Speaker 1: Step into the world of power, loyalty, and luck.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna make him an offer you can't refuse.
Speaker 1: With family, canoli's and spins mean everything.
Speaker 2: Now you want to get mixed up in the family.
Speaker 1: Business, Introducing the Godfather at champacasino dot com. Test your
Speaker 1: luck in the shadowy world at the Godfather slot.
Speaker 2: Someday I will call upon you to do a service
Speaker 2: for me.
Speaker 1: Play the Godfather now at champacasino dot com.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the Family vdW group. No perch is necessary
Speaker 3: if we were previted by loss he Terms and Conditions
Speaker 3: eighteen plus.
Speaker 4: Lucky Land Casino, asking people what's the weirdest place you've
Speaker 4: gotten lucky? Lucky in line at the Delhi I guess ah,
Speaker 4: in my dentist's office more than once.
Speaker 5: Actually do I.
Speaker 4: Have to say?
Speaker 2: Yes? You do?
Speaker 4: In the car before my kid's PTA meeting? Really? Yes?
Speaker 4: Excuse me? What's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky? I
Speaker 4: never win? And tell well, there you have it. You
Speaker 4: could get lucky anywhere playing at Lucky landslots dot com.
Speaker 4: Play for free right now? Are you feeling lucky?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 4: Just necessary? Void my Law eighteen plus Terms and Conditions of Plicy,
Speaker 4: What's every details?
Speaker 1: Judy was boring?
Speaker 7: Hello, Then Judy discovered chumpacasino dot com.
Speaker 3: It's my little escape.
Speaker 4: Now Judy is the life of the party.
Speaker 3: Oh baby, mama is bringing home the bacon.
Speaker 7: WHOA, take it easy, Judy, jump the Chumba. Life is
Speaker 7: for everybody. So go to chumpacasino dot com and play
Speaker 7: over one hundred casino style games. Join today and play
Speaker 7: for free for your chance to redeem some serious prices.
Speaker 7: Jump chumpacasito dot com. No, we'd just necessary.
Speaker 2: Boy.
Speaker 7: We're promited to by law eighteen plus Terms and condition
Speaker 7: to Plicy, What's every Details?
Speaker 1: Step into the world of power, loyalty, and luck.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna make him an offer you can't refuse.
Speaker 1: We're family, Canoli's and spins mean everything?
Speaker 2: Now you want to get mixed up in the family.
Speaker 1: Business, Introducing the Godfather at chumpacasino dot com. Test your
Speaker 1: luck in the shadowy world of the Godfather slot.
Speaker 2: Someday I will call upon you to.
Speaker 1: Do play the Godfather now at Champa casino dot com.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the family vdW group. NOPERD is necessary if
Speaker 3: we were privateed by loss he Terms and Conditions eighteen
Speaker 3: plus Love.
Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week,
Speaker 5: another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host
Speaker 5: journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 8: Good Evening from The New York Times best selling author
Speaker 8: of Facing the Scream, The First and Last Days of
Speaker 8: the War on Drugs, A radical new way of thinking
Speaker 8: about depression and anxiety? What really causes depression and anxiety
Speaker 8: and how can we really solve them? Award winning journalist
Speaker 8: Johann Hari suffered from depression since he was a child
Speaker 8: and started taking antidepressants when he was a teenager. He
Speaker 8: was told that his problems were caused by a chemical
Speaker 8: imbalance in his brain. As an adult trained in the
Speaker 8: social sciences, he began to investigate whether this was true,
Speaker 8: and he learned that almost everything we have been told
Speaker 8: about depression and an anxiety is wrong. Across the world,
Speaker 8: Harry found social scientists who are uncovering evidence that depression
Speaker 8: and anxiety are not caused by a chemical imbalance in
Speaker 8: our brains. In fact, they are largely caused by key
Speaker 8: problems with the way we live today. Harry's journey took
Speaker 8: him from from a mind blowing series of experiments in Baltimore,
Speaker 8: to an Amish community in Indiana to an uprising in Berlin.
Speaker 8: Once he had uncovered the nine real causes of depression
Speaker 8: and anxiety, they led him to scientists who were discovering
Speaker 8: seven very different solutions, ones that work. It is an
Speaker 8: epic journey that will change how we think about one
Speaker 8: of the biggest crises in our culture today. His Ted
Speaker 8: talk Everything you Think You Know about Addiction Is Wrong
Speaker 8: has been viewed more than eight million times and revolutionized
Speaker 8: the global debate. This book will do the same. The
Speaker 8: book that we're featuring, the Seething is Lost Connections Uncovering
Speaker 8: the real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions with
Speaker 8: my special guest journalist and author Johann Hari. Thank you
Speaker 8: very much for a Greenness interview and welcome back to
Speaker 8: the program. Johann Hari.
Speaker 6: Hey Dan, it's ready to get to be back with you.
Speaker 6: And you're still the only radio host who says my
Speaker 6: name right first time round. That's eternally great.
Speaker 8: Wow. I'm I'm grateful I can do that because I'm
Speaker 8: usually butchering people's names. So there we go. Congratulations on
Speaker 8: this book. This is amazing. Let's get right to this.
Speaker 8: You talk about being eighteen years old when you first
Speaker 8: swallowed your first antidepressant and it was Paxel, and you
Speaker 8: started this book three years ago. Take us back to
Speaker 8: that first time and your experience with antidepressants, and then
Speaker 8: tell us about the impetus for this book, the reason
Speaker 8: for this book and where you started and three years ago.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the answer to those questions is really interconnected.
Speaker 7: Dan.
Speaker 6: There were these two mysteries that were hanging over me.
Speaker 6: The first was ninety years old. Every year I've been
Speaker 6: alive in Britain, the United States, and Canada, depression and
Speaker 6: anxiety have increased, and I wanted to understand why, what's
Speaker 6: going on? Why do so many more people all around
Speaker 6: us seem to be becoming so distressed? And the second
Speaker 6: mystery was more personal. When I was a teenager, as
Speaker 6: you mentioned, I went to my doctor and I explained
Speaker 6: that I had this feeling like pain was kind of
Speaker 6: bleeding out of me. I didn't understand it, I didn't
Speaker 6: I feel quite ashamed of it. I didn't know why
Speaker 6: this was happening, and my doctor told me a story
Speaker 6: about why I felt this way. He said, as entirely
Speaker 6: biological story. He said, well, we scientists have discovered what
Speaker 6: causes this kind of will, causes depression. There's a chemical
Speaker 6: called serotonin in people's brains. Some people are naturally lacking it.
Speaker 6: You're clearly one of them. And the solution is just
Speaker 6: that we need to give you these drugs. So I
Speaker 6: started taking as you say, packed and I felt an
Speaker 6: immediate and significant boost, and for several months I felt
Speaker 6: radically better. But after a while this sense of pain
Speaker 6: started to kind of bleed back through. So I went
Speaker 6: back to my doctor. He said, clearly I didn't give
Speaker 6: you a high enough dose. I started taking a higher dose. Again.
Speaker 6: I felt better again, I started to feel a lot
Speaker 6: with side effects, so I started putting on a lot
Speaker 6: of weight, for example. Again this sense of pain started
Speaker 6: to bleed back through, and I got a higher dose.
Speaker 6: And it was kind of in this cycle until I
Speaker 6: was taking the maximum possible dose for thirteen possible for
Speaker 6: thirteen years, at the end of which I was still depressed. Right.
Speaker 6: I had felt some benefits initially, but I was still depressed.
Speaker 6: So for my bit lost connections, I really want to
Speaker 6: go on this journey to understand what's to really solve
Speaker 6: these two mysteries, what's happening here? Right? So I ended
Speaker 6: up going traveling, as you say, over forty thousand miles
Speaker 6: to meet the leading experts in the world about what
Speaker 6: causes depression and anxiety and what solved them, and to
Speaker 6: go to places that had very different perspectives on this.
Speaker 6: And I think I learned many things for this book
Speaker 6: but on this but one of the most important to
Speaker 6: me was I realized that until I went to my
Speaker 6: doctor when I was a teenager, I thought my depression
Speaker 6: and anxiety were all in my head, meaning, you know,
Speaker 6: I was just being weak. I needed to man up,
Speaker 6: I needed to be tougher, you know, insert whatever stigmatizing
Speaker 6: cliche you want there. And then for the next thirteen years,
Speaker 6: I thought depression was all in my head, meaning it
Speaker 6: was just a kind of chemical imbalance in my brain.
Speaker 6: But actually, what I learned on this journey is from
Speaker 6: the leading experts in the world, there are real biological
Speaker 6: factors that can make you more sensitive to these problems.
Speaker 6: There are real brain changes, your genes, and so on,
Speaker 6: which are write about in the book, But actually the
Speaker 6: main causes of these problems, according to for example, the
Speaker 6: World Health Organization, the leading medical body in the whole world,
Speaker 6: are largely not in our heads. They're mostly in specific
Speaker 6: factors in the way we're living. I learned there are
Speaker 6: nine causes of depression and anxiety for which there is
Speaker 6: scientific evidence. Two of them are biological, seven of them
Speaker 6: are factors in the way we live. And once you
Speaker 6: understand that, it leads you to a very different set
Speaker 6: of solutions, ones that are more effective.
Speaker 8: Before you did this, though, or a part of this
Speaker 8: entire process, before you come to the realizations that you
Speaker 8: do in this book, though, you had to look at
Speaker 8: the studies from the pharmaceutical companies. You had to look
Speaker 8: at the importance of Seeble effect, and you looked at
Speaker 8: someone named Irving Kersh's work and the Emperor's new drugs.
Speaker 8: So tell us a little bit about this work that
Speaker 8: he had done and the research that you did into
Speaker 8: those studies that he did.
Speaker 6: Yes, So we need to have a more nuanced conversation
Speaker 6: about chemical ancy depressants, because too often this debate is
Speaker 6: framed as either are you fool or against amcal antidepressants,
Speaker 6: which I think is too simplistic a way of thinking
Speaker 6: about this. So one of the things that really startled
Speaker 6: me was to discover that the story I was told
Speaker 6: that depression is caused by low serotonin in the brain,
Speaker 6: there was never a time when half of the scientists
Speaker 6: in the field believed that. Professor Andrew Scarlett, Princeton University
Speaker 6: says it is deeply misleading and unscientific to say depression
Speaker 6: is caused by low serotonin in the brain. One of
Speaker 6: the leading experts here in Britain, Dr David Healy, said
Speaker 6: to me, Yeah, you couldn't even call that story discredited
Speaker 6: because it was never credited. There was never a time
Speaker 6: when half of the scientists in the field believe it.
Speaker 6: The reason we were sold that story that it was
Speaker 6: about low serotonin in the brain is because that was
Speaker 6: the story that was most popular with drug company prs.
Speaker 6: That was the story that made it easiest to sell
Speaker 6: you drugs because what it tells you is, oh, you've
Speaker 6: just got a natural chemical imbalance in your brain and
Speaker 6: these drugs are restoring you to a natural state. Right now,
Speaker 6: that's not true. That doesn't mean these drugs have no
Speaker 6: value mentioned Professor Irvin Kersho's the leading expert on this
Speaker 6: at Harvard Medical School who's done really important research on
Speaker 6: this question. And there's many things he discovered, but I
Speaker 6: think the most important is depression is often measured by
Speaker 6: something called the Hamilton scale. I've always felt really sorry
Speaker 6: for whether Hamilton was that we only remember him by
Speaker 6: measuring how miserable we are. But the habit of scale
Speaker 6: goes to give you a sense of it from one
Speaker 6: where you would be dancing around in ecstasy or maybe
Speaker 6: on ecstasy, to fifty one, where you would be acutely suicidal,
Speaker 6: and to give you a sense of what movement on
Speaker 6: the Hamilton scale looks like. If you improve your sleep patterns,
Speaker 6: you'll generally gain six points on the Hamilton scale. And
Speaker 6: if your sleep patterns deteriorates to say, you know, you
Speaker 6: have a kid or something, have a baby, you'll generally
Speaker 6: lose six points on the Hamilton scale. What Professor kersh
Speaker 6: fan by looking at the data, so there's a very selective.
Speaker 6: The way it works is everyone knows what if you
Speaker 6: take selfies to you know, do your Tinder profile, you
Speaker 6: you know, you take thirty pictures, you get rid of
Speaker 6: the twenty nine where you look like you've got a
Speaker 6: double chin or like you're building or whatever, and then
Speaker 6: you use the thirtieth one as your Tinder profile picture.
Speaker 6: When the original applications were being made for antidepressants to
Speaker 6: be released and they were applying to the drug regulators,
Speaker 6: it turned out the drug companies did something very similar.
Speaker 6: They basically selectively released the studies. So only the studies
Speaker 6: which suggested the drugs had a really powerful effectas were released,
Speaker 6: were published. So we ended up with a quite distorted
Speaker 6: picture of how well they did. What professor Kershpound is
Speaker 6: if you look at the data, all the data, not
Speaker 6: just the stuff that they released to the public. But
Speaker 6: what he showed is, on average, chemical antidepressants moved people
Speaker 6: one point eight points on the Hamilton scale. So remember,
Speaker 6: improving your sleep patterns gives you a six point boost
Speaker 6: on average, chemical anti depressants give you a one point
Speaker 6: eight point boost. There's a few things that are important
Speaker 6: to stress about that. Firstly, that's an average, so I
Speaker 6: initially got more over time, I got less. Important to say,
Speaker 6: there's a debate. Some people think it works better with
Speaker 6: people with severe depression, and it's important to say some
Speaker 6: scientists think that that Professor Kirsher's figures slightly underestimate it,
Speaker 6: and that it's more like three points on the Hamilton scale.
Speaker 6: But once you understand that, what you can see is
Speaker 6: a few things. Firstly, one point eight points is worth
Speaker 6: having for some people, right, some people that boost will
Speaker 6: outweigh the significant side effects, in which case, you know,
Speaker 6: I'm glad for them and they should carry on. But
Speaker 6: you can also see why for most people over time,
Speaker 6: that boost isn't big enough to solve the problem of
Speaker 6: their depression and their anxiety. You need more. And one
Speaker 6: of the people who really helped me to understand one
Speaker 6: of the ways we need to think about this differently
Speaker 6: was a South African psychiatrist called Derek Summerfield, where I
Speaker 6: went to interview and he explained to me, just by coincidence,
Speaker 6: Derek was in Cambodia in two thousand and one when
Speaker 6: chemical and antidepressants were first introduced in that country, and
Speaker 6: the local doctors, the Cambodian doctors didn't know what these
Speaker 6: drugs were. They've never heard of them, so they asked him, well,
Speaker 6: what are they. I'm sorry, I'm losing my voice, but
Speaker 6: and he explained he explained what these drugs were, and
Speaker 6: they said to him, oh, we don't need those, we
Speaker 6: don't need them, We've already got antidepressants. And he said,
Speaker 6: what do you mean. He thought they were going to
Speaker 6: talk about some you know, local herbal remedy or something.
Speaker 6: Instead they told him a story. They told them about
Speaker 6: a farmer in their community who worked in the rice
Speaker 6: fields and one day he stood on a land line
Speaker 6: and got his leg blown off, and they gave him
Speaker 6: an artificial leg. They're good at that in Cambodia, as
Speaker 6: I saw myself when I was there, and they he
Speaker 6: went back to work in the fields. But apparently it's
Speaker 6: very painful to work underwater when you've got an artificial limb.
Speaker 6: For obvious reasons. I'm imagining it was pretty traumatic for
Speaker 6: this guy to be back in the fields where he
Speaker 6: got blown up, and he started to cry all day.
Speaker 6: He didn't want to get out of bed, kind of
Speaker 6: classic depression, they said to Derek, So we gave him
Speaker 6: an antidepressant. Derek said, what was it. They explained that
Speaker 6: they went and sat with him, they listened to him.
Speaker 6: They realized that his pain made sense, that he wasn't
Speaker 6: some irrational malfunction. It was being caused by the way
Speaker 6: he was being made to live. They figured if they
Speaker 6: bought him a cow, he could become a dairy farmer.
Speaker 6: He wouldn't have to be in this situation that was
Speaker 6: causing him so much distress. So they brought him a cow.
Speaker 6: Within a month, he stopped crying. His depression went away,
Speaker 6: they said to Derek, So that cow was an antidepressant. Right,
Speaker 6: that's what you mean. What those Cambodian doctors knew, intuitively
Speaker 6: is what the World Health Organization, the leading medical body
Speaker 6: in the world, has been trying to tell us for years.
Speaker 6: If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not crazy. You're
Speaker 6: not a machine with broken parts. You're a human being
Speaker 6: with unmet needs, and you need support and help to
Speaker 6: get those needs met. And this is one of the
Speaker 6: things that really united not all, but most of the
Speaker 6: causes of depression and anxiety that I learned about. Everyone
Speaker 6: listening to your showdown knows that they have natural physical needs. Right.
Speaker 6: You need food, you need water, you need cleaner, you
Speaker 6: need shelter. If I took them away from you, you
Speaker 6: would be in real trouble, real fast. Right. There's equally
Speaker 6: strong evidence that human beings have natural psychological needs. You
Speaker 6: need to feel you belong, You need to feel your
Speaker 6: life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that
Speaker 6: people see you and value you. You need to feel
Speaker 6: you've got a secure future. And our culture is good
Speaker 6: at many things, but we've been getting less and less
Speaker 6: good at meeting these underlying psychological needs but very large
Speaker 6: numbers of people. And that is one is not the
Speaker 6: only one, but that's one of the key reasons why
Speaker 6: we have a growing depression and anxiety crisis.
Speaker 8: You've found out a little bit more as well, because
Speaker 8: we mentioned that you were decribed antidepressants at eighteen years
Speaker 8: of age. Sure, and you also looked at and you
Speaker 8: chronicle about what the lands had concluded and the studies
Speaker 8: they did specifically for use with antidepressants with teens, and
Speaker 8: so what were those conclusions.
Speaker 6: This was really shocking for me. So the Lancer, which
Speaker 6: is one of the leading one of the leading medical
Speaker 6: journeys and journals in the world, published a very detailed
Speaker 6: study that found that it looked at i think it
Speaker 6: was seventeen chemical antidepressants for teenagers and it found that
Speaker 6: all but one didn't work at all. And so it
Speaker 6: recommended they'd not be given to teenager. One thing it
Speaker 6: was shocking as one of them was the drug that
Speaker 6: I was in fact given as a teenager PASO, And
Speaker 6: it was quite shocking as well to see some of
Speaker 6: the leaked memos from the drug company that produced these
Speaker 6: drugs saying they didn't work for teenagers. But I think
Speaker 6: one of the other names for the drug is peroxetine,
Speaker 6: and I think the wording of the memo was that
Speaker 6: it would be commercially unacceptable for the profile of peroxetine
Speaker 6: to release that information, so they didn't, So they carried
Speaker 6: on giving out We know this partly because there was
Speaker 6: a big court case taken by Elliot Spitzer when he
Speaker 6: was the Attorney General of New York State against the
Speaker 6: drug companies and they had to make a big payout
Speaker 6: in court because of the court found they had in
Speaker 6: fact misled people about giving antidepressants to teenagers. So I
Speaker 6: think again what that shows is I'm not arguing that
Speaker 6: we should take chemicalanty depressants off the menu. They do
Speaker 6: give some relief to some people. What I'm arguing is
Speaker 6: we need to radically expand the menu because they're not
Speaker 6: solving the problem for extremely large numbers of people. It
Speaker 6: doesn't mean they have no value, but it does mean
Speaker 6: we need a lot more options. And one of the
Speaker 6: things that was so fascinating to me was meeting all
Speaker 6: over the world with people who were acting on this insight.
Speaker 6: So I'll talk about one of the causes of depression anxiety,
Speaker 6: and then someone who decided to effectively do the equivalent
Speaker 6: of what those Cambodian doctors want to do, which is
Speaker 6: bind a cow for the problem. Right, So we are
Speaker 6: the loneliest that has ever existed. There's a study that
Speaker 6: asks Americans how many close friends do you have who
Speaker 6: you can call on in a crisis? And when they
Speaker 6: started doing this study years ago, the most common answer
Speaker 6: was five. Today the most common answer is none. It's
Speaker 6: not the average, but it's the most. There were more
Speaker 6: people who say none than any other option, which is
Speaker 6: kind of startling, right. And I remember I thought about
Speaker 6: this a lot because I interviewed extensively the leading expert
Speaker 6: on loneliness in the world, a man who sadly actually
Speaker 6: died this week, a wonderful guy called Professor John Cassiopo,
Speaker 6: who did really groundbreaking research on this, and Professor Cassiopo
Speaker 6: discovered what he discovered many things. One's shocking one. He showed,
Speaker 6: so when we're stressed, we release a hormone called corssol.
Speaker 6: He showed that feeling acutely lonely is as stressful for
Speaker 6: human beings as being punched in the face by a stranger.
Speaker 6: And he explained to me, you know, if you think
Speaker 6: about why are you and I able to have this conversation, Dan,
Speaker 6: it's partly because our ancestors on the savannahs of Africa
Speaker 6: were really good at one thing, right. They weren't bigger
Speaker 6: than the animals they took down, they weren't faster than
Speaker 6: the animals they took down, but they were incredibly good
Speaker 6: at banding together into tribes and cooperating. Every human instinct
Speaker 6: is to live in a tribe. Bes need to hive,
Speaker 6: Humans need a tribe. If you think about the circumstances
Speaker 6: where we evolve, if you were separated from the tribe,
Speaker 6: you were frightened and anxious and depressed for a really
Speaker 6: good reason. You were probably about to die, right, you know,
Speaker 6: And those are the impulses we have. We are the
Speaker 6: first humans to ever try to live without tribes. It's
Speaker 6: contrary to our human nature, and especially because one of
Speaker 6: the heroes of my book Lost Connections is someone who
Speaker 6: really absorbed this insight in this research and began to
Speaker 6: act on it. So, as you can tell from my
Speaker 6: weird down to Abbey accent, I'm British, or though I
Speaker 6: spent life in the US and here in London at
Speaker 6: the moment. In East London there's an extraordinary doctor called
Speaker 6: Sam Everington. So Sam is a general practitioner in a
Speaker 6: poor part of East London. It's actually where I lived
Speaker 6: for a long time, although sadly he was never my doctor.
Speaker 6: And Sam was really uncomfortable because like me, he's not
Speaker 6: blanket the opposed to chemical antidepressants. But he could just
Speaker 6: see he had loads of patients coming to him who,
Speaker 6: for example, were really lonely, and he could just see
Speaker 6: that this wasn't solving their problem, you know that for
Speaker 6: most of them. So he decided to try something different.
Speaker 6: One day, a woman came to him called Lisa Cunningham.
Speaker 6: Lisa had been shut away in her home with crippling
Speaker 6: depression and anxiety for seven years. She'd barely left her
Speaker 6: house and Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'll carry.
Speaker 6: I'm giving you the drugs. I'm also going to prescribe
Speaker 6: something else. I'm going to prescribe for you to take
Speaker 6: part in a group. So there was an area behind
Speaker 6: the doctor's surgery that was just kind of like scrubland, right,
Speaker 6: And he said to Lisa, what I'd like you to
Speaker 6: do is to turn up twice a week. I'll come
Speaker 6: and support you. And the group of other depressed and
Speaker 6: anxious people were going to turn this scrubland into a
Speaker 6: beautiful garden. The first meeting of the group, Lisa was
Speaker 6: literally physically sick with anxiety, but she kept going. And
Speaker 6: several things happened in this group. One is these were
Speaker 6: inner city East London people don't know anything about the
Speaker 6: natural world, right. They started to put their fingers in
Speaker 6: the soil. They started to teach themselves gardening, and they
Speaker 6: started to you know, they didn't know anything about any
Speaker 6: of this stuff. And there's a lot of evidence that
Speaker 6: interacting with the natural world is a very powerful antidepressant
Speaker 6: for reasons we can talk about if you want. They
Speaker 6: also started to do what human beings do when we
Speaker 6: form tribes. They started to solve each other's problems. There
Speaker 6: was one person, this is an extreme example in the
Speaker 6: group who was sleeping on the local public bus. Right
Speaker 6: the drivers would just let him sleep on the night bus.
Speaker 6: Everyone else in the group was like, well, of course
Speaker 6: you're depressed if you're sleeping on the bus. They started
Speaker 6: pressuring the local authority to get this guy a home,
Speaker 6: and they succeeded. It was the first time done something
Speaker 6: for someone else in years, and it made them feel great.
Speaker 6: Over the weeks and months and then years, the garden
Speaker 6: began to grow, the way Lisa put it to me,
Speaker 6: as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom.
Speaker 6: There was a study in Norway that found a very
Speaker 6: similar program prescribing people to take part in gardening was
Speaker 6: more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants. I think
Speaker 6: for a kind of obvious reason, right, it's dealing with
Speaker 6: the reasons, some of the reasons why they were depressed
Speaker 6: in actions in the first place, and everywhere away in
Speaker 6: the world. I write about seven different kind of alternative
Speaker 6: antidepressants because I think anything that reduces depressions should be
Speaker 6: regarded as an antidepressant. That program is an antidepressant. But
Speaker 6: why do we hear all the time about the drugs
Speaker 6: which have some value, and not about, for example, this program,
Speaker 6: which was shown to be twice as effective. It's because
Speaker 6: there's a ten billion dollar industry in drugging Lisa, and
Speaker 6: there's a zero billion dollar industry in getting her to
Speaker 6: learn gardening with other depressed and anxious people and bonding
Speaker 6: with other people. So we've ended up with a very
Speaker 6: distorted picture what explains depression and anxiety. It's not that
Speaker 6: the biological stories. There are real biological explanations for depression
Speaker 6: anxiety which do contribute to it. There are real brain
Speaker 6: changes that happen when you become depressed, and there are
Speaker 6: obviously real your genes can make you significantly more sensitive
Speaker 6: to these problems. But what we've been told is a
Speaker 6: story that focuses almost entirely on those factors and barely
Speaker 6: all on the wider factors which the World Health Organization
Speaker 6: says are the main drivers of this crisis.
Speaker 8: This book is called Lost Connections, and so you talk
Speaker 8: about disconnection and then later reconnecting and the ways.
Speaker 2: To do that.
Speaker 8: You talk about though not to dwell on, and people
Speaker 8: know this, but this is startling. You say that twenty
Speaker 8: first century man, we check our phone every six and
Speaker 8: a half minutes, and if you're a teen, you send
Speaker 8: an average of one hundred texts a day. Again, where
Speaker 8: is society right now? And as you describe sort of
Speaker 8: the opposite of where maybe it should be? How does
Speaker 8: that work? How does that happen despite everything that we're
Speaker 8: trying and intending to do?
Speaker 6: Apparently, So I wanted to understand this and the role
Speaker 6: that our obsession with our phones and these devices might
Speaker 6: be playing in this crisis. So one of the places
Speaker 6: I went was the first ever Internet rehab center in
Speaker 6: the United States. It's a place called a Restart Washington.
Speaker 6: It's just outside Spokane in Washington State. And then the
Speaker 6: woman who runs it co founded it, is called Dr
Speaker 6: Hillary Cash's a really extraordinary person, and she became a
Speaker 6: kind of accidental expert on this because she happened to
Speaker 6: have an office near the Microsoft officers in the nineties,
Speaker 6: so she saw the first wave of Internet addiction that
Speaker 6: later becomes a kind of TSUN army. And it was
Speaker 6: I've got a bit. When I arrived at this Internet
Speaker 6: rehab center. My first thing I did, absolutely instinctively get
Speaker 6: out of the car's clearing in the woods, was I
Speaker 6: glanced at my phone and felt really irritated though I
Speaker 6: didn't have any self overception and couldn't check my email,
Speaker 6: and I was like, oh wait, you're in an Internet
Speaker 6: rehab center. You're in the right place, right And what's
Speaker 6: fascinating is they get all kinds of people that restart Washington,
Speaker 6: but one of the biggest group, the biggest kind of
Speaker 6: demographic group they get, is young men who've often become
Speaker 6: obsessed with these multiplayer role player games like World of
Speaker 6: Warcraft and Doctor Cash said to me, what do these
Speaker 6: young men get out of these games? They get the
Speaker 6: things they used to get from the culture but no
Speaker 6: longer get. They get a sense of tribe, they get
Speaker 6: a sense of identity, They get a way to rise,
Speaker 6: to gain points, to gain status. These are things that
Speaker 6: culture doesn't give to these young men, anyway to give
Speaker 6: to many people anymore. You know, there's a study in
Speaker 6: Britain that found the average British child now spends less
Speaker 6: time outdoors than the average maximum security prisoner because by law,
Speaker 6: a maximum security prisoner has to have seventy minutes a day,
Speaker 6: and most kids don't get that. So you think about
Speaker 6: the profoundly strange environment in which these kids have grown
Speaker 6: have grown up. So what it is is an attempt
Speaker 6: to fill the whole that's been left by the connections
Speaker 6: we've lost. Now it's not a good way to fill
Speaker 6: that hole. And I think as I spent a lot
Speaker 6: of time there speaking to people that came to think
Speaker 6: that the relationship between social media and social life, I
Speaker 6: think is a bit like the relationship between pornography and sex. Right.
Speaker 6: I'm not opposed to pornography. Sometimes I look at it,
Speaker 6: but if your entire sex life consisted just of looking
Speaker 6: at pornography, you would go around constantly frustrated and irritated.
Speaker 6: Because we didn't evolve to look at images of sexual images,
Speaker 6: just we evolved to have sex, right, and no one
Speaker 6: spends an hour looking at porn and feels valued and
Speaker 6: held and satisfied the way you do worce. You've had
Speaker 6: sex if it goes right, you know, not every time, obviously,
Speaker 6: and in a similar way, you know. It also made
Speaker 6: me think about the moment in history when the Internet arrives, right,
Speaker 6: so the internet arrives in our lives for most of
Speaker 6: us in the late nineties the early two thousands, when
Speaker 6: a lot of the factors that are driving up depression
Speaker 6: and anxiety that I write about in Lost Connections had
Speaker 6: already massively been supercharged. Right. I go through nine courses,
Speaker 6: most of them had risen by them or had all
Speaker 6: remained high. And actually what's interesting is the Internet arrives
Speaker 6: and it looks a lot like the things we've lost. Right,
Speaker 6: We've lost our friends, so it looks like it Facebook friends,
Speaker 6: We've lost our status officers, status updates. Right, But actually
Speaker 6: it's a parody of the thing we've lost. Now, this
Speaker 6: is not to say, of course, and doctor Cash, who
Speaker 6: runs the start Washington, said this very clearly. You know,
Speaker 6: it's not to say that the Internet is a bad thing,
Speaker 6: or that would be ludicrous. Right, she's on Facebook, I'm
Speaker 6: on Facebook. But if it dominates too much of your
Speaker 6: life evolve to interact through screens, it doesn't meet our
Speaker 6: deeper needs. Right. The deeper communication we need is this
Speaker 6: face to face communication where we see it into each
Speaker 6: other's eyes. We send these forms of communication, those are
Speaker 6: the forms of communication that meet out deeper needs.
Speaker 7: And so.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think this is partly there's an element where
Speaker 6: this Internet obsession is a symptom of the disconnection we have.
Speaker 6: And then, of course, in some ways it makes it worse.
Speaker 6: It forces us. For example, if you spend an hour
Speaker 6: scrolling through Instagram, one of the things you do is
Speaker 6: you end up making lots of comparisons. And one of
Speaker 6: the things we know is one of the things that
Speaker 6: makes people much more depressed is thinking about your life
Speaker 6: externally and looking at other people's lives externally rather than
Speaker 6: thinking about what you actually value, makes you more depressed.
Speaker 6: There's kind of a lot of things going on there.
Speaker 8: We should talk about that too, because really, what you say,
Speaker 8: disconnection from meaning of values is very, very important. And
Speaker 8: you talk about extrinsic and intrinsic motives, so intrinsic and
Speaker 8: extrac intrinsic values as well. So explain that. And it's
Speaker 8: key to happiness or its connection to happiness.
Speaker 6: So we all know that junk food has taken over
Speaker 6: our diets and made us physically sick.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 6: I said this with no sensens superiorready, because between the
Speaker 6: ages of twenty and thirty I basically lived off KFC. Right.
Speaker 6: I tell the story in the Book of How on
Speaker 6: Christmas Eve two thousand and nine, at lunch time, I
Speaker 6: went to my local KFC. Makes even Saturday's Christmas Eve
Speaker 6: and I said my standard order, which I will even
Speaker 6: repeat because it's so disgusting. And one of the guys
Speaker 6: behind the canter said, oh, Johan, we're so glad you're here.
Speaker 6: And I was like okay, and he went back, you know,
Speaker 6: behind the ovens and everything, and he brought out a
Speaker 6: massive Christmas card they'd brought me, the entire staff had
Speaker 6: brought me, and it said to our best customer. My
Speaker 6: heart sank, partly because I thought, this is even the
Speaker 6: fried chicken store I come to the most right. So
Speaker 6: we all know how jung food appeals to the part
Speaker 6: of us that evolved to need food, but it doesn't
Speaker 6: give us nutrition. It doesn't give us, you know, the
Speaker 6: things we need. A very similar thing has happened to
Speaker 6: our values. So the thousands of years, philosophers have said,
Speaker 6: if you think life is about money and status, you
Speaker 6: and you know how you look to other people, you're
Speaker 6: much more like it's become depressed and unhappy. But weirdly,
Speaker 6: no one had actually scientifically investigated this until an extraordinary
Speaker 6: man I got to know, called professor Tim Kasser who's
Speaker 6: at Knox College in Illinois, and Professor Casson Knu. You'd
Speaker 6: already been discovered that there are basically two ways human
Speaker 6: beings motivate each other motivate ourselves. To put it crudely, so,
Speaker 6: imagine you play the piano in the morning because you
Speaker 6: love it.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 6: If you do that, that's an intrinsic reason to play
Speaker 6: the piano. You're doing it just because the thing you're
Speaker 6: doing gives you joy and pleasure. Right, You're not doing
Speaker 6: it to get anything else out of it. You're just
Speaker 6: doing it for that experience. Okay, Now, imagine you played
Speaker 6: the piano not because you love it, but in a
Speaker 6: dive bar to make the rent, right, or because your
Speaker 6: parents are really pressuring you because they want you to
Speaker 6: be a piano maestro, or maybe to impress a woman.
Speaker 6: You know, maybe there's some piano fetishist out there. Right,
Speaker 6: that would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano.
Speaker 6: You're not doing it because you love it. You're doing
Speaker 6: it to get something else out of it. Right now.
Speaker 6: Of course, we're all a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
Speaker 6: Every human being is. But what Professor Kassa showed is
Speaker 6: several things that are really important. As a culture. We
Speaker 6: have become much more driven by these junk values, by
Speaker 6: these extrinsic values, than we were before. And the more
Speaker 6: you are driven by these junk values, these extrinsic values,
Speaker 6: the more you will become depressed and anxious by quite
Speaker 6: a significant effect. There's now been more than two dozen
Speaker 6: studies that have shown this across the world, and there's
Speaker 6: several reasons for us. Professor Kassa has discovered lots of
Speaker 6: reasons why living this way makes us so depressed. I'll
Speaker 6: just give you two examples. One is one of the
Speaker 6: things that makes human beings feel really good is what
Speaker 6: are called flow states. So there are moments when you're
Speaker 6: doing something you love. So for me it's writing, for
Speaker 6: someone else it might be running or singing or whatever,
Speaker 6: and you're just in the zone and you feel you're
Speaker 6: flowing in the moment and time seems to just melt away.
Speaker 6: That's called the flow state, right. They make people feel
Speaker 6: really good. We need them as human beings. And what
Speaker 6: Professor Cassa showed is the more you are driven by
Speaker 6: junk values, by how you look to other people, the
Speaker 6: less you get into these flow states. So you imagine
Speaker 6: when you're playing the piano and because you love it.
Speaker 6: And now imagine you suddenly stop you in the middle
Speaker 6: of playing the piano because you love it, and suddenly
Speaker 6: you think, how do I look to all the other
Speaker 6: people in this room? Am I the best piano player
Speaker 6: in the United States today? How much am I going
Speaker 6: to be paid for playing this piano? You can see
Speaker 6: how that would jolt you out of the flow state
Speaker 6: right more we were driven by junk values. The more
Speaker 6: that happens, you can see this. I mean the other
Speaker 6: day I went to a music concert, right, amazing concert,
Speaker 6: and you just see people who are in the moment,
Speaker 6: you know, listening to this great performer, and suddenly they
Speaker 6: get out their phones and they want to show off
Speaker 6: on Facebook that they're at this thing, right, and you
Speaker 6: can see how it jolts them out of the experience
Speaker 6: out at the moment, we are all being jolted out
Speaker 6: of these blowstates much more because we've all become driven
Speaker 6: much more by junk values. Another example would be Professor
Speaker 6: Kassa found that the more we're driven by junk values,
Speaker 6: the more the worse our relationship has become. So I'll
Speaker 6: give you a concrete example. This is going to sound
Speaker 6: like a little bit of a dig, but I don't
Speaker 6: mean it as a dig. In two thousand and nine,
Speaker 6: Milania Trump went to speak at NYU, this is long
Speaker 6: before the political stuff happened, and a student asked hers
Speaker 6: something like, would you have married Donald Trump if he
Speaker 6: wasn't rich? And she replied, do you think he would
Speaker 6: have married me if I wasn't beautiful? And what that
Speaker 6: shows is how much their relationship is driven by these
Speaker 6: extrinsic values. So what Millennia and Trump knows is if
Speaker 6: she got fat is over. What Donald Trump knows is
Speaker 6: if he lost his status and money is over. Right, Now,
Speaker 6: you can see why that would be a more insecure
Speaker 6: anxious relationship than say someone who'd say, you know what,
Speaker 6: I love my husband whether he's rich or poor. I
Speaker 6: love my wife whether she's fat or thin. Right, it's
Speaker 6: the difference between everything being contingent and things being secure. Now,
Speaker 6: as a culture, we have become much more like Dol
Speaker 6: than Milania Trump, and much less like people who have
Speaker 6: more secure relationships. So those are just two of some
Speaker 6: of the reasons why these junk values are making us
Speaker 6: feel so much worse. And again that shows all this evidence.
Speaker 6: Professor Casser and other people have found shows you can
Speaker 6: see why it's way too simplistic to just say to
Speaker 6: someone it's just a chemical imbalance in your brain. Of
Speaker 6: course things are happening in your brain. I don't think
Speaker 6: a chemical imbalance is the right way to describe that.
Speaker 6: But there are real things happening in your brain. But
Speaker 6: you can see why it's too simplistic. Your your brain
Speaker 6: changes in line with the way you live, right in
Speaker 6: the same way that if I start lifting weights my
Speaker 6: arms will get bigger. Doesn't mean I've got on disease.
Speaker 6: I mean I'm using my arms differently. And so we've
Speaker 6: been told the story that's too simplistical. We need to
Speaker 6: have a much more complex conversation about what causes the
Speaker 6: depression of anxiety and how to solve them.
Speaker 8: He needs us just for a second, Johann to talk
Speaker 8: about today's sponsor, Hymns. Hymns is a new wellness brand
Speaker 8: for men. Two thirds of men start to lose their
Speaker 8: hair at thirty five. Do they realize that they'd get
Speaker 8: much better results if they addressed it early, That it's
Speaker 8: easier to keep what you have than replace what you've lost,
Speaker 8: And why do men do nothing about the problem instead
Speaker 8: of turning to science and medicine, there is a solution.
Speaker 8: Four hymns dot com, a one stop shop for hair loss, skincare,
Speaker 8: and sexual wellness for men, offering medical grade solutions and
Speaker 8: highly qualified doctors that will prescribe far less expensive generic
Speaker 8: equivalents to name brand medications and ship them right to
Speaker 8: your door. There are no clinics or waiting rooms. You
Speaker 8: simply go to four hymns dot com. Just answer a
Speaker 8: few questions. The doctor will review and then prescribe you
Speaker 8: what you need. Affordable, convenient, and very easy straight talk
Speaker 8: from qualified professionals. Order now, my listeners get a trial
Speaker 8: month of everything you need to keep your hair for
Speaker 8: just five dollars to day, right now, while supplies last.
Speaker 8: See website for full details. Now this would cost hundreds
Speaker 8: if you went to the doctor or pharmacy. Go to
Speaker 8: four hymns dot com. Slash murder. That's f O R
Speaker 8: H I M S dot com slash murder four hymns
Speaker 8: dot com slash murder. Johann, you were talking about status
Speaker 8: and we were talking about you also, just start to
Speaker 8: talk about e classist. I'm mispronounced that. Sorry us a
Speaker 8: little bit about this, tell us a little bit about
Speaker 8: status and respect and this alpha baboon named Solomon.
Speaker 6: So this is really fascinating to me. When when I
Speaker 6: feel depressed, I say, like a lot of people that
Speaker 6: I feel down. And one of the things I learned
Speaker 6: is that's a little bit more than a kind of metaphor.
Speaker 6: So one of people he's made a really big breakthrough
Speaker 6: in understanding depression is a guy called Professor Robert Sapolski
Speaker 6: who's at Stanford University, and when he was in his
Speaker 6: early twenties, he went to go and live with a
Speaker 6: troop of baboons in Kenya and the savannahs of Kenya,
Speaker 6: and his job was to find out when are baboons
Speaker 6: most stressed, right, And so when baboons are stressed, like
Speaker 6: human beings, they release a hormone called cortisol. So what
Speaker 6: Rober's job was party to do is just dart these
Speaker 6: baboons and then take blood samples from them. And baboons live,
Speaker 6: male baboons, interestingly, not the women, but the male baboons
Speaker 6: live in a very strict hierarchy. So so there's forty
Speaker 6: men in the baboon troop. Number one knows he's above
Speaker 6: number two. Number two knows he's above number three all
Speaker 6: the way down to number fourteen. And where you are
Speaker 6: in the hierarchy determines what you get to eat, who
Speaker 6: you get to have sex with, you know, so the
Speaker 6: top baboon gets to have sex with all the women
Speaker 6: in the bottom baboon doesn't get to have sex with anyone, right,
Speaker 6: and suppressor Suposki lives with this this group, and baboons
Speaker 6: move through the hierarchy, right, So sometimes you rise to
Speaker 6: become the top baboon, the king of the swingers, and
Speaker 6: then you can get knocked down from your position. As
Speaker 6: you get older and you get weaker, some younger guy
Speaker 6: is going to come up and start having sex with
Speaker 6: the women in front of you and eventually drive you
Speaker 6: out right. And what Professor Sepolski found was two things
Speaker 6: the baboons are most There are two circumstances where baboons
Speaker 6: are most stressed. One is when their status is insecure,
Speaker 6: So the top baboon when the young men are circling,
Speaker 6: is insecure about whether he can keep his position. And
Speaker 6: the second is when you're at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Speaker 6: That the baboons at the bottom were stressed constantly. And
Speaker 6: what happens is the baboons that are at the bottom,
Speaker 6: that are stressed constantly, look a lot like depressed human beings.
Speaker 6: They withdraw, they don't want to get up. They keep
Speaker 6: their bodies low, their heads low, they keep their heads down.
Speaker 6: They show what's called a submission response. It's basically a
Speaker 6: way of saying, okay, you beat me, just leave me alone. Stop,
Speaker 6: stop stop harassing and attacking me. Right, are you okay?
Speaker 6: You got me right? That's called the submission response. And
Speaker 6: what Professor Sepolski and quite a lot of other social
Speaker 6: scientists have argued is that modern human depression is part
Speaker 6: of what's going on there. Is basically, if you are
Speaker 6: stressed and insecure too much about your status, or you
Speaker 6: feel you're at the bottom of the pile too much,
Speaker 6: you experienced these physical sensations which are a bit like
Speaker 6: the ancient forms of the submission response, the kind of
Speaker 6: what baboons experience of submission response, and what's into One
Speaker 6: of the ways we know this is that so baboons
Speaker 6: always live in a hierarchy, right, but humans don't always
Speaker 6: live in strict hierarchies. Our hierarchy is mary. So, for example,
Speaker 6: Norway is a very equal country. So the richest Norwegian
Speaker 6: is not that much richer than the poorest Norwegian. The
Speaker 6: United States today is a massively unequal society.
Speaker 8: That the.
Speaker 6: Five heirs to the Walmart fortune own more than the
Speaker 6: bottom one hundred million Americans, right, So you can see
Speaker 6: some societies have there's you know, a few baboons at
Speaker 6: the top, and you know, and everyone else is like
Speaker 6: the baboon at the bottom, and there's some have a
Speaker 6: big middle, right. And what we know, and Professor Kate
Speaker 6: Pickett and Professor Richard Wilkinson have shown this really powerful
Speaker 6: along with other people is the more a society becomes unequal,
Speaker 6: the more people feel humiliated, the more people feel defeated,
Speaker 6: the more depression and anyis al grows up, grows up. Right.
Speaker 6: So one of the things that's happening is we live
Speaker 6: in an environment that makes us feel Jesus, I'm being
Speaker 6: defeated here, right. If you're constantly being bombarded with images
Speaker 6: of people who are so much richer than you, and
Speaker 6: there is no way you're ever going to get up
Speaker 6: to being to joining the of it. This is tiny
Speaker 6: early at the top, and everyone else is constantly stressed
Speaker 6: and harassed and humiliated that produces more depression and anxiety.
Speaker 6: This is one of the nine causes a depression and
Speaker 6: anxiety that are about lost connections. It's a disconnection from
Speaker 6: a sense that you are respected and have a status.
Speaker 8: I mentioned butchered neuroplasticity and its importance in this, and
Speaker 8: it's good news for people tell us about this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you don't want to butcher people's brains. That's sort
Speaker 6: of a bad sign. So a lot of people are
Speaker 6: I had misunderstood this, and this is very important to
Speaker 6: think about how we end stigma as well, so against
Speaker 6: depression and anxiety and things like addiction as well, which
Speaker 6: is the subject of my previous book, Chasing the Scream
Speaker 6: with You, and I talked about on the show. So
Speaker 6: what often happen is people will be shown an image
Speaker 6: of the brain of a depressed person and they'll be
Speaker 6: told this is what this is depression. You can see
Speaker 6: the brain is very different to a non depressed person's
Speaker 6: brain in all sorts of ways. This shows depression is
Speaker 6: a brain disease and it's an inherent problem, right, And
Speaker 6: lots of people have debunked this, but one of the
Speaker 6: people who really helped me to understand This is a
Speaker 6: wonderful guy called Professor Mark Lewis. So Professor Lewis has
Speaker 6: has shown and explained your brain changes as many other
Speaker 6: scientists shims as well. Your brain changes according to how
Speaker 6: you use it. Right, Like I mentioned before, we all
Speaker 6: know this about other parts of our body. If I
Speaker 6: started lifting weights, which I tragically don't, but if I
Speaker 6: started lifting weights, my arms would become much bigger. It
Speaker 6: doesn't mean I've got an arm disease. It means using
Speaker 6: my arms differently, a very similar process happens with our brains.
Speaker 6: So London taxi drivers famously have to sit a really
Speaker 6: difficult examination to get their license to be a London
Speaker 6: taxi driver. It's really hard to get this license. You
Speaker 6: have to memorize the map of London. It takes on
Speaker 6: average three years to do it. It's called the knowledge.
Speaker 6: If you do brain scans of London taxi drivers, their
Speaker 6: brains look very different to your brain and my brain.
Speaker 6: The part of the brain that relates to spatial awareness
Speaker 6: is called hippercampus, is much bigger and more developed. Right now,
Speaker 6: that doesn't mean that being a London taxi driver is
Speaker 6: a brain disease. Obviously, right now, The danger with the
Speaker 6: story we tell about brains is it's true, as you
Speaker 6: become depressed, your brain changes. Now you're usually you're becoming
Speaker 6: depressed because of these wider factors that we're talking about
Speaker 6: and many of the others we haven't talked about yet.
Speaker 6: Your brain changes. Your brain changes in ways that do
Speaker 6: make it harder to get out of that state. But
Speaker 6: it's important to stress. When you are given the support
Speaker 6: and love and the interventions that we know work to
Speaker 6: reduce depression and anxiety, your brain will change out of
Speaker 6: that state of depression. So this is called neuroplasticity. The
Speaker 6: brain restructures itself according to how you use it right,
Speaker 6: and so the danger what we do when we tell
Speaker 6: people these stories about people's brains. If we tell a
Speaker 6: static story about the brain, first of it, it's not true,
Speaker 6: but secondly that actually traps people. It makes them, you know,
Speaker 6: it makes them think, oh, JESU, weal, I'm just biologically different,
Speaker 6: and to me, one of the worst things we do.
Speaker 6: One of the biggest problems about the story we tell
Speaker 6: about depression just being a chemical imbalance or just being
Speaker 6: some other problem in the brain is it tells people
Speaker 6: that their pain is meaningless. It's just a malfunction. Right,
Speaker 6: And one of the most important things I learned is
Speaker 6: that our pain is not meaningless. Right. It is a
Speaker 6: signal is telling us something. It's telling us that are
Speaker 6: same has moved in a direction that does not meet
Speaker 6: our underlying needs. It tells us that we've got to
Speaker 6: change some of the ways we live together. Right, that's
Speaker 6: a really important signal if we pathologize that. You know,
Speaker 6: an analogy that kept coming to me. This is a
Speaker 6: trivial analogy, but you know, I spend a lot of
Speaker 6: my time in the US, and it always amazes me
Speaker 6: the existence of indigestion pills, right, things like pepto bismal,
Speaker 6: and whenever I'm offered them, I always want to say
Speaker 6: to people, for wait a minute, Indigestion isn't a malfunction.
Speaker 6: Indigestion is a signal from your body that you're eating
Speaker 6: too fast. Right. You don't want to get rid of
Speaker 6: that signal. That's a really important signal. If you don't
Speaker 6: listen to it, you're gonna hurt your stomach, give yourself
Speaker 6: stomach ache, you're gonna put on weight, you're gonna make
Speaker 6: yourself unwell.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: That it's not a pathology to experience indigestion in a
Speaker 6: similar way. Don't want to take that analogy too far,
Speaker 6: because depression is infinitely more agonizing than indigestion. But depression
Speaker 6: is a signal, right, It's a signal that something's going wrong.
Speaker 6: We need to listen. We need to stop insult that
Speaker 6: signal and start listening to it and honoring it. That
Speaker 6: doesn't mean that people should just sit with the signal
Speaker 6: any more than you should just sit with indigestion. It
Speaker 6: means that it's a signal that's telling us the direction
Speaker 6: in which we need to change.
Speaker 8: You talk about and spend some time in acknowledging and
Speaker 8: overcoming childhood trauma, is something you write about. Tell us
Speaker 8: what you found.
Speaker 6: This was the hardest part of the book for me
Speaker 6: to write for lots of reasons. So I'm telling you
Speaker 6: the story of how this was discovered. And at first
Speaker 6: your listeners are going to think, why is he telling
Speaker 6: us this? This is a completely different subject. But I
Speaker 6: think you can only understand the breakthrough that was made
Speaker 6: if you understand this. So in the mid nineteen eighties,
Speaker 6: a wonderful scientist I got to know called Dr Vincent
Speaker 6: Feliti was working in San Diego and he was approached
Speaker 6: by kinds of Permanente, who are one of the not
Speaker 6: for profit medical providers in California, and they said, look,
Speaker 6: we've got this really big problem. Obesity was massively rising
Speaker 6: in California like in the rest of the country, and
Speaker 6: everything they were trying just wasn't working, like giving people
Speaker 6: nutritional advice that kind of thing. And they were like, look,
Speaker 6: this is really screwing with people's health and with our budget.
Speaker 6: So they gave Vincent a really big budget to just
Speaker 6: do Blue Sky's research to figure out what the hell
Speaker 6: was going on. Right, So Vincent starts to work initially
Speaker 6: with a group of three hundred and fifty extremely obese people.
Speaker 6: These were people who weighed more than four hundred pounds,
Speaker 6: and one day he had this, well, seems like a
Speaker 6: really stupid idea. He just said, what would happen if
Speaker 6: they literally just stopped eating and we gave them the
Speaker 6: vitamin supplements that they would need so they wouldn't get
Speaker 6: like scurvy and whatever. And so they decided to do it,
Speaker 6: obviously with like massive medical supervision and lots of doctors
Speaker 6: monitoring it. And the crazy thing is in one sense
Speaker 6: it worked. They did, in fact lose loads of weight. Right,
Speaker 6: So there was one woman in the program, so I'm
Speaker 6: going to call Susan to protect her medical confidentiality, who
Speaker 6: went down from more than four hundred pounds to one
Speaker 6: hundred and thirty eight pounds. Everyone was celebrating, you know,
Speaker 6: her life has been saved. And one day something happens
Speaker 6: that no one expected. She freaked the hell out. She
Speaker 6: goes to KFC or wherever it was. She starts obsessively eating,
Speaker 6: and quite quickly she's back at was not quite where
Speaker 6: she was, but a really high weight Vincent called her
Speaker 6: in and said, Susan, what happened? She said, I don't know,
Speaker 6: I don't know. She was really ashamed, and he said, well,
Speaker 6: tell me about the day that you cracked. What happened.
Speaker 6: It turned out that day something had happened to her
Speaker 6: that never happened to her when she was obese. A
Speaker 6: man had hit on her and it really freaked her out.
Speaker 6: And Lynda started to ask, well, that's interesting. When did
Speaker 6: you start to put on weight? In her case, it
Speaker 6: was when she was eleven. He said, well, what happened
Speaker 6: when you were eleven? That didn't happen when you were
Speaker 6: you know, ten or fourteen, and she looked down and
Speaker 6: she said, well, that's when my grandfather started to rape me.
Speaker 6: Vincent started to talk to everyone in the program. He
Speaker 6: discovered that fifty five percent of them had put on
Speaker 6: their extreme weight in the way of being sexually abused,
Speaker 6: which really startled him. He began to realize this thing
Speaker 6: that seemed like it was just an irrational pathology putting
Speaker 6: on loads of weight, which is of course extremely dangerous,
Speaker 6: in fact, was performing a function for these people. It
Speaker 6: was protecting them from sexual attention. As Susan put it,
Speaker 6: overweights overlooked, and that's what I needed to be. And
Speaker 6: so this was still quite a small study. So Vincent
Speaker 6: got a load of funding from the Center for Disease Control,
Speaker 6: obviously one of the most important bodies in the US,
Speaker 6: and they start and they gave him a load of
Speaker 6: money so that every single patient it came to Kus
Speaker 6: of Permanente in the next year for anything, whether it
Speaker 6: was headaches, broken legs, schizophrenia, anything, was given a questionnaire
Speaker 6: and the questionnaire asked, firstly, did any of these ten
Speaker 6: bad things happen to you when you were a child?
Speaker 6: Things like you know, sexual abuse, dosical abuse, and then
Speaker 6: it asked have you had any of these problems as
Speaker 6: an adult? Things like obesit, addiction, And then at the
Speaker 6: last minute they added depression and suicide attempts. When the
Speaker 6: CDC added up the figures, they were absolutely stunned. For
Speaker 6: every category of childhood trauma you experienced, you were radically
Speaker 6: more likely to become depressed and anxious. If you had
Speaker 6: had six of those categories of childhood trauma, you were
Speaker 6: three thousand, one hundred percent more likely to have attempted
Speaker 6: suicide as an adult than somebody who had none of
Speaker 6: those categories. Right, you don't get figures like this in
Speaker 6: science very often. One of the reasons I found this
Speaker 6: really hard was because and I actually was very resistant
Speaker 6: to this, And it made me realize why I had
Speaker 6: stayed this simplistic idea that depression is just a chemical
Speaker 6: imbalance in our brains, because you know, even quite early on,
Speaker 6: I had suspicions that this story couldn't be right. I'm
Speaker 6: not an idiot, right, if it was just a problem
Speaker 6: in people's brains, why would it be rising so much? Right?
Speaker 6: But I think one of the reasons I stayed with
Speaker 6: that story is when I was a child, my mother
Speaker 6: had been very ill, and my dad had been in
Speaker 6: a different country, and I had experienced some very extreme
Speaker 6: acts of abuse from an adult in my life. I
Speaker 6: didn't want to think about that. I don't want to
Speaker 6: think that was still playing out in my life. I
Speaker 6: didn't want to reckon with it. I didn't want to
Speaker 6: think about the shame I felt about that. But one
Speaker 6: of the reasons I stayed with this is because of
Speaker 6: what doctor Feliti discovered. Next. So, if you'd gone to
Speaker 6: a doctor and you've filled in this questionnaire, as everyone
Speaker 6: in San Diego had who was with Kus of Permanente,
Speaker 6: your doctor was told the next time you come in,
Speaker 6: say to the patient something like, I see that when
Speaker 6: you were a child you were sexually abused. I'm really
Speaker 6: sorry that happened to you. That should never have happened.
Speaker 6: Would you like to talk about it? And a significant
Speaker 6: minority of people said, I don't want to talk about it,
Speaker 6: but most people did. On average, the conversation lasted five minutes,
Speaker 6: and then some of those people were told, I can
Speaker 6: refer you to a therapist to talk about it more.
Speaker 6: What they found was just that five minute conversation and
Speaker 6: nothing else led to a really significant falling depression of anxiety,
Speaker 6: and the people who referred on to a therapist haven't
Speaker 6: even bigger falling depression of anxiety. What that tells us,
Speaker 6: it's with a much wider body of knowledge that we have,
Speaker 6: is that shane is catastrophic for human beings. It's devastating.
Speaker 6: For example, we know that in the age crisis, openly
Speaker 6: gay men died on average two years later than closetive
Speaker 6: gay men, even when they got medical care at the
Speaker 6: same time. Shame destroys you, and giving people ways to
Speaker 6: release shame is very powerful. After in that experiment, one
Speaker 6: of the a woman in her eighties, wrote to her
Speaker 6: doctor after they had this conversation. She'd been sexually abused.
Speaker 6: She said, thank you so much for asking. I thought
Speaker 6: I was gonna die and nobody would ever know. And again,
Speaker 6: it was in the childhood trauma. It was when I
Speaker 6: was researching this child too traumahich is one of the
Speaker 6: nine causes I write that in Lost Connections of Depression
Speaker 6: and Anxiety. It was there that I really got a
Speaker 6: sense of howp unethical it was that I was told
Speaker 6: that it was just a chemical imbalance. You know a
Speaker 6: thirteen years I was given chemical ancy depressants. Never once
Speaker 6: did any doctor say to me, is that any reason
Speaker 6: you might feel this way? And I think this is
Speaker 6: really it's not that. You know, doctors are very overstressed
Speaker 6: and they have very little time to spend with their
Speaker 6: patients and have a lot of sympathy for them, and
Speaker 6: as a society, we've only given them one lever to
Speaker 6: pull right, which is chemical anity depressants, I mean, and
Speaker 6: a little bit of therapy in some cases. So I'm
Speaker 6: not so much anger with the doctor, but as a
Speaker 6: society and as a culture, we have to reckon with
Speaker 6: the scientific evidence about what is actually causing this crisis
Speaker 6: of depression and anxiety, and we have to look at
Speaker 6: the best solutions, and we have to offer more than
Speaker 6: just drugs. Drug should remain on the table. Of course,
Speaker 6: I'm arguing for expanding the menu of options, not for
Speaker 6: taking anything off the menu. But we have to do
Speaker 6: a much better job with this.
Speaker 8: You call it social prescribing. But you did find something
Speaker 8: very profound that is available to everyone. What did you
Speaker 8: find it was so profound? And why is it so
Speaker 8: profound in regards to depression.
Speaker 6: There's so many things that I learned. I mean, I'll
Speaker 6: give you one example one that really affected me. So
Speaker 6: I went to Berkeley and met this brilliant academic called
Speaker 6: Dr Bretford, who did with her colleagues this research that
Speaker 6: really blew my mind. Actually, So they wanted to figure out,
Speaker 6: if you deliberately decided you were going to spend more
Speaker 6: time trying to be happy, would you become happier? Right,
Speaker 6: so let's say that you Dan thought, right, from now
Speaker 6: on I'm going to spend two hours a night trying
Speaker 6: to make myself happy. Would you actually become happier? And
Speaker 6: they looked at this in four countries the United States, Russia, China,
Speaker 6: and Japan, and what they discovered was totally fascinating. In
Speaker 6: the United States, if you try deliberately to make yourself happier,
Speaker 6: you do not become happier. But in the other places,
Speaker 6: if you tried to make yourself happier, you do become happier.
Speaker 6: They were like, what's going on why? And what they
Speaker 6: discovered was in the United States and Canada and Britain,
Speaker 6: I'm pretty sure if you try to make yourself happier,
Speaker 6: generally what you do is something for yourself, you try
Speaker 6: to get promotion, you buy something for yourself, you show
Speaker 6: off on Instagram, whatever it is. Generally, in the other
Speaker 6: countries Russia, China, and Japan, if you tried to make
Speaker 6: yourself happier, you generally did something for someone else. You
Speaker 6: do something for your friends, your family, and your community.
Speaker 6: So we have an individualistic idea of what it means
Speaker 6: to be happy, and they have a collective idea of
Speaker 6: what it means to be happy. And it turns out
Speaker 6: our model of happiness just doesn't work very well. Right,
Speaker 6: It's just not very effective. It's not the species we are.
Speaker 6: In fact, if human beings had been individualists from the start,
Speaker 6: you and I wouldn't be having this conversation because the
Speaker 6: species would have died out because they wouldn't have been
Speaker 6: able to cooperate enough to survive. Right, Their theory of
Speaker 6: happiness and more collective theory of happiness does work. And
Speaker 6: I've tried to very deliberately move myself and I realized
Speaker 6: that in the past, not every time, but a lot
Speaker 6: of the time when I felt these painful feelings coming, generally,
Speaker 6: what I would do would be something for myself, right,
Speaker 6: I would try to dig myself up in some way now.
Speaker 6: When I feel those painful feelings coming, generally, what I
Speaker 6: try to do is do something for someone else. And
Speaker 6: I don't mean, you know, I'm not like, oh for it.
Speaker 6: I don't turn up with a free car for someone.
Speaker 6: I just leave my phone at home and try to
Speaker 6: go and sit with them and listen to them. We
Speaker 6: live in a culture where people are so isolated, with
Speaker 6: so few people are heard and seen that just turning
Speaker 6: up and being present with people it's one of the
Speaker 6: most and really being present is one of the most
Speaker 6: powerful things we can do. So there are lots of
Speaker 6: things I go through in lost connections, lots of things
Speaker 6: that people can do. Some of them are individualistic things,
Speaker 6: some of them are bigger things we need to fight
Speaker 6: for collectively. But there are these solutions waiting for us,
Speaker 6: and there is evidence that they work.
Speaker 8: In your conclusion, for yourself. And I mean, that's why
Speaker 8: this is so important for everybody. Everybody's touched by depression.
Speaker 8: Everyone will be is touched by it by someone around them,
Speaker 8: or they will. For yourself and for everyone listening, and
Speaker 8: for everyone that reads this book, for those people that
Speaker 8: are grieving, for those people that believe that they have
Speaker 8: some legitimate source of depression. What is the good news?
Speaker 8: What is what you found?
Speaker 6: Well, that your pain makes sense and there are answers
Speaker 6: to that pain. And one of the places, you know,
Speaker 6: I could talk to you about the science all day,
Speaker 6: but one of the places this most fell into place
Speaker 6: for me was in this incredible place that I went
Speaker 6: to where I learned so much. It was in Berlin.
Speaker 6: How much time do we have done? Because I don't
Speaker 6: think I've got time to tell this story properly.
Speaker 8: We have as much time as we need, oh great, perfect.
Speaker 6: So in the summer of twenty eleven, a woman called
Speaker 6: Nuria chengis quite religious Muslim woman in Berlin, put a
Speaker 6: notice in her window. She lived on a big, anonymous
Speaker 6: housing project where no one knew each other, and the
Speaker 6: notice said something like, I'm getting evicted next Thursday night
Speaker 6: from my apartment because i can't pay the rent anymore.
Speaker 6: So on Wednesday night, I'm going to kill myself. And
Speaker 6: you know, this was a housing project and slightly weird
Speaker 6: it's It was a quite poor part of Berlin for
Speaker 6: a long time, and basically people who lived there were
Speaker 6: either recent Muslim immigrants, gay people, or punk squatters who,
Speaker 6: as you can imagine, looked at each other with a
Speaker 6: lot of you know, incomprehension, right, and no one knew
Speaker 6: Nuria on this housing project. But people saw this sign
Speaker 6: in her window and they started to knock on her door,
Speaker 6: and she was like, They were like, do you need
Speaker 6: any help, and she was like, screw you, I don't
Speaker 6: want an help. I'm going to kill myself. And some
Speaker 6: people started talking in the kind of outside her apartment
Speaker 6: and they were like, you know, there's this big thoroughfare
Speaker 6: that runs into the center of Berlin that goes through
Speaker 6: this this project is called Kotti, And they were like,
Speaker 6: maybe if we just blocked the road for a day
Speaker 6: and we protested because a lot of them were really
Speaker 6: angry that their rents were going up so much as well.
Speaker 6: We just protested and we wheeled Nuria out. Maybe there'll
Speaker 6: be some media coverage, you know, maybe they'll you know,
Speaker 6: let her stay in her apartment. So they decided to
Speaker 6: do it. So one Saturday, they blocked the road and
Speaker 6: they wheeled Nuria out. She was like, well, I'm going
Speaker 6: to kill myself anywhere, and may as well do this.
Speaker 6: And they did get quite a lot of media coverage
Speaker 6: that day in Berlin, you know, the local news came
Speaker 6: and at the end of the day the police turned
Speaker 6: up and they basically said, okay, you've had your fun,
Speaker 6: take it down. And the people there said, well, hang
Speaker 6: on a minute. You haven't told Nuria she can stay here,
Speaker 6: and actually we want a rent freeze for all of us, right,
Speaker 6: so we'll take this down when we've been guaranteed that.
Speaker 6: But they knew that the minute they left this barricade
Speaker 6: the police would just tear it down anyway. So there
Speaker 6: was one of the people who live in Cottie, one
Speaker 6: of my favorite people there, called Tanya Gartner, who she's
Speaker 6: one of the punks there. She wears tiny mini skirts
Speaker 6: even in Berlin winters, which shows real dedication Tanya. Tanya
Speaker 6: had in her apartment one of those things that makes
Speaker 6: a really loud noise for soccer matches or clackson. So
Speaker 6: she went and got it and she put it down
Speaker 6: and she said, Okay, what we're going to do. We're
Speaker 6: going to draw up a timetable to man this barricade
Speaker 6: and if the police come to take it down, let
Speaker 6: off the clackson. We'll all come out of our apartments
Speaker 6: and we'll stop them, right, So people who don't know
Speaker 6: each other all over COTTI start signing up to do
Speaker 6: the night shift. Right, Tanya and Nuria were paired together
Speaker 6: to do the night shift. You cannot imagine what a
Speaker 6: likely combination of people. Nuria, as I say, is a
Speaker 6: very religious Muslim and a headscarf. Tanya is the opposite, right,
Speaker 6: and they're paired. I think they had the Thursday night shift,
Speaker 6: if I remember rightly. And the first few nights they
Speaker 6: sit together, it's just super awkward. They don't know what
Speaker 6: to say. They think they've got nothing in common. Then
Speaker 6: they started talking about their lives. Turns out they had
Speaker 6: something extraordinary in common. Nuria had come to Berlin when
Speaker 6: she was seventeen years old from her village in Turkey.
Speaker 6: She came with her two kids, and the idea was
Speaker 6: that she would make enough money so she could then
Speaker 6: send back the money to her husband, who would come
Speaker 6: and join her. After she'd been in Berlin for a
Speaker 6: short time, she received word that her husband had died.
Speaker 6: She'd always told people that her husband had died of
Speaker 6: a heart attack. She told Tanya something she'd never told anyone,
Speaker 6: that actually her husband had dieded tuberculosis, which was seen
Speaker 6: as a disease of poverty. She'd been really ashamed as that,
Speaker 6: so she'd found herself alone in Germany, not knowing anyone
Speaker 6: to young children. Tanya told Nui or something about her life.
Speaker 6: She'd been thrown out at home when she was fifteen.
Speaker 6: She found her way to live in a squat for
Speaker 6: punks in Kotti. She got pregnant when she was fifteen.
Speaker 6: They'd both been alone in this frightening place with young children.
Speaker 6: When they were still teenagers themselves. They realized they had
Speaker 6: so much in common. All over Kotti there were these
Speaker 6: pairings of people who would never have spoken to each other.
Speaker 6: There was a young Turkish German lad called Mehmet who
Speaker 6: was seventeen, loved hip hop, kept being nearly thrown out
Speaker 6: of school because they said he had ADHD. Got paired
Speaker 6: with a seventy year old, grumpy white German guy who
Speaker 6: loved stalin right. The old German guy started helping him
Speaker 6: with his homework when they did their shift right. And
Speaker 6: this was happening all over Kotty. Opposite the housing project,
Speaker 6: there's a gay club called Zudblock, which run by guy
Speaker 6: I love called Rickard Stein and to give you a
Speaker 6: sense of the previous club that Rickard owned was called
Speaker 6: Cafe Anal. So these are pretty cop guys, right. And
Speaker 6: when they first opened the club, you can imagine there's
Speaker 6: a lot of religious Muslims who live there. They'd smashed
Speaker 6: the windows. There've been a lot of opposition to this club.
Speaker 6: The zudblock. The gay club started saying. When the protests began,
Speaker 6: they gave loads of their furniture to the protest. They said,
Speaker 6: after a while, they said, you know, you guys could
Speaker 6: come and have your meetings for free, and we'll give
Speaker 6: you food and drinks in this gay club. And at
Speaker 6: first even the kind of lefties in Kotti were like, look,
Speaker 6: we're not going to get these Muslims to come and
Speaker 6: sit under posters for fifting like Claub, but you know,
Speaker 6: meetings about our protests. But actually everyone took these small
Speaker 6: steps to begin to understand each other. After the protest
Speaker 6: had been going on for about six months, a guy
Speaker 6: turned up one day at the protest camp called tun
Speaker 6: Kai and Tunkai has he's in his early fifties, was
Speaker 6: in his early fifties at the time. He has kind
Speaker 6: of cognitive difficulties, as you can tell when you meet him.
Speaker 6: He'd been living homeless. Then he started saying, can I
Speaker 6: help out, and everyone in the camp loved him. Tunkai
Speaker 6: has this great energy about him, and he was really
Speaker 6: popular with all three groups, the Muslims, the gays and
Speaker 6: the punks. And he began living. You know, they'd actually
Speaker 6: turned this barricade into a permanent structure, and they said
Speaker 6: to him, you know, you could start sleeping here if
Speaker 6: you want. You know, he wanted to be sleeping on
Speaker 6: the street, especially in Berlin it gets really cold, so
Speaker 6: he started sleeping there. He became one of the great
Speaker 6: fixtures of the protest movement. And after he'd been there
Speaker 6: for about six months, one day the police came. They
Speaker 6: would do these inspections and Tunkai doesn't like it when
Speaker 6: people argue. He thought the police were arguing, so he
Speaker 6: went to hug one of them. They thought he was
Speaker 6: attacking them, so they arrested him. That was when they
Speaker 6: discovered Tung Kai had been shut away in a psychiatric
Speaker 6: hospital for twenty years, often in a literal padded cell.
Speaker 6: He'd escaped and he'd found his way to Kotti, so
Speaker 6: they took him back. The police took him back to
Speaker 6: this psychiatric hospital, and suddenly the whole of the Kotti
Speaker 6: protest movement turned into a kind of free Tung Kai movement.
Speaker 6: They descended on this psychiatric hospital in the suburbs of Berlin,
Speaker 6: and the psychiatrists they are like, what the hell is this.
Speaker 6: They suddenly got all these Muslims, gaze and punks demanding
Speaker 6: the release of this person who they'd kept shut away
Speaker 6: for twenty years. And I remember Uli, one of the protesters.
Speaker 6: They're saying to them, you know, but he doesn't belong
Speaker 6: with you, He belongs with us. We loved him, we
Speaker 6: want him back. It took him a long time, but
Speaker 6: they got tun Kai released. He now lives in Koti.
Speaker 6: Many things happened at Koti. The kind of most important
Speaker 6: headline I guess is they got a rent freeze, not
Speaker 6: just for their entire housing project, but they launched a
Speaker 6: referendum initiative that got the largest number overwritten signatures in
Speaker 6: the history of the city of Berlin. But the last
Speaker 6: time I went to see Nuria, the woman who had
Speaker 6: been suicidal, had put this notice in her window, had
Speaker 6: started this whole protest. Nuria said to me, you know,
Speaker 6: I'm really glad I got to stay in my apartment.
Speaker 6: That's a great thing, but I gained so much more
Speaker 6: than that. I was surrounded all along by these amazing people.
Speaker 6: And I never knew another. One of the Turkish Gairman
Speaker 6: women in there. A woman called Nehreman said to me
Speaker 6: that when she was a kid and she grew up
Speaker 6: in Turkey, she learned that what you call home is
Speaker 6: just your what you call home is your whole village, right,
Speaker 6: that the village is home. But then she came to
Speaker 6: live in Germany and she realized that what you're meant
Speaker 6: to call home is just your four walls in the
Speaker 6: Western world, right. And then this whole protest began, and
Speaker 6: she said, we got to know each other, and this
Speaker 6: whole place became my home. And she said she realized
Speaker 6: that all this time she'd been living in the Western world,
Speaker 6: she had been in some sense homeless. That we need
Speaker 6: to feel we belong and our sense of home in
Speaker 6: the West is too small to meet our sense of belonging, right,
Speaker 6: And I kept thinking about I mean, I learned so
Speaker 6: many things in Kotti. I think they think I'm crazy
Speaker 6: because I would just turn up every few months to
Speaker 6: listen to them and just cry because I felt it
Speaker 6: so moving. But one of the things is those people
Speaker 6: didn't need to be drugged. They needed to be together.
Speaker 6: That so many problems that seem insoluble when you are
Speaker 6: an isolated individual becomes soluble when you have a when
Speaker 6: you have a group. You know, Nuria was suicidal, Tonguai
Speaker 6: was shut away in an actual padded cell. That young
Speaker 6: lad of Memet kept being nearly thrown out of school
Speaker 6: because they said he had ADHD. Right, all these problems
Speaker 6: they've been insoluble when they were alone, were perfectly soluble
Speaker 6: when they were part of a tribe of people who
Speaker 6: cared about them and wanted to help them solve their problems.
Speaker 6: And to me, that's one of the most important things
Speaker 6: I learned that if we carry on just being broken
Speaker 6: up and isolated, you know, we might we'll find some
Speaker 6: patchwork solutions here and there, But the key is we
Speaker 6: need to reconnect. We need to build a sense of
Speaker 6: home together. We need to because I guarantee anyone listening
Speaker 6: to this who is depressed and anxious, you are surrounded
Speaker 6: by people who are depressed and anxious, and they have
Speaker 6: the same longings for connection, for reconnection, for meaning to
Speaker 6: be seen and heard that you have, and we've got
Speaker 6: to begin that process of a deep reconnection. So obviously
Speaker 6: there are many solutions to depression and anxiety that I
Speaker 6: talk about Lost Connections, but to me, that's the beating
Speaker 6: emotional heart of the most important one.
Speaker 8: It's a wonderful book, Johan. I want to thank you
Speaker 8: very much for coming on and talking about Lost Connections
Speaker 8: and covering the real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions.
Speaker 8: It's been an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much for those Just say to my publishers,
Speaker 6: tell me off if I don't say this anyone who
Speaker 6: wants any more information about the book, or to find
Speaker 6: out the kind of crazy mixture of people who've praised
Speaker 6: the book, from Hillary Clinton to Tucker Carlson, the top
Speaker 6: rated Box News host to Russell Brand, Arianna Huffington, Glenn Greenwild,
Speaker 6: Bj Novak, who wrote the office, a huge range of
Speaker 6: different people. And also if you want to take a
Speaker 6: quiz to see how much you know about the real
Speaker 6: causes of depression of anxiety, go to the Lost Connections
Speaker 6: dot com. You can also hear audio interviews with loads
Speaker 6: of the people we've been talking about, and some of
Speaker 6: the best experts in the world, all those people in
Speaker 6: Cottie and a load of other other great people who
Speaker 6: spoke to me said the book.
Speaker 8: That's wonderful. I was going to ask for that, so
Speaker 8: thank you for doing that. Thank you very much.
Speaker 6: When I did an interview recently where at the end
Speaker 6: of the interview they said to me, you know, what's
Speaker 6: your Twitter, what's your Facebook, what's your Instagram? And anybod
Speaker 6: who wants any of that, they can go to the
Speaker 6: books the Lost Connections dot com. But at the end
Speaker 6: they were like, and what's your Snapchat? And I said,
Speaker 6: I am a thirty nine year old man. I will
Speaker 6: do a lot of things to promote my work. I
Speaker 6: draw any thirty nine year old man on Snapchat is
Speaker 6: probably a pedophile, right, you should be very suspicious of them.
Speaker 6: So fortunately you did not ask with my snaptat because
Speaker 6: I would have had to give a horrified answer.
Speaker 8: Ah. That's fantastic. Thank you very much, Johann. This has
Speaker 8: been wonderful. It's a wonderful book, Lost Connections. Thank you
Speaker 8: very much for taking the time to call us all
Speaker 8: the way from London to this program. Thank you very much.
Speaker 8: Have a great evening, and thank you again.
Speaker 6: It's always a joy to talk to you. Thanks so much.
Speaker 6: Cheers Bye, Thank you.
Speaker 8: Cheers by
Speaker 7: M HM