Speaker 1: More eighteen month old children recognize the McDonald's m than
Speaker 1: know their own last name. Welcome to the One You Feed.
Speaker 1: Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 1: thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 1: you are what you think ring true, and yet for
Speaker 1: many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf m. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on
Speaker 1: this episode is Johan Harry and this is his second
Speaker 1: time on The One You Feed podcast. He's the New
Speaker 1: York Times best selling author of Chasing the Scream, which
Speaker 1: has been adapted into a feature film. Johan was twice
Speaker 1: named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International UK.
Speaker 1: He's written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times,
Speaker 1: and others, and he's a regular panelist on HBO's Real
Speaker 1: Time with Bill Maher, which is a show. I love
Speaker 1: his new book, his Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real causes
Speaker 1: of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions. Hi Johan, Welcome to
Speaker 1: the show. Hi Eric, it's really good to be back
Speaker 1: with you. I should just preemptively apologize to your listeners
Speaker 1: that I am trying to give up caffeine and failing. Basically,
Speaker 1: I would I would ideally have caffeine running into my
Speaker 1: sins on I V Drip seven. So if I seem
Speaker 1: a little bit lower energy the last time you spoke
Speaker 1: to me, that that is the reason. It's not that
Speaker 1: I'm slowly lapstick into a comba or something wonderful. Well,
Speaker 1: we're thrilled to have you back. We had you on
Speaker 1: to discuss your book, Chasing the Scream, and I love
Speaker 1: the book and the conversation, and now we're here to
Speaker 1: talk about your new book, Lost Connections, Uncovering the real
Speaker 1: causes of depression and the Unexpected Solutions. And we'll jump
Speaker 1: into that in a second, but let's start like we
Speaker 1: always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking
Speaker 1: with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two
Speaker 1: wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One
Speaker 1: is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
Speaker 1: bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second
Speaker 1: and looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start us off by asking you
Speaker 1: what that parable means to you and your life and
Speaker 1: in the work that you do. You know, it's so
Speaker 1: interesting because I think I think about this parable differently
Speaker 1: now than I did when we spoke, I guess three
Speaker 1: three years ago, because it's something I learned in the
Speaker 1: research for my book. So everyone listening to the show
Speaker 1: knows that junk food has kind of taken over our
Speaker 1: diets and made us physically sick. Right. I say this
Speaker 1: with no sense of superiority as someone who basically lived
Speaker 1: on KFC for like ten years in my twenties. But
Speaker 1: what's interesting is there's equally strong evidence that a kind
Speaker 1: of junk values have taken over our minds and made
Speaker 1: us mentally sick. For thousands of years, philosophers have said,
Speaker 1: if you think life is about money and status and
Speaker 1: how you look to other people, you're going to feel terrible,
Speaker 1: right from Confucius to Plato round down right. But interestingly,
Speaker 1: no one had actually scientifically studied this question until an
Speaker 1: incredible man I got to know, called Professor Tim casser
Speaker 1: Because it um not college in Illinois who did this
Speaker 1: really interesting and important research. So it had already been
Speaker 1: established before Professor Cassa that there are basically two kinds
Speaker 1: of human motivation, right. Put it crudely, imagine you play
Speaker 1: the piano. If you play the piano in the morning
Speaker 1: because you love it and it gives you joy, that's
Speaker 1: an intrinsic reason to play the piano. You're not doing
Speaker 1: it to get anything out of it. You're doing it
Speaker 1: because that experience is the experience you want to have. Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: imagine you play the piano, you know, because your parents
Speaker 1: are really pressuring you to be a piano maestro, or
Speaker 1: in a dive bar that you can't stand, to make
Speaker 1: the rent, or to impress a woman. I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe there's some piano fettershift out there, Right, that would
Speaker 1: be an extrinsic reason to play the piano. Right, You're
Speaker 1: not doing it for the thing itself, You're doing it
Speaker 1: to get something out of it, right, something external saying
Speaker 1: external to the experience. Now, obviously we're all a mixed
Speaker 1: of internal and external motivations. But Professor Cassa showed a
Speaker 1: few really interesting things. One is, as a culture, we
Speaker 1: have become much more driven by these external what I
Speaker 1: think of his junk values, and you can see, I mean,
Speaker 1: he gives lots of evidence. But even something as trivial
Speaker 1: as you know, go to a music concert now and
Speaker 1: you'll notice about half the people will just spend the
Speaker 1: whole time not being present at the concept, but just
Speaker 1: filming it on their phones a video they will never watch, right,
Speaker 1: because if you want to watch Beyonce, there's great clips
Speaker 1: on YouTube. Why are they doing that? They're doing that
Speaker 1: to display that they're having experience in order to be
Speaker 1: envied by other people. They that rather than having the experience,
Speaker 1: they're externally displaying that they're having the experience and suppressed.
Speaker 1: The cast A showed firstly that we've all become much
Speaker 1: more driven by these external values. And secondly, and I
Speaker 1: think really importantly, Um, the more you're driven by these
Speaker 1: external values, these junk values, the more you're driven by
Speaker 1: how you look to other people, how much money you've got,
Speaker 1: your status, the more you will become depressed and anxious.
Speaker 1: It's a quite powerful effect. It's been shown in over
Speaker 1: two dozen studies now, and I think it relates to
Speaker 1: the parable on which your show is built in a
Speaker 1: in a really interesting way, because I think not so
Speaker 1: much in terms of individuals, but as a culture, as
Speaker 1: a society, what have we chosen to feed? Right? And
Speaker 1: you can see there's an interesting little experiment that was
Speaker 1: done in the late seventies. It's a really simple experiment.
Speaker 1: You take a bunch of five year olds and you
Speaker 1: split them into two groups. The first group is shown
Speaker 1: two advertisements for a specific toy whatever the equivalent, like
Speaker 1: pepper Pig was in can't what it was, and the
Speaker 1: sa I thought that must be an English thing. I've
Speaker 1: never heard of pepper pig, like Dora the Explorer or whatever.
Speaker 1: All the kids in my life are slightly too old
Speaker 1: now for me to up to date with these tally
Speaker 1: tubbies whatever. Right, And the second group of kids kids
Speaker 1: are split into two groups first group have shown two
Speaker 1: advertisements for a toy, the second group shown no advertisements.
Speaker 1: And then at the end, all the kids are told, Okay, kids,
Speaker 1: you've got a choice. Now. You can either play with
Speaker 1: a nice boy who doesn't have any toys, or you
Speaker 1: can play with a nasty boy who's got the toy
Speaker 1: that was in the advertisement. The kids who haven't seen
Speaker 1: the advertisement choose the nice boy who doesn't have any toys.
Speaker 1: The kids who've seen just two advertisements choose the nasty
Speaker 1: boy who's got the toy. What does that tell you?
Speaker 1: Just two advertisements prime to these kids to choose an
Speaker 1: inanimate lump of plastic over the possibility of kindness and connection.
Speaker 1: Everyone listening to your show has seen more than two
Speaker 1: advertisements today, right more. I mean, we're so immersed in
Speaker 1: this machinery, even the moment we're born, that feeds the
Speaker 1: extrinsic parts of us, right, that tells us the way
Speaker 1: to be happy is to buy staff, to consume more.
Speaker 1: Eighteen month old children recognize the McDonald's m than know
Speaker 1: their own last name. Right, That's that's how that's how
Speaker 1: deeply we're immersed in this machinery. And as Professor Cassiput.
Speaker 1: It's me. We're raised from the moment we're born in
Speaker 1: a machinery that's designed to get us to neglect what's
Speaker 1: good about life, right, that's designed to get us to
Speaker 1: live in this extrinsic hollow way driven by these junk values.
Speaker 1: So in a sense I'm interested in. Obviously, there's a
Speaker 1: degree to which individuals make some choices within this system,
Speaker 1: and we can choose what to feed or not to feed.
Speaker 1: But to me, what's more interesting is how did we
Speaker 1: build and why maintain this machinery that feeds the worst
Speaker 1: parts of us. That's designed. You know, the whole point
Speaker 1: of advertising is to make us feel inadequate, right, That's
Speaker 1: that's what it's designed to do until you buy the product,
Speaker 1: and then it's got to be careful. You've got to
Speaker 1: quite quickly feel inadequate again, right. I think a lot
Speaker 1: about you know, where I grew up, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of normal suburb of London. You know there's a couple
Speaker 1: I know who lived there. Still, who are people I love,
Speaker 1: people close to me, I go see them. They live
Speaker 1: so purely by these values, these these consumers values, so
Speaker 1: they work really hard to buy this stuff that they
Speaker 1: see in advertisements, and they display it on Instagram and
Speaker 1: on Facebook, and people comment going, OMG, so jealous. And
Speaker 1: then they're puzzled that they don't feel good and they
Speaker 1: think I was just I didn't buy the right thing.
Speaker 1: So they work even harder. They buy another junk thing
Speaker 1: they don't need, and they display that, and they're constantly
Speaker 1: puzzled by their own despair, their own pain, because although
Speaker 1: they don't put it quite like this, there's an implicit
Speaker 1: sense of the moment, but what, I'm doing everything I
Speaker 1: meant to do, right, why do I feel so bad?
Speaker 1: It's a sense I'm doing everything I'm meant to do.
Speaker 1: Why do I feel so bad? And so that was
Speaker 1: the kind of first thing that came to mind, A
Speaker 1: very long answer in response to this parable you read, Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I really identified with that section of the book about
Speaker 1: junk values, and I also related with you know, later
Speaker 1: in the book you sort of reference back to that,
Speaker 1: and you say, you know what I've been told, how
Speaker 1: bad these are for us. I understand it. I've done
Speaker 1: all the research, and yet I feel pulled by them,
Speaker 1: and I just find that to be so true. In
Speaker 1: my case. It's really the reason that I try and
Speaker 1: stay away from any sort of commercial TV because I
Speaker 1: fall prey to in a very subtle way. It's not
Speaker 1: like I suddenly am like, well I need that Budweiser, right,
Speaker 1: But what I start to think is what's important is
Speaker 1: how do I look? How does my girlfriend look? You know?
Speaker 1: Am I on a beach? Am I? You know? I
Speaker 1: I just suddenly internalize those things in a in a
Speaker 1: very um stronger way than I would think, and I
Speaker 1: just kind of noticed it about myself, and I really
Speaker 1: register with with what you're saying. With that, that's so true.
Speaker 1: What you're saying because before advertising sells, as any particular
Speaker 1: product it sells is the idea that your problems can
Speaker 1: be solved through buying. Right. That's the kind of under message,
Speaker 1: and you can see how that often sold in this
Speaker 1: kind of self affirmation. You know, even our shampoo bottles
Speaker 1: tell us you're worth it, right, So you can see
Speaker 1: how this happens. There's an absolutely implicit approach to life embedded.
Speaker 1: And as Professor Cassa says, our motivation is bragile. Right.
Speaker 1: We all have intrinsic motives and we all have extrinsic
Speaker 1: junk motives, and of course you need both, right, of course,
Speaker 1: but he said very easily extrinsic motives can crowd out
Speaker 1: the more meaningful motives in it. And it sounds strange
Speaker 1: because at one level it's banale. It's a cliche to say, Look,
Speaker 1: no one listening to your show is going to lie
Speaker 1: on their deadbed and think about all the things they bought. Right,
Speaker 1: they will think about moments of meaning and connection. But
Speaker 1: we are immersed in a propaganda system that is designed
Speaker 1: to get us to neglect that that insight, and it's
Speaker 1: not the only thing that's going on, but this is
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why we have a depression and
Speaker 1: anxiety epidemic. And Professor Cass, along with an academic called
Speaker 1: Jill Twinge, showed that the amount of GDP in the
Speaker 1: US that is spent on advertising correlates with teenage anxiety.
Speaker 1: So as GDP spending on advertising goes up, teenage anxiety
Speaker 1: goes up. As it goes down to age anxiety goes down. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be clear. This is one of
Speaker 1: many causes of depression anxiety I write about in the book,
Speaker 1: but I do think it's an important one. I think so,
Speaker 1: I mean that actually there's lots of things in the
Speaker 1: book that relevant to the parable you tell, but that's
Speaker 1: just one thing. So let's back up a little bit
Speaker 1: to the idea of the book, and then I want
Speaker 1: to talk about depression in general, because your book is
Speaker 1: basically saying that, you know what, a lot of us
Speaker 1: have been sold a story that says, the reason we're
Speaker 1: depressed is because there's something chemically wrong in our brain.
Speaker 1: And so the primary thing that a lot of people
Speaker 1: are given is an antidepressant for that. And and what
Speaker 1: you're saying is that by and large, the biggest contributor
Speaker 1: to our depression are these nine different causes that you name,
Speaker 1: and that our brains and our genes and the chemicals
Speaker 1: are a small part of that. Or even to put
Speaker 1: it slightly different, the horse has already left the barn
Speaker 1: with these other causes, right, and then the chemical changes
Speaker 1: come along with that. And I really want to explore
Speaker 1: that because that I did a couple of things to me.
Speaker 1: One is I agree with so much of it wholeheartedly,
Speaker 1: and I fought with it all through the book, and
Speaker 1: I think you did too. And I think that's interesting because,
Speaker 1: like you, I have been on antidepressants for a long time.
Speaker 1: I'm in the process of weaning off of some right now,
Speaker 1: but I would say by and large, I think they
Speaker 1: have been positive thing for me. And so right out
Speaker 1: of the gate, I want to make sure that we
Speaker 1: say this, because I know you say it too. We
Speaker 1: this is not a conversation that is telling anybody, No
Speaker 1: matter what the rest of what you hear is that
Speaker 1: you should get off your medicine, that medicine is bad,
Speaker 1: any of that. That's not what we're going to be saying.
Speaker 1: What we're gonna be saying is we need to look
Speaker 1: more holistically at depression and anxiety and not have all
Speaker 1: the focus on that one little thing, and then people
Speaker 1: can draw their own conclusions. But a lot of the
Speaker 1: criticism I've seen about your book is people who think
Speaker 1: that's what you're saying. And I agree with you. You
Speaker 1: are in no way saying that. But I just want
Speaker 1: to be really clear with it, upfront with our audience. No, no,
Speaker 1: that's true, and to be fair to the people who
Speaker 1: say that, they do admit they haven't read the book.
Speaker 1: So yeah, But but I think to go to the
Speaker 1: wider thing the word question asked, which is really important.
Speaker 1: So there were these two mysteries that were really haunting
Speaker 1: me that made me write this book. And actually it's
Speaker 1: a sign of how, like you say, how much I
Speaker 1: struggled with this, how afraid I was to write this,
Speaker 1: to go and investigate this, that actually I wanted to
Speaker 1: write this book seven years ago and I started, in
Speaker 1: fact started writing it three and a half years ago.
Speaker 1: And the reason why is I figured it would be
Speaker 1: easier for me to write a book about the war
Speaker 1: on drugs that required me to go and spend time
Speaker 1: with hit men for the Mexican drug cartels, then it
Speaker 1: would be to look into this story about my own depression.
Speaker 1: That's how afraid I was of it. And there were
Speaker 1: these two mysteries that were really hanging over me. That
Speaker 1: The first was I'm thirty nine years old. Every single
Speaker 1: year that I've been alive, depression and anxiety has increased
Speaker 1: in the United States and across most of the developed world,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to understand why, what what's going on here? Right?
Speaker 1: And the second thing is is you alluded to before
Speaker 1: when I was a teenager, I went to my doctor.
Speaker 1: I explained that I had this feeling like pain was
Speaker 1: kind of bleeding out of me and I couldn't control
Speaker 1: it or regulate it. And my doctor told me a
Speaker 1: story that I now know did not match the best
Speaker 1: science then and does not match the best science now.
Speaker 1: He said, we know why people feel this way. There's
Speaker 1: a chemical called serotonian in people's brains makes them feel good.
Speaker 1: Some people are naturally lacking it. You're clearly one of them.
Speaker 1: All we need to do is give you this drug.
Speaker 1: In my case, it was but it's called Axilent in
Speaker 1: the United States, and you'll be all right. So I
Speaker 1: started taking paxil and experienced to really significant boost in
Speaker 1: my mood. My depression went away. A couple of months later,
Speaker 1: maybe three or three months later, I started to feel
Speaker 1: the sense of pain coming back. I went back to
Speaker 1: my doctor. He said, I didn't give you a high
Speaker 1: enough dose. He gave me a high dose again. I
Speaker 1: felt a significant boost. Again, this feeling of pain came back,
Speaker 1: and I was really in this cycle until I was
Speaker 1: taking the maximum possible does that you're legally allowed to
Speaker 1: take that for thirteen years, at the end of which
Speaker 1: I was still depressed, and I was experiencing all sorts
Speaker 1: of horrible side effects. And what happened to me fit
Speaker 1: into this wider picture. So I went on this long
Speaker 1: journey for the book. I traveled over forty thou miles.
Speaker 1: I wanted to meet the leading experts in the world
Speaker 1: about what causes depression and anxiety, what alo and also
Speaker 1: just people with very different perspectives. From an Amish village
Speaker 1: in Indiana, because the Amish have very low levels of depression,
Speaker 1: to to a city in Brazil where they bound advertising
Speaker 1: to see if that would make people feel better. To
Speaker 1: a lab in Baltimore where they're giving people silocyby and
Speaker 1: the active component magic mushrooms to see if that would help.
Speaker 1: And I think, as you said, that the opposite. I
Speaker 1: learned a huge number of things, but to me that
Speaker 1: the kind of core of it is until I went
Speaker 1: to my doctor when I was a teenager, I thought
Speaker 1: my depression was all in my head, meaning I was
Speaker 1: just weak I needed to man up. And then for
Speaker 1: the next thirteen years I thought my causes of my
Speaker 1: depression were all in my head, meaning it was a
Speaker 1: chemical imbalance in my brain. But what I learned is
Speaker 1: the scientific evidence for nine causes of depression anxiety. Two
Speaker 1: of them are indeed biological. They're very real, and they're
Speaker 1: important to talk about. There your genes, and there are
Speaker 1: real changes in your brain that happened. I don't think
Speaker 1: they should be described as a chemical imbalance for reasons
Speaker 1: we can talk about. But the other seven causes are
Speaker 1: not in our heads. They're actually factors in the way
Speaker 1: we live, and once you understand them, that opens up
Speaker 1: very different kinds of antidepressants are about solving those problems.
Speaker 1: We should be offered alongside, not instead of alongside chemical andity.
Speaker 1: Depressant is aware of radically expanding the menu of options
Speaker 1: and expanding our understanding of what's happening to us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about how I've dealt with depression
Speaker 1: because in some ways it is spot on with what
Speaker 1: you do, and in one other way it is very
Speaker 1: very different, and I just think it's an interesting conversation.
Speaker 1: So I have long believed that taking a pill for
Speaker 1: depression is not gonna do the job sufficiently, and so
Speaker 1: I've long had a series of things that I felt
Speaker 1: like I need to do to treat depression in my life.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting because they line up very much in
Speaker 1: some ways with your different causes and reconnections. I just
Speaker 1: sort of stumbled into them over time, I've got like
Speaker 1: a list of about twelve or fifteen things that I
Speaker 1: keep track of every day. Now I don't do all
Speaker 1: twelve or fifteen every day. My goal is just to
Speaker 1: do a good number of them consistently. And I know
Speaker 1: that that really really makes the difference in whether I'm
Speaker 1: depressed or not. So on one hand, totally on board,
Speaker 1: and you know, I'm a living proof that trying to
Speaker 1: work with these causes makes a big difference. So that's
Speaker 1: where total alignment. And then there's this other way that
Speaker 1: I deal with it, which is very, very different, and
Speaker 1: that is that when I inevitably feel like I hit
Speaker 1: a cycle of feeling a little bit more depressed, so
Speaker 1: it almost feels physical to me. It almost just feels
Speaker 1: like I just can feel it come on. And I'm
Speaker 1: not really interested in anything. The things that I normally
Speaker 1: love I don't care about. You know, I can't think
Speaker 1: of a book to read, I can't think of a
Speaker 1: song to listen to. And so what I've learned to
Speaker 1: do over time with that is almost the exact opposite
Speaker 1: of look for causes. I've come to treat that and
Speaker 1: I don't I'm not saying this is right by any stretch.
Speaker 1: I'm just talking about kind of what I've done, and
Speaker 1: and I've talked about this on this show that in
Speaker 1: those moments where it feels like a brief sort of
Speaker 1: cycle through something, I've learned to treat it like having
Speaker 1: a cold. And what I've done is I've just sort
Speaker 1: of said, you know what, let me make sure I'm
Speaker 1: doing the things that are on my list, let me,
Speaker 1: you know, let me make sure I'm doing the things
Speaker 1: that i know help my depression. And then what I'm
Speaker 1: not going to do is fall into an existential crisis
Speaker 1: about whether the direction of my life is correct or
Speaker 1: all of that because of a small cycle of depression.
Speaker 1: So on one hand, I treat it very actively, and
Speaker 1: on the other hand, so I would say I treat
Speaker 1: the thing as a whole very aggressively and very actively,
Speaker 1: and then I treat individual incidents, which are usually a
Speaker 1: couple of days, almost exactly the opposite by going, you
Speaker 1: know what, I'm not going to make a big fuss
Speaker 1: out of this. It comes, it goes, not a big deal.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to examine all of my life. And
Speaker 1: I just think it's interesting that that I've kind of
Speaker 1: ended up in that spot with it after having worked
Speaker 1: with it for so many years. That's a really interesting
Speaker 1: and aloquent way of putting it. I think that's exactly
Speaker 1: right about when you change the wider framework, there will still,
Speaker 1: of course be fluctuations and how you cope that. It
Speaker 1: makes me think about one of the causes and one
Speaker 1: of the solutions that are right about in loss connections.
Speaker 1: So we are the loneliest culture that has ever been.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a study that ask Americans how many
Speaker 1: close friends do you have whe you can call on
Speaker 1: in a crisis, And when they started doing the study
Speaker 1: years ago, the most common answer was fine. Today the
Speaker 1: most common answer is none. There are more Americans who
Speaker 1: have nobody to turn to than any other option when
Speaker 1: things go wrong. I was thinking about this a lot
Speaker 1: in the last few weeks because one of the people
Speaker 1: who taught me so much about this, an amazing man,
Speaker 1: Professor John Cassiopo at the University of Chicago, but sadly
Speaker 1: just died. He was it wasn't an old man. It's
Speaker 1: terrible loss, but he was the leading expert in the
Speaker 1: world on loneliness. Professor Cassiopo proved a few really important things.
Speaker 1: One of them was for a human being, being acutely
Speaker 1: lonely is a stressful It releases as much of the
Speaker 1: stressful amone cortisol as being punched in the face by
Speaker 1: a stranger. And a lot of his work was about, well,
Speaker 1: why why is that? What's going on there? And he
Speaker 1: said to me, you know, why do we exist. One
Speaker 1: of the reasons that you and I are able to
Speaker 1: have this conversation, Eric, is because our ancestors on the
Speaker 1: Savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They
Speaker 1: weren't bigger than the animals they took down. In a
Speaker 1: lot of cases, they often went faster than the animals
Speaker 1: they took down, but they were much better at banding
Speaker 1: together into groups and cooperating. And just like being, he's
Speaker 1: evolved to need a high humans evolved to need a tribe.
Speaker 1: And if you think about those circumstances, if you were
Speaker 1: separated from the tribe, in the circumstances where we evolved,
Speaker 1: you were depressed and anxious for a really good reason.
Speaker 1: Right you were flooded with stress and regrison you're about
Speaker 1: to die. Probably it was a very powerful signal to
Speaker 1: get back to the tribe. We are the first humans
Speaker 1: ever to try to live without tribes. It's making us
Speaker 1: feel terrible, and Professor Cassie, I've approved this was a
Speaker 1: major factor in causing our depression epidemic. One of the
Speaker 1: heroes of my book is a wonderful doctor called Sam Everington.
Speaker 1: As you can tell from my weird downtown a b Boys,
Speaker 1: I'm British, although I spent a lot of time in
Speaker 1: the US and um Sam is is a doctor in
Speaker 1: a poor part of East London where I lived for
Speaker 1: a long time. And Sam was really uncomfortable because he
Speaker 1: had loads of patients coming to him with depression and anxiety.
Speaker 1: And like me, he's not blanketly opposed to chemic clanted depressants.
Speaker 1: He thinks they do play good rather for some people.
Speaker 1: But he could just see firstly that his patients were
Speaker 1: often depressed perfectly good reasons, like being really lonely, and
Speaker 1: secondly that while the antidepressants could take the edge off
Speaker 1: that for some people, which had value, for most of
Speaker 1: his patients, it was not solving the problem. So he
Speaker 1: decided to pioneer a different approach. One day, a woman
Speaker 1: came to him called Lisa Cunningham. Lisa had been shut
Speaker 1: away in her home with crippling depression and anxiety for
Speaker 1: seven years. And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry our
Speaker 1: Karen giving you these drugs. I'm also going to prescribe
Speaker 1: something else. There was an area behind the doctor's surgery.
Speaker 1: It was known as dog Shit Alley, which gives you
Speaker 1: a sense of what it was like. Backed onto a
Speaker 1: park and Sam said to Lisa, what I like to
Speaker 1: do is come and turn up twice a week. I'm
Speaker 1: going to turn out and support you. There'll be a
Speaker 1: group of depressed and anxious people. We're going to turn
Speaker 1: Dogshit Alley into something good. Right first meeting they had,
Speaker 1: Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety. But a couple
Speaker 1: of things happened. The first thing was Lisa discovered as
Speaker 1: the weeks went on, they had something to talk about
Speaker 1: that wasn't how terrible they felt. Most of the time,
Speaker 1: we offer depressed people drugs or we give them the
Speaker 1: opportunity to go and talk about their pain, both of
Speaker 1: whichever real value. But here they decided something else completely different.
Speaker 1: They decided they were going to learn gardening. They started
Speaker 1: to put their fingers in the soil. They started to
Speaker 1: learn the rhythms of the seasons, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a
Speaker 1: very powerful antidepressant. We can talk about that if you want.
Speaker 1: The second thing that happened is they began to form
Speaker 1: a tribe, and they did what human beings do when
Speaker 1: we formed tribes. They started to solve each other's problems.
Speaker 1: To give you the most extreme example, there was a
Speaker 1: guy in the program who was sleeping on the local
Speaker 1: public bus at night because he'd been thrown out at
Speaker 1: his home. People in the group were like, well, of
Speaker 1: course for depressed sleeping on a bus. They started pressuring
Speaker 1: the local authority to get him a home. They succeeded.
Speaker 1: It was the first time they've done something for someone
Speaker 1: else in years. It made them feel great, the way
Speaker 1: Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom,
Speaker 1: we began to bloom. There's a study in Norway of
Speaker 1: a very similar program, which is part of a growing
Speaker 1: body that evidence that found it was more than twice
Speaker 1: as effective as chemicaliented depressants in reducing depression. I think
Speaker 1: for a kind of obvious reason, it's something I saw
Speaker 1: all over the world, from Sydney to San Francisco to
Speaker 1: Saint Paolo, the best and most effective responses to depression
Speaker 1: were the ones that deal with the reasons why we're
Speaker 1: so depressed and anxious in the first place, and to
Speaker 1: relate that to what you're saying. It's not that within
Speaker 1: that program Lisa didn't have bad days. She did have
Speaker 1: bad days. But the difference between having a bad day
Speaker 1: in a context where you are held and valued and
Speaker 1: having a bad day in a context when you are
Speaker 1: isolated and alone is all the difference in the world.
Speaker 1: And that's just one of the causes of depression anxiety.
Speaker 1: I'm right, aback, So I think you're right that certainly
Speaker 1: no one is suggesting or maybe there are some people,
Speaker 1: but they're foolish that, you know, if we deal with
Speaker 1: these massive social and psychological factors that are driving up
Speaker 1: depression and anxiety, that they will still will not be
Speaker 1: profound human distress. Of course, there will be um that
Speaker 1: you know, there are tragedies inherent to the human condition. Right,
Speaker 1: you will die, I will die, We will be forgotten.
Speaker 1: Everyone we know will die and be forgotten. The inherent
Speaker 1: you know, there are some things that just inherently tragic
Speaker 1: concid about being human being that don't go away, but
Speaker 1: what we can do is deal with many of these
Speaker 1: deep environmental factors that are driving up the epidemic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's so true. And what you just said
Speaker 1: there about the way that they connected over the garden,
Speaker 1: I think is really important. I mean, you made a
Speaker 1: good point there that they didn't go to the garden
Speaker 1: to talk about their trouble. And we had a woman
Speaker 1: on I don't know if you're familiar with. Her name
Speaker 1: is Emily White, and she wrote a book called Loneliness,
Speaker 1: and then her next book was about how she dealt
Speaker 1: with it by reconnecting to the world, and that was
Speaker 1: one of her big points was that, you know, we
Speaker 1: think that the type of friendship that's going to help us,
Speaker 1: you know, is the one that it's all about dealing
Speaker 1: with our problems, etcetera, etcetera. And what she realized, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of to your point, was that what was really
Speaker 1: helpful to her was to form these friendships that did
Speaker 1: something other than just that there wasn't so much pressure
Speaker 1: on them to be like the thing that solves a problem.
Speaker 1: But you know, loneliness is such a big thing and
Speaker 1: it's something I wrestle with on this show a little
Speaker 1: bit because you know, I've exposed that science that you know,
Speaker 1: you know, being lonely is worse than smoking, right, And
Speaker 1: I get some reactions from people, which is like, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's freaking me out because I'm lonely and I don't
Speaker 1: know what to do. And so it's one of those
Speaker 1: things that I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about,
Speaker 1: like what's the role of something like this, a show
Speaker 1: that's in a virtual world with helping people to be
Speaker 1: less lonely? And I just think it. It is such
Speaker 1: a pervasive problem, and I agree with you that there's
Speaker 1: a big societal issue here, and yet for folks that
Speaker 1: are wrestling with it, we also need to find our
Speaker 1: way through it while we hope to address the bigger
Speaker 1: societal issues. A lot of the things I learned for
Speaker 1: lost connections I learned from experts, I learned from scientists,
Speaker 1: And there were lots of places where things fell into
Speaker 1: place emotionally for me. And there's one place that I
Speaker 1: went back to again and again. If it's okay, I'll
Speaker 1: tell your listeners the story of this place, because I
Speaker 1: think it it tells us so much. So in the
Speaker 1: summer of two thousand and eleven, on a big anonymous
Speaker 1: housing project in Berlin, a woman put a sign in
Speaker 1: her window. She lived on the ground floor. The sign
Speaker 1: said something like I got to notice saying I'm going
Speaker 1: to be evicted next Thursday, So on Wednesday night, I'm
Speaker 1: going to kill myself. She was a woman in her
Speaker 1: early sixties. Her name is Nuria Chengish. She was a
Speaker 1: Turkish German woman, very religious, sure her job. And this
Speaker 1: was housing project in a kind of poor part of
Speaker 1: Berlin where basically three kinds of people lived, relatively recent
Speaker 1: Muslim immigrants, gay people, and punk squad as as you
Speaker 1: can imagine, these three groups that at each other with
Speaker 1: a lot of incomprehension, and no one really knew anyone, right,
Speaker 1: no one like a big anonymous housing project like one
Speaker 1: anywhere in the western world. No one knew anyone. No
Speaker 1: one kne who this woman was. But people saw the
Speaker 1: sign in her window and they started to knock on
Speaker 1: her door and they said do you need any help,
Speaker 1: and she said, fuck you, I don't want any help.
Speaker 1: I'm going to kill myself. And people started talking outside
Speaker 1: her corridor, and you know, they were all kind of
Speaker 1: piste off because their rents have been rising and lots
Speaker 1: of people have been evicted. And one of them had
Speaker 1: an idea. He had actually been watching on the news
Speaker 1: Terrier Square. That was the summer of the Egyptian Revolution,
Speaker 1: and there was a big thoroughfare that goes into the
Speaker 1: center of Berlin into Mitter that goes through this housing
Speaker 1: project center with this housing project, and then this idea.
Speaker 1: They said, if we just blocked the road for a
Speaker 1: day on a Saturday and we will nea out, the
Speaker 1: media will come, there'll be a bit of a fuss,
Speaker 1: they'll probably let her stay. Maybe there'll be a good
Speaker 1: pressure to keep our rents down. So they did it.
Speaker 1: They willed Mary out. She was like, well, I'm going
Speaker 1: to kill myself anyway, I might as well let them
Speaker 1: put me in the middle of the street. And the
Speaker 1: media did come, and there were news reports about her,
Speaker 1: and then it got to the end of the day
Speaker 1: from the media went home and the police came and
Speaker 1: they said, okay, take it down. You've had your fun.
Speaker 1: Take it down. And the residents, the people who live
Speaker 1: in this place it's called COTTI said, well, hang on
Speaker 1: a minute, you haven't told Nourria she gets to stay.
Speaker 1: And actually we want a rent freeze for all of us,
Speaker 1: So we'll take this down when we've been told we're
Speaker 1: getting a rent freeze. But of course they knew the
Speaker 1: moment they took this barricade down, the police would come
Speaker 1: and take it away. So one of my favorite people
Speaker 1: at Cotti Women called Tanya Gartner. She's one of the
Speaker 1: punk squatters. She she wears a tiny miniskirt even in
Speaker 1: Berlin winters. Tania is hardcore. She had in her apartment Clackson,
Speaker 1: you know, one of those things you use at soccer
Speaker 1: matches to make noises. She went and got it and
Speaker 1: she said, Okay, what we're gonna do. We can draw
Speaker 1: up a timetable to man this barricade and when the
Speaker 1: police come to take it down, let off. The clack
Speaker 1: Center will all come down from our apartments and we'll
Speaker 1: all stop them. Right, So people who would never ad met, you,
Speaker 1: didn't know each other, start to sign up to man
Speaker 1: this barricade. So Tanya, in her tiny miniskirt, was given.
Speaker 1: I think it was the Thursday night shift with Nuria,
Speaker 1: very religious Muslim in a in a full hitge hob right,
Speaker 1: and the first nights they sat there, it was super awkward.
Speaker 1: They're like, we've got nothing to talk about. This person
Speaker 1: is nothing like me. But as the nights went on
Speaker 1: they started talking to each other they discovered they had
Speaker 1: something incredibly similar in common. Nuria had come to Berlin
Speaker 1: when she was seventeen years old with her two children
Speaker 1: from a village in Turkey, and her job was to
Speaker 1: earn enough money to send back the money for her
Speaker 1: husband to come. But after she'd been in Berlin for
Speaker 1: a year, she got word from home that her husband
Speaker 1: had died. She told Tanya something she'd never told anyone.
Speaker 1: She had always told people that her husband died of
Speaker 1: a heart attack. Actually he died of TB, which was
Speaker 1: regarded as a disease of poverty and was quite shameful
Speaker 1: at that time. Tania told Nurias something she didn't talk
Speaker 1: about very often. She had come to Cotti when she
Speaker 1: was fifteen. She'd been thrown out of her middle class home.
Speaker 1: She'd come there. She lived in a squat with a
Speaker 1: bunch of other punks. She got pregnant when she was fifteen.
Speaker 1: They actually realized they both had had young children and
Speaker 1: been really lost in this place when they when they
Speaker 1: were themselves children. This was happening all over COTTI there
Speaker 1: was a young lad called Memer who was Turkish German
Speaker 1: lad really into hip hop, kept being nearly thrown out
Speaker 1: of school because they said he had a d h D.
Speaker 1: He got paired with this elderly, grumpy white German who
Speaker 1: loved stalin and said he didn't believe in direct action,
Speaker 1: and they got talking. They were had a shift together
Speaker 1: and the old white guy started helping him with his homework.
Speaker 1: There were these pairings, these connections that were happening. Across
Speaker 1: the street from this housing project, there's a gay club
Speaker 1: called zod Block, which is run by a man I
Speaker 1: love called Rick clud Strauss. And to give you a
Speaker 1: sense of what this gay club is like, the previous
Speaker 1: place that Rick hard rand was called Cafe Anal. So
Speaker 1: it's pretty uncompromising. I always thought you weren't have a
Speaker 1: stab through, you know, pretty uncomprovised gay people. And you
Speaker 1: know when they first opened this club, and you know
Speaker 1: it's it's a lot of religious Muslims in this area.
Speaker 1: People some people really outraged. Some people have smashed the windows.
Speaker 1: When the protests began, this gay club, Zoodblock, donated all
Speaker 1: of their furniture. They said, you know you guys should
Speaker 1: have your meetings in our club, come whenever you want.
Speaker 1: And at first even the kind of left wing people
Speaker 1: in Katti were like, look, we're not going to get
Speaker 1: these very religious Muslims to come and have meetings underneath,
Speaker 1: you know, the poster for fisting night, right, But actually
Speaker 1: they did start meeting there. As one of the Muslim
Speaker 1: women there said to me, we all realized we had
Speaker 1: to take these small steps to get to understand each other.
Speaker 1: After the protests have been going on for about six months,
Speaker 1: one day guy turned up called ton Kai and when
Speaker 1: you when you meet ton Kaites, he was in his
Speaker 1: early fifties at the time. When you meet Tunkites, clear
Speaker 1: he's got some cognitive difficulties. He'd been living homeless, and
Speaker 1: he started saying, can I do anything to how up here?
Speaker 1: And they started asking him to help, and quite quickly
Speaker 1: all three groups, the Muslims, the Gaze and the punks
Speaker 1: loved him. Right, it's got lovely caring energy. By this time,
Speaker 1: they had actually turned the thing blocking the street into
Speaker 1: a permanent structure, so they started saying to Tunkai, well,
Speaker 1: why don't you sleep here? We don't want you sleeping
Speaker 1: on the streets. You know, Berlin, it can be cold
Speaker 1: in the fall. In the winter, he started sleeping there.
Speaker 1: He became a much beloved kind of staple of the
Speaker 1: protest camp. And then after he'd been there for about
Speaker 1: a year, one day the police came to inspect. They
Speaker 1: would do this every now and then, and tun Kai
Speaker 1: doesn't like it when people arguing. He thought the police
Speaker 1: were arguing, so he went to try to hug one
Speaker 1: of the officers, but they thought he was attacking them,
Speaker 1: so they arrested him. That was when it was discovered
Speaker 1: Tunkai had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital, often
Speaker 1: in an actual padded cell, for twenty years, and he
Speaker 1: had escaped and been lived on the streets for a
Speaker 1: few months and then found his way to catty. So
Speaker 1: the police took him back to this psychiatric hospital in Charlottenburg,
Speaker 1: right the other side of burling In, at which point
Speaker 1: the entire Cotti protest movement turned itself into a kind
Speaker 1: of free Tungukai movement, and they descended on this psychiatric
Speaker 1: hospital at the other side of the city, and you know,
Speaker 1: the psychiatrists are just like, what is this. There's suddenly
Speaker 1: there's all these like Muslims gaze and punks demanding a
Speaker 1: release of one of their patients. They've never seen anything
Speaker 1: like this. Remember Uli, one of the women at COTTI saying,
Speaker 1: you know, she's she sent to the protesters, to the story,
Speaker 1: to the psychiatrists. But he doesn't belong with you. You
Speaker 1: don't love him. He belongs with us. We love him.
Speaker 1: And I remember thinking, how many of us, if we
Speaker 1: were carted away, would have hundreds of people descending on
Speaker 1: this place saying, no, this person belongs with us, No,
Speaker 1: we love this person. It took them a long time,
Speaker 1: but they got tongue Kai back. He still lives there.
Speaker 1: And you know, many things happened at COTTI that I
Speaker 1: wrote that and lost connections. I mean, obviously the obvious
Speaker 1: headline is they got went freeze for their entire housing project.
Speaker 1: They then launched a referenced diminitiative UM because you you
Speaker 1: have to get set number of signatures. It got the
Speaker 1: largest number of written signatures in the history of the
Speaker 1: city of Berlin. But you know, when I went to
Speaker 1: go and see Nuria, the woman who started the protest,
Speaker 1: the last time I ever saw Nuria, I remember, you know,
Speaker 1: she said to me, look, I'm really glad I got
Speaker 1: to stay in my apartment. That's great, but I gained
Speaker 1: so much more than that. I was surrounded by these
Speaker 1: amazing people all along, and I never knew remember another
Speaker 1: another woman there, Aman who took part in the protest,
Speaker 1: and a Turkish German, and said to me, when I
Speaker 1: grew up in Turkey, I called my whole village home.
Speaker 1: And I came to live in the Western World, and
Speaker 1: I learned that what you're meant to call home is
Speaker 1: just your four walls. And then this whole protest began,
Speaker 1: and now I call this whole place, and all these
Speaker 1: people in my home. And she said she realized that
Speaker 1: at some level she had been homeless all the time
Speaker 1: she had been living in the West World. That we are,
Speaker 1: at some level homeless. The human beings need to feel
Speaker 1: we belong and our sense of home in this culture
Speaker 1: is not big enough to meet our sense of belonging.
Speaker 1: And let thing about Cotty, and I think they think
Speaker 1: I'm crazy because I would go there every three months,
Speaker 1: just burst into tears and leave again. At when one
Speaker 1: of them, Sandy said to me, your hand, do you
Speaker 1: think you maybe you have allergies? Your eyes water very much,
Speaker 1: but that you know, I remember thinking what was so
Speaker 1: clear to me and Cotty is those people think about
Speaker 1: how distress they were. You know, Newya was suicidal, a
Speaker 1: Tunkai was shut away in a padded cell, mement, that
Speaker 1: young lad was constantly being nearly thrown out of school
Speaker 1: because they said he had a d h D. They
Speaker 1: did not need to be drugged. They needed to be together.
Speaker 1: The problems that seem insoluble when you are isolated and
Speaker 1: alone and told that life is about buying ship and
Speaker 1: screaming each other through screens, those problems are insoluble when
Speaker 1: you are in that framework. But when you are part
Speaker 1: of a tribe and you reorient your values, you can
Speaker 1: begin to find in solutions that you couldn't find when
Speaker 1: you were alone. And and and Britania saying to me outside
Speaker 1: the gay clubs, she said to me one day, you know,
Speaker 1: when you're all alone and you feel like ship, you
Speaker 1: think there's something wrong with you. But what happened is
Speaker 1: we came out of our corner crying and we started
Speaker 1: to fight, and we realized we were surrounded by so
Speaker 1: many other people who feel the same way. And when
Speaker 1: you do that, you realize how strong you can be.
Speaker 1: And I really felt that so acutely with them, that
Speaker 1: this is just below the surface. So those people listening
Speaker 1: to you who are hearing those messages about learnliness and
Speaker 1: saying this freaks me out because because you can feel
Speaker 1: the truth of it. Remember, you are surrounded by people
Speaker 1: who feel that, and it takes very little. It takes
Speaker 1: very little for that to come to the surface, for
Speaker 1: that hunger to come to the surface. It didn't take
Speaker 1: long for people in Cotting to really see what they
Speaker 1: had and what they were developing. Do you see what
Speaker 1: I mean as a response to what you're saying, Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and that story is incredible, and it reminds me of
Speaker 1: a slightly more prosaic version of this that has happened
Speaker 1: over and over and over and over, and it's um
Speaker 1: twelve step programs. And I have some concerns with with
Speaker 1: twelve step programs and some of the things that you know,
Speaker 1: they're not perfect by any stretch. They have saved my
Speaker 1: life a couple of times. But what I'm struck by
Speaker 1: is that all across the world, on any given day,
Speaker 1: you have this thing where people emerge from I'm all
Speaker 1: alone in this thing into a group of people who
Speaker 1: all have have the same situation and and lives change dramatically.
Speaker 1: And I often think that you know, twelve step program
Speaker 1: would say, you know, God is the reason this happens.
Speaker 1: I actually think the fact that you go into that
Speaker 1: group is the reason that it happens. But it's it's
Speaker 1: another pointer towards this can really happen and does happen.
Speaker 1: It's not an insoluble problem. Well, the unnatural thing is
Speaker 1: not that people connect to from tribes. The unnatural thing
Speaker 1: is that you don't write that that actually this These
Speaker 1: are our deepest impulses as a species. Right, and you're right,
Speaker 1: I agree with you both. You know, there are some
Speaker 1: aspects of TRUSTEPS theology that I don't think of everyone.
Speaker 1: But I think the model of connection and support that
Speaker 1: is embedded in trust its programs is profound and beautiful.
Speaker 1: And the fact that you know any city, anyone in
Speaker 1: this is listening to you know, you could go to
Speaker 1: an AA meeting tonight. You go to it and no
Speaker 1: one will ask you for any money, and you will
Speaker 1: be welcomed and treated with care and respect. That's a
Speaker 1: that's an extraordinary thing. And you know there are many
Speaker 1: dark aspects of human nature, of course, but that is
Speaker 1: much truer to our nature and who we are as
Speaker 1: a species than sitting alone, you know, buying ship on
Speaker 1: your laptop. You know, the book is so deep and
Speaker 1: there's nine causes, and we're going to get to almost
Speaker 1: We're gonna get to so very little of it. We're
Speaker 1: running we're running up on time here. Soon. You and
Speaker 1: I are going to talk a little bit afterwards in
Speaker 1: the post show conversation. UM listeners, you've heard the drill before.
Speaker 1: Supporters of the show can can hear those over on Patreon.
Speaker 1: But I want to just touch on a couple of
Speaker 1: things because I think the book can be summed up really,
Speaker 1: really well in one line that you wrote, and it's
Speaker 1: the depression is itself a form of grief for all
Speaker 1: the connections we need but don't have. Yeah, this comes
Speaker 1: from this thing that was discovered in the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: about depression that was so explosive that it had to
Speaker 1: be kind of brushed under the carpet. In the seventies,
Speaker 1: the APIA, the American Psychological Association, decided for the first
Speaker 1: time to standardize how depression was diagnosed in the United States.
Speaker 1: So they drew up a list of ten symptoms of
Speaker 1: depression that are pretty obvious things that you could guess,
Speaker 1: crying a lot, feeling worthless. And they sent them out
Speaker 1: to doctors all over the country and the kind of
Speaker 1: psychiatric bible, the diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and they said,
Speaker 1: to doctors, if any of your patients experienced more than
Speaker 1: five of these symptoms for more than two weeks, diagnosed
Speaker 1: them as depressed, as mentally ill, do what you can
Speaker 1: to help them. So doctors start using this. But sometime
Speaker 1: later doctors and psychiatrists come back and they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: we've got a bit of a problem here. If we
Speaker 1: use this guideline, we should be diagnosing every grieving person
Speaker 1: as depressed, because this is what happens to you when
Speaker 1: someone you love dies. So the A p A get
Speaker 1: together and they're like, well, that's really not what we meant.
Speaker 1: That's not what we intended. Um, So they invented something
Speaker 1: that became known as the grief loophole. Right, So what
Speaker 1: they said is, okay, use these ten symptoms to diagnose
Speaker 1: people as depressed unless someone they love has died in
Speaker 1: the last year, in which case they're not mentally ill.
Speaker 1: It's perfectly understandable response don't diagnose them, it's okay. So
Speaker 1: doctors started using that, But that started to beg a
Speaker 1: kind of question that lots of doctors asked, which was,
Speaker 1: hang in a minute, we're meant to be telling people
Speaker 1: that depression is just a brain disease that you're identify
Speaker 1: on a checklist. Except there's one situation, and only one
Speaker 1: situation in life where it's perfectly understandable response. But why
Speaker 1: is that the only situation where it's okay to respond
Speaker 1: this way and understandable? Why not if you lose your job,
Speaker 1: Why not if you lose your house, Why not if
Speaker 1: you're stuck in a job you hate for the next
Speaker 1: four years. You can all imagine, you commagine a hundreds
Speaker 1: of situations. But that as Dr Joanne Cassier Torre, who's
Speaker 1: one of the real experts on this in an absolute
Speaker 1: extraordinary person who lost her own daughter when Yanne and childbirth,
Speaker 1: as as Dr Cassier Tore put it to me, that
Speaker 1: insight would require a whole system overhaul. It would require
Speaker 1: us to think about the whole life and not just
Speaker 1: the isolated symptoms or not trying to boil it down
Speaker 1: to being just a problem in the person's brain. The
Speaker 1: system isn't built to do that. There are lots of
Speaker 1: good psychiatrists and many admirable and indeed heroic psychiatrists, but
Speaker 1: the system we've built a psychiatry is not designed to
Speaker 1: do that, right. And so what happened is the A
Speaker 1: P A got rid of the grief exception don't existing.
Speaker 1: More So, now, if your baby dies at ten am,
Speaker 1: you can be diagnosed that morning. If they said to you, well,
Speaker 1: have you had these symptoms of the last two weeks,
Speaker 1: have you been upset? Have you been yeah, well, then
Speaker 1: they can diagnose you straight away. In fact, as Dr
Speaker 1: Cassier Tore has shown, nine of grieving parents are diagnosed
Speaker 1: and drugged in the first hours after their child dies.
Speaker 1: And what she said is that tells us something really profound, right,
Speaker 1: because most people instinctively know that just drugging someone for grief,
Speaker 1: that grief is not an irrational pathology. Grief is a
Speaker 1: tribute to the person we have loved. Right, We grieve
Speaker 1: because we have loved. And she argues that actually drugging
Speaker 1: greeting parents disrupts the grieving process in ways that really damaging.
Speaker 1: But but I think you can see this in a
Speaker 1: wider context, as Dr cass Tory herself, she's really a
Speaker 1: remarkable person, applies it in a in a wider context,
Speaker 1: which is that, you know, the worst thing for me
Speaker 1: about what my doctor told me that it was just
Speaker 1: a chemical imbalance of my problem. Fact, it's not true
Speaker 1: that it's just a chemical mapills friends. The worst thing
Speaker 1: is what that says to people is your pain is meaningless.
Speaker 1: It's like a glitch in a computer program. But what
Speaker 1: the World Health Organization, the leading medical body in the world,
Speaker 1: and so many of the people who looked at the
Speaker 1: real evidence have been trying to tell us is your
Speaker 1: pain has meaning. You're not a machine with broken parts
Speaker 1: when you're depressed. You're not crazy, you're not broken. You're
Speaker 1: a human being with unmet needs. And what you need
Speaker 1: is love, support and help to get those those those
Speaker 1: deeper needs met. And I think, as you say, as
Speaker 1: you quote from the book, it's not a coincidence that
Speaker 1: depression and grief have the same symptoms. I think partly
Speaker 1: what depression is is a form of grief your own
Speaker 1: needs not being met. And I think that tells us
Speaker 1: something really profound about how we've been approaching it in
Speaker 1: the wrong way. It's one of the other moments when
Speaker 1: emotionally it fell into place for me was when I
Speaker 1: went to interview this um South African psychiatrist called Derek Summerfield.
Speaker 1: He's a wonderful person. Derek happened to be in Cambodia
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one when chemic cliented depressants were
Speaker 1: first introduced in that country, and the local Cambodian doctors
Speaker 1: were like, what are these drugs? They hadn't heard of them.
Speaker 1: What is an antidepressant? And Derek explained and they said
Speaker 1: to him, we don't need them, We've already got antidepressants.
Speaker 1: And he said, what do you mean. He thought they
Speaker 1: were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy
Speaker 1: or something. Instead they told him a story. There was
Speaker 1: a farmer in their community who worked in the rice
Speaker 1: fields and one day he stood on a lambline and
Speaker 1: he got his leg blown off. So they gave him
Speaker 1: an artificial limb and he went back to work in
Speaker 1: the rice fields. But apparently it's extremely painful to work
Speaker 1: in the rice field. It worked under water when you've
Speaker 1: got artificial limb. I'm imagining it was traumatic for very
Speaker 1: obvious reasons. The guy started to cry all day, didn't
Speaker 1: want to get out of bed, classic depression. So they
Speaker 1: said to Derek, that's when we gave him an antidepressant.
Speaker 1: They said, well, he said, what was it. They explained
Speaker 1: that they went and sat with him, They listened to him.
Speaker 1: They saw that his pain made sense. They figured precisely
Speaker 1: because they listened to the source of the pain, they
Speaker 1: began to look for solutions. They figured, if we brought
Speaker 1: him a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He
Speaker 1: wouldn't be so distressed. So they brought him a cow.
Speaker 1: Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month,
Speaker 1: his depression had gone. They said to Derek, So you see, doctor,
Speaker 1: that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean
Speaker 1: Right now, as I say, those Cambodian doctors new intuitively
Speaker 1: what the World Health organization has been trying to tell us.
Speaker 1: They understood that your pain has meaning. We evolved a
Speaker 1: pain impulse for a reason, right. I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: trivial example. You know, as a European who spends a
Speaker 1: lot of my time in the US, I never failed
Speaker 1: to be surprised by the existence of indigestion treatments like
Speaker 1: peptobismal right, we should just don't exist anywhere in Europe.
Speaker 1: I've never seen them anywhere in Europe. I remember the
Speaker 1: first time. I was, Oh, yeah, we don't have them,
Speaker 1: no such thing. I mean, maybe they're available, I've never
Speaker 1: seen I've never seen anyone take when. I've never seen
Speaker 1: anyone selling them. Because the reaction of a European when
Speaker 1: you've seen indigestion treatment is to say, well, were in
Speaker 1: a minute. Indigestion isn't a malfunction. It's a necessary signal
Speaker 1: from your body that you're eating too fast. The solution
Speaker 1: to indigestion is to eat more slowly, right, because that's
Speaker 1: a signal that you're eating too much, you're reading too fast,
Speaker 1: you're gonna make yourself sick, you're gon upset your stomach.
Speaker 1: Now that's a trivial example, because indigestion is infinitely less
Speaker 1: agonizing the depression, which is the worst thing I've ever
Speaker 1: gone through. But you can see that principle. We have
Speaker 1: pain impulses for a reason, right, they are not malfunctions.
Speaker 1: That and the fact that one in five Americans is
Speaker 1: going to take a psychiatric drug in their lifetime, and
Speaker 1: average white male life expectancy just fell for the first
Speaker 1: time in the history of the American Republic apart from
Speaker 1: the Civil War. These are signals that are telling us something.
Speaker 1: And what they're telling us is not that everyone mysteriously
Speaker 1: just had a serotonin imbalance in their brains. Right, There
Speaker 1: are real things that happen to depressed people's brains. Of course,
Speaker 1: those things sometimes make it harder to get out of depression.
Speaker 1: That is true, and I go through that in the book.
Speaker 1: Of course, we've been told this ludicrously reductive explanation that
Speaker 1: to me, the problem is not so much with the drugs,
Speaker 1: because the drugs have some benefit for some people, that
Speaker 1: do some harm to some people. We can have a
Speaker 1: complex and nuance to about that. But to me, the
Speaker 1: really harmful thing is what the story does to people. Well,
Speaker 1: that story does is it tells you that your pain
Speaker 1: doesn't mean anything. And what that does is it cuts
Speaker 1: you off from following that pain to its source, both
Speaker 1: you as an individual and us as more importantly, us
Speaker 1: as a society, and solving the things that are hurting
Speaker 1: us so much. I agree completely, Like I said early on,
Speaker 1: for me, you know what I've I've described my treating
Speaker 1: depression is I kind of like throw the kitchen sink
Speaker 1: at it, right. I recognized it's a there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of things that are a factor in it for me,
Speaker 1: and and I need to treat all those different things.
Speaker 1: And I think that's what you're you're pointing to so much,
Speaker 1: is that, you know, And I think that's so true
Speaker 1: that that our pain is very often a signal about something.
Speaker 1: It's like guilt. Guilt used in the proper way is
Speaker 1: a signal that we're living against what our values are.
Speaker 1: Now this conspiral into shame. We can feel guilty about
Speaker 1: things that other people tell us, but it's core right
Speaker 1: in a well functioning human, guilt tells us like I
Speaker 1: don't feel good about that, and so it's a signal.
Speaker 1: And so to just ignore it is troublesome. And I
Speaker 1: and I agree with you, and I think what we've
Speaker 1: done it, I think that's a really well put But
Speaker 1: I don't think ignoring it. I don't think as a
Speaker 1: culture we've ignored it. I think it's worse as a culture.
Speaker 1: We've pathologized it. As a culture. We've said that it's
Speaker 1: a sign of craziness or malfunction in the individual If
Speaker 1: we ignored it, that would be bad enough. What we've
Speaker 1: done is even worse than ignoring it. Um. Yeah, we've
Speaker 1: pathologized it. And to me that's the most and that's
Speaker 1: the most the most damaging thing. Well, because it makes
Speaker 1: people them mistrust the impulse, It makes them mistrust the signal,
Speaker 1: It makes them systematically misread the signal as a culture,
Speaker 1: and I think if we had listened to these signals
Speaker 1: about depression, we could have dealt with some of these
Speaker 1: problems before it became, for example, the opioid crisis. And
Speaker 1: I've spent time in places like men and Not New Hampshire,
Speaker 1: which at the absolute epicenter of the opioid crisis, where
Speaker 1: what's happening there, the heart of what's happening there, that
Speaker 1: the core of it. I mean, there are many things
Speaker 1: going on, but as you know, it's a subject in
Speaker 1: my previous book, Chasing the Screen, which is about addiction.
Speaker 1: But the core of that is the core of addiction
Speaker 1: is about trying not to be present in your life
Speaker 1: because your life is too painful a place to be, right,
Speaker 1: it's not a coincidence to places with the highest levels
Speaker 1: of opioid use have the highest levels of suicide and
Speaker 1: have the highest level of antidepressant prescriptions. These are ways
Speaker 1: of trying to not be present in an unbearably painful reality.
Speaker 1: And if we had listened to these signals sooner, we
Speaker 1: wouldn't be having these extreme distress signals. And I have
Speaker 1: to say, I don't think we would be having the
Speaker 1: current president either. You know. I remember in the run
Speaker 1: up to the election, I was with this fascinating group
Speaker 1: who I'm running about for a different project, why do
Speaker 1: deep canvassing work to try to persuade voters? And we
Speaker 1: were on this street in Cleveland, in a part of
Speaker 1: Cleveland called Slavic City has really haunted me as my
Speaker 1: memory of the election. We're on this long street and
Speaker 1: it was this devastated street, like kind of like Detroit
Speaker 1: without the poetry of the ruins, and about a third
Speaker 1: of the houses had been abandoned, a third had actually
Speaker 1: been demolished, and the third still have people living in
Speaker 1: them off and behind barbed wire. I mean knocked on
Speaker 1: one door and there was this woman who got talking
Speaker 1: to I would have guessed from looking at her with
Speaker 1: sixty discovered from the conversation she was actually the same
Speaker 1: age as me. I was thirty seven at the time,
Speaker 1: and we're having this conversation, is she was quite particulate,
Speaker 1: very very angry. She wasn't going to vote for Trump,
Speaker 1: she was going to not vote at all, but really furious.
Speaker 1: And at one point she made this verbal slip. She
Speaker 1: was talking about what the area used to be like
Speaker 1: for her parents and grandparents, and she meant to say
Speaker 1: when I was young, but what she actually said is
Speaker 1: when I was alive. And it really she didn't she
Speaker 1: didn't notice she had made that verbal slip, but it
Speaker 1: really knocked me back. And when I hear people on
Speaker 1: my side, and you can guess my politics, when I
Speaker 1: hear people on my side talking about Trump voters or
Speaker 1: people who didn't vote as stupid or racist or just
Speaker 1: pathologizing the signal they've sent out, and which, don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong, I think is obviously a disastrous signal, as
Speaker 1: you can guess what I think about that, But to
Speaker 1: pathologize the signal, it means you can't hear what they're saying, right,
Speaker 1: you can't hear what needs to be heard. If we're
Speaker 1: going to deal with this, if we're going to deal
Speaker 1: with this deep pain um and and the fact that
Speaker 1: we have so many kind of alarm signals going off,
Speaker 1: you know, the election of very extreme political choices across
Speaker 1: the world, one in five Americans to your psychiatric drug,
Speaker 1: falling white male life expectancy for the the first time history
Speaker 1: of the Republic. You know, these are these are interconnective
Speaker 1: signals that we've built a culture that doesn't meet people's
Speaker 1: underlying psychological needs in all sorts of crucial ways. But
Speaker 1: we can deal with that. There are lots of ways
Speaker 1: back from that. I've seen them in practice, I've seen
Speaker 1: how they work. I report the last third of the
Speaker 1: book is about solutions that are not kind of hypothetical solutions,
Speaker 1: but places I went people, I interviewed, science, I saw
Speaker 1: which show ways back for And we've already touched on
Speaker 1: a very small number of the causes and very few
Speaker 1: of the solutions. But I think that is to me,
Speaker 1: the core of it is, it doesn't have to be
Speaker 1: this way, but to find your way out of this pain,
Speaker 1: you have to understand the problem differently. And I wish
Speaker 1: in a way the book is the letter I wish someone.
Speaker 1: You know, It's like a letter to my teenage self.
Speaker 1: This is that these are the things I wish someone
Speaker 1: had told me when I walked into that doctor's surgery
Speaker 1: in such as date of pain and pain and distress
Speaker 1: that I was not told rather than the story I
Speaker 1: was told, which set me off on a path away
Speaker 1: from the source of my pain and away from understanding me.
Speaker 1: I agree, it's a beautiful way to put it. We're
Speaker 1: out of time here, but I will encourage listeners absolutely
Speaker 1: check out the book. It has so many important points
Speaker 1: and really summarizes I think a lot of things that
Speaker 1: this show has been about in in sort of one place.
Speaker 1: And so I thank you so much for you for
Speaker 1: taking the time to come on the show, and and
Speaker 1: for writing the book, and my publishers always, I should say,
Speaker 1: my publishers always tell me to always feel like a
Speaker 1: kind of advertising person in one of those bad nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties movies when I do this. But they've told me
Speaker 1: I have to say this at the end of interviews,
Speaker 1: which is if anyone would like any more information about
Speaker 1: where they can get the book or the audiobook, if
Speaker 1: they would like to know what A range of people
Speaker 1: have said about the book, from Hillary Clinton to tack A.
Speaker 1: Carlson to Arianna Huffington's to Russell Brand if you would
Speaker 1: like to take a quiz to see how much do
Speaker 1: you know about the real causes of depression and anxiety,
Speaker 1: or if you'd like to hear audio with any of
Speaker 1: the people we've been talking about, like there's amazing people
Speaker 1: in Berlin, you can go to www. Dot the Lost
Speaker 1: Connections dot com. It's not Lost Connections dot com because
Speaker 1: that was a band called Lost Connections. Don't really about
Speaker 1: um and um yeah, um yeah, the Lost Connections dot com.
Speaker 1: And also on that site you can see where to
Speaker 1: follow me on Twitter, Instagram and I'll absolutely put links
Speaker 1: to that site in the show notes that go along
Speaker 1: with the show. So thank you so much. A pleasure
Speaker 1: as always to talk with you, totally my pleasure. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much. Bye. If what you just heard was
Speaker 1: helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the
Speaker 1: One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed
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