A disappearance, a diagnosis, and a career change. Told by Ali Bu Salah (EP 34).
Ali Bu Salah's closest friend disappeared from daily life. There was no argument, no dramatic event — the friend simply stopped being present. When Bu Salah eventually found him, the friend had been diagnosed with severe depression.
Bu Salah was studying engineering at the time. The experience of watching his closest friend vanish into an illness that nobody around them had the language or tools to address shook him deeply enough to abandon his degree. Within nine months, he had switched entirely to psychology.
What struck Bu Salah was not only his friend's condition but the absence of any infrastructure to deal with it. In Benghazi, severe depression was not something the immediate social environment knew how to recognise, name, or treat. The friend had not been ignored out of cruelty. He had been ignored because the people around him — Bu Salah included — did not know what they were looking at until it was clinical.
The story is the origin of Bu Salah's career in preventive psychology and his later social media work on mental health. The nine-month pivot from engineering to psychology was not a gradual interest. It was a reaction to a specific failure — his own failure to see what was happening to someone he was close to. His subsequent work, including the signature question "What lies within me that holds me back?", traces directly to this moment.
See: Ali Bu Salah