“I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since I Was Eighteen”

My Interview with Patch Adams

Firewalking Instructor, Master Trainer in NLP, and someone who has spent thirty years teaching people how to walk across hot coals and cold logic in equal measure.

There are a handful of conversations in my career that have genuinely stopped me in my tracks. As a certifying Master Trainer in Neuro-Linguistic Programming — trained directly by the pioneers of the field, Richard Bandler and John Grinder — and someone who has spent decades in rooms with senior leaders at companies like Regus, Haworth, and Celebrity Speakers International, I don’t say that lightly. I have interviewed CEOs, elite athletes, and change-makers who thought they’d seen it all. Few of them rearranged my thinking the way Dr. Hunter “Patch” Adams did, back in 2020.

You know Patch — or you think you do. Robin Williams played him in the 1998 film, red nose and all, and the popular image is of a clown-doctor who believed laughter was medicine. That’s true, but it’s the smallest part of the man. When I sat down with him, what came through wasn’t comedy. It was conviction. Patch has spent over fifty years running the Gesundheit! Institute, treating patients for free, and along the way he arrived at a diagnosis of modern life that I think every reader of this magazine needs to sit with.

“I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since I Was Eighteen”

Patch told me something that I’ve repeated in workshops ever since. At eighteen, he made a decision — not a wish, a decision — to dedicate his life to peace, justice, and care for people and nature. And he told me plainly:

“I’m now seventy-four. I haven’t had a bad day since I was eighteen, because I make me.”

I make me. Three words. If you’ve ever sat in one of my NLP sessions, you’ll know this is close to the bone of everything I teach about state control and personal responsibility — except Patch arrived there through decades of service, not a training manual. That’s the difference between knowing a technique and living a philosophy.

The Subject Schools Never Teach

Here’s where the conversation turned, and where I think Patch said something that wellbeing professionals like myself don’t say often enough, because it’s a little uncomfortable.

He pointed out that love — arguably the single most important thing in a human life — isn’t taught for even one hour across an entire school career, kindergarten through to graduation. Nowhere. And alongside it, he said, we fail to teach wonder, curiosity, passion, hope, and play.

Read that list again. Wonder. Curiosity. Passion. Hope. Play. Not one of those is a “soft skill” add-on — in my professional opinion, having built training programmes for some of the world’s most demanding corporate environments, those five things are the curriculum of a well-lived life. We spend twelve-plus years teaching people algebra and almost none teaching them how to be alive.

“I Don’t Believe There Is a Thing, Mental Illness”

This is the line that will raise eyebrows, and I want to give you Patch’s words rather than soften them, because context matters. He told me:

“I don’t believe there is a thing, mental illness. I think it’s the pharmaceutical company diagnosis and the multi-trillion-dollar-a-year [industry].”

Now, I want to be careful here, as I’m sure Patch would want me to be. He isn’t dismissing suffering — a man who has spent his life at the bedside of the desperately unwell would never do that. What he’s challenging is the framing. He’s asking whether we’ve taken something profoundly human — disconnection, grief, loneliness — and repackaged it as a chemical malfunction to be medicated, rather than a signal to be listened to and a wound to be healed with connection.

Whether or not you agree with him entirely, it’s a conversation worth having honestly, not defensively.

Seven & a Half Billion People & Still Lonely

The moment that landed hardest for me was this one. Patch, with that mischievous glint he’s famous for, said something like:

“How is it that anyone is lonely in a world of seven and a half billion people? It’s actually humorous — because if you are friendly and vibrant and alive, you can find friends anywhere, even if you don’t speak the language. Your eyes show people they’re safe.”

Your eyes show people they’re safe. I’ve built an entire career on the idea that communication is far less about words than we think — the tonality, the physiology, the state you walk into a room with. Patch, without ever having sat in an NLP certification, understood this instinctively. Loneliness, in his view, isn’t a population problem. It’s a permission problem — we’ve forgotten how to signal warmth, and how to walk toward strangers rather than away from them.

Photo by Kampus Production

What I Took Away

I’ve coached executives who’d spent decades building empires, and few of them carried Patch Adams’s ease with himself. What struck me, leaving that interview, wasn’t a technique or a training model — it was simplicity. A man who decided, at eighteen, who he was going to be, and then just… was that person, for fifty-six years running.

If there’s one thing I’d ask readers of Foyht to take from this piece, it’s Patch’s own prescription: teach the people around you wonder. Show curiosity to a stranger. Let your eyes tell someone they’re safe. It costs nothing, and according to a man who has spent his life healing people for free, it might be the only medicine that actually works.

Main – Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash