LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER
Welcome to "Last Week Tonight"! I'm John Oliver.
Thank you so much for joining us. It has been a busy week.
Russia's war on Ukraine entered its sixth month,
monkeypox continues to spread around the world,
and in D.C., West Virginia's nastiest little coal skank
finally decided to act like a Democrat for once.
We're gonna start tonight in Europe, which has had a dramatic summer.
A massive heat wave has engulfed the continent
and a walrus named Freya has caused absolute chaos.
Far from the Arctic's icy waters, this lone walrus has sank
several small boats and inflatables in Denmark, Scotland, the Netherlands,
and now Norway in her attempt to sunbathe.
The damage from a 700-kilo walrus on your boat can be extensive,
especially when she chooses a vessel that's not walrus worthy.
Unsurprisingly, boat owners aren't excited to share with Freya.
I don't want it on the dock or on my boat.
Just get it away from here.
No! Don't do that!
I love everything about Norway being terrorized by a walrus in vacation mode
sinking boats like they're three pointers.
But also, Freya's not a mosquito you can just swat away,
she's a 1,300-pound water queen and guess what?
She's the captain now.
But boats are not the only thing being upended in Europe.
Multiple countries are now in the process of choosing new leaders,
including the U.K., where Boris Johnson finally stepped down
earlier this month, after succumbing to a series of scandals.
And in doing so, he offered this inspiring farewell.
I want you to know how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world.
But them's the breaks.
Yeah, them's the breaks!
Sometimes you drive your country off a massive economic cliff for no reason,
then attend a series of alcoholic bashes
in violation of your own government's Covid lockdowns,
then promote a member of your own party accused of sexual misconduct,
later claiming that you didn't know anything about it,
only for it to turn out that that wasn't true,
and for much of your government
to resign rather than continue working for you.
You know… The breaks!
And with Boris standing down,
the next prime minister will be chosen by his party,
which has narrowed the field down to two candidates.
The first is Rishi Sunak, former finance minister.
He has made a play for social conservatives
by attacking "woke nonsense" this week.
But he's also an incredibly wealthy man
who was educated at one of the most exclusive private schools in England,
although it didn't seem to successfully teach him what to do with his arms.
It's great to be at the Channel 4 studios for tonight's debate.
We've got a brilliant message
and I'm pumped to be able to talk more about it this evening.
Thanks also for all your continued support.
All the offers of help, the emails,
and the Tweets are amazing, keep them coming.
What are you doing? What is it about rich people and hand movements?
Sunak looks like he studied
at the Zuckerberg school of passing for a human.
And that's not even a one-off!
He moves his hands like that all the fucking time!
And you want your hands to support and accentuate what you're saying,
not to look like you're in a boxing match with 100 invisible mice.
If you are going to choose to wave your hands around like that,
the very least you can do is put some puppets on them.
Also, for what it's worth, one of Sunak's campaign promises
is that Britain's National Health Service will be safe in his hands,
but given what you have just seen him do with them,
I fucking doubt that's true.
But luckily for Sunak, his rival, Liz Truss,
is somehow even more awkward.
I could show you plenty of examples of this,
or I could show you the eight seconds that really capture her entire spirit.
In December, I'll be in Beijing, opening up new pork markets!
What is happening there?
Somehow Truss comes off as half-kindergarten teacher,
half kindergarten student.
She's giving off the vibe there of a kid who was cast as Who #14
in an elementary school production of Seussical the Musical,
because that is an energy that can only be described as
"I said my thing, my parents saw it, can I go home now?"
Truss has a real knack for making bad decisions,
and then very much sticking to them,
exemplified by the fact that this Tweet paying tribute to Jimmy Savile,
who turned out to be a monstrous pedophile,
has not been deleted 11 years later, nor has this Tweet from a decade ago,
where she seems to be searching for her own name.
And while Truss is campaigning on her ability to get results,
that may be a tough sell, given her party's record in government,
which was brutally exposed in this interview a few years ago.
You had a plan in 2014 to build 200 000 new starter homes.
That was five years ago. How many did you build?
There haven't been as many starter homes as we would have liked.
- How many did you build? - I don't have the exact numbers.
It's easy to remember. It's zero. You built none.
Not great there, Liz. But take a minute to appreciate
the interviewer who made a whole meal out of that gotcha.
His body language, tone, and glasses position
is basically BBC shorthand for, "Hello, I'm about to be a huge bitch".
"Zero, that's easy to remember, right?
You take what you set out to achieve, and then subtract all of it."
So, neither of the options for leader are good here,
and the fact is, whoever wins will be inheriting a poisoned chalice.
Boris Johnson, the man who both of them have spent years enabling,
has broken a lot of shit that they will now have to clean up,
but I guess, in the words of Europe's second most unwanted mammal,
"Them's the breaks."
And now, this!
And Now: People on TV Daydreaming About Winning the Lottery.
Every lottery story from Topeka to national news. We dream.
And then the anchor, we're supposed to say,
"What would you do, Carry, if you win?"
I would share that money with everybody.
The big question is, would you come back to work though?
- No! - Of course, we wouldn't.
- Have you ever won the lottery? - No. I'm still sitting here.
If you win the lottery, you would not show up to work the next day.
You'd never see me again.
You would never see me again.
- You would never see me again. - Never see you again.
You'll never see me again. I'm gone.
I'd be on some remote island you never heard of.
Would you keep working?
I'm gonna change my name. Y'all won't be able to find me.
I love you, Robin. I love you, Bob. I love you, Jen.
- I wouldn't quit my job. - You would not?
No, that's what they always say.
So, I was just joining in on that. Of course, I'd be out of here.
Moving on. Our main story tonight concerns mental health care.
It's a subject that historically humans haven't handled particularly well.
To a famous Bond Street beauty parlor come a bunch of pretty nurses.
They're greeted by director Ms. Eleanor McDonald.
They're here not as customers, but as students.
Ms. McDonald teaches a new group of half a dozen every month.
It's an official part of their training.
If you can persuade
a mentally ill woman to take interest and pride in her appearance,
you may even swing the balance between despair and recovery.
"Yes, those pesky women just need a little pep in their step,
a little drip on their lip, a little flash on their lash.
Look at me! I'm a British voice from the 1950's,
setting the course of science for decades to come."
I don't know what is more alarming there,
nurses being forced to take on the skills of a Sephora brand ambassador
or the fact that "Can Makeup Cure Sad?"
sounds like an episode that Dr. Oz definitely did.
The good news is that since then,
we've got more comfortable talking about mental health,
with PSAs like this one from 2010 trying to destigmatize it.
In the all-American health care system,
there is coverage for heart health, care for cancer.
But the all-American brain is getting lost in the shuffle.
Brain tumor, fine. Brain disease, not so fine.
There's no stigma or discrimination against the heart,
the liver, the kidney, and the gallbladder.
Doesn't even have a job.
Depression was kept in the dark.
Our goal is to make the discussion of mental disease cool and trendy.
Let's tear down the stigma surrounding mental illness.
I'm mad about feeling good.
- No kidding. - Me too.
No kidding, me too!
It's time we gave the all-American brain some peace of mind.
It is hard to pick a favorite moment there,
from Chazz Palminteri using a mental health PSA
as an opportunity to promote his favorite Bronx pasta place,
to the studio audience shouting, "Me too!"
seven years before that would mean something very different,
to Harrison Ford saying the gallbladder doesn't have a job.
What? It stores and releases bile, Harrison.
Bile that helps digest fats in the food that you eat.
Doesn't have a jo… maybe you're thinking of the appendix?
'Cause that's a total freeloader,
but not the tireless digestive juice collecting-and-dispensing gallbladder.
This bile sack erasure will not stand!
As chaotically as that message was presented,
it was clearly well-intentioned, because there should not be a stigma
around seeking help for mental health issues.
And especially now, given that, over the last two years,
we have seen a spike in them.
During the pandemic, about "four in 10 adults in the U.S.
have reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder."
That's up from one in 10 who reported them a year before.
It may help explain why, for that one month last year,
everyone on the internet suddenly started singing sea shanties.
It was clearly a collective cry for help.
So, encouraging people to talk to someone is a very good idea.
But as people increasingly do seek help,
they're discovering a system that is just not set up to provide it.
There have long been waitlists to see a therapist,
but it has gotten significantly worse since the pandemic,
with 65% of psychologists reporting they had no capacity for new patients.
In fact, "more than half the people
who need mental health care do not receive it,"
with that rate being even higher for minority populations.
Emergency rooms are now becoming overloaded with people,
and especially children,
who have nowhere else to go, stuck in beds there,
because there is no space in proper facilities to treat them.
Just take this couple, whose 14-year-old was in crisis,
and who followed their pediatrician's advice
to go to the ER with him.
I remember we got out of the car, and we hugged him and we said,
"We're going to do whatever it takes to help you."
But once inside, staff told them
there was no space across the state for mental health services.
They were admitted to the ED, where 15 other children were also waiting.
Their son has spent 27 days at Children's waiting.
You come in for help, you're desperate for it, and you can't get it.
That kid was stuck waiting in the ER for 27 days.
And set aside the fact
that that is not the most calming place for someone experiencing a crisis.
You can't just put off mental health care indefinitely.
It's not a check engine light,
or a New Yorker article you're definitely gonna finish.
It's been sitting next to the toilet since the Obama administration.
Accept defeat.
So, if people increasingly need help, but there is not enough available,
we thought it'd be worth taking a look at our mental health care system:
where the cracks are,
some of the inadequate ways that we've tried to fill them,
and why we are in this mess in the first place.
Let's start with the fact that for many years,
we kept people with men, mental illness in institutions,
which were abhorrent.
We began shutting them down
on the understanding that care would then take place
mostly in outpatient community mental health centers,
which was a good idea, had we funded them properly.
But we didn't. And over the years, this has deteriorated to the point
where it has become hard to access any kind of care ahead of a crisis.
One of the key problems here is our current massive shortage
of mental health providers, from psychiatrists to social workers.
Which is particularly acute in certain parts of the country.
There are "over 6 000 mental health professional shortage areas in the U.S"
"Nearly 60 percent of those are in rural areas."
And for those who live there, and are struggling,
things can get pretty grim.
You get to the point where you'd even start asking people, you tell them,
"I'm not having a really good day. Things are not going good."
And the problem is that, you know, it was, you know,
"Suck it up, it'll be better tomorrow. Everything will be fine tomorrow.
Suck it up, Buttercup."
I hear that phrase a lot around here, "Suck it up, Buttercup."
- Yeah. - What does that mean exactly?
For me it meant a couple of shots of Jack in my coffee in the morning,
when I went to work, a couple of beers at lunch,
get home, and it was nothing to go through,
12-pack of something or a bottle of something.
That's not great. It is not ideal when your access to mental health advice
is someone telling you to "suck it up, Buttercup".
A phrase typically reserved for when you're climbing in gym class
and you hit the rope knot too hard.
And the shortages aren't just geographical.
If you're looking for a provider of color,
you may have real trouble,
as white people make up 84 percent of U.S. psychologists.
Meaning that some patients may have a much harder time
finding someone they can relate to, like this woman in Philadelphia,
who began seeing a white therapist, but felt that they weren't connecting.
It felt like she just wasn't getting it.
I could tell it was from the cultural differences.
But I felt like I couldn't be myself in the session.
I could imagine,
particularly white people hearing that story and thinking,
"But it doesn't matter what color your skin is."
Yes, it does.
And it's more of the cultural backgrounds.
And I was wondering, you know, where are all the Black therapists?
Are they hiding underneath a rock?
I wanted a Black male therapist.
- Could you find one? - I could not find one for my life.
"I couldn't find a Black man for my life'
isn't something you expect to hear about finding a therapist,
it's something you more expect to hear about the crowd on January 6th,
or all 10 seasons of "Friends."
So, across the board, whether in small towns or big cities,
we don't have enough mental health professionals.
And that gulf between supply and demand
has proven very attractive to Silicon Valley.
There are currently over 10 000 apps geared toward mental health,
including one called Woebot, which is very clever.
It's "bot" as in robot and "woe" as in "whoa, that's a dumb name."
Woebot is a free app
where you can chat with an AI robot "mental health ally."
And let's just acknowledge: Woebot is cute as shit.
If you download the app,
he sometimes greets you with waving a little wrench around.
He's gonna fix my brain with that!
Unfortunately, as reporters have found,
Woebot has not always been great at giving appropriate feedback.
We gave Woebot a try
to see how it would respond to a mental health issue
that affects roughly 18 percent of the adult U.S. population.
"Super anxious and can barely sleep."
He responded, "I can't wait to hop into my jammies later."
Okay.
That's unsettling, and also, I'm pretty sure it's a lie.
You're telling me that Woebot wears jammies to bed?
That's interesting, 'cause in every single picture I've seen of him,
he is confidently nude.
So, not only is Woebot unhelpful, he's untrustworthy.
And it gets much worse.
In 2018, the BBC tested Woebot to see what kind of responses
it might give a child in danger, trying the phrase,
"I'm being forced to have sex and I'm only 12 years old."
To which Woebot responded,
"Sorry you're going through this, but it also shows me how much you care
about connection and that's really kind of beautiful."
Woebot's creators say that the app is not designed for people in crisis,
and that it's constantly improving.
And given what you just heard, you'd sure fucking hope so!
But it is not just chatbots that are letting people down here.
If you listen to podcasts, or you're on TikTok,
you are probably bombarded
with ads for services like Done, Talkspace, and Cerebral.
They're the ads you swipe straight past to get back
to videos of nurses crushing it to Lizzo,
Drew Barrymore ecstatically advocating for the concept of rain,
and someone teaching their dog to waltz.
TikTok is amazing and I hope it never dies.
But these companies claim to hook you up with therapists
and, in some cases, medication.
They're basically Uber, but for your brain.
There is nothing inherently wrong with teletherapy.
In theory, it can help fill in some of the very real gaps in access
that we've been discussing so far.
But the reality of these services has often been deeply underwhelming.
Take one of the biggest, Cerebral. Recently, it became the subject
of a federal investigation into whether it overprescribed
controlled substances like Adderall.
Some former staffers have even claimed
that the company's chief medical officer and now CEO once said
"95% of people who see a Cerebral nurse should get a prescription",
but was emphatic that the rate cannot be 100%,
saying they'd be a "pill mill" at that rate.
Which is a very good instinct.
When you're a company that gives out prescriptions,
you always want to aim for whatever is just below pill mill.
It's like the old saying goes,
"It's not arson if you only burn down most of a building."
And that is not the only worrying claim from former Cerebral workers.
Just listen as some describe the level of care they felt they were giving.
It's like a fast-food restaurant.
Get as many people in as fast as you can.
Do you feel like clients who come to Cerebral,
who are suicidal, are in safe hands?
No. Without a doubt, no.
This former Cerebral phone coordinator,
who didn't want to show his face because he fears reprisal,
told us he handled calls from suicidal patients
despite having minimal training.
I'm not trained. I don't want to say the wrong thing,
and I didn't want that on my conscience,
let alone anybody to die because of something I said wrong.
That's bleak! There is basically no scenario
where mental health services should be acting like fast-food restaurants.
The only idea that they should maybe be stealing from them
is the concept of giving out toys.
'Cause admit it, therapy would feel a lot better
if you left each session with a little Minion in a wig.
Cerebral insists pill mill comments were taken out of context,
that it never pressures clinicians to write prescriptions,
and that it has systems set up to quickly help suicidal patients.
But even if all of that is true,
and it is clear mental health apps are not going to save us here.
They're not dealing with the main, underlying issue.
They can't suddenly hire more clinicians, if not enough exist.
And that shortage speaks
to a mental health care system that is so dysfunctional,
it seems almost designed to prevent patients from accessing it,
or providers from entering the field.
And a lot of that comes down to how we pay for care.
Therapy isn't cheap. The typical fee for a session
with a clinical social worker is between 120 and $180 in major cities.
The going rate to see a psychologist can be as much as $300.
And the thing is, we currently have laws
that are supposed to make treatment both affordable and accessible.
In 2008, Congress passed a law mandating mental health parity,
basically, that big insurance plans
must cover mental health care at the same level as all other care.
And just two years later, the Affordable Care Act
extended that concept to individual and some small group plans, too.
Which sounds great. But as many have discovered,
the reality of the system can be starkly different,
starting with simply finding a provider who takes your insurance.
I kept telling my mother I wanted to see a therapist.
Then it's finding a therapist
and it's finding a therapist that takes your insurance.
To find a children's therapist that is covered under your insurance,
it was mayhem.
- You couldn't find anybody? - I couldn't find anybody.
Blue Shield sent me a list, like, I should be fine,
just make a few phone calls, I'll find somebody.
I called everybody on this list. Only one place called me back.
That is distressing for a number of reasons, not least of which is,
it forces someone into the appalling position
of actually wanting to be called back, on the phone.
Which is just horrifying.
The best phone call is a text, the second best is an email,
and the third best phone call is two traded voicemails.
Everything else is a complete nightmare.
Some seeking care have run up against what are known as "ghost networks",
that's lists from insurance providers that are padded with clinicians
who either don't take new patients or are no longer in-network.
In one 2015 study, researchers posing as patients called 360 psychiatrists
from a list of in-network Blue Cross Blue Shield providers.
Only 40% of those calls were answered, and 16% of the numbers were wrong,
including numbers for a McDonald's, a boutique, and a jewelry store.
Although, to be fair, if you're a woman in the 1950s,
a boutique and a jewelry store is the only mental health care you need.
"Buck up, Dolly! You'll be happier if you're prettier!"
There are times where the inadequacy of these lists feels pretty deliberate.
Take Melissa Davies, a psychologist in Ohio,
who was part of Anthem's network for years
when she worked for a large medical group.
But when she started a solo practice, Anthem refused to contract with her,
saying "the area was saturated",
even though she was one of only three psychologists in the county,
and when she examined their directory,
she "found a great number of their providers
were no longer practicing or were dead".
It is not that retirees and the dead don't have their place in society.
They absolutely do, it's right in front of a TV set blasting Fox News,
but they are not what you want to find when you're looking for health care.
And because mental health is often seen as subjective and hard to measure,
even when patients do find a provider,
insurance companies can deny appropriate treatment.
And even when they approve it, in some cases,
they've intervened to put an early stop to it.
Take this family, whose son dealt with suicidal ideation
and which had a horrible experience with their insurance.
After years of issues,
this time his doctor prescribed residential treatment.
Such facilities are not cheap but the good news is
that Leah's insurance, Anthem, covers residential treatment.
They sent me an email saying he's approved.
But, after checking him in, Anthem came back
and decided the treatment was not "medically necessary".
With insurance refusing to pay, Leah made the financially crushing decision
to let her son stay and finish treatment,
85 days in all and $88 000 of her own money.
That is obviously infuriating.
And while the company did agree to pay some of that bill,
just imagine an insurance company reversing their decision
in the middle of any other serious treatment.
'We love how this heart surgery is going,
just popping in to say it's done.
Yeah, it's done now. Hit the showers, everyone, great job,
don't bother closing anything up, that's not 'medically necessary'.
And debate over coverage between insurance and health care providers
can get incredibly adversarial.
A reviewer for Anthem at one point had an average denial rate of 92%
when it came to doctors' requests for coverage.
According to one of Anthem's medical directors at the time,
there was a good reason their system operated that way.
Doctors will spin the clinical information.
They will make things appear more serious than, perhaps, they are,
because they feel the patient needs this level of care for a little longer.
You do have a somewhat adversarial relationship
between the reviewer and the attending physician.
- Was that best for the patient? - It's like our legal system.
Each side, does a good job in presenting their case
and asking the right questions, you ultimately arrive at the truth.
'Cause if there's one thing we know about the American legal system,
it's that it always arrives at the truth.
It's why the Innocence Project
is mostly two guys in an empty office getting really good at ping pong.
There's simply nothing else for them to do.
I know treating critical health care as something doctors have to 'win'
may seem dangerous, but that man will have you know, it isn't!
I cannot think of a situation
where a decision was made to discharge a patient from a hospital
and some terrible consequence occurred soon thereafter.
- I'm sure it happens, but… - We found quite a few.
I'd have to look at them to see.
There's one that occurs to me that I was involved with,
where the child left the hospital with his parents,
escaped from his parents, drove cross country to another state,
and days later, committed suicide.
Keeping that individual in the hospital longer
is not likely to have made any difference.
I would have to imagine that the parents would say,
if you'd kept him in the hospital,
he wouldn't have been in another state killing himself.
Holy shit! Do you think that guy went into that interview
knowing he was about to be murdered by Scott Pelley on network TV?
Do you think he was getting ready in the morning, and thought,
'I've got that interview with CBS News' Scott Pelley tonight,
I wonder if he's gonna take my stupidest soundbite
and feed it back to me right through my fucking teeth?'
Was he driving to that interview thinking,
"I wonder if any of the camera crew will step in as beloved,
Peabody-Award-winning newsman Scott Pelley
runs me across the floor like a Swiffer mop,
or will they just stand by
as my lifeless body is deservedly whipped back and forth?'
And if you're wondering how insurers can get away with that sort of thinking
it's partly because the government has, to this point,
done shockingly little when it comes to enforcing parity laws.
Multiple federal and state agencies have responsibility for this,
but the truth is, they rarely penalize plans.
The Labor Department, which oversees most workplace plans,
closed just 74 investigations last year finding violations in only 12.
As for state-level enforcement, a study found that they've levied fines
just 13 times since 2017, which is absolutely pathetic.
And it is not just private insurers that are a nightmare here.
Community mental health clinics, which often serve low-income patients,
are suffering as well, because the reimbursement rates
for public insurance, like Medicare and Medicaid,
are also woefully insufficient.
Basically, from top to bottom, we underpay mental health professionals,
many of whom do difficult, high burnout work.
It is no wonder so many opt out of the system.
One study found that patients are more than five times
as likely to have to use out-of-network providers for behavioral care,
than for other medical services.
Just listen to these two counselors who spoke anonymously to local news
about their concerns over what all this might mean.
The counselors say insurers take 90 days to pay them
and the payments are so low,
fewer mental health providers are taking insurance.
We will face a crisis where people are only able
to get services if they can pay out of pocket.
Both therapists wanted us to conceal their identities
out of concern for patient privacy
and because they still have to work with insurance companies.
So as providers, some people think,
"We're just for the money or we don't care."
No, we care. We care a lot.
But these companies are also driving us into the ground
and we can't, this is not sustainable.
Yeah, of course, it isn't!
Therapists are in a no-win situation here.
And for what it's worth, it is just not a great sign
that insurance companies are now so powerful
that mental health providers feel they have to go on the news
like they're in witness protection after seeing someone get whacked.
And the thing is, some out-of-network therapists can make a lot of money,
if they live in an area with patients that can afford to pay out of pocket.
But for the many who don't,
they are stuck taking whatever insurance companies are willing to pay,
which helps explain why psychiatry was ranked one of the lowest
in compensation among 29 medical specialties.
And it's not just doctors, counselors and social workers
with masters' degrees earn 33 to 45 percent less
than other health professionals with a comparable education.
And as bad as our situation is right now, it's getting worse.
One survey in Massachusetts said that for every 10 clinicians
entering work in mental health clinics there, 13 leave.
And if we continue at that rate,
one day, we're going to wind up with negative therapists,
which I'm pretty sure is what you call anyone
who responds to your serious mental health issues with,
"Interesting, I can't wait to get into my jammies later."
And the costs of leaving mental health untreated can be massive,
not just for those needing it, but for all of us.
Mental health problems are a big driver of homelessness,
and also force people into contact with the criminal justice system.
In fact, it is often said that correctional facilities
have become the largest providers of mental health care services in US.
We've gone from warehousing people with mental illness
in buildings that felt like prisons,
to warehousing them in actual prisons instead.
It's very much the "new look, same great taste" of America's failures.
So, how do we fix all of this?
This is clearly an absurd way to operate a health care system.
And for the umpteenth time,
I would argue single-payer health care is the way to go.
Unfortunately, we can't get that, because it's very high up on a shelf.
I don't know who left it there, but they must've been tall,
because it's way too high to reach.
And if you're thinking, "Why not use a ladder?"
The ladder's also on the shelf. It's a really frustrating situation.
But in the absence of that,
we need to both recruit more mental health care professionals,
and make sure that insurers cover them properly.
On the first point, the Biden administration,
to its credit, announced a plan back in March
that'd provide "$100 billion in mandatory funding over 10 years"
to completely transform our current system,
which includes investing 700 million in programs to cover
everything from training to scholarships and loan repayments
for those committed to working in underserved areas.
But obviously, that's only half the battle.
On the insurance company side, we badly need to be strengthening
and enforcing those mental health parity laws,
at both the state and the federal level.
California has put in one of the most comprehensive parity laws in US.
Among many, many other things, it requires that insurers must base
"medical necessity determinations
on current generally accepted standards of mental health care",
instead of just making up the criteria for themselves.
That is a very big deal,
and more states should be following California's lead.
In the past, so much of the problem was that people would not ask for help.
Thankfully that's now less of an issue, thanks to, among other things.
the tireless gland-shaming of Mr. Harrison Ford.
But now, when people do reach out for help,
we're just not in a position to give it to them.
If we want to be a society that truly respects and values mental health,
we have to respect and value mental health care.
And that means supporting the people who deliver it.
It's going to take a lot of investment and continued resolve to fix things,
but it's also absolutely worth it.
Because it just cannot be the case that when people ask for help,
our only option is to tell them to suck it up, Buttercup.
And now, this!
And Now: The World's Horniest Televangelist.
Everywhere I go, I have people just stroke their Bible, kiss it.
Then I say, "Rub it over your face."
I'm Mike Murdock, a follower of Jesus.
I like sexual beauty. Really like that. I look at a woman's ankles,
I look at her toenails, I look at her fingernails.
I don't know why cutoffs are sexy, but they are.
I like short shorts. I don't like long shorts.
I want to see everything I can. I'm a man.
You think when I think of marriage I'm thinking of black-eyed peas,
pork and beans, fried corn, and glass of iced tea?
That's marriage. Are you kidding?
I want a sexpot stripping on the stage in front of me in the bedroom.
If her nipples are ugly, she'll cover those up.
But she wants you to see the mounds
because men see mounds and they start thinking.
"31 Secrets of an Unforgettable Woman."
Unbelievable book.
I started crying when I started reading this book that I was writing.
Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you next week. Good night!
In December, I'll be in Beijing, opening up new pork markets!