For many years Sergeant Kevin Briggs had a dark, unusual, at times strangely rewarding job: He patrolled the southern end of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a popular site for suicide attempts. In a sobering, deeply personal talk Briggs shares stories from those he’s spoken — and listened — to standing on the edge of life. He gives a powerfu...

Even when our lives appear fine from the outside, locked within can be a world of quiet suffering, leading some to the decision to end their life. At TEDYou, JD Schramm asks us to break the silence surrounding suicide and suicide attempts, and to create much-needed resources to help people who reclaim their life after escaping death. Resources: ...

Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy takes on a terrifying question: How does the Taliban convince children to become suicide bombers? Propaganda footage from a training camp is intercut with her interviews of young camp graduates. A shocking vision.

Is there someone in your life dealing with anxiety, depression or thoughts of suicide -- but is too ashamed to talk about it? Jeremy Forbes saw this happening around him, and now he's on a mission to teach people how to start a conversation about it. In this deeply personal talk, Forbes shares his approach to helping a group of traditionally sil...

Tanmay Bakshi realized that in order to prevent suicide, we need a better way of detecting patterns. For the last 3 years, Tanmay and his team have been developing an app that can pick up on irregularities in a person's online behavior to build an early warning systems for at-risk teens. His hope is that this app will help get teens in distress ...

Veterans in the United States take their own lives at an alarming rate. Suggesting new ways to prioritize mental health in the military, veterans advocate Charles P. Smith offers a data-driven plan to help prevent suicide and ensure service members get proper care before, during and after active duty.

What makes suicide one of the more common causes of death among young American men? Entrepreneur Rob Wang draws on his own experience of suicidal depression to explain how misguided notions of masculinity affected his mental health and describes his approach to helping other men in similar situations.

Kevin Breel didn't look like a depressed kid: team captain, at every party, funny and confident. But he tells the story of the night he realized that -- to save his own life -- he needed to say four simple words.

"The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment." In a talk equal parts eloquent and devastating, writer Andrew Solomon takes you to the darkest corners of his mind during the years he battled depression. That led him to an eye-opening journey across the world to int...

"Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop," says Monica Lewinsky. In 1998, she says, “I was Patient Zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.” Today, the kind of online public shaming she went through has become constant -- and can turn deadly. In a brave talk, she takes a hard look at our online culture o...

Tobacco use remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States, killing more people each year than alcohol, AIDS, car accidents, illegal drugs, murder and suicide combined. Follow health policy expert Mitch Zeller into the murky depths of the tobacco industry as he details the sordid history of nicotine addiction -- ...

After fighting overseas, 92 percent of American veterans say they want to continue their service. Meanwhile, one after another, natural disasters continue to wreak havoc worldwide. What do these two challenges have in common? In telling the story of his friend Clay Hunt, Jake Wood from Team Rubicon reveals how veterans can contribute to disaster...

Surgeon and author Sherwin Nuland discusses the development of electroshock therapy as a cure for severe, life-threatening depression -- including his own. It's a moving and heartfelt talk about relief, redemption and second chances.

Sue Klebold is the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two shooters who committed the Columbine High School massacre, murdering 12 students and a teacher. She's spent years excavating every detail of her family life, trying to understand what she could have done to prevent her son's violence. In this difficult, jarring talk, Klebold explores the...

Sebastian Junger has seen war up close, and he knows the impact that battlefield trauma has on soldiers. But he suggests there's another major cause of pain for veterans when they come home: the experience of leaving the tribal closeness of the military and returning to an alienating and bitterly divided modern society. "Sometimes, we ask oursel...

In April 2003, just as American troops began rolling into Baghdad, a shell smashed into the building author and war correspondent Jean-Paul Mari was reporting from. There he had a face-to-face encounter with death, beginning his acquaintance with a phantom that has haunted those who have risked their lives on battlefields since ancient times. "W...

Dixon Chibanda is one of 12 psychiatrists in Zimbabwe -- for a population of more than 16 million. Realizing that his country would never be able to scale traditional methods of treating those with mental health issues, Chibanda helped to develop a beautiful solution powered by a limitless resource: grandmothers. In this extraordinary, inspirati...

Growing up as a gay teen in Northern Ireland, Lyra McKee had her share of disagreements with the Church and, as a journalist in her 20s, found herself estranged from religious institutions. It wasn't until 2017 and an unexpected conversation about LGBTQ rights in an Orlando mosque that she found herself reckoning with the influence of religion o...

Depression is the leading cause of disability in the world; in the United States, close to ten percent of adults struggle with the disease. But because it's a mental illness, it can be a lot harder to understand than, say, high cholesterol. Helen M. Farrell examines the symptoms and treatments of depression, and gives some tips for how you might...

In this gripping talk, lawyer Jason McCue urges for a new way to attack terrorism, to weaken its credibility with those who are buying the product -- the recruits. He shares stories of real cases where he and other activists used this approach to engage and create change.

When a young woman texted with a heartbreaking cry for help, the organization responded by opening a nationwide Crisis Text Line for people in pain. Nearly 10 million text messages later, the organization is using the privacy and power of text messaging to help people handle addiction, suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, sexual abuse and more. ...

Exposing what life looks like in Afghanistan after a 20-year US occupation and the Taliban's stunning and rapid takeover, TED Fellow and documentary photographer Kiana Hayeri captures harrowing glimpses and multifaceted realities of a war-torn country. Through the lens of her camera, she documents devastation and deferred dreams -- but also resi...

Health care workers are under more stress than ever before. How can they protect their mental health while handling new and complex pressures? TED Fellow Laurel Braitman shows how writing and sharing personal stories helps physicians, nurses, medical students and other health professionals connect more meaningfully with themselves and others -- ...

Lindsay Amer is the creator of "Queer Kid Stuff," an educational video series that breaks down complex ideas around gender and sexuality through songs and metaphors. By giving kids and their families a vocabulary to express themselves, Amer is helping to create more empathetic adults -- and spreading a message of radical acceptance in a world wh...

For places that observe daylight saving time, gaining an hour of sleep every November -- or losing an hour every March -- doesn't just affect how well-rested (or caffeinated) people are. The effects of the semi-annual time change are far-reaching, drastically changing stroke and car accident rates, stock prices and more! Sleep scientist Matt Wal...

In this stunning spoken-word performance, poet and "freedom-forging futurist" Naima Penniman celebrates the wonders of the natural world and humanity's connection to it. "I wonder if the sun debates dawn some mornings," she says.

Social psychologist Thomas Curran explores how the pressure to be perfect -- in our social media feeds, in school, at work -- is driving a rise in mental illness, especially among young people. Learn more about the causes of this phenomenon and how we can create a culture that celebrates the joys of imperfection.

In a disturbing — but fascinating — walk through history, Frances Larson examines humanity's strange relationship with public executions … and specifically beheadings. As she shows us, they have always drawn a crowd, first in the public square and now on YouTube. What makes them horrific and compelling in equal measure?

Millions of images and videos are uploaded to the internet each day, yet we rarely see shocking and disturbing content in our social media feeds. Who's keeping the internet "clean" for us? In this eye-opening talk, documentarians Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck take us inside the shadowy world of online content moderators -- the people contract...

Two men, Estragon and Vladimir, meet by a tree at dusk to wait for someone named "Godot." So begins a vexing cycle where the two debate when Godot will come, why they're waiting and whether they're even at the right tree. The play offers a simple but stirring question- what should the characters do? Iseult Gillespie shares everything you need to...