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But I wasn’t sure how kids would respond. So I spoke to those kids that day, not even sure if they could hear me or whether they would care if they heard me. I was fearful the campaign might end that day. When I finished speaking, there was dead silence – I mean dead silence. It was very awkward, very embarrassing. And the principal was behind, then he got up on the dais to shake my hand, said thanks for coming. And then after four seconds of silence where no one had moved – it looked like an oil painting – suddenly those kids stood up in those bleachers on both sides of that gym and applauded for almost a min- ute. They were whistling and clapping – you could hear it bouncing off the block walls. I said, they’re not applauding me. They don’t know me. They’ll never see me again. But what they are saying is, I agree with that guy. Why aren’t we talking about it, normalizing it, supporting people who are suffering? That happens almost every time I go out. What are we doing? One day I went to one of the most exclusive private high schools in America – in the world, for that matter. I was asked to come because they wanted to have a mental health awareness day with no classes. I spoke to the entire student body and when I finished speaking at this very elite school where the Ivy Leagues were clearly within reach, they stood up and applauded. Not about me. It’s about this. And when I had them sit down, the senior boy who introduced me, who had lost his mother to suicide six months earlier, asked this question: If there’s anyone in this auditorium this morning, he said, who either has a mental health problem or someone you love has a mental health prob- lem – those were the only two categories – would you please stand up? I was new to the campaign. I thought, no one’s going to stand, not here. After about thirty seconds – there were hundreds of students – all but twenty-five were standing. I thought, even here. It’s hiding in plain sight. I told that story to a public high school auditorium on the seacoast of New Hampshire about six months later, and when I told them the question that boy asked his classmates, I wasn’t asking those kids, I was sharing what he did, and when they heard that question, they started standing up. Everyone was standing. The principal said, I’m shocked by this. I said, I’m not. Not anymore. Not anymore. We need to start talking about it, normalize it, demythologize it. This generation of young people, I love these kids. I mean that. They’re amazing. They’re smarter than I was, they’re more worldly wise than I was. I don’t want to read about more suicides. I don’t want to see kids suffering and not getting help. It’s immoral, the way we treat mental illness in Amer- ica. Doesn’t need to be that way. The Center for Disease Control does a survey every two years of high school students. I didn’t know about it. I know about it now. Goes to hun- dreds and hundreds of high schools across this country. In 2019, before COVID, they issued this report. Kids take this survey anonymously, by the way: What’s your year in school, what’s your sex, what’s your age? That’s it. In 2019, before COVID, 46.6 percent of high school girls in the United States were depressed. The question isn’t are you depressed? The ques- tion is have you been sad or hopeless for two consecutive weeks or longer in the last twelve months so that you weren’t able to engage in nor- mal everyday activity? Twenty-six percent of high school boys, twen- ty-five percent of high school girls in that sur- vey said they had given serious consideration to ending their own lives in the previous twelve months. Fifteen percent of those kids, those young women, said they had made plans to kill themselves. Eleven percent had attempted sui- cide one or more times. Are we okay with that? The numbers are higher after COVID, but they weren’t great before COVID. I know those sta- tistics are real because I’ve hugged them in places I’ll never go back to, the kids who open up to me, only because they know I won’t judge them or shame them or blame them. That’s all it takes. 41 JOURNAL