Well, if anybody says country music isn't powerful, let me tell you this: I got there because my father's passion for Johnny Cash and a song, "A Boy Named Sue."
And we need to make it happen, because every single one of us -- woman, man, gay, straight, disabled, perfect, normal, whatever -- everyone of us must be the very best of ourselves.
Well, I was born with a rare visual condition called achromatopsia, which is total color blindness, so I've never seen color, and I don't know what color looks like, because I come from a grayscale world.
I've got nightmare disorder, which is categorized if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued or declared a failure, and all my dreams involve people chasing me down the street going, "You're a failure!"
And I think it's actually quite rare to have both malingering and generalized anxiety disorder, because malingering tends to make me feel very anxious.
Childhood bipolar -- children as young as four are being labeled bipolar because they have temper tantrums, which scores them high on the bipolar checklist.
That's interference. Communication requires sending and receiving, and I have another whole TEDTalk about the importance of conscious listening, but I can send as well as I like, and you can be brilliant conscious listeners.
So you start to hear these abusive voices, but you don't hear one abusive voice, you hear about a thousand -- 100, 000 abusive voices, like if the Devil had Tourette's, that's what it would sound like.
Now, for you who may be less familiar with the term "autism, " it's a complex brain disorder that affects social communication, learning and sometimes physical skills.
And across the world, every 20 minutes, one new person is diagnosed with autism, and although it's one of the fastest-growing developmental disorders in the world, there is no known cause or cure.
An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you -- (Applause) One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder.
It's a very extreme point of view, but it points to the reality that people engage with the life they have and they don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated.
So for the last few minutes, what I want to do is change gears and talk about some really new, breaking areas of neuroscience, which is the association between mental health, mental illness and sleep disruption.
We include everyone: the young, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally challenged, the blind, the elite, the amateur runners, even moms with their babies.
Some patients were going into therapy with one problem -- maybe they had depression, an eating disorder -- and they were coming out of therapy with a different problem.
(Laughter) But instead, I remained a glorified piece of furniture that you could only recognize from the back of my head, and it became clear to me that casting directors didn't hire fluffy, ethnic, disabled actors.
I want to live in a world where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning.
I had never had a Jewish friend before, and frankly I felt a sense of pride in having been able to overcome a barrier that for most of my life I had been led to believe was insurmountable.
A world where our kids are free to become the best versions of themselves, where the way they think they look never holds them back from being who they are or achieving what they want in life.
Just like the women I photographed, I had to overcome many barriers to becoming the photographer I am today, many people along the way telling me what I can and cannot do.
Umm El-Saad, Asma and Fayza, and many women across the Arab world, show that it is possible to overcome barriers to education, which they know is the best means to a better future.
Instead of blaming parents for causing autism, Asperger framed it as a lifelong, polygenetic disability that requires compassionate forms of support and accommodations over the course of one's whole life.
And they include terrible things -- debilitating muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal distress -- but now you're thinking, "Five percent, not very likely it's going to happen to me, I'll still take the drug."
Many of them had experienced early hardships, anywhere from poverty, abandonment, death of a parent while young, to learning disabilities, alcoholism and violence.
Jocelyne Bloch: The biggest obstacles are regulations. (Laughs) So, from these exciting results, you need to fill out about two kilograms of papers and forms to be able to go through these kind of trials.
And it should not have escaped you that the reason I paired the prisoner with his arms out with Leonardo da Vinci's ode to humanity is that that prisoner was mentally ill.
実力社会とは 貴方に 才能や 精力 技能があれば 何の障害もなく トップに立てる社会です
A meritocratic society is one in which, if you've got talent and energy and skill, you will get to the top, nothing should hold you back.
There's an important difference and distinction between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not I'm disabled.
Despite the fact that each and every one of these disorders originates in the brain, most of these disorders are diagnosed solely on the basis of observable behavior.
And then I came across a team at Harvard University that had taken one such advanced medical technology and finally applied it, instead of in brain research, towards diagnosing brain disorders in children.
Well, if anybody says country music isn't powerful, let me tell you this: I got there because my father's passion for Johnny Cash and a song, "A Boy Named Sue." 