Johann Hari on Depression and Lost Connections

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Johan Harry and this is his second

time on The One You Feed podcast. He's the New York Times best selling author of Chasing the Scream, which has been adapted into a feature film. Johan was twice named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International UK. He's written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others, and he's a regular panelist on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, which is a show. I love his new book, his Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real causes

of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions. Hi Johan, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, it's really good to be back with you. I should just preemptively apologize to your listeners that I am trying to give up caffeine and failing. Basically, I would I would ideally have caffeine running into my sins on I V Drip seven. So if I seem a little bit lower energy the last time you spoke to me, that that is the reason. It's not that I'm slowly lapstick into a comba or something wonderful. Well,

we're thrilled to have you back. We had you on to discuss your book, Chasing the Scream, and I love the book and the conversation, and now we're here to talk about your new book, Lost Connections, Uncovering the real causes of depression and the Unexpected Solutions. And we'll jump into that in a second, but let's start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two

wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start us off by asking you what that parable means to you and your life and

in the work that you do. You know, it's so interesting because I think I think about this parable differently now than I did when we spoke, I guess three three years ago, because it's something I learned in the research for my book. So everyone listening to the show knows that junk food has kind of taken over our diets and made us physically sick. Right. I say this with no sense of superiority as someone who basically lived

on KFC for like ten years in my twenties. But what's interesting is there's equally strong evidence that a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. For thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money and status and how you look to other people, you're going to feel terrible,

right from Confucius to Plato round down right. But interestingly, no one had actually scientifically studied this question until an incredible man I got to know, called Professor Tim casser Because it um not college in Illinois who did this really interesting and important research. So it had already been established before Professor Cassa that there are basically two kinds of human motivation, right. Put it crudely, imagine you play

the piano. If you play the piano in the morning because you love it and it gives you joy, that's an intrinsic reason to play the piano. You're not doing it to get anything out of it. You're doing it because that experience is the experience you want to have. Okay, Now, imagine you play the piano, you know, because your parents are really pressuring you to be a piano maestro, or in a dive bar that you can't stand, to make

the rent, or to impress a woman. I don't know, maybe there's some piano fettershift out there, Right, that would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano. Right, You're not doing it for the thing itself, You're doing it to get something out of it, right, something external saying external to the experience. Now, obviously we're all a mixed of internal and external motivations. But Professor Cassa showed a

few really interesting things. One is, as a culture, we have become much more driven by these external what I think of his junk values, and you can see, I mean, he gives lots of evidence. But even something as trivial as you know, go to a music concert now and you'll notice about half the people will just spend the whole time not being present at the concept, but just filming it on their phones a video they will never watch, right, because if you want to watch Beyonce, there's great clips

on YouTube. Why are they doing that? They're doing that to display that they're having experience in order to be envied by other people. They that rather than having the experience, they're externally displaying that they're having the experience and suppressed. The cast A showed firstly that we've all become much

more driven by these external values. And secondly, and I think really importantly, Um, the more you're driven by these external values, these junk values, the more you're driven by how you look to other people, how much money you've got, your status, the more you will become depressed and anxious.

It's a quite powerful effect. It's been shown in over two dozen studies now, and I think it relates to the parable on which your show is built in a in a really interesting way, because I think not so much in terms of individuals, but as a culture, as a society, what have we chosen to feed? Right? And you can see there's an interesting little experiment that was done in the late seventies. It's a really simple experiment. You take a bunch of five year olds and you

split them into two groups. The first group is shown two advertisements for a specific toy whatever the equivalent, like pepper Pig was in can't what it was, and the sa I thought that must be an English thing. I've never heard of pepper pig, like Dora the Explorer or whatever. All the kids in my life are slightly too old now for me to up to date with these tally

tubbies whatever. Right, And the second group of kids kids are split into two groups first group have shown two advertisements for a toy, the second group shown no advertisements. And then at the end, all the kids are told, Okay, kids, you've got a choice. Now. You can either play with a nice boy who doesn't have any toys, or you can play with a nasty boy who's got the toy that was in the advertisement. The kids who haven't seen the advertisement choose the nice boy who doesn't have any toys.

The kids who've seen just two advertisements choose the nasty boy who's got the toy. What does that tell you? Just two advertisements prime to these kids to choose an inanimate lump of plastic over the possibility of kindness and connection. Everyone listening to your show has seen more than two

advertisements today, right more. I mean, we're so immersed in this machinery, even the moment we're born, that feeds the extrinsic parts of us, right, that tells us the way to be happy is to buy staff, to consume more. Eighteen month old children recognize the McDonald's m than know their own last name. Right, That's that's how that's how deeply we're immersed in this machinery. And as Professor Cassiput.

It's me. We're raised from the moment we're born in a machinery that's designed to get us to neglect what's good about life, right, that's designed to get us to live in this extrinsic hollow way driven by these junk values. So in a sense I'm interested in. Obviously, there's a degree to which individuals make some choices within this system, and we can choose what to feed or not to feed. But to me, what's more interesting is how did we build and why maintain this machinery that feeds the worst

parts of us. That's designed. You know, the whole point of advertising is to make us feel inadequate, right, That's that's what it's designed to do until you buy the product, and then it's got to be careful. You've got to quite quickly feel inadequate again, right. I think a lot about you know, where I grew up, you know, kind of normal suburb of London. You know there's a couple I know who lived there. Still, who are people I love,

people close to me, I go see them. They live so purely by these values, these these consumers values, so they work really hard to buy this stuff that they see in advertisements, and they display it on Instagram and on Facebook, and people comment going, OMG, so jealous. And then they're puzzled that they don't feel good and they think I was just I didn't buy the right thing.

So they work even harder. They buy another junk thing they don't need, and they display that, and they're constantly puzzled by their own despair, their own pain, because although they don't put it quite like this, there's an implicit sense of the moment, but what, I'm doing everything I meant to do, right, why do I feel so bad? It's a sense I'm doing everything I'm meant to do.

Why do I feel so bad? And so that was the kind of first thing that came to mind, A very long answer in response to this parable you read, Yeah, well, I really identified with that section of the book about junk values, and I also related with you know, later in the book you sort of reference back to that, and you say, you know what I've been told, how bad these are for us. I understand it. I've done all the research, and yet I feel pulled by them, and I just find that to be so true. In

my case. It's really the reason that I try and stay away from any sort of commercial TV because I fall prey to in a very subtle way. It's not like I suddenly am like, well I need that Budweiser, right, But what I start to think is what's important is how do I look? How does my girlfriend look? You know? Am I on a beach? Am I? You know? I I just suddenly internalize those things in a in a very um stronger way than I would think, and I just kind of noticed it about myself, and I really

register with with what you're saying. With that, that's so true. What you're saying because before advertising sells, as any particular product it sells is the idea that your problems can be solved through buying. Right. That's the kind of under message, and you can see how that often sold in this kind of self affirmation. You know, even our shampoo bottles tell us you're worth it, right, So you can see how this happens. There's an absolutely implicit approach to life embedded.

And as Professor Cassa says, our motivation is bragile. Right. We all have intrinsic motives and we all have extrinsic junk motives, and of course you need both, right, of course, but he said very easily extrinsic motives can crowd out the more meaningful motives in it. And it sounds strange because at one level it's banale. It's a cliche to say, Look, no one listening to your show is going to lie on their deadbed and think about all the things they bought. Right,

they will think about moments of meaning and connection. But we are immersed in a propaganda system that is designed to get us to neglect that that insight, and it's not the only thing that's going on, but this is one of the reasons why we have a depression and anxiety epidemic. And Professor Cass, along with an academic called Jill Twinge, showed that the amount of GDP in the US that is spent on advertising correlates with teenage anxiety.

So as GDP spending on advertising goes up, teenage anxiety goes up. As it goes down to age anxiety goes down. Now, I don't want to be clear. This is one of many causes of depression anxiety I write about in the book, but I do think it's an important one. I think so, I mean that actually there's lots of things in the book that relevant to the parable you tell, but that's

just one thing. So let's back up a little bit to the idea of the book, and then I want to talk about depression in general, because your book is basically saying that, you know what, a lot of us have been sold a story that says, the reason we're depressed is because there's something chemically wrong in our brain. And so the primary thing that a lot of people

are given is an antidepressant for that. And and what you're saying is that by and large, the biggest contributor to our depression are these nine different causes that you name, and that our brains and our genes and the chemicals are a small part of that. Or even to put it slightly different, the horse has already left the barn with these other causes, right, and then the chemical changes come along with that. And I really want to explore that because that I did a couple of things to me.

One is I agree with so much of it wholeheartedly, and I fought with it all through the book, and I think you did too. And I think that's interesting because, like you, I have been on antidepressants for a long time. I'm in the process of weaning off of some right now, but I would say by and large, I think they have been positive thing for me. And so right out of the gate, I want to make sure that we

say this, because I know you say it too. We this is not a conversation that is telling anybody, No matter what the rest of what you hear is that you should get off your medicine, that medicine is bad, any of that. That's not what we're going to be saying. What we're gonna be saying is we need to look more holistically at depression and anxiety and not have all the focus on that one little thing, and then people

can draw their own conclusions. But a lot of the criticism I've seen about your book is people who think that's what you're saying. And I agree with you. You are in no way saying that. But I just want to be really clear with it, upfront with our audience. No, no, that's true, and to be fair to the people who say that, they do admit they haven't read the book. So yeah, But but I think to go to the wider thing the word question asked, which is really important.

So there were these two mysteries that were really haunting me that made me write this book. And actually it's a sign of how, like you say, how much I struggled with this, how afraid I was to write this, to go and investigate this, that actually I wanted to write this book seven years ago and I started, in fact started writing it three and a half years ago.

And the reason why is I figured it would be easier for me to write a book about the war on drugs that required me to go and spend time with hit men for the Mexican drug cartels, then it would be to look into this story about my own depression. That's how afraid I was of it. And there were these two mysteries that were really hanging over me. That

The first was I'm thirty nine years old. Every single year that I've been alive, depression and anxiety has increased in the United States and across most of the developed world, and I wanted to understand why, what what's going on here? Right? And the second thing is is you alluded to before when I was a teenager, I went to my doctor. I explained that I had this feeling like pain was kind of bleeding out of me and I couldn't control

it or regulate it. And my doctor told me a story that I now know did not match the best science then and does not match the best science now. He said, we know why people feel this way. There's a chemical called serotonian in people's brains makes them feel good. Some people are naturally lacking it. You're clearly one of them. All we need to do is give you this drug. In my case, it was but it's called Axilent in

the United States, and you'll be all right. So I started taking paxil and experienced to really significant boost in my mood. My depression went away. A couple of months later, maybe three or three months later, I started to feel the sense of pain coming back. I went back to my doctor. He said, I didn't give you a high enough dose. He gave me a high dose again. I

felt a significant boost. Again, this feeling of pain came back, and I was really in this cycle until I was taking the maximum possible does that you're legally allowed to take that for thirteen years, at the end of which I was still depressed, and I was experiencing all sorts of horrible side effects. And what happened to me fit into this wider picture. So I went on this long journey for the book. I traveled over forty thou miles.

I wanted to meet the leading experts in the world about what causes depression and anxiety, what alo and also just people with very different perspectives. From an Amish village in Indiana, because the Amish have very low levels of depression, to to a city in Brazil where they bound advertising to see if that would make people feel better. To a lab in Baltimore where they're giving people silocyby and the active component magic mushrooms to see if that would help.

And I think, as you said, that the opposite. I learned a huge number of things, but to me that the kind of core of it is until I went to my doctor when I was a teenager, I thought my depression was all in my head, meaning I was just weak I needed to man up. And then for the next thirteen years I thought my causes of my depression were all in my head, meaning it was a chemical imbalance in my brain. But what I learned is the scientific evidence for nine causes of depression anxiety. Two

of them are indeed biological. They're very real, and they're important to talk about. There your genes, and there are real changes in your brain that happened. I don't think they should be described as a chemical imbalance for reasons we can talk about. But the other seven causes are not in our heads. They're actually factors in the way we live, and once you understand them, that opens up very different kinds of antidepressants are about solving those problems.

We should be offered alongside, not instead of alongside chemical andity. Depressant is aware of radically expanding the menu of options and expanding our understanding of what's happening to us. Yeah, I want to talk about how I've dealt with depression because in some ways it is spot on with what you do, and in one other way it is very very different, and I just think it's an interesting conversation.

So I have long believed that taking a pill for depression is not gonna do the job sufficiently, and so I've long had a series of things that I felt like I need to do to treat depression in my life. And it's interesting because they line up very much in some ways with your different causes and reconnections. I just sort of stumbled into them over time, I've got like a list of about twelve or fifteen things that I keep track of every day. Now I don't do all

twelve or fifteen every day. My goal is just to do a good number of them consistently. And I know that that really really makes the difference in whether I'm depressed or not. So on one hand, totally on board, and you know, I'm a living proof that trying to work with these causes makes a big difference. So that's

where total alignment. And then there's this other way that I deal with it, which is very, very different, and that is that when I inevitably feel like I hit a cycle of feeling a little bit more depressed, so it almost feels physical to me. It almost just feels like I just can feel it come on. And I'm not really interested in anything. The things that I normally love I don't care about. You know, I can't think of a book to read, I can't think of a

song to listen to. And so what I've learned to do over time with that is almost the exact opposite of look for causes. I've come to treat that and I don't I'm not saying this is right by any stretch. I'm just talking about kind of what I've done, and and I've talked about this on this show that in those moments where it feels like a brief sort of cycle through something, I've learned to treat it like having

a cold. And what I've done is I've just sort of said, you know what, let me make sure I'm doing the things that are on my list, let me, you know, let me make sure I'm doing the things that i know help my depression. And then what I'm not going to do is fall into an existential crisis about whether the direction of my life is correct or all of that because of a small cycle of depression.

So on one hand, I treat it very actively, and on the other hand, so I would say I treat the thing as a whole very aggressively and very actively, and then I treat individual incidents, which are usually a couple of days, almost exactly the opposite by going, you know what, I'm not going to make a big fuss out of this. It comes, it goes, not a big deal.

I'm not going to examine all of my life. And I just think it's interesting that that I've kind of ended up in that spot with it after having worked with it for so many years. That's a really interesting and aloquent way of putting it. I think that's exactly right about when you change the wider framework, there will still, of course be fluctuations and how you cope that. It makes me think about one of the causes and one of the solutions that are right about in loss connections.

So we are the loneliest culture that has ever been. You know, there's a study that ask Americans how many close friends do you have whe you can call on in a crisis, And when they started doing the study years ago, the most common answer was fine. Today the most common answer is none. There are more Americans who have nobody to turn to than any other option when

things go wrong. I was thinking about this a lot in the last few weeks because one of the people who taught me so much about this, an amazing man, Professor John Cassiopo at the University of Chicago, but sadly just died. He was it wasn't an old man. It's terrible loss, but he was the leading expert in the world on loneliness. Professor Cassiopo proved a few really important things.

One of them was for a human being, being acutely lonely is a stressful It releases as much of the stressful amone cortisol as being punched in the face by a stranger. And a lot of his work was about, well, why why is that? What's going on there? And he said to me, you know, why do we exist. One of the reasons that you and I are able to have this conversation, Eric, is because our ancestors on the Savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They

weren't bigger than the animals they took down. In a lot of cases, they often went faster than the animals they took down, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating. And just like being, he's evolved to need a high humans evolved to need a tribe. And if you think about those circumstances, if you were separated from the tribe, in the circumstances where we evolved, you were depressed and anxious for a really good reason.

Right you were flooded with stress and regrison you're about to die. Probably it was a very powerful signal to get back to the tribe. We are the first humans ever to try to live without tribes. It's making us feel terrible, and Professor Cassie, I've approved this was a major factor in causing our depression epidemic. One of the heroes of my book is a wonderful doctor called Sam Everington.

As you can tell from my weird downtown a b Boys, I'm British, although I spent a lot of time in the US and um Sam is is a doctor in a poor part of East London where I lived for a long time. And Sam was really uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming to him with depression and anxiety. And like me, he's not blanketly opposed to chemic clanted depressants. He thinks they do play good rather for some people.

But he could just see firstly that his patients were often depressed perfectly good reasons, like being really lonely, and secondly that while the antidepressants could take the edge off that for some people, which had value, for most of his patients, it was not solving the problem. So he decided to pioneer a different approach. One day, a woman came to him called Lisa Cunningham. Lisa had been shut away in her home with crippling depression and anxiety for

seven years. And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry our Karen giving you these drugs. I'm also going to prescribe something else. There was an area behind the doctor's surgery. It was known as dog Shit Alley, which gives you a sense of what it was like. Backed onto a park and Sam said to Lisa, what I like to do is come and turn up twice a week. I'm going to turn out and support you. There'll be a group of depressed and anxious people. We're going to turn

Dogshit Alley into something good. Right first meeting they had, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety. But a couple of things happened. The first thing was Lisa discovered as the weeks went on, they had something to talk about that wasn't how terrible they felt. Most of the time, we offer depressed people drugs or we give them the opportunity to go and talk about their pain, both of whichever real value. But here they decided something else completely different.

They decided they were going to learn gardening. They started to put their fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons, and there's a lot of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a very powerful antidepressant. We can talk about that if you want. The second thing that happened is they began to form a tribe, and they did what human beings do when we formed tribes. They started to solve each other's problems.

To give you the most extreme example, there was a guy in the program who was sleeping on the local public bus at night because he'd been thrown out at his home. People in the group were like, well, of course for depressed sleeping on a bus. They started pressuring the local authority to get him a home. They succeeded. It was the first time they've done something for someone else in years. It made them feel great, the way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom,

we began to bloom. There's a study in Norway of a very similar program, which is part of a growing body that evidence that found it was more than twice as effective as chemicaliented depressants in reducing depression. I think for a kind of obvious reason, it's something I saw all over the world, from Sydney to San Francisco to Saint Paolo, the best and most effective responses to depression were the ones that deal with the reasons why we're so depressed and anxious in the first place, and to

relate that to what you're saying. It's not that within that program Lisa didn't have bad days. She did have bad days. But the difference between having a bad day in a context where you are held and valued and having a bad day in a context when you are isolated and alone is all the difference in the world. And that's just one of the causes of depression anxiety.

I'm right, aback, So I think you're right that certainly no one is suggesting or maybe there are some people, but they're foolish that, you know, if we deal with these massive social and psychological factors that are driving up depression and anxiety, that they will still will not be profound human distress. Of course, there will be um that you know, there are tragedies inherent to the human condition. Right, you will die, I will die, We will be forgotten.

Everyone we know will die and be forgotten. The inherent you know, there are some things that just inherently tragic concid about being human being that don't go away, but what we can do is deal with many of these deep environmental factors that are driving up the epidemic. Yeah, I think that's so true. And what you just said there about the way that they connected over the garden, I think is really important. I mean, you made a good point there that they didn't go to the garden

to talk about their trouble. And we had a woman on I don't know if you're familiar with. Her name is Emily White, and she wrote a book called Loneliness, and then her next book was about how she dealt with it by reconnecting to the world, and that was one of her big points was that, you know, we think that the type of friendship that's going to help us, you know, is the one that it's all about dealing

with our problems, etcetera, etcetera. And what she realized, you know, kind of to your point, was that what was really helpful to her was to form these friendships that did something other than just that there wasn't so much pressure on them to be like the thing that solves a problem.

But you know, loneliness is such a big thing and it's something I wrestle with on this show a little bit because you know, I've exposed that science that you know, you know, being lonely is worse than smoking, right, And I get some reactions from people, which is like, Okay, that's freaking me out because I'm lonely and I don't

know what to do. And so it's one of those things that I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about, like what's the role of something like this, a show that's in a virtual world with helping people to be less lonely? And I just think it. It is such a pervasive problem, and I agree with you that there's a big societal issue here, and yet for folks that are wrestling with it, we also need to find our way through it while we hope to address the bigger

societal issues. A lot of the things I learned for lost connections I learned from experts, I learned from scientists, And there were lots of places where things fell into place emotionally for me. And there's one place that I went back to again and again. If it's okay, I'll tell your listeners the story of this place, because I think it it tells us so much. So in the summer of two thousand and eleven, on a big anonymous housing project in Berlin, a woman put a sign in

her window. She lived on the ground floor. The sign said something like I got to notice saying I'm going to be evicted next Thursday, So on Wednesday night, I'm going to kill myself. She was a woman in her early sixties. Her name is Nuria Chengish. She was a

Turkish German woman, very religious, sure her job. And this was housing project in a kind of poor part of Berlin where basically three kinds of people lived, relatively recent Muslim immigrants, gay people, and punk squad as as you can imagine, these three groups that at each other with a lot of incomprehension, and no one really knew anyone, right, no one like a big anonymous housing project like one anywhere in the western world. No one knew anyone. No

one kne who this woman was. But people saw the sign in her window and they started to knock on her door and they said do you need any help, and she said, fuck you, I don't want any help. I'm going to kill myself. And people started talking outside her corridor, and you know, they were all kind of piste off because their rents have been rising and lots of people have been evicted. And one of them had an idea. He had actually been watching on the news

Terrier Square. That was the summer of the Egyptian Revolution, and there was a big thoroughfare that goes into the center of Berlin into Mitter that goes through this housing project center with this housing project, and then this idea. They said, if we just blocked the road for a day on a Saturday and we will nea out, the media will come, there'll be a bit of a fuss, they'll probably let her stay. Maybe there'll be a good pressure to keep our rents down. So they did it.

They willed Mary out. She was like, well, I'm going to kill myself anyway, I might as well let them put me in the middle of the street. And the media did come, and there were news reports about her, and then it got to the end of the day from the media went home and the police came and they said, okay, take it down. You've had your fun. Take it down. And the residents, the people who live in this place it's called COTTI said, well, hang on a minute, you haven't told Nourria she gets to stay.

And actually we want a rent freeze for all of us, So we'll take this down when we've been told we're getting a rent freeze. But of course they knew the moment they took this barricade down, the police would come and take it away. So one of my favorite people at Cotti Women called Tanya Gartner. She's one of the punk squatters. She she wears a tiny miniskirt even in Berlin winters. Tania is hardcore. She had in her apartment Clackson, you know, one of those things you use at soccer

matches to make noises. She went and got it and she said, Okay, what we're gonna do. We can draw up a timetable to man this barricade and when the police come to take it down, let off. The clack Center will all come down from our apartments and we'll all stop them. Right, So people who would never ad met, you, didn't know each other, start to sign up to man this barricade. So Tanya, in her tiny miniskirt, was given.

I think it was the Thursday night shift with Nuria, very religious Muslim in a in a full hitge hob right, and the first nights they sat there, it was super awkward. They're like, we've got nothing to talk about. This person is nothing like me. But as the nights went on they started talking to each other they discovered they had

something incredibly similar in common. Nuria had come to Berlin when she was seventeen years old with her two children from a village in Turkey, and her job was to earn enough money to send back the money for her husband to come. But after she'd been in Berlin for a year, she got word from home that her husband had died. She told Tanya something she'd never told anyone. She had always told people that her husband died of

a heart attack. Actually he died of TB, which was regarded as a disease of poverty and was quite shameful at that time. Tania told Nurias something she didn't talk about very often. She had come to Cotti when she was fifteen. She'd been thrown out of her middle class home. She'd come there. She lived in a squat with a bunch of other punks. She got pregnant when she was fifteen. They actually realized they both had had young children and been really lost in this place when they when they

were themselves children. This was happening all over COTTI there was a young lad called Memer who was Turkish German lad really into hip hop, kept being nearly thrown out of school because they said he had a d h D. He got paired with this elderly, grumpy white German who loved stalin and said he didn't believe in direct action, and they got talking. They were had a shift together and the old white guy started helping him with his homework.

There were these pairings, these connections that were happening. Across the street from this housing project, there's a gay club called zod Block, which is run by a man I love called Rick clud Strauss. And to give you a sense of what this gay club is like, the previous place that Rick hard rand was called Cafe Anal. So it's pretty uncompromising. I always thought you weren't have a

stab through, you know, pretty uncomprovised gay people. And you know when they first opened this club, and you know it's it's a lot of religious Muslims in this area. People some people really outraged. Some people have smashed the windows. When the protests began, this gay club, Zoodblock, donated all of their furniture. They said, you know you guys should have your meetings in our club, come whenever you want.

And at first even the kind of left wing people in Katti were like, look, we're not going to get these very religious Muslims to come and have meetings underneath, you know, the poster for fisting night, right, But actually they did start meeting there. As one of the Muslim women there said to me, we all realized we had to take these small steps to get to understand each other.

After the protests have been going on for about six months, one day guy turned up called ton Kai and when you when you meet ton Kaites, he was in his early fifties at the time. When you meet Tunkites, clear he's got some cognitive difficulties. He'd been living homeless, and he started saying, can I do anything to how up here? And they started asking him to help, and quite quickly all three groups, the Muslims, the Gaze and the punks

loved him. Right, it's got lovely caring energy. By this time, they had actually turned the thing blocking the street into a permanent structure, so they started saying to Tunkai, well, why don't you sleep here? We don't want you sleeping on the streets. You know, Berlin, it can be cold in the fall. In the winter, he started sleeping there. He became a much beloved kind of staple of the protest camp. And then after he'd been there for about

a year, one day the police came to inspect. They would do this every now and then, and tun Kai doesn't like it when people arguing. He thought the police were arguing, so he went to try to hug one of the officers, but they thought he was attacking them, so they arrested him. That was when it was discovered Tunkai had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital, often in an actual padded cell, for twenty years, and he had escaped and been lived on the streets for a

few months and then found his way to catty. So the police took him back to this psychiatric hospital in Charlottenburg, right the other side of burling In, at which point the entire Cotti protest movement turned itself into a kind of free Tungukai movement, and they descended on this psychiatric hospital at the other side of the city, and you know, the psychiatrists are just like, what is this. There's suddenly there's all these like Muslims gaze and punks demanding a

release of one of their patients. They've never seen anything like this. Remember Uli, one of the women at COTTI saying, you know, she's she sent to the protesters, to the story, to the psychiatrists. But he doesn't belong with you. You don't love him. He belongs with us. We love him. And I remember thinking, how many of us, if we were carted away, would have hundreds of people descending on this place saying, no, this person belongs with us, No, we love this person. It took them a long time,

but they got tongue Kai back. He still lives there. And you know, many things happened at COTTI that I wrote that and lost connections. I mean, obviously the obvious headline is they got went freeze for their entire housing project. They then launched a referenced diminitiative UM because you you have to get set number of signatures. It got the largest number of written signatures in the history of the

city of Berlin. But you know, when I went to go and see Nuria, the woman who started the protest, the last time I ever saw Nuria, I remember, you know, she said to me, look, I'm really glad I got to stay in my apartment. That's great, but I gained

so much more than that. I was surrounded by these amazing people all along, and I never knew remember another another woman there, Aman who took part in the protest, and a Turkish German, and said to me, when I grew up in Turkey, I called my whole village home. And I came to live in the Western World, and I learned that what you're meant to call home is just your four walls. And then this whole protest began, and now I call this whole place, and all these

people in my home. And she said she realized that at some level she had been homeless all the time she had been living in the West World. That we are, at some level homeless. The human beings need to feel we belong and our sense of home in this culture is not big enough to meet our sense of belonging. And let thing about Cotty, and I think they think I'm crazy because I would go there every three months,

just burst into tears and leave again. At when one of them, Sandy said to me, your hand, do you think you maybe you have allergies? Your eyes water very much, but that you know, I remember thinking what was so clear to me and Cotty is those people think about how distress they were. You know, Newya was suicidal, a Tunkai was shut away in a padded cell, mement, that young lad was constantly being nearly thrown out of school because they said he had a d h D. They

did not need to be drugged. They needed to be together. The problems that seem insoluble when you are isolated and alone and told that life is about buying ship and screaming each other through screens, those problems are insoluble when you are in that framework. But when you are part of a tribe and you reorient your values, you can begin to find in solutions that you couldn't find when

you were alone. And and and Britania saying to me outside the gay clubs, she said to me one day, you know, when you're all alone and you feel like ship, you think there's something wrong with you. But what happened is we came out of our corner crying and we started to fight, and we realized we were surrounded by so many other people who feel the same way. And when you do that, you realize how strong you can be. And I really felt that so acutely with them, that

this is just below the surface. So those people listening to you who are hearing those messages about learnliness and saying this freaks me out because because you can feel the truth of it. Remember, you are surrounded by people who feel that, and it takes very little. It takes very little for that to come to the surface, for that hunger to come to the surface. It didn't take long for people in Cotting to really see what they

had and what they were developing. Do you see what I mean as a response to what you're saying, Absolutely, and that story is incredible, and it reminds me of a slightly more prosaic version of this that has happened over and over and over and over, and it's um twelve step programs. And I have some concerns with with twelve step programs and some of the things that you know, they're not perfect by any stretch. They have saved my

life a couple of times. But what I'm struck by is that all across the world, on any given day, you have this thing where people emerge from I'm all alone in this thing into a group of people who all have have the same situation and and lives change dramatically. And I often think that you know, twelve step program would say, you know, God is the reason this happens. I actually think the fact that you go into that

group is the reason that it happens. But it's it's another pointer towards this can really happen and does happen. It's not an insoluble problem. Well, the unnatural thing is not that people connect to from tribes. The unnatural thing is that you don't write that that actually this These are our deepest impulses as a species. Right, and you're right, I agree with you both. You know, there are some aspects of TRUSTEPS theology that I don't think of everyone.

But I think the model of connection and support that is embedded in trust its programs is profound and beautiful. And the fact that you know any city, anyone in this is listening to you know, you could go to an AA meeting tonight. You go to it and no one will ask you for any money, and you will be welcomed and treated with care and respect. That's a

that's an extraordinary thing. And you know there are many dark aspects of human nature, of course, but that is much truer to our nature and who we are as a species than sitting alone, you know, buying ship on your laptop. You know, the book is so deep and there's nine causes, and we're going to get to almost We're gonna get to so very little of it. We're running we're running up on time here. Soon. You and I are going to talk a little bit afterwards in

the post show conversation. UM listeners, you've heard the drill before. Supporters of the show can can hear those over on Patreon. But I want to just touch on a couple of things because I think the book can be summed up really, really well in one line that you wrote, and it's the depression is itself a form of grief for all the connections we need but don't have. Yeah, this comes from this thing that was discovered in the nineteen seventies about depression that was so explosive that it had to

be kind of brushed under the carpet. In the seventies, the APIA, the American Psychological Association, decided for the first time to standardize how depression was diagnosed in the United States. So they drew up a list of ten symptoms of depression that are pretty obvious things that you could guess,

crying a lot, feeling worthless. And they sent them out to doctors all over the country and the kind of psychiatric bible, the diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and they said, to doctors, if any of your patients experienced more than five of these symptoms for more than two weeks, diagnosed them as depressed, as mentally ill, do what you can to help them. So doctors start using this. But sometime later doctors and psychiatrists come back and they're like, hey,

we've got a bit of a problem here. If we use this guideline, we should be diagnosing every grieving person as depressed, because this is what happens to you when someone you love dies. So the A p A get together and they're like, well, that's really not what we meant. That's not what we intended. Um, So they invented something

that became known as the grief loophole. Right, So what they said is, okay, use these ten symptoms to diagnose people as depressed unless someone they love has died in the last year, in which case they're not mentally ill.

It's perfectly understandable response don't diagnose them, it's okay. So doctors started using that, But that started to beg a kind of question that lots of doctors asked, which was, hang in a minute, we're meant to be telling people that depression is just a brain disease that you're identify on a checklist. Except there's one situation, and only one situation in life where it's perfectly understandable response. But why is that the only situation where it's okay to respond

this way and understandable? Why not if you lose your job, Why not if you lose your house, Why not if you're stuck in a job you hate for the next four years. You can all imagine, you commagine a hundreds of situations. But that as Dr Joanne Cassier Torre, who's one of the real experts on this in an absolute extraordinary person who lost her own daughter when Yanne and childbirth, as as Dr Cassier Tore put it to me, that

insight would require a whole system overhaul. It would require us to think about the whole life and not just the isolated symptoms or not trying to boil it down to being just a problem in the person's brain. The system isn't built to do that. There are lots of good psychiatrists and many admirable and indeed heroic psychiatrists, but the system we've built a psychiatry is not designed to do that, right. And so what happened is the A P A got rid of the grief exception don't existing.

More So, now, if your baby dies at ten am, you can be diagnosed that morning. If they said to you, well, have you had these symptoms of the last two weeks, have you been upset? Have you been yeah, well, then they can diagnose you straight away. In fact, as Dr Cassier Tore has shown, nine of grieving parents are diagnosed and drugged in the first hours after their child dies.

And what she said is that tells us something really profound, right, because most people instinctively know that just drugging someone for grief, that grief is not an irrational pathology. Grief is a tribute to the person we have loved. Right, We grieve because we have loved. And she argues that actually drugging greeting parents disrupts the grieving process in ways that really damaging.

But but I think you can see this in a wider context, as Dr cass Tory herself, she's really a remarkable person, applies it in a in a wider context, which is that, you know, the worst thing for me about what my doctor told me that it was just a chemical imbalance of my problem. Fact, it's not true that it's just a chemical mapills friends. The worst thing is what that says to people is your pain is meaningless.

It's like a glitch in a computer program. But what the World Health Organization, the leading medical body in the world, and so many of the people who looked at the real evidence have been trying to tell us is your pain has meaning. You're not a machine with broken parts when you're depressed. You're not crazy, you're not broken. You're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is love, support and help to get those those those

deeper needs met. And I think, as you say, as you quote from the book, it's not a coincidence that depression and grief have the same symptoms. I think partly what depression is is a form of grief your own needs not being met. And I think that tells us something really profound about how we've been approaching it in the wrong way. It's one of the other moments when emotionally it fell into place for me was when I went to interview this um South African psychiatrist called Derek Summerfield.

He's a wonderful person. Derek happened to be in Cambodia in two thousand and one when chemic cliented depressants were first introduced in that country, and the local Cambodian doctors were like, what are these drugs? They hadn't heard of them. What is an antidepressant? And Derek explained and they said to him, we don't need them, We've already got antidepressants. And he said, what do you mean. He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy

or something. Instead they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields and one day he stood on a lambline and he got his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial limb and he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently it's extremely painful to work in the rice field. It worked under water when you've got artificial limb. I'm imagining it was traumatic for very obvious reasons. The guy started to cry all day, didn't

want to get out of bed, classic depression. So they said to Derek, that's when we gave him an antidepressant. They said, well, he said, what was it. They explained that they went and sat with him, They listened to him. They saw that his pain made sense. They figured precisely because they listened to the source of the pain, they began to look for solutions. They figured, if we brought him a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be so distressed. So they brought him a cow.

Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression had gone. They said to Derek, So you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean Right now, as I say, those Cambodian doctors new intuitively what the World Health organization has been trying to tell us. They understood that your pain has meaning. We evolved a pain impulse for a reason, right. I mean, there's a

trivial example. You know, as a European who spends a lot of my time in the US, I never failed to be surprised by the existence of indigestion treatments like peptobismal right, we should just don't exist anywhere in Europe. I've never seen them anywhere in Europe. I remember the first time. I was, Oh, yeah, we don't have them, no such thing. I mean, maybe they're available, I've never seen I've never seen anyone take when. I've never seen

anyone selling them. Because the reaction of a European when you've seen indigestion treatment is to say, well, were in a minute. Indigestion isn't a malfunction. It's a necessary signal from your body that you're eating too fast. The solution to indigestion is to eat more slowly, right, because that's a signal that you're eating too much, you're reading too fast, you're gonna make yourself sick, you're gon upset your stomach.

Now that's a trivial example, because indigestion is infinitely less agonizing the depression, which is the worst thing I've ever gone through. But you can see that principle. We have pain impulses for a reason, right, they are not malfunctions. That and the fact that one in five Americans is going to take a psychiatric drug in their lifetime, and average white male life expectancy just fell for the first time in the history of the American Republic apart from

the Civil War. These are signals that are telling us something. And what they're telling us is not that everyone mysteriously just had a serotonin imbalance in their brains. Right, There are real things that happen to depressed people's brains. Of course, those things sometimes make it harder to get out of depression. That is true, and I go through that in the book.

Of course, we've been told this ludicrously reductive explanation that to me, the problem is not so much with the drugs, because the drugs have some benefit for some people, that do some harm to some people. We can have a complex and nuance to about that. But to me, the really harmful thing is what the story does to people. Well, that story does is it tells you that your pain

doesn't mean anything. And what that does is it cuts you off from following that pain to its source, both you as an individual and us as more importantly, us as a society, and solving the things that are hurting us so much. I agree completely, Like I said early on, for me, you know what I've I've described my treating depression is I kind of like throw the kitchen sink

at it, right. I recognized it's a there's a bunch of things that are a factor in it for me, and and I need to treat all those different things. And I think that's what you're you're pointing to so much, is that, you know, And I think that's so true that that our pain is very often a signal about something. It's like guilt. Guilt used in the proper way is a signal that we're living against what our values are.

Now this conspiral into shame. We can feel guilty about things that other people tell us, but it's core right in a well functioning human, guilt tells us like I don't feel good about that, and so it's a signal. And so to just ignore it is troublesome. And I and I agree with you, and I think what we've done it, I think that's a really well put But I don't think ignoring it. I don't think as a culture we've ignored it. I think it's worse as a culture.

We've pathologized it. As a culture. We've said that it's a sign of craziness or malfunction in the individual If we ignored it, that would be bad enough. What we've done is even worse than ignoring it. Um. Yeah, we've pathologized it. And to me that's the most and that's

the most the most damaging thing. Well, because it makes people them mistrust the impulse, It makes them mistrust the signal, It makes them systematically misread the signal as a culture, and I think if we had listened to these signals about depression, we could have dealt with some of these

problems before it became, for example, the opioid crisis. And I've spent time in places like men and Not New Hampshire, which at the absolute epicenter of the opioid crisis, where what's happening there, the heart of what's happening there, that the core of it. I mean, there are many things going on, but as you know, it's a subject in my previous book, Chasing the Screen, which is about addiction.

But the core of that is the core of addiction is about trying not to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be, right, it's not a coincidence to places with the highest levels of opioid use have the highest levels of suicide and have the highest level of antidepressant prescriptions. These are ways of trying to not be present in an unbearably painful reality. And if we had listened to these signals sooner, we

wouldn't be having these extreme distress signals. And I have to say, I don't think we would be having the current president either. You know. I remember in the run up to the election, I was with this fascinating group who I'm running about for a different project, why do deep canvassing work to try to persuade voters? And we were on this street in Cleveland, in a part of Cleveland called Slavic City has really haunted me as my

memory of the election. We're on this long street and it was this devastated street, like kind of like Detroit without the poetry of the ruins, and about a third of the houses had been abandoned, a third had actually been demolished, and the third still have people living in them off and behind barbed wire. I mean knocked on one door and there was this woman who got talking to I would have guessed from looking at her with sixty discovered from the conversation she was actually the same

age as me. I was thirty seven at the time, and we're having this conversation, is she was quite particulate, very very angry. She wasn't going to vote for Trump, she was going to not vote at all, but really furious. And at one point she made this verbal slip. She was talking about what the area used to be like for her parents and grandparents, and she meant to say when I was young, but what she actually said is

when I was alive. And it really she didn't she didn't notice she had made that verbal slip, but it

really knocked me back. And when I hear people on my side, and you can guess my politics, when I hear people on my side talking about Trump voters or people who didn't vote as stupid or racist or just pathologizing the signal they've sent out, and which, don't get me wrong, I think is obviously a disastrous signal, as you can guess what I think about that, But to pathologize the signal, it means you can't hear what they're saying, right,

you can't hear what needs to be heard. If we're going to deal with this, if we're going to deal with this deep pain um and and the fact that we have so many kind of alarm signals going off, you know, the election of very extreme political choices across the world, one in five Americans to your psychiatric drug, falling white male life expectancy for the the first time history

of the Republic. You know, these are these are interconnective signals that we've built a culture that doesn't meet people's underlying psychological needs in all sorts of crucial ways. But we can deal with that. There are lots of ways back from that. I've seen them in practice, I've seen

how they work. I report the last third of the book is about solutions that are not kind of hypothetical solutions, but places I went people, I interviewed, science, I saw which show ways back for And we've already touched on a very small number of the causes and very few of the solutions. But I think that is to me, the core of it is, it doesn't have to be this way, but to find your way out of this pain,

you have to understand the problem differently. And I wish in a way the book is the letter I wish someone. You know, It's like a letter to my teenage self. This is that these are the things I wish someone had told me when I walked into that doctor's surgery in such as date of pain and pain and distress that I was not told rather than the story I was told, which set me off on a path away from the source of my pain and away from understanding me.

I agree, it's a beautiful way to put it. We're out of time here, but I will encourage listeners absolutely check out the book. It has so many important points and really summarizes I think a lot of things that this show has been about in in sort of one place.

And so I thank you so much for you for taking the time to come on the show, and and for writing the book, and my publishers always, I should say, my publishers always tell me to always feel like a kind of advertising person in one of those bad nineteen

fifties movies when I do this. But they've told me I have to say this at the end of interviews, which is if anyone would like any more information about where they can get the book or the audiobook, if they would like to know what A range of people have said about the book, from Hillary Clinton to tack A. Carlson to Arianna Huffington's to Russell Brand if you would like to take a quiz to see how much do you know about the real causes of depression and anxiety,

or if you'd like to hear audio with any of the people we've been talking about, like there's amazing people in Berlin, you can go to www. Dot the Lost Connections dot com. It's not Lost Connections dot com because that was a band called Lost Connections. Don't really about um and um yeah, um yeah, the Lost Connections dot com. And also on that site you can see where to follow me on Twitter, Instagram and I'll absolutely put links to that site in the show notes that go along

with the show. So thank you so much. A pleasure as always to talk with you, totally my pleasure. Thank you so much. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.