If you read most first aid guides, the last step in treating someone who’s gotten injured or sick is always: get the victim to professional medical help.

But what if you found yourself in a situation where hospitals were overcrowded, inaccessible, or non-functional? What if you found yourself in a grid-down, long-term disaster, and you were the highest medical resource available?

Dr. Joe Alton is an expert in what would come after the step where most first aid guides leave off. He’s a retired surgeon and the co-author of The Survival Medicine Handbook: The Essential Guide for When Help is NOT on the Way. Today on the show, Joe argues that every family should have a medical asset and how to prepare to be a civilian medic. We discuss the different levels of first aid kits to consider creating, from an individual kit all the way up to a community field hospital. And we talk about the health-related skills you might need in a long-term grid-down disaster, from burying a dead body, to closing a wound with super glue, to making an improvised dental filling, to even protecting yourself from the radiation of nuclear fallout.

• AoM Article: How to Use a Tourniquet to Control Major Bleeding
• AoM Article: The Complete Guide to Making a DIY First Aid Kit
• AoM Article: How to Suture a Wound
• AoM Article: What Every Man Should Keep in His Car
• AoM Article: Improvised Ways to Close a Wound
• AoM Podcast #869: The Survival Myths That Can Get You Killed With Alone Winner Jim Baird

• Doom and Bloom website
• Doom and Bloom on YouTube
• Doom and Bloom on FB

Over the last decade, there's been an increase in the number of people, particularly young adults, who struggle with low moods, distractibility, and anxiety and consequent difficulties with getting their life on track and making progress in work, friendship, and romance.

In addressing these difficulties, people are often given or adopt a mental health diagnosis, and look for a solution in therapy and/or medication.

My guest isn't opposed to these remedies. She is herself a clinical psychologist who's maintained a practice for a quarter century that specializes in treating clients in their twenties. But Dr. Meg Jay, who's also the author of The Twentysomething Treatment, believes that a lot of what young adults, and in fact adults of all ages, struggle with, aren't disorders that need to be treated, but problems that can be solved.

In the first half of our conversation, Meg explains what's behind the decline in mental health for young adults and how it's bigger than just smartphones. We discuss the dangers of self-diagnosis, the potential downsides of using medications to treat mental health issues, and why she advocates for "skills over pills." In the second half of our conversation, we talk about how mental health gets better when we get better at life, and what skills twentysomethings, and many older adults, need to develop, including the skills of thinking, feeling, working, socializing, and even cooking. We also discuss how porn is affecting the young men in her practice and an alternative to being a self-assurance junkie.

• Meg's last appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #51 — The Defining Decade
• AoM series on not wasting your twenties
• Study on whether antidepressants work better than placebos
• AoM series on depression
• Sunday Firesides: Congratulations, You’re a Human!
• AoM Podcast #741: The Exercise Prescription for Depression and Anxiety
• AoM Podcast #772: How Long Does It Take to Make Friends (And How Does That Process Work, Anyway)?

• Meg's website

When we think of rituals, we tend to think of big, inherited, more occasional religious or cultural ceremonies like church services, holidays, weddings, and funerals. But as my guest observes, we also engage in small, self-made, everyday rituals that help us turn life's more mundane moments into more meaningful ones.

In the The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, psychologist and Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton explores the way our DIY rituals shape, and enhance, our lives. We take up that survey on today's show. Michael explains the difference between a habit and a ritual and how individuals and families create unique "ritual signatures" even within more standard rituals like holidays. We discuss the different areas of life in which rituals show up and what they do for us, including how they help us cope with uncertainty, savor life, and connect to the past. We get into the function DIY rituals perform in romantic relationships, from deepening intimacy to facilitating a break-up, the role that "kinkeepers" play in keeping a family together, the tricky business of combining family traditions when people get married, how to know when a family tradition should be retired, and much more.

• AoM series on the power of ritual
• AoM Article: How to Turn an Ordinary Routine Into a Spirit-Renewing Ritual
• AoM Podcast #505: A Man’s Need for Ritual
• AoM Podcast #835: The Power of Ritual
• "Deja Vu" by Olivia Rodrigo

• Michael's website — including the "Habit or Ritual?" quiz