put down core beliefs as I’ve done here, because it seems to imply that they're the only core beliefs I have, and that they’re unchangeable – NOT the case.

Still, that should give you a primer and some understanding of where we’re coming from when we talk about our solution.

Read the next post for the (current version of the) idea itself.

-David

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