Speaker 1: In case you're just recently joining us, or however long
Speaker 1: you've been a listener of the show. You may not
Speaker 1: realize that we have over seven years of incredible episodes
Speaker 1: in our archive. We've had so many wonderful guests that
Speaker 1: we've decided to hand pick one of our favorites that
Speaker 1: may be new to you, but if not, it's definitely
Speaker 1: worth another liston. We hope you'll enjoy this episode with
Speaker 1: Johann harry More. Eighteen month old children recognize the McDonald's
Speaker 1: m than know their own last name. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the
Speaker 1: importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think ring true.
Speaker 1: And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction.
Speaker 1: How they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Johan Harri and this
Speaker 1: is his second time on the One You Feed podcast.
Speaker 1: He's the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream,
Speaker 1: which has been adapted into a feature film. Johan was
Speaker 1: twice named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International UK.
Speaker 1: He's written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles
Speaker 1: Times and others, and he's a regular panelist on HBO's
Speaker 1: Real Time with Bill Maher, which is a show I love.
Speaker 1: His new book is Lost Actions, 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'm trying to give up caffeine and failing. Basically,
Speaker 1: I would I would ideally have caffeine running into my
Speaker 1: veins 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 likeness and bravery
Speaker 1: and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
Speaker 1: grandson stops and thinks about it for a second and
Speaker 1: 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 in 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 year. Is 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 play to run 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 Cassa
Speaker 1: is it Um Knox 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 fetters thist out there, right, that
Speaker 1: would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano. Right,
Speaker 1: You're not doing it for the thing itself, You're doing
Speaker 1: it to get something out of it, right, saying external,
Speaker 1: saying external to the experience. Now, obviously we're all a
Speaker 1: mixed of internal and external motivations. But Professor Casta showed
Speaker 1: a few really interesting things. One is, as a culture,
Speaker 1: we have become much more driven by these external what
Speaker 1: I think of his junk values, and you can see,
Speaker 1: I mean, he gives lots of evidence. But even something
Speaker 1: as trivial as you know, go to a music concert
Speaker 1: now and you'll notice about half the people will just
Speaker 1: spend the whole time not being present at the concept,
Speaker 1: but just filming it on their phones, a video they
Speaker 1: will never watch, right, Because if you want to watch Beyonce,
Speaker 1: there's great clips on YouTube. Why are they doing that.
Speaker 1: They're doing that to display that they're having the experience
Speaker 1: in order to be envied by other people. That rather
Speaker 1: than having the experience, they're externally displaying that they're having
Speaker 1: the experience and suppress. The caster showed firstly that we've
Speaker 1: all become much more driven by these external values. And secondly,
Speaker 1: and I think really importantly, um, the more you're driven
Speaker 1: by these external values, these junk values, the more you're
Speaker 1: driven by how you look to other people, how much
Speaker 1: money you've got, your status, the more you will become
Speaker 1: depressed and anxious. It's a quite powerful effect. It's been
Speaker 1: shown in over two dozen studies now, and I think
Speaker 1: it relates to the parable on which your show is
Speaker 1: built in a in a really interesting way because I think,
Speaker 1: if not so much in terms of individuals, but as
Speaker 1: a culture, as a society, what have we chosen to feed? Right?
Speaker 1: And you can see there's an interesting little experiment that
Speaker 1: was 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 incint what it was, and the thought
Speaker 1: that must be an English thing. I've never heard of
Speaker 1: pepper pig, like Dora the Explorer or whatever. The All
Speaker 1: the kids in my life are slightly too old now
Speaker 1: from me to up to date with these tally tubbies
Speaker 1: whatever right, And the second group of kids kids have
Speaker 1: split into two groups. First group have shown two advertisements
Speaker 1: for a toy, the second group shown no advertisements. And
Speaker 1: 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 you'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 a 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 Cassi
Speaker 1: put it to me, we're raised from the moment we're
Speaker 1: born in a machinery that's designed to get us to
Speaker 1: neglect what's good about life, Right, that's designed to get
Speaker 1: us to live in this extrinsic, hollow way driven by
Speaker 1: these junk values. So, in a sense I'm interested in. Obviously,
Speaker 1: there's a degree to which individuals make some choices within
Speaker 1: this system, and we can choose what to feed or
Speaker 1: not to feed. But to me, what's more interesting is
Speaker 1: how did we build and why maintain this machinery that
Speaker 1: feeds the worst parts of us? That's designed. You know,
Speaker 1: the whole point of advertising is to make us feel inadequate, Right,
Speaker 1: That's that's what it's designed to do. Until you buy
Speaker 1: the product, and then it's got to be careful. You've
Speaker 1: got to quite quickly feel inadequate again. Right. I think
Speaker 1: a lot about you know, where I grew up, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of normal suburb of London. You know there's a
Speaker 1: couple I know who lived there. Still, who are people
Speaker 1: I love, people close to me and I go see them.
Speaker 1: They live so purely by these values, these these consumers values.
Speaker 1: So they work really hard to buy this stuff that
Speaker 1: they see in advertisements, and they display it on Instagram
Speaker 1: and on Facebook, and people comment going OMG, so jealous.
Speaker 1: And then they're puzzled that they don't feel good and
Speaker 1: they think I was just that I didn't buy the
Speaker 1: right thing. So they work even harder. They buy another
Speaker 1: junk thing they don't need, and they display that, and
Speaker 1: they're constantly puzzled by their own despair, their own pain,
Speaker 1: because although they don't put it quite like this, there's
Speaker 1: an implicit sense of them, but what I'm doing everything
Speaker 1: I meant to do, right, why do I feel so bad?
Speaker 1: It's a sense I'm doing everything I 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 very
Speaker 1: long answer in response to the parable you read, Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I really adentify 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 what
Speaker 1: you're saying because before advertizing cells as any particular product,
Speaker 1: it sells as the idea that your problems can be
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 1: embedded in it. And as Professor Cassa says, our motivation
Speaker 1: is fragile. Right. We all have intrinsic motives and we
Speaker 1: all have extrinsic junk motives, and of course you need both,
Speaker 1: right of course, but he said, very easily extrinsic motives
Speaker 1: can crowd out the more meaningful motives and it and
Speaker 1: it sounds strange because at one level it's vanale. It's
Speaker 1: a cliche to say, Look, no one listening to your
Speaker 1: show is going to lie on their deadbed and think
Speaker 1: about all the things they bought, right, They will think
Speaker 1: about moments of meaning and connection. But we are immersed
Speaker 1: in a propaganda system that is designed to get us
Speaker 1: to neglect that that insight, and it's not the only
Speaker 1: thing that's going on. But this is one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why we have a depression and anxiety epidemic. And
Speaker 1: Professor casse along with an academic called Jill Twinge, showed
Speaker 1: that the amount of GDP in the US that is
Speaker 1: spent on advertizing correlates with teenage anxiety. So as GDP
Speaker 1: spending on advertising goes up, teenage anxiety goes up. As
Speaker 1: it goes down to age anxiety goes down. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't want to be clear. This is one of many
Speaker 1: causes of depression anxiety I write about in the book,
Speaker 1: but I do think it's an important one, I think,
Speaker 1: So I mean that, actually, there's lots of things in
Speaker 1: the book that relevant to the parable you tell, but
Speaker 1: that's just one thing. So let's back up a little
Speaker 1: bit to the idea of the book. And then I
Speaker 1: want to talk about depression in general, because your book
Speaker 1: is basically saying that, you know what, a lot of
Speaker 1: us have been sold a story that says the reason
Speaker 1: we're depressed is because there's something quickly 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 in positive thing for me. And so right
Speaker 1: out of the gate, I want to make sure that
Speaker 1: we say this, because I know you say it too.
Speaker 1: We this is not a conversation that is telling anybody,
Speaker 1: no matter what the rest of what you hear is
Speaker 1: that 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 questions, which is really important. So
Speaker 1: there were these two mysteries that were really haunting me
Speaker 1: that made me write this book. Actually it's a sign
Speaker 1: of how, like you say, how much I struggled with this,
Speaker 1: how afraid I was to write this, to go and
Speaker 1: investigate this that Actually I wanted to write this book
Speaker 1: seven years ago and I started, in fact started writing
Speaker 1: it three and a half years ago. And the reason
Speaker 1: why is I figured it would be easier for me
Speaker 1: to write a book about the war on drugs that
Speaker 1: required me to go and spend time with hitmen for
Speaker 1: the Mexican drug cartels, then it would be to look
Speaker 1: into this story about my own depression. That's how afraid
Speaker 1: I was of it. And there were these two mysteries
Speaker 1: that were really hanging over me that the first was,
Speaker 1: I'm thirty nine years old. Every single year that I've
Speaker 1: been alive, depression and anxiety has increased in the United
Speaker 1: States and across most of the developed world, and I
Speaker 1: 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 myor told me a story
Speaker 1: that I now knew did not match the best science
Speaker 1: then and does not match the best science now. He said,
Speaker 1: we know why people feel this way. There's a chemical
Speaker 1: called serotonian in people's brains makes them feel good. Some
Speaker 1: 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 pack Sill
Speaker 1: in the United States, and you'll be all right. So
Speaker 1: I started taking Paxil and experienced a really significant boost
Speaker 1: in my mood. My depression went away. A couple of
Speaker 1: months later, maybe three or three months later, I started
Speaker 1: to feel the sense of pain coming back. I went
Speaker 1: back to my doctor. He said, I didn't give you
Speaker 1: a high enough dose. He gave me a higher dose again.
Speaker 1: I felt a significant boost. Again, this feeling of pain
Speaker 1: came back. And I was really in this cycle until
Speaker 1: I was taking the maximum possible does that you're legally
Speaker 1: allowed to take that for thirteen years, at the end
Speaker 1: of which I was still depressed, and I was experiencing
Speaker 1: all sorts of horrible side effects. And what happened to
Speaker 1: me fit into this wider picture. So I went on
Speaker 1: this long journey for the book. I traveled over forty
Speaker 1: hours and miles. I wanted to meet the leading experts
Speaker 1: in the world about what causes depression and anxiety whatso,
Speaker 1: and also just people with very different perspectives. From an
Speaker 1: Amish village in Indiana, because the Amish have very low
Speaker 1: levels of depression, to to a city in Brazil where
Speaker 1: they bound advertising to see if that would make people
Speaker 1: feel better. To a lab in Baltimore where they're giving
Speaker 1: people pilocyby and the active component in magic mushrooms to
Speaker 1: see if that would help. And I think, as you said,
Speaker 1: that the opposite. I learned a huge number of things,
Speaker 1: but to me that the kind of core of it
Speaker 1: is until I went to my doctor when I was
Speaker 1: a teenager, I thought my depression was all in my head,
Speaker 1: meaning I was just weak I needed to man up.
Speaker 1: And then for the next thirteen years, I thought my
Speaker 1: causes of my depression were all in my head, meaning
Speaker 1: it was a chemical imbalance in my brain. But what
Speaker 1: I learned is the scientific evidence for nine causes of
Speaker 1: depression and anxiety. Two of them are indeed biological. They're
Speaker 1: very real, and they're important to talk about. Their your genes,
Speaker 1: and there are real changes in your brain that happened.
Speaker 1: I don't think they should be described as a chemical
Speaker 1: imbalance for reasons we can talk about. But the other
Speaker 1: seven causes I'm not in our heads. That are actually
Speaker 1: factors in the way we live, and once you understand them,
Speaker 1: that opens up very different kinds of antidepressants are about
Speaker 1: solving those problems. We should be offered alongside, not instead
Speaker 1: of alongside chemical ANDSY depressant is away radically expanding the
Speaker 1: menu of options and expanding our understanding of what's happening
Speaker 1: to us. I want to talk about how I've dealt
Speaker 1: with depression because in some ways it is spot on
Speaker 1: with what you do, and in one other way, it
Speaker 1: is very very different, and I just think it's an
Speaker 1: interesting conversation. So I have long believed that taking a
Speaker 1: pill for depression is not gonna do the job sufficiently,
Speaker 1: and so I've long had a series of things that
Speaker 1: I felt like I need to do to treat depression
Speaker 1: in my life. And it's interesting because they line up
Speaker 1: very much in some ways with your different causes and reconnections.
Speaker 1: I just sort of stumbled into them over time. I've
Speaker 1: got like a list of about twelve or fifteen things
Speaker 1: that I keep track of every day. Now I don't
Speaker 1: do all twelve or fifteen every day. My goal is
Speaker 1: just to do a good number of them consistently. And
Speaker 1: I know that that really really makes the difference in
Speaker 1: whether I'm depressed or not. So on one hand, totally
Speaker 1: on board, and you know, I'm a living proof that
Speaker 1: trying to work with these causes makes a big difference.
Speaker 1: So that's where total alignment. And then there's this other
Speaker 1: way that I deal with it, which is very very different,
Speaker 1: and that is that when I inevitably feel like I
Speaker 1: hit a cycle of feeling a little bit more depressed,
Speaker 1: so it almost feels physical to me. It almost just
Speaker 1: feels like I just can feel it come on, and
Speaker 1: I'm not really interested in anything. The things that I
Speaker 1: normally love I don't care about. You know, I can't
Speaker 1: think of a book to read, I can't think of
Speaker 1: a song to listen to. And so what I've learned
Speaker 1: to do over time with that is almost the exact
Speaker 1: opposite of look for causes. I've come to treat that,
Speaker 1: and I don't I'm not saying this is right by
Speaker 1: any stretch. I'm just talking about kind of what I've done,
Speaker 1: and and I've talked about this on this show that
Speaker 1: in those moments where it feels like a brief sort
Speaker 1: of cycle through something, I've learned to treat it like
Speaker 1: having a cold. And what I've done is I've just
Speaker 1: sort of said, you know what, let me make sure
Speaker 1: I'm 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 psych call of depressions. So,
Speaker 1: on one hand, I treat it very actively and on
Speaker 1: the other hand, So I would say I treat the
Speaker 1: thing as a whole very aggressively and very actively, and
Speaker 1: then I treat individual incidents, which are usually a couple
Speaker 1: of days, almost exactly the opposite by going, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to make a big fuss out of this.
Speaker 1: It comes, it goes, not a big deal. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to examine all of my life. And I just
Speaker 1: think it's interesting that that I've kind of ended up
Speaker 1: in that spot with it after having worked with it
Speaker 1: for so many years. That's a really interesting and aquent
Speaker 1: way of putting it. I think that's exactly right about
Speaker 1: when you change the wider framework there will still, of
Speaker 1: course be fluctuations and how you cope that. It makes
Speaker 1: me think about one of the causes and one of
Speaker 1: the solutions that are right about in loose connections. So
Speaker 1: we are the loneliest culture that has ever been. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a study that as Americans, how many close friends
Speaker 1: do you have w you can call on in a crisis.
Speaker 1: And when they started doing the study years ago, the
Speaker 1: most common answer was fine. Today the most common answer
Speaker 1: is none. There are more Americans who have nobody to
Speaker 1: turn to than any other option when things go wrong.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about this a lot in the last
Speaker 1: few weeks because one of the people who taught me
Speaker 1: so much about this, an amazing man, Professor John Cassiopo
Speaker 1: at the University of Chicago, but sadly just died. He
Speaker 1: was it wasn't an old man. It's terrible loss. But
Speaker 1: he was the leading expect in the world on loneliness.
Speaker 1: Professor Cassiopo proved a few really important things. One of
Speaker 1: them was for a human being being acutely lonely is
Speaker 1: a stressful It releases as much of the stressful amone
Speaker 1: cortisol as being punched in the face by a stranger.
Speaker 1: And a lot of his work was about well, why
Speaker 1: why is that? What's going on there? And he said
Speaker 1: to me, you know, why do we exist. One of
Speaker 1: the reasons that you and I are able to have
Speaker 1: this conversation, Eric, is because our ancestors on the savannahs
Speaker 1: of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren't
Speaker 1: bigger than the animals they took down. In a lot
Speaker 1: of cases, they often went faster than the animals they
Speaker 1: took down, but they were much better at banding together
Speaker 1: into groups and cooperate. And just like bees evolved to
Speaker 1: need a high, humans evolved to need a tribe. And
Speaker 1: if you think about those circumstances, if you were separated
Speaker 1: from the tribe, in the circumstances where we evolved, you
Speaker 1: were depressed and anxious for a really good reason. Right
Speaker 1: you were flooded with stress and regrison, you're about to die.
Speaker 1: Probably it was a very powerful signal to get back
Speaker 1: to the tribe. We are the first humans ever to
Speaker 1: try to live without tribes. It's making us feel terrible
Speaker 1: and Professor Cassie, I've approved this was a major factor
Speaker 1: in causing our depression epidemic. One of the heroes of
Speaker 1: my book is a wonderful doctor called Sam Everington. As
Speaker 1: you can tell from my Weird Downtown a b Boys,
Speaker 1: I'm British are though I spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: in the US and um. Sam is is a doctor
Speaker 1: in a poor part of East London where I lived
Speaker 1: for a long time. And Sam was really uncomfortable because
Speaker 1: he had loads of patients coming to him with depression
Speaker 1: and anxiety. And like me, he's not blanketly opposed to
Speaker 1: coming cliented depressants. He thinks they do play good rather
Speaker 1: for some people. But he could just see firstly that
Speaker 1: his patients were often depressed for perfectly good reasons, like
Speaker 1: being really lonely, and secondly that while the antidepressants could
Speaker 1: take the edge off that for some people, which had
Speaker 1: value for most of his patients, it was not solving
Speaker 1: the problem. So he decided to pioneer a different approach.
Speaker 1: One day, a woman came to him called Lisa Cunningham.
Speaker 1: Lisa had been shut away in her home with crippling
Speaker 1: depression and anxiety for seven years, and Sam said to Lisa,
Speaker 1: don't worry our Karen giving you these drugs. I'm also
Speaker 1: going to prescribe something else. There was an area behind
Speaker 1: the doctor's surgery. It was known as dog Shit Alley,
Speaker 1: which gives you a sense of what it was like.
Speaker 1: And backed onto a park and Sam said to Lisa,
Speaker 1: what I like to do is come and turn up
Speaker 1: twice a week. I'm going to turn out and support you.
Speaker 1: There'll be a group of depressed and anxious people. We're
Speaker 1: going to turn dogshit Alley into something good. Right first
Speaker 1: meeting they had, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety.
Speaker 1: But a couple of things happened The first thing was
Speaker 1: Lisa discovered as the weeks went on, they had something
Speaker 1: to talk about that wasn't how terrible they felt. Most
Speaker 1: of the time we offer depressed people drugs or we
Speaker 1: give them the opportunity to go and talk about their paint,
Speaker 1: both of whichever real value. But here they decided something
Speaker 1: else completely different. They decided they were going to learn gardening.
Speaker 1: They started to put their fingers in the soil. They
Speaker 1: started to learn the rhythms of the seasons, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of evidence that exposure to the natural world
Speaker 1: is a very powerful enter depressing. We can talk about
Speaker 1: that if you want. The second thing that happened is
Speaker 1: they began to form a tribe, and they did what
Speaker 1: human beings do when we formed tribes. They started to
Speaker 1: solve each other's problems. To give you the most extreme example,
Speaker 1: there was a guy in the program who was sleeping
Speaker 1: on the local public bus at night because he'd been
Speaker 1: thrown out of his home. People in the group were like, well,
Speaker 1: of course, for depressed sleeping on a bus. They started
Speaker 1: pressuring the local authority to get him 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 agram, which is part of a growing
Speaker 1: body of 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: Santa 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. Now, 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 about. 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 not be profound
Speaker 1: human distress. Of course, there will be um that you know,
Speaker 1: there are tragedies inherent to the human condition. Right, you
Speaker 1: will die, I will die, We will be forgotten. Everyone
Speaker 1: we know will die and be forgotten, the inherent you know,
Speaker 1: there are some things that just inherently tragic and sad
Speaker 1: about being human being that don't go away. But what
Speaker 1: we can do is deal with many of these deep
Speaker 1: environmental factors that are driving up this epidemic. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's so true. And what you just said there
Speaker 1: about the way that they connected over the garden, I
Speaker 1: think is really important. I mean, you made a good
Speaker 1: point there that they didn't go to the garden to
Speaker 1: talk about their trouble. And we had a woman on
Speaker 1: I don't know if you're familiar with. Her name is
Speaker 1: Emily White, and she wrote a book called Loneliness, and
Speaker 1: then her next book was about how she dealt with
Speaker 1: it by reconnecting to the world, and that was one
Speaker 1: of her big points was that, you know, we think
Speaker 1: that the type of friendship that's going to help us
Speaker 1: you know, the one that it's all about dealing with
Speaker 1: 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 squatters. As you can imagine,
Speaker 1: these three groups that at each other with a lot
Speaker 1: of incomprehension, and no one really knew anyone right, No
Speaker 1: one like big anonymous housing project, like one anywhere in
Speaker 1: the western world. No one knew anyone, No one knew
Speaker 1: who this woman was. But people saw the sign in
Speaker 1: her window and they started to knock on her door,
Speaker 1: and they said, do you need any help, and she said,
Speaker 1: fuck you, I don't want any help. I'm going to
Speaker 1: kill myself. And people started talking outside her corridor, and
Speaker 1: you know, they were all kind of piste off because
Speaker 1: their rents have been rising and lots of people have
Speaker 1: been evicted. And one of them had an idea. He'd
Speaker 1: actually been watching on the news Terrier Square that was
Speaker 1: the summer of the Egyptian Revolution, and there was a
Speaker 1: big thoroughfare that goes into the center of Berlin into
Speaker 1: Mitter that goes through this housing project, center of this
Speaker 1: housing project. And then this idea. They said, if we
Speaker 1: just blocked the road for a day on a Saturday
Speaker 1: and we will nea out, the media will come, there'll
Speaker 1: be a bit of a fuss, they'll probably let her stay.
Speaker 1: Maybe there'll be a good pressure to keep our rents down.
Speaker 1: So they did it. They wield no out. She was like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to kill myself anyway, I might as well
Speaker 1: let them put me in the middle of the street,
Speaker 1: and the media did come and there were news reports
Speaker 1: about her, and then it got to the end of
Speaker 1: the day and the media went home and the police
Speaker 1: came and they said, okay, take it down. You've had
Speaker 1: your fun. Take it down. And the residents, the people
Speaker 1: who live in this place it's called COTTI said, well,
Speaker 1: hang in a minute. You haven't told Nourria she gets
Speaker 1: to stay. And actually we want a rent freeze for
Speaker 1: all of us, so we'll take this down when we've
Speaker 1: been told we're getting a rent freeze. But of course
Speaker 1: they knew the moment they took this barricade down, the
Speaker 1: police would come and take it away. So one of
Speaker 1: my favorite people at Cotton Women called Tanya Gardner. She's
Speaker 1: one of the punk squatters. She she wears a tiny
Speaker 1: miniskirt even in Berlin winters. Tanya is hardcore. She had
Speaker 1: in her apartment Clackson, you know, one of those things
Speaker 1: you use at soccer matches to make noises. She went
Speaker 1: and got it and she said, okay, what we're gonna do.
Speaker 1: We can draw up a timetable to man this barricade
Speaker 1: and when the police come to take it down, let
Speaker 1: off the Clackson and will all come down from our
Speaker 1: apartments and we'll all stop them. Right, So people who
Speaker 1: would never have met, we didn't know each other, start
Speaker 1: to sign up to man this barricade. So Tanya, in
Speaker 1: her tiny miniska was given I think it was the
Speaker 1: Thursday night shift with Nuria, very religious Muslim, in a
Speaker 1: in a full hitge hob right, And the first nights
Speaker 1: they sat there it was super awkward. They're like, we've
Speaker 1: got nothing to talk about. This person is nothing like me.
Speaker 1: But as the nights went on they started talking to
Speaker 1: each other they discovered they had something incredibly similar in common.
Speaker 1: Nuria had come to Berlin when she was seventeen years
Speaker 1: old with her two children from a village in Turkey,
Speaker 1: and her job was to earn enough money to send
Speaker 1: back the money for her husband to come. But after
Speaker 1: she'd been in Berlin for a year, she got word
Speaker 1: from home that her husband had died. She told Tanya
Speaker 1: something she'd never told anyone. She had always told people
Speaker 1: that her husband died of a heart attack. Actually he
Speaker 1: died of TB, which was regarded as a disease of
Speaker 1: poverty and was quite shameful at that time. Tanya told
Speaker 1: Nur is something she didn't talk about very often. She
Speaker 1: had come to Cotti when she was fifteen. She'd been
Speaker 1: thrown out of her middle class home. She'd come there.
Speaker 1: She lived in a squat with a bunch of other punks.
Speaker 1: She got pregnant when she was fifteen. They actually realized
Speaker 1: they both had had young children and been really lost
Speaker 1: in this place when they when they were themselves children.
Speaker 1: This was happening all over Cotti. There was a young
Speaker 1: lad called Memer who was Turkish German lad really into
Speaker 1: hip hop, kept being nearly thrown out of school because
Speaker 1: they said he had a d h D. He got
Speaker 1: paired with this elderly, grumpy white German who loved stalin
Speaker 1: and said he didn't believe in direct action, and they
Speaker 1: got talking. They were had a shift together, and the
Speaker 1: old white guy started helping him with his homework. There
Speaker 1: were these pairings, these connections that were happening. Across the
Speaker 1: street from this housing project, there's a gay club called
Speaker 1: Zoo Block, which run by a man I love called
Speaker 1: Rick carud Strauss. And to give you a sense of
Speaker 1: what this gay club is like, the previous place that
Speaker 1: Rick hard Rand was called Cafe Anal. So it's pretty
Speaker 1: unco providing. I always thought you weren't have a savage
Speaker 1: with you know, pretty uncomprovised gay people. And you know,
Speaker 1: when they first opened this club, and you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's a lot of religious Muslims in this area. People
Speaker 1: some people really outraged. Some people have smashed the windows.
Speaker 1: When the protests began, this gay club zoop Block donated
Speaker 1: all of their furniture. They said, you know, you guys
Speaker 1: should have your meetings in our club, come whenever you want.
Speaker 1: And and at first even the kind of left wing
Speaker 1: people in Koti were like, look, we're not going to
Speaker 1: get these very religious Muslims to come and have meetings
Speaker 1: underneath you know, the poster for Fisting night, right. But
Speaker 1: actually they did start meeting there. As one of the
Speaker 1: Muslim women there said to me, we all realized we
Speaker 1: had to take these small steps to get to understand
Speaker 1: each other. After the protests have been going on for
Speaker 1: about six months, one day guy turned up called ton
Speaker 1: Kai And when you when you meet ton Kaites, he
Speaker 1: was in his early fifties at the time. When you
Speaker 1: meet Tunkites, clear he's got some cognitive difficulties. He'd been
Speaker 1: living homeless, and he started saying, can I do anything
Speaker 1: to help here? And they started asking him to help,
Speaker 1: and quite quickly all three groups, the Muslims, the Gaze
Speaker 1: and the punks loved him right. It's got lovely caring energy.
Speaker 1: By this time they had actually turned the thing blocking
Speaker 1: the street into a permanent structure, so they started saying
Speaker 1: to Tunkai, well, why don't you sleep here? But don't
Speaker 1: want you sleeping on the streets. As you know Berlin,
Speaker 1: it can be get cold in the fall in the winter.
Speaker 1: He started sleeping there. He became much beloved, kind of
Speaker 1: staple of the protest camp. And then after he'd been
Speaker 1: there for about a year, one day the police came
Speaker 1: to inspect. They would do this every now and then,
Speaker 1: and tun Kai doesn't like it when people arguing. He
Speaker 1: thought the police were arguing, so he went to try
Speaker 1: to hug one of the officers, but they thought he
Speaker 1: was attacking them, so they arrested him. That was when
Speaker 1: it was discovered Tunkai had been shut away in a
Speaker 1: psychiatric hospital, often in an actual padded cell, for twenty years,
Speaker 1: and he had escaped and been lived on the streets
Speaker 1: for a few months and then found his way to Catty,
Speaker 1: so the police took him back to the psychiatric hospital
Speaker 1: in Charlotte and right the other side of Berlin, at
Speaker 1: which point the entire Cotti protest movement turned itself into
Speaker 1: a kind of free Tongukai movement, and they descended on
Speaker 1: this psychiatric hospital at the other side of the city.
Speaker 1: And you know, the psychiatrists are just like, what is this.
Speaker 1: That's suddenly there's all these like Muslims, gaze and punks
Speaker 1: demanding a release of one of their patients. They've never
Speaker 1: seen anything like this. Remember Uli, one of the women
Speaker 1: at Cotti saying, you know she's she said to the protesters,
Speaker 1: to the story, to the psychiatrists, but he doesn't belong
Speaker 1: with you, you don't love him. He belongs with us.
Speaker 1: We love him. And I remember thinking how many of us,
Speaker 1: if we were carted away, would have hundreds of people
Speaker 1: descending on this place saying, now 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 A
Speaker 1: write 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 referendum initiative um because you have
Speaker 1: to get set number of signatures. It got the largest
Speaker 1: number of written signatures in the history of the city
Speaker 1: of Berlin. But you know, when I went to go
Speaker 1: and see Nuria, the woman who started the protest, the
Speaker 1: last time I oversaw Neuria, remember you know, she said
Speaker 1: to me, Look, I'm really glad I got to stay
Speaker 1: in my apartment. That's great, But I gained so much
Speaker 1: more than that. I was surrounded by these amazing people
Speaker 1: all along, and I never knew. Remember another another woman there,
Speaker 1: Aman who took part in the protests, and a Turkish German,
Speaker 1: and said to me, when I grew up in Turkey,
Speaker 1: I called my whole village home, and I came to
Speaker 1: live in the Western world, and I learned that what
Speaker 1: you're meant to call home is just your four walls.
Speaker 1: And then this whole protest began, and now I call
Speaker 1: this whole place and all these people in my home.
Speaker 1: And she said she realized that at some level she
Speaker 1: had been homeless all the time she'd been living in
Speaker 1: the Western world. That we are at some level homeless.
Speaker 1: The human beings need to feel we belong and our
Speaker 1: sense of home in this culture is not big enough
Speaker 1: to meet our sense of belonging. And lets thing about Cotty,
Speaker 1: and I think they think I'm crazy because I would
Speaker 1: go there every three months, just burst into tears and
Speaker 1: leave again. At one of them, Sandy said to me
Speaker 1: your hand, do you think you maybe you have allergies?
Speaker 1: Your eyes water very much, but that you know? I
Speaker 1: remember thinking. What was so clear to me and Cotty
Speaker 1: is those people think about how distress they were. You know,
Speaker 1: new Ya was suicidal, a Tunkai was shut away in
Speaker 1: a padded cell, mement, that young lad was constantly being
Speaker 1: nearly thrown out of school because they said he had
Speaker 1: a d h D. They did not need to be drugged.
Speaker 1: They needed to be together. The problems that seem insoluble
Speaker 1: when you are isolated and alone and told that life
Speaker 1: is about buying ship and screaming each other through screens,
Speaker 1: those problems are insoluble when you are in that framework.
Speaker 1: But when you are part of a tribe and you
Speaker 1: reorient your values, you begin to find solutions that you
Speaker 1: couldn't find when you were alone and Britania saying to
Speaker 1: me outside that gay clubs, She said to me one day,
Speaker 1: you know, when you're all alone and you feel like ship,
Speaker 1: you think there's something wrong with you. But what happened
Speaker 1: is we came out of our corner crying and we
Speaker 1: started to fight, and we realized we were surrounded by
Speaker 1: so many other people who feel the same way. And
Speaker 1: when 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 Cotty 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: that story is incredible and it reminds me of a
Speaker 1: slightly more prosaic version of this that has happened over
Speaker 1: and over and over and over, and it's um twelve
Speaker 1: step programs, and I have some concerns with with twelve
Speaker 1: 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 formed tribes. The unnatural thing is
Speaker 1: that we don't write that that actually this These are
Speaker 1: our deepest impulses as a species. Right, And you're right
Speaker 1: that I agree with you both. You know, there are
Speaker 1: some aspects of trust steps theology that I don't think
Speaker 1: for everyone. But I think the model of connection and
Speaker 1: support that is embedded in trust its programs is profound
Speaker 1: and beautiful. And the fact that you know any city,
Speaker 1: anyone in this is listening to You know, you could
Speaker 1: go to an a a meeting tonight. You go to
Speaker 1: it and no one will ask you for any money,
Speaker 1: and you will be welcomed and treated with care and respect.
Speaker 1: That's a That's an extraordinary thing. And you know there
Speaker 1: are many dark aspects of human nature, of course, but
Speaker 1: that is much truer to our nature and who we
Speaker 1: are as a species than sitting alone, you know, buying
Speaker 1: ship on your laptop. You know, the book is so deep,
Speaker 1: and there's nine causes, and we're going to get to
Speaker 1: almost We're going to get to so very little of it.
Speaker 1: We're running we're running up on time here. Soon. You
Speaker 1: and I are going to talk a little bit afterwards
Speaker 1: in the post show conversation. UM listeners you've heard the
Speaker 1: drill before. Supporters of the show can can hear those
Speaker 1: over on Patreon. But I want to just touch on
Speaker 1: a couple of things because I think the book can
Speaker 1: be summed up really really well in one line that
Speaker 1: you wrote, and it's the depression is itself a form
Speaker 1: of grief for all the connections we need but don't have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this comes from this thing that was discovered in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies about depression that was so explosive that it
Speaker 1: had to be kind of brushed under the carpet. In
Speaker 1: the seventies, the APIA, the American Psychological Association, decided for
Speaker 1: the first time to standardize how depression was diagnosed in
Speaker 1: the United States. So they drew up a list of
Speaker 1: ten symptoms of depression that are pretty obvious things that
Speaker 1: you could guess, crying a lot, feeling worthless, and they
Speaker 1: sent them out to doctors all over the country and
Speaker 1: the kind of psychiatric bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,
Speaker 1: and they said to doctors, if any of your patients
Speaker 1: experienced more than five of these symptoms for more than
Speaker 1: two weeks, diagnosed them as depressed, as mentally ill, do
Speaker 1: what you can to help them. So doctors start using this.
Speaker 1: But sometime 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 together,
Speaker 1: 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: we hang in a minute, we're meant to be telling
Speaker 1: people that depression is just a brain disease that you
Speaker 1: identify on a checklist. Except there's one situation, and only
Speaker 1: one situation in life where it's perfectly understandable response. But
Speaker 1: why is that the only situation where it's okay to
Speaker 1: respond this way and understandable. Why not if you lose
Speaker 1: your job? Why not if you lose your house, not
Speaker 1: if you're stuck in a job you hate for the
Speaker 1: next forty years. You can all imagine, you imagine 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 absolutely
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 of 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 doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 1: So now if your baby dies at ten am, you
Speaker 1: can be diagnosed that morning. If they said, too, 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: Cassio Tore has shown, nine of grieving parents are diagnosed
Speaker 1: and drugged in the first forty 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 druging
Speaker 1: greeting parents disrupts the grieving process in ways that really damaging.
Speaker 1: But I think you can see this in a wider
Speaker 1: context as Dr cassu Tory herself, which is really a
Speaker 1: remarkable person, applies it in a wider context, which is
Speaker 1: that you know, the worst thing for me about what
Speaker 1: my doctor told me that it was just a chemical
Speaker 1: imbalance of my problem, that it's not true that it's
Speaker 1: just a chemical manills frames. The worst thing is what
Speaker 1: that says to people is your pain is meaningless. It's
Speaker 1: like a glitch in a computer program. But what the
Speaker 1: World Health Organization, the leading medical body in the world,
Speaker 1: and so many of the people who've 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. Abut how we've been approaching it in
Speaker 1: the wrong way. It is. One of the other moments
Speaker 1: when emotionally it fell into place to me was when
Speaker 1: I went to interview this um South African psychiatrist called
Speaker 1: Derek Summerfield. He's a wonderful person. Derek happened to be
Speaker 1: in Cambodia in two thousand and one when chemic client
Speaker 1: to depressants were first introduced in that country, and the
Speaker 1: local Cambodian doctors were like, what are these drugs? They
Speaker 1: hadn't heard of them. What is an antidepressant? And Derek
Speaker 1: explained and they said to him, we don't need them,
Speaker 1: We've already got antidepressants. And he said, what do you mean.
Speaker 1: He thought they were going to talk about some kind
Speaker 1: of herbal remedy or something. Instead they told him a
Speaker 1: story There was a farmer in their community who worked
Speaker 1: in the rice fields, and one day he stood on
Speaker 1: a landline and he got his leg blown off. So
Speaker 1: they gave him an artificial limb and he went back
Speaker 1: to work in the rice fields. But apparently it's extremely
Speaker 1: painful to work in the rice field. It worked under
Speaker 1: water when you've got artificial limb. I'm imagining it was
Speaker 1: traumatic for very obvious reasons. The guy started to cry
Speaker 1: all day, didn't want to get out of bed, classic depression.
Speaker 1: So they said to Derek, that's when we gave him
Speaker 1: an antidepressant. They said, well, he said, what was it.
Speaker 1: They explained that they went and sat with him, They
Speaker 1: listened to him. They saw that his pain made sense.
Speaker 1: They figured precisely because they listened to the source of
Speaker 1: the pain, they began to look for solutions. They figured,
Speaker 1: if we brought him a cow, he could become a
Speaker 1: dairy farmer. He wouldn't be so distressed. So they brought
Speaker 1: him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped.
Speaker 1: Within a month, his depression had gone. They said to Derek,
Speaker 1: so you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant.
Speaker 1: That's what you mean right now, as I say, those
Speaker 1: Cambodian doctors new intuitively what the World Health Organization has
Speaker 1: been trying to tell us. They understood that your pain
Speaker 1: has meaning. We evolved a pain impulse for a reason, right,
Speaker 1: I mean there's a trivial example. You know, as a
Speaker 1: European who spends a lot of my time in the US,
Speaker 1: I never failed to be surprised by the existence of
Speaker 1: indigestion treatments like peptobismal right, we shoul just don't exist
Speaker 1: anywhere in Europe. I've never seen them anywhere in Europe.
Speaker 1: I remember the first time I was, Oh, yeah, we
Speaker 1: don't have them, no such thing. I mean, maybe they're available,
Speaker 1: I've never seen I've never seen anyone take when. I've
Speaker 1: never seen anyone selling them. Because the reaction of European
Speaker 1: when you've seen indigestion treatment is to say, well whw
Speaker 1: In a minute, indigestion isn't a malfunction. It's a necessary
Speaker 1: signal from your body that you're eating too fast. The
Speaker 1: solution to indigestion is to eat more slowly, right, because
Speaker 1: that's a signal that you're eating too much, you're reading
Speaker 1: too fast, You're gonna make yourself sick, going to upset
Speaker 1: your stomach. Now that's a trivial example, because indigestion is
Speaker 1: infinitely less agonizing the depression, which is the worst thing
Speaker 1: I've ever gone through. But you can see that principle.
Speaker 1: We have pain impulses for a reason, right, they are
Speaker 1: not malfunctions. That and the fact that one in five
Speaker 1: Americans is going to take a psychiatric drug in their lifetime,
Speaker 1: and average white male life expectancy just fell for the
Speaker 1: first time in the history of the American Republic apart
Speaker 1: from the Civil War. These are signals that are telling
Speaker 1: us something. And what they're telling us is not that
Speaker 1: everyone mysteriously just had a serotonin imbalance in their brains. Right,
Speaker 1: there are real things that happen to depressed people's brains.
Speaker 1: Of course, those things sometimes make it harder to get
Speaker 1: out of depression. That is true, and I go through
Speaker 1: that in the book. Of course, we've been told this
Speaker 1: ludicrously reductive explanation that to me, the problem is not
Speaker 1: so much with the drugs, Because the drugs have some
Speaker 1: benefit for some people that do some harm to some people.
Speaker 1: We can have a complex and a nuanced debate about that.
Speaker 1: But to me, the really harmful thing is what the
Speaker 1: story does to people, Well, that story does is it
Speaker 1: tells you that your pain doesn't mean anything. And what
Speaker 1: that does is it cuts you off from following that
Speaker 1: pain to its source. Both you as an individual and
Speaker 1: us is more important than us as a society and
Speaker 1: solving the things that are hurting us so much. I
Speaker 1: agree completely, Like I said early on, for me, you
Speaker 1: know what I've I've described my treating depression is I
Speaker 1: kind of like throw the kitchen sink at it, right.
Speaker 1: I recognized it's a there's a bunch of things that
Speaker 1: are a factor in it for me, and and I
Speaker 1: need to treat all those different things. And I think
Speaker 1: that's what you're you're pointing to so much, is that,
Speaker 1: you know, and I think that's so true that that
Speaker 1: our pain is very often a signal about something. It's
Speaker 1: like guilt. Guilt used in the proper way is a
Speaker 1: signal that we're living against what our values are now
Speaker 1: dis conspiral into shame. We can feel guilty about things
Speaker 1: that other people tell us, but it's core right, you know,
Speaker 1: well functioning human guilt tells us like I don't feel
Speaker 1: good about that, and so it's a signal, and so
Speaker 1: to just ignore it is troublesome. And I and I
Speaker 1: agree with you, and I think what we've done it,
Speaker 1: I think that's a really well put But I don't
Speaker 1: think ignoring it. I don't think as a culture we've
Speaker 1: ignored it. I think it's worse as a culture. We've
Speaker 1: pathologized it. As a culture. We've said that it's a
Speaker 1: sign of craziness or malfunction in the individual. If we
Speaker 1: ignored it, that would be bad enough. What we've done
Speaker 1: is even worse than ignoring it. Um. Yeah, we've pathologized it.
Speaker 1: And to me, that's the most and that's the most
Speaker 1: the most damaging thing. Well, because it makes people them
Speaker 1: mistrust the impulse, it makes them mistrust the signal, it
Speaker 1: makes them systematically misread the signal. As a culture, um and,
Speaker 1: I think if we had listened to these signals about depression,
Speaker 1: we could have dealt with some of these problems before it,
Speaker 1: for example, the opioid crisis. And I've spent time in
Speaker 1: places like men and Not New Hampshire, which at the
Speaker 1: absolute epicenter of the opioid crisis, where what's happening there,
Speaker 1: the heart of what's happening there that the core of it.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are many things going on, but as
Speaker 1: you know, the subject in my previous book, Chasing the Screen,
Speaker 1: which is about addiction, but the core of that is
Speaker 1: the core of addiction is about trying not to be
Speaker 1: present in your life because your life is too painful
Speaker 1: a place to be. Right, It's not a coincidence the
Speaker 1: places with the highest levels of opioid use have the
Speaker 1: highest levels of suicide and have the highest level of
Speaker 1: antidepressant prescriptions. These are ways of trying to not be
Speaker 1: present in an unbearably painful reality. And if we had
Speaker 1: listened to these signals sooner, we wouldn't be having these
Speaker 1: extreme distress signals. And I have to say, I don't
Speaker 1: think we would be having the current president either. You remember,
Speaker 1: in the run up to the election, I was with
Speaker 1: this fascinating group who I'm running about for a different project,
Speaker 1: who do deep canvassing work to try to persuade voters,
Speaker 1: and we were on this street in Cleveland, in a
Speaker 1: part of Cleveland called Slavic City's really haunted me as
Speaker 1: my memory of the election. Were on this long street
Speaker 1: and it was this devastated street, like kind of like
Speaker 1: Detroit without the poetry of the ruins, and about a
Speaker 1: third of the houses had been abandoned, a third had
Speaker 1: actually been demolished, and the third still have people living
Speaker 1: in them. Of from behind barbed wire, I mean knocked
Speaker 1: on one door, and there was this woman who got
Speaker 1: talking to I would have guessed from looking at her
Speaker 1: with sixty I discovered from the conversation she was actually
Speaker 1: the same age as me. I was thirty seven at
Speaker 1: the time, and we're having this conversation and she was
Speaker 1: quite particulate, very very angry. She wasn't going to vote
Speaker 1: for Trump, she was going to not vote at all,
Speaker 1: but really furious. And at one point she made this
Speaker 1: verbal slip. She was talking about what the area used
Speaker 1: to be like for her parents and grandparents, and she
Speaker 1: meant to say when I was young, but she actually
Speaker 1: said is when I was alive, And it really she
Speaker 1: didn't she didn't notice she had made that verbal slip,
Speaker 1: but it really knocked me back. And when I hear
Speaker 1: people on my side, and you can guess my politics,
Speaker 1: when I hear people on my side talking about Trump
Speaker 1: voters or people who didn't vote as stupid or racist
Speaker 1: or just pathologizing, the signal they've sent out, and which,
Speaker 1: don't get me wrong, I think is obviously a disastrous signal.
Speaker 1: You can guess what I think about that. But to
Speaker 1: pathologize the signal 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 that the fact
Speaker 1: that 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 American to take your psychiatric drug,
Speaker 1: falling white male life expectancy, first time history of the Republic.
Speaker 1: You know, these are these are interconnected signals that we've
Speaker 1: built a culture that doesn't meet people's underlying psychological needs
Speaker 1: in all sorts of crucial ways. But we can deal
Speaker 1: with that. There are lots of ways back from that.
Speaker 1: I've seen them in practice, I've seen how they work.
Speaker 1: I report the last third of the book is about
Speaker 1: solutions that are not kind of hypothetical solutions, but places
Speaker 1: I went people, I interviewed, science, I saw which show
Speaker 1: ways back and we've arealy touched on a boy small
Speaker 1: number of the causes and very few of the solutions.
Speaker 1: But I think that is to me, the core of
Speaker 1: it is, it doesn't have to be this way, but
Speaker 1: to find your way out of this pain, you have
Speaker 1: to understand the problem differently. And I wish in a
Speaker 1: way the book is the letter I wish someone you know,
Speaker 1: It's like a letter to my teenage self. This is
Speaker 1: that these are the things I wish someone had told
Speaker 1: me when I walked into that doctor's surgery and state
Speaker 1: of pain and pain and distress that I was not told,
Speaker 1: rather than the story I was told, which set me
Speaker 1: off on a path away from the source of my
Speaker 1: pain and away from understanding that. I agree it's a
Speaker 1: beautiful way to put it. We're out of time here,
Speaker 1: but I will encourage listeners absolutely check out the book.
Speaker 1: It has so many important points and really summarizes I
Speaker 1: think a lot of things that this show has been
Speaker 1: about in in sort of one place. And so I
Speaker 1: thank you so much for you for taking the time
Speaker 1: to come on the show and and for writing the book.
Speaker 1: My publishers always, i should say, my publishers always tell
Speaker 1: me to always feel like a kind of advertising person
Speaker 1: in one of those bad nineteen fifties movies when I
Speaker 1: do this, but they've told me I have to say
Speaker 1: this at the end of interviews, which is if anyone
Speaker 1: would like any more information about where they can get
Speaker 1: the book or the audiobook, if they would like to
Speaker 1: know what a range of people have said about the book,
Speaker 1: from Hillary Clinton to Cocker Carlson to Arianna Huffington's to
Speaker 1: Russell Brand, if you would like to take a quiz
Speaker 1: to see how much you know about the real causes
Speaker 1: of depression and anxiety, or if you'd like to hear
Speaker 1: audio of any of the people we've been talking about,
Speaker 1: like there's amazing people in Berlin. You can go to www.
Speaker 1: Dot the Lost Connections dot com. It's not Lost Connections
Speaker 1: dot com because that was a band called Lost Connections
Speaker 1: I don't know about um and um yeah, um yeah,
Speaker 1: the Lost Connections dot com. And also on that site
Speaker 1: you can see where to follow me on Twitter, Instagram,
Speaker 1: and I'll absolutely put links to that site in the
Speaker 1: show notes that go along with the show. So thank
Speaker 1: you so much. A pleasure as always to talk with you,
Speaker 1: totally my pleasure. Thank you so much. Bye. If what
Speaker 1: you have heard was helpful to you, please consider making
Speaker 1: a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over
Speaker 1: to one you Feed dot net slash support. The One
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