The Real Causes of Depression | Johann Hari

[Applause] before I start I'd have to confess something which would be awkward which is I've only worn this kind of microphone once before and a slightly weird circumstance I had to give the TED talk that John referred to and as the technician was putting it on me that time I said to him you know if he make me wear this I am gonna feel like Madonna and and he looked at me really intensely and he said you should always feel like Madonna so I'm trying to inhabit my full Madonna if there are any there any 19 year old Cuban dancers in the audience be afraid I'm sorry I was a bit of a slowrun Madonna actually we're going to start with that I also want to just apologize for the else which is that and it's a bit like a stress dream being told okay they're gonna fill the conway hall with people we want you to come out and talk about your most painful feelings to them so all I need now for stress dream is to look down and realize I'm not wearing any trousers I'm not even gonna look and so I might be a little bit less slick than I normally am and I apologize these are difficult things to talk about and all the time I was researching this book I kept thinking about something that happened to me and I didn't understand why it'll seem like an irrelevant thing at first I was researching another book around the same time right time I started doing this which I'm not written yet actually and I was in Vietnam and one day I side of the road in Hanoi I bought an apple from a seller I'm really bad at haggling so I paid like five dollars for an apple and I went back to the hotel room it's called the very charming Hanoi hotel and it was very charming and and I ate it and I was so tired and as I ate it it tasted like the way remember those nuclear post-nuclear war films like threads it was what I imagined when I was a kid that food would taste like that right but I was so lazy and tired I ate about half it then threw it away anyway you can guess what happened next I was like volcanic Li sick for like three days I was lying there in front of CNN and on the fourth day I said to my fixer one look I've only got a limited amount of time in Vietnam I've got to go meet the people I was going to interview just just take me so I just had to meet survivors of the war the American invasion of Vietnam and we drove all the way out there is about five hours into the countryside and we were interesting and a woman who was the only person with her children to survive from her whole village the war and shocking picture already clear issues you know it was late 80s shad like stained red lips from consuming something she was she moved around on a plank she's turned this reading she historian as she began to speak I just exploded right I'm not gonna go and see more details but I think you understand what I'm talking about and and and I'm caught lying there just on the floor I thought the worst I've ever felt physically and this woman said to my translator he's really sick you need to take him to a hospital and I was like no no no look I lived on fried chicken for ten years in East London I know what food poisonings like just take just take me back to Hanoi I'll lie in my hotel bed this will just pass and he said to me yeah man this is the only woman who survived the Vietnam War from her village I am going to listen to her medical advice over yours we're taking to the hospital so I get the hospital and I go in and my translator starts saying like completely false things but I was the only Westerner they'd ever treated there and he starts saying this is a really important Westerner if he dies he will disgrace our country and so by that time I felt like the whole room was kind of moving around me it was spinning and I felt really really strange and they start asking me all these questions and I they said what did you eat and I mentioned the Apple I then discovered that parenting this is useful travel advice parent you can't just wash an apple in Vietnam you have to cut off the peel because it's so soaked in fertilizers and I remember when he told me that saying and not fertilizers chemicals pesticides and I remember when he said think it'd be really interesting investigates a piece and I thought oh now I'm about to die I'll never get the writer and then I thought I had the most insufferable thought I've ever had I thought oh I'm about to die because of a poisoned Apple I'm like Eve and and Snow White and Alan Turing and then I was like your last thought proves that you're a pretentious twice alright anyway I had really bad nausea extreme nausea the whole room is spinning and I said to the doctors please give me something for this nausea I can't bear this feeling and they were splash scabby questions in the translator the doctor explained to me the doctor was saying to me you need your nausea it's a symptom it will tell us what's wrong with you we need to listen to it anyway they gave me treatment turned out what happened is I because I hadn't absorbed in any liquids in me for four days I was extremely dehydrated like a person had been in the desert they gave me a drip I was fighting with a couple of days and they said to me when I left if you had if you had actually gone back to Hanoi he tried to drive that so you would have died on the way so that that signal that signal that I didn't want to hear saved my life I'll come back to why I thought about that a lot later the reason I wrote lost connections because there were these two mysteries that were hanging over me and I was really frightened to look into them the first one was why was I still depressed when I was a teenager I went to my doctor and I explained that I had this feeling like pain was leaking out of me and I couldn't regulate it and I couldn't control it and I felt really ashamed and my doctor told me a story my doctor said we know why you feel this way it's been proven by scientists there's a chemical called serotonin in people's brains some people are just naturally lacking it you're clearly one of them if you take this trip these these drugs that I'll give you it'll boost your serotonin levels you'll feel fine I felt fantastic when I was told this story I went I left not very far from here actually I swallowed my first pill I remember it really clearly and it was a little white pill and I'm as I swallowed it it felt like a kind of chemical kiss and I thought this tremendous sense of relief and even when it couldn't possibly been the chemicals because that yeah it doesn't work like that you don't get it the second you'll get the feeling the second you swallow it and and for a few months I felt really significantly better and then the pain started to kind of come back through we start to bleed back in and so I went back to my doctor said clearly think of your high enough dose we'll give you a higher dose and again I felt a real relief and again the pain started to bleed through I went back again he gave me a higher dose this pattern continued until for thirteen years with a couple of short breaks I was taking the maximum possible dose and at the end of all that I was still depressed and I was really reluctant to admit it because I thought it must be something wrong with me because I'm doing what our culture tells me to do and I still feel like this the bigger mystery which is much more important is why are there so many other people feeling like this one in eleven people in Britain is taking antidepressants there are a huge number more people who are depressed and anxious while not taking antidepressants that this seemed to be an enormous rise in depression and anxiety which I later discovered is evidence for and I began to think can it really be that all of us just have some kind of chemical malfunction in our brain if that's true why our brain starts to malfunction more what could be happening here and it's a sign of how reluctant I was looking because if you have a story about your pain and your distress even if that story doesn't actually work for you very well it structures your pain right it's like putting a leash on a rabid animal at least you think well I can know where it is right and if that story seems threatened it's an extraordinarily destabilizing feeling and it's a sign of how reluctant I was to look into this I wanted to start writing this seven years ago I decided it'd be easier to write a book that required me to go meet hit men for the Mexican drug cartels I found that less frightening and I ended up excuse me saying I ended up doing this research so I ended up ended up being a really long journey I went over 40,000 miles I went to loads of places a ten-speed the leading experts in the world on the causes of depression and anxiety and I went to places that just had really different perspectives from an Amish village in Indiana because the Amish have extremely low levels of depression to a city in Brazil but banned advertising to see if it would make people feel better to you know a lab in one of the leading universities in the United States where they were giving people the active component in magic mushrooms to see if that worked for depression ask me about it afterwards if you want and and and I learned lots of things I think the most destabilizing a difficult thing was the thing I suspected I might learn at the start very early on I learned that that story my doctor told me is not true so professor Andrew skal at Princeton University says the idea that depression is just caused by low serotonin is deeply misleading and unscientific those were his words dr. David Healy one of the experts here in Britain said to me you can't even say that story was discredited because there was never a time when it was credited there was never a time when half of the scientists in the field would have attributed people's depression just to low serotonin and that was really shocking because for all sorts of reasons and I can go into some of them you want to ask about them but I then looked at this more and and so that depression is measured by something called next would say the fact that depression is not caused by chemical imbalance which is the position of the wall Health Organisation the UN does not mean there is no value in the drugs that I took we could actually measure how much value there is depression is measured by something called the Hamilton scale I've always felt slightly sorry for whoever Hamilton was because that's all he's remembered playing you know how much misery people have but it's the how to scale goes from zero where you done where you basically just taken a tab of a 251 where you'd be profoundly suicidal and to give you a sense of movement on that scale if you improve your sleep patterns you will get a movement of six points on the Hamilton scale or if your sleep patterns really deteriorated like when you have a baby you would go six points the other way right and chemical antidepressants on average it puts us as an average it's not for everyone on average give you a movement of one point eight points on the Hamilton scale so that's that's real right that's above a placebo that is a real effect but for most people it's relatively minor right not for everyone but I thought I was a freak for taking these drugs and still being depressed in fact what I learned from Professor Erlin Kirsch at Harvard University and the incredible research he's done which I then spoke to his critics as well and I really feel openings research stands up shows antidepressants should be one of the things on the menu I don't want to take anything off the menu I don't judge anyone one point eight points is better than no points right a lot of people I love at taking chemical antidepressants I've never aged them to stop but that is not enough for most people right we need a lot more things on the menu but that really threw me because I was like well what how do we even think about that I was really struck the World Health Organization you know the leading medical institution in the world made his statement in 2011 around the time I started the book saying mental health is produced socially it's a social indicator and it needs social solutions and I was really thrown by that well this is so different to the story but what does that mean what's going on here I mean as i as i interviewed far more people as i studied this science in depth and i was trained to be able to study social scientific research that was my training and i learned there i could find evidence for nine causes of depression and anxiety two of them are biological there are real biological contributions supports that some people deny the biological aspects expression they're wrong but seven of them are factors in the way we live and I think not all of a significant number of them this good evidence have been rising and that is why we have this epidemic and the solution requires a very different way of thinking about it so I tell you it could sound a bit weird and abstract so one of the things that connected a lot of these things as I spoke to scientists was this realization so everyone in this room knows you have physical needs right you need food any water in each shelter you need clean air if I took any of that away from you you would be in trouble really quickly there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs you need to feel you belong you need to feel your life has meaning and purpose you need to feel that people see you and value you you need to feel that you have a future that you understand and our culture is good at lots of things I'm glad to be alive today but we have been getting less and less good at meeting people's deep underlying psychological needs and I think that's one of the key I think is strong evidence that's one of the key drivers of our crisis when it comes to depression anxiety addiction actually gets one of the drivers of brexit and trump you can ask me about IQ one but I'll give you a specific example of something that I think will connect most people in this room war will immediately get so I know is that lots of people who I know who are depressed and anxious the depression and anxiety focuses around their work right so I start to look at evidence what do we know about how people feel about their work there was this study by Gallup than big opinion poll research for companies a massive study it took over a year and it looked at how people feel about their work and this is what it found 13% of us most of the time like our jobs 63% of us are sleepwalking through our work so we don't like it we don't hate it and 24% of people hate their work fear it and dread it so you think about that right this is the thing that we do most of the time the average person enters their first email from work at 7:48 a.m. and clocks off at 7:15 p.m. think about that 87% of us are doing something we don't want to do most of our waking lives and you're almost twice as likely to hate your job as love your job and I began to think what okay could there be something could there be some relationship between that the thing that's affecting what we do most of the time and our crisis with depression and anxiety and I learned there was a man actually figured this out as Australian amazing Australian social scientist I got to interview could professor Michael Marmot so I can explain how if you want to think it's an important story I tell it in the book but I'll just give you the headline of what he discovered he figured out the fact the biggest factor there are a few but the biggest factor that makes work depressing right if you go to work and you feel you have little or no control over your work so you're like just a machine you are significantly more likely to become depressed you're actually significantly more likely to have a heart attack and when I learned that I actually I actually misunderstood what Michael was telling me and what his research was telling me at first because I thought he was saying okay there's some people who get to have wanky nice job so we're gonna be happy and then there's loads of people are going to be condemned to miserable jobs I thought about my family right my my my my dad was the bus driver my mum worked in a refuge my sister is a nurse my brother is a delivery person my grandmother cleaned toilets for living I thought what is he just saying they're just condemned to be one and then I kept going back to him and anything and said me it's not the work that's depressing it's the lack of control so start thinking what how could we change that so I went to Baltimore and that an amazing amazing group of people who taught me an important lesson Meredith Keogh was a young woman he's to go to bed every Sunday night sick with anxiety almost physically sick with anxiety she had an office job wasn't the worst office job in the world she wasn't being bullied but she just couldn't bear the thought that the next 40 years of her life were gonna be this thing she just didn't want to do and one day with her husband Josh she did something bold so Josh and her sister was a teenager had worked in bike stores in Baltimore and you know that's insecure controlled work you do what the boss tells you in the US even worse than here she don't even have things like health care right and and one day Josh and his friends at the bike store were like what this our boss actually do right they liked their boss he wasn't an awful person but they were like we fix all the bikes and so they had this idea to set up a bike store that would run differently so instead of having a boss it's a democratic corporate it's got Baltimore bicycle works it's a democratic cooperative they take all the big decisions together by voting they share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks they share the profit obviously and one of these that fascinated me going to Baltimore bicycle Burke's which totally fit to be professor michael marmots bindings it's how many of them said that in their previous work they had been depressed and anxious but in this new way of working the depression that they still have bad days the depression and anxiety had largely gone away now it's important to say it's not like they quit their job fixing bikes and went to be like Beyonce's backing singers right they fix bikes before they fix bikes now what changed is the factor that causes depression it's to control and as Josh said to me after reading a lot of noam chomsky that there's no reason why any business should be run like this in this this is causing so much depression right apart for anything else businesses that are more democratic according to a study by Cornell University grow four times faster partly because the workers are so much more motivated so it's not even efficient but more importantly why should we have why shouldn't every corporation be democratic cooperative imagine if every one of you tomorrow was got knew you were going into a workplace where you with everyone around you set the decisions and priorities where the boss was accountable to you so if there was something making you depressed and a particular task that you could be shared around among everyone else and where you elected your boss if you had to have her if the big enough that you had to have a boss think about how transformative that would be for people's mental health now I would argue that is an antidepressant anything that reduces depression should be regarded as an antidepressant and that is one of them I think it's one of the the big ones although I looked at many others and one of the things that helped me to think about this was I went in to be the South African psychiatrist called Derek Sommerfeld who's an amazing man Derek happened to be in Cambodia in the early part of this century when chemical antidepressants were first introduced there and the Cambodian doctors didn't know what they were right because they had heard of them and they said to him what are they and Derek explained and they said oh we don't need them we've got antidepressants and Derek said what do you mean and they said well they told him a story there was a farmer in their community who one day had stood on a landmine in the rice fields and left over by the American invasion and his leg was blown off and he they gave him an artificial limb and he went back to work in the rice fields but apparently it's really painful to work underwater with an artificial limb I'm imagining it was pretty traumatic as you know obviously he blown up there and it just became acutely depressed classic depression and they said to Derek so we gave him an antidepressant he said what did you do they said well we went and we sat with him and we listened to him and we and we saw I'm paraphrasing we saw what his problem was we saw that his pain made sense and we figured if we bought him a cow he doesn't have to go into the water and does it have to go to this place where his traumatized it can become a dairy farmer so we bought him a cow on within a few weeks as Depression went away now if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have you've been trained by your doctors the way I was to think about it that sounds like you're taking the piss right a cow is an antidepressant what you're talking about but what those Cambodian doctors understood absolutely intuitively is what the World Health Organization has shown what so many of the scientists I may have shown which is that our pain and our distress makes sense it's a response to our needs not being met and if you want to deal with that the most effective way to deal with that is to to meet people's deep underlying needs so give you an example of someone very close to here who did this when another wonderful person got to know dr. Sam evering Tim co-run a doctor's surgery called Bromley by Bo centre it's in East London it's near where I used to live and although sadly he was never my doctor so Sam was really uncomfortable loans that people were coming to him with depression and anxiety and he would listen to their stories and they see they were really lonely they were really cut off from the things that make life meaningful and his training had told him even though he knew the science was more sophisticated than this tell them they've got a chemical imbalance drug them the end right later they'd also had a little bit of CBT cognitive paper therapy to the menu but um but not then not when some started doing this and Sam like me is not opposed to chemical and depressants he does prescribe them if I was doctor I would too but he just thought this is not enough this is not adequate to the scale of the problem that these people are bringing to me so he decided to try and experiment tell you bout one of the people who took part one called Lisa Cunningham who I got to know Lisa had been shut away in our house with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years she barely left that she ran to the shop at the end of a road to buy cat food and Ben and Jerry's and she ran back right and she went to see a cough it's Sam or one of his colleagues and they said to her okay we're gonna keep giving you the drugs don't worry we're also going to prescribe for you to take part in a group behind the doctor's surgery doctor surgery backed on to a park but between the surgery and the park there was a little there was a patch of land that they called [ __ ] alley which gives you sense of what it was like and they said to Lisa and to her friends to the group not her friend sorry other depressed people who later became my friends what we want is for you guys to meet a couple of times a week will come along and support you and we want you just to turn this into something beautiful first time she went to the meeting Lisa was physically sick with anxiety so what a lot of the other people in the group but they persisted they literally put their fingers in the store they knew nothing about gardening they're from East London right they they they also got a hiss there sorry East London gardeners are now gonna tell me and but they they they and they started to teach themselves gardening and they had something to talk about that wasn't how [ __ ] they felt and they started to listen to each other's problems what would be other people in the group was led to sleeping on the bus the night bus Lisa was outraged she started phoning the council to get him a flat she got him afire she was so proud of herself ups the first thing she'd done for someone else in years that was more powerful to her than any self-reflection and the way Lisa and lots of the other people in the group put it is as the garden began to bloom they began to bloom there was a study in Norway that found it remove people more than twice as much on the Hamilton scale as chemical antidepressants why similar program in Norway why I think because it deals with the reasons some of the reasons why they were depressed in the first place it's the lesson of the cow applied to our world there's lots of other lessons of the cow and come to them but I want to just talk quickly about um it would be easy for me to talk about the causes of depression anxiety I learned about that I found easiest to think about like loneliness like being disconnected from the future can explain that later if you want but I thought I would force myself to talk about the two that I found most challenging because they played out in my life so we all know that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick right what and believe me I know this better than most people and that what I learned is that a similar thing has happened with our minds that kind of junk values have taken over our minds and are making us mentally sick and I learned this from an called Professor Tim caster and this incredible body of research that he started and then it's been picked up by lots of other scientists so the thousands of years philosophers have said if you think life is all about money and status and showing off you're gonna feel like [ __ ] right that's not exact quote from Confucius but that's the gist of it right um but weirdly no one had ever scientifically investigated this until professor caste has started about 25 years ago he wanted to figure out actually how does what we value affect how we feel so he knew it already he didn't figure this bit out it been already established there to put it crudely there are two kinds of things the two kinds of ways that we can motivate ourselves to do something just playing out in every one of us right so imagine if you play the piano I can't do but if you measure you play the piano if you play the piano in the morning because you love playing the piano the experience gives you pleasure and joy that's an intrinsic reason to play the piano you're not getting anything out of it you're not doing it to get something else you're doing it because you want to do that thing okay now imagine you play the piano because your parents really want you to be like a piano maestro or to impress a man I don't know maybe some piano fetishist or something or maybe you maybe play it in a bar at a dive bar that you don't like to pay the rent that would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano right that's you're not doing it for the thing itself you're doing it to get something else out of the experience and it turns out we're all a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic values right and we change throughout our lives but what professor Cass approved like it's been how if you want this interesting story is the more you think life is about extrinsic values the more you think it's about money and status and showing off and looking good externally the more you will become depressed and anxious it's quite a powerful aesthetic this they have been established in with depression I think it was 22 studies and with anxiety 12 studies internationally have shown this effect right and professor caster has gone through many reasons why just give you a few one is living extrinsic Lee doesn't meet your needs what you need is to feel connected and to feel that you have meaningful relationships so it could be an example is gonna sound like a cheat point but I think it is and milania itch is extreme example but Melania Trump a few years ago before she was first lady went to give a speech at NYU I can't imagine why and someone several in the audience asked her would you have married Donald Trump if he wasn't rich and she said do you think he would have married me if I wasn't beautiful now that's a really powerful illustration of extrinsic values right so what she what they both know this right so she think about the insecurity that creates how that doesn't meet their needs it's not you say to your partner I love you because you're you and whatever happens I love you I value you I enjoy your company well Melania Trump knows if she gets fat and what Donald Trump knows is if he gets he doesn't stops being rich it's over right think about the insecurity that creates in a relationship extrinsic values make us all more insecure and anxious for those reasons if you think the people around you value you because of some external thing you've done not because they just like you being around you're going to be more depressed than anxious there's lots of other reasons why these extrinsic values these junk values make us feel so bad but that's just one example and one of the things that's happened is that as a culture we have become much more driven by extrinsic values and as a little experiment that I think tells you how that works so what this wasn't done by professor caso this was done by someone else in 1978 you get a bunch of five-year-olds and you get them all in a little sandbox and you divide them into two groups the first group is shown to adverts for a particular toy whatever the 1978 equivalent of Dora the Explorer or whatever it was and just two adverts take a couple of minutes second group isn't showing any adverts then they say to all the kids okay kids you got a choice now you could either play with a really nice boy who doesn't have the toy in the advert or you can play with a boy who's really not nice who's got the toy the kids who've seen the advert choose the nasty boy the kids who haven't seen the advert she's the nice boy just two adverts primed those kids to choose an inanimate lump of plastic over kindness and connection right think about Melania Trump again right that don't think about and no okay Trump is a very extreme example if you've ever stayed at work beyond the time you had to to earn more money to buy something you don't really need rob and go home and be with your kids that dynamic from that sandbox has played out with you and I realized when I met professor I found this really challenging I'd always had some intrinsic values like everyone knows how much of my life had been driven by these junk values by this [ __ ] and at some level I had always known but you're not going to lie on your deathbed and remember you know effect you know kind of [ __ ] stuff about the ego you'll remember moments of kindness and love and connection but as Professor kasih put it to me our whole culture is geared towards getting us to neglect those insights towards getting us to forget that and live by junk values more 18 month old children recognize the McDonald's m then know their own surname we are immersed in this message from the moment we were born and he talked about and profession cancer then discovered these amazing ways to kind of deprogram that which I'm happy to talk about in the book asked me about it if you want to know okay the other one is much harder to talk about but I'm forcing myself to talk about it for a specific reason that will become clear one of the hardest people need to talk to you for this book was a man called dr. Vincent felitti Vincent discovered this incredible evidence about the role that childhood trauma plays in depression and anxiety and addiction and obesity lots of other things so could tell you the story of how he discovered it and it's gonna sound weird it's gonna sound like I'm talking about something from a completely different book for a minute but bear with me in the mid-1980s dr. felitti was commissioned in San Diego by a group called Kaiser Permanente who were a medical provider to figure out what was going on with obesity because their obesity caught that costs related to obesity were just massively rising and it was a disaster and it was costing them loads of money and it was really bad for people's health and everything they were trying like giving people nutritional advice what's not working so they say to him just do blue skies research figure out what's going on so he starts with a group I think it's about 300 and less than 350 extremely obese people people who weighed more than 400 pounds in most cases and he starts just talking to them and one day he has this idea which sounds really stupid he'd seen the hunger strikers in Northern Ireland on the TV and it took them ages to die right you remember and he suddenly thought if really obese people just stopped eating if and we monitored them and we gave them nutritional supplements would they just lose loads away so with loads of medical supervision they started doing this and the incredible thing was it worked turns out if you're 400 pounds and you just stop eating and you're given all sorts of nutritional supplements you will in fact get down to a normal way and they celebrated and then some thing they didn't expect happened loads of the people on the program would get down to a certain weight freak the [ __ ] out and go to KFC or whatever and just massively put on weight again so Vincent's like what happened because they'd suddenly become healthiest people who were on the brink of death right because they were so overweight he sat with the woman who for her medical confidentiality I'm going to call Susan and he said well Susan did anything happen that day that you cracked it turns out when she'd been extremely overweight no men had hit on her and one day a man when she lost loads away a man hit on her in a birthing kit was in a bar and that was the trigger and they start talking more they had this really long conversation he said Susan when did she put on all this way it was actually when she was 11 we started so did anything happen when you were 11 that didn't happen when you were 10 that didn't happen when you were 13 and she said well yeah that's that's when my grandfather started to rape me and Vince it was really thrown he started to interview all the people in the program 55% of them had started putting on weight after they had been sexually assaulted or abused and suddenly Vincent had this realization he had thought that obesity was a pathology it was a misunderstanding suddenly he realized it actually had a perfectly understandable rational psychological role it was their way of protecting themselves from sexual attention as one of the women put it to him overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be so Vincent obvious want to be much more teased of really good scientists want to do much more research about this say commissioned this study everyone who came for health care to Kaiser Permanente over the next year because a year was giving a questionnaires don't matter where they came in with migraines headache broken leg just gets afree near anything and it just asked about two sets of ten questions first question was did any of these bad things happen to you when you're a kid things like sexual abuse severe neglect that kind of thing and then it said have you had any of these problems as an adult obesity addiction and at the last minute they added depression when they got the results funded by the Center for Disease Control the biggest body funding this in the United States when the results came back people literally couldn't believe it if you had a severely traumatic childhood you were radically more likely to have all these problems if you'd had a severely traumatic childhood you were three thousand one hundred percent more likely to attempt suicide as an adult 3,100 percent and Vincent was really thrown by this but what he started to as he put it to me as one of his colleagues actually one of the other people did the study dr. Robert and I said to me it made them realize we need to stop asking what's wrong with you and start asking what happened to you the reason why I found this very difficult it made me realize something about myself I had clung to the chemical imbalance theory of depression for a really long part of my life longer than I kind of knew I had these hints of a different way of thinking and I had batted them away and I remember when after it's the first time I saw Vincent in San Diego I'm going and looking out at the sea for San Diego's gorgeous and just shaking with anger because when I was a child I had experienced some very extreme acts of violence from an adult in my life my mother had been ill my dad had been in a different country in it was very very extreme acts and I think one of the benefits of the chemical imbalance theory is it just cauterizes thinking about these things right and what he was saying is no actually you need to think about this you need to think about the things that have happened to you and I found that really challenging but then I learned about the next stage of his research which I found incredibly empowering it was why I forced myself to talk about this tonight so when people indicated on their forms they'd had these traumatic experiences as children Vincent got their doctor the next time they came in - they weren't called in but the next time they came in - just say a little script to them which was something like I see that when you were a child you were sexually abused I'm really sorry that happened to you that should not have happened would you like to talk about it and usually they'd have it some people would just say no don't wanna talk about it and some people which have a five-minute conversation and at the end the doctors would always say we can refer you to see speaking more depth with someone what Vincent found is the release of shame involved in that in seeing that an authority figure didn't judge you in fact said that should never have happened that in itself reduced depression and other problems by 35% and the people who went to a therapist were less likely to come back with depression balls by 50% that tells you something now again release of shame is an antidepressant right that's a really powerful antidepressant and I learned a lot from all these scientists but there was one place where a lot of this kicked in for me and I want to just finish by telling you one story that I've come back to Vietnam for a second and it was something I stumbled across and I kept going back to loads of times in the summer of 2011 on a big anonymous council estate in Berlin a woman called Maria Cheng guess who lived on the ground floor put a sign in her window and it said something like I've been given my eviction notice from my flat so next Thursday I'm going to kill myself this was like a lot of council estates in Britain people don't really know each other very anonymous very Aksum eyes lots of people taking antidepressants lots of people who were also depressed or anxious who weren't taking the drugs and it's a slightly weird area she just explained where this council estate is so when the map if you look at map of the Berlin Wall when it was thrown up in 1961 they obviously threw up quite quickly this was the bit of West Berlin that jutted into East Berlin like a tooth so it was like the front line if the Soviets had invaded it would have been the first place they took so no one really wanted to live there for the whole time the war was there except for recent Muslim immigrants from Turkey like Maria who put the sign in her window and gay people and punks and these three groups had always kind of look to each other with like the amusement right and no one knew urea on this estate hardly anyone they started to knock on her door they said can we help you she said no I don't want any help [ __ ] off and and lots of people on that estate were really pissed off because when the wall came down this thing that had been the worst place in Berlin the tooth was suddenly like prime real estate in the middle of Berlin so rents had been rising all over Berlin but they're particularly rising in kotti this area and a couple of people got started chatting this was actually you might remember the summer of Tahrir Square kind of loads of uprisings all over the world they'd seen terrace square a couple of people in the estate said you know there's this big thoroughfare that runs into the centre of Berlin into MIT sir that goes through kotse but they said if we just blocked the road for the day a load of us and we will nuria out and we stand there and we protest probably we'll get some media probably the media will come and film it Nuria will you know and there probably let Nuria stay so it might bring a bit of attention to the back to our rents are so high so they did it and they wheeled maria out and know it was like what i'm gonna kill myself anyway i may as well do this and and they stood there for a day an area was completely bonita these people came and stood with her she said to me i thought they just thought i was a stupid old woman in a her job in a wheelchair and she stood there and the media did come and there were news reports and at the end of the day the police said okay you've had your fun take it down and the people there said hang on a minute you haven't told Maria she gets to stay and actually we want our rent frozen so no we're not going to take it down but they knew that when they left this kind of impromptu barricade they built the police would just come so Tanya who lives he lived in the block so I should explain Tanya it's one of my favorite people that she's she wears tiny little miniskirts in Berlin winters which is hardcore she she's a punk she's just an amazing person and Tanya happened to have in her flat am what they call a klaxon so she brought you down I said ok what we're gonna do we'll drop a timetable we're gonna man this barricade and when the police come to take it down if they do let off this klaxon and we'll all come down and stop them right so people who didn't know each other who would never have spoken to each other start signing up to man the barricade at kotti Maria was paired with Tanya Maria like I say is a 63 are women with the time of 63 are women in a wheelchair and a hedge am very religious Muslim Tanya is not a very religious Muslim and and and the first few nights they were there they just had sat there on a laptop it's super awkward but as they did the night shift and as time went on they began to talk to each other and they discovered something about what they had in common they had both run away to kotti they had both been stranded there with young children Maria had come from a village in Turkey and she came with her kids and she was there to raise money to send for her husband and then once she'd been there for a while she had gotten used their husband had died so he was suddenly stranded in kotti with these kids working every hour she could she told Tanya something she'd never told anyone she'd always said to people that her husband had died of a heart attack actually he died of tuberculosis which was seen as a disease of poverty she'd been ashamed she told Tonya that it really surprised her that she told her that Tonya told her how she came to kotti she'd been thrown out of her middle-class family when she was 15 years old she'd come to live in a squatting kotti she got pregnant really early she was stuck with a child on her own these two people who thought they couldn't be more different realised how much they had in common there were all these pairings over kotti there was a young lad who was a kind of turkish german turkish hip-hop fan who kept me nearly thrown out of school they said he had ADHD he got paired with a grumpy old white communist who told him that direct action was evil and they just need to have communism and they got talking and these pairings were happening all over cutting and directly opposite this counselor state there's a gay club run by a guy called Rick Hodge Stein and the club is called seblak butts give his sense of Richard Ricardo in his previous cafe was called Cafe anal and he died and when they opened it people smashed the windows the local Turkish Muslim community were obviously many of them quite anti-gay they smashed the windows I don't want this [ __ ] round here Ricard donated their furniture - man this barricade it actually got ten kilos then with construction workers little permanent barricade right permanent structure and and he said to them you know what you guys can have all your meetings in this gay club just come over we'll give you free drinks just do it here and at first even the kind of lefties at kotti were like look we're not going to get these conservative Muslims to come and sit underneath the posters for fisting night right it's not gonna happen but they started to have these meetings and as one of them put it to me everyone had to take these small steps that we would never have taken we had to learn to talk to each other and one day a guy turned up at kotti at the protest camp called tenkai to craziness early 50s and he's got cognitive developmental problems and he has a slightly misshapen palate sirs he speaks in a slightly strange way and he'd clearly been living homeless and he said look can I clean things up you can I do anything and he started helping out and everyone just loved him the Turkish really loved in the gay men loved it everyone loved him and they said Tim why don't you just start they built this permanent structure why don't you just live here why don't you just stay here we all know she started staying there over three or four months it became like the staple at the protest camp one day so the police used to come to you know inspect things and one day the police came and chung-kai didn't like it when he thought people were arguing so he tried to hug them and they thought he was attacking them so they arrested him and they took him away and that's when they discovered that Tonka had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital in a literal padded cell for twenty years before he came to kotti and they took him back to the psychiatric hospital and the whole of kotti turned into a free tank eye movement they descended on this psychiatric hospital and these psychiatrists were completely bemused that bunch of Muslims gays and Punk's were demanding the release of this guy they kept in a padded room for twenty years and they said to the people in the psychiatric hospital he doesn't belong here with you he belongs here with us we love him we want him back and the psychic shot saw was baffled they've never had people say this about about someone in that stay and they had to go through loads of bureaucracy it's Germany let's go to layers of bureaucracy but they got Tong Chi back he lives with them and many highs and lows happened though took many years where they thought they weren't gonna win on the rent freeze in the end they launched a referendum initiative they got the largest number of written signatures in the history of the city of Berlin for a rent freeze across the city and the City Council robbed them face that referendum negotiated and they gave them a lot of what they demanded last time I went to see Maria she said to me I got to stay in my neighborhood that's great but I gained so much more than that I was surrounded all along by these amazing people and I never knew it and one of the things that struck me so powerfully in CATI was how problems that seemed insoluble when we are alone and we are isolated and we're screaming each other through screens and we're told that life is about money becomes soluble when we sit together and we listen to each other you know Mehmet the guide the young lad he was kept being nearly thrown out of school they said he had ADHD turned out just having adults sitting with him and helping him with his homework did fine at school chung-kai it was difficult for someone to look after him on zone so they put him in a padded cell but when he had a community of people to look after him his life became great loads of the people on that council estate had been profoundly depressed Maria was in fact suicidal and when she found these other people they found life they found the things that make life meaningful and their depression and anxiety largely went away there was a woman one of the Turkish women there called Nariman said to me when I grew up in Turkey I learned that what you call home is your village right it's everyone around you and then I came to the Western world and I learned that what you call home is just your four walls and if you're lucky your family and then this protest happened and I started to call this whole place home and what Nariman had realized is that all this time in the Western world she had been homeless and in some sense we are homeless in this culture human beings need a tribe we need a place we belong that bosnian writer alexander Heyman said home is where people notice when you're not there right how many of us if we were carried away would have hundreds of people descending on a hospital saying he belongs with us we love him he's ours not that many as a study that asked the average person ask people how many close friends do you have you can call on in a crisis when they started doing it years ago the most common answer was five today the most common answer is none the thing I felt most profoundly at Katya is how wrong what my doctor told me was they didn't need to be drugged they needed to be together they needed they needed each other they need a connection that's not to say there isn't a role for drugs there is but I saw Tania put it to me really well she said when you're sitting in your house and you're all alone you think it's just you you think it's just your fault but if you come out of your corner fighting you feel strong again you see that it's not just you it's everyone around you you get on the cheap going home you are surrounded by other depressed and anxious people what we need to do is build a home with them that meets our needs until we do that we are going to carry on having a very serious depression and anxiety crisis and that just brings me back to the thing that I learned I realized in kotti why I had kept thinking about Vietnam so what that doctor so well I doctor said to me my remember is you need your nausea it's a sign it's telling us something right we need to listen to the nausea what we've done with depression up to now most of the time not everyone not all the time what my doctor basically said is you're depressed because you are broken right and it's just a malfunction what I realized this depression is in fact a function you know I spend a lot of my time in the US and one thing that totally baffles me in the u.s. is the existence of perfectly normal people who will give you indigestion pills right so you'll be having taneema someone I said would you like an indigestion pill and you go but wait in digestion is a sign from your body to go eating too fast you don't want to get rid of that because then you'll eat too much you'll make yourself sick right now depression is infinitely more agonizing than indigestion obviously but what we've done is we try to pathologize this signal when we should have been honoring it and respecting it and listening to it well my doctor should have been saying it's what Sam ever inton says you should have been saying I think your pain makes sense I think you feel this way for a reason let's figure out what that reason is now I don't blame my individual doctor who had five minutes to see each patient we've only given doctors one or two levers to pull I don't criticize them for only pulling those levers but as a culture we've got to do better you need your nausea you need your pain it's telling you something okay shoo two questions yes thank you Thank You Cheers so that is thanks very much thanks there's a nice person with a microphone here who I'm good try to do alternate women and men so I'll go with women first to compensate for the patriarchy and so there's a no it's not much compensation apologize hello you're not getting equal pay so you knows what settle for this it's not really a question it's supposed to thank you actually I was supposed to come with a couple of friends tonight they couldn't come they're too anxious which is you know which is which is hard really because I've been supporting one of those friends since she was 15 and I'm 46 the thing that I think which I just really want to say is this has come at such a valuable time I'm now a mom I have a daughter who's 13 in a couple of weeks she's a grammar school and every day that she goes to that grammar school she's told as they all are told you're brilliant I worked as a consultant I specialized in the future of work I know that they are going to fall off a cliff at some point soon and it really really really upsets me to your point about work and how many people are struggling at work because we have so much identity from work so really I'm just saying do you know what they must have been hard for you to stand up there say all that staff write the book go on that journey but it's really importantly you've done this and big love to you thank you so much oh thank you I defer to the microphone person because I feel that you have been a judgment to me so there's a man all right great how are you man no we can compensate I can actually see you so that's not an insult sorry hi generic person of any gender hi um I was just wondering if we could take you up on your offer to expand on the connection between rise in anxiety and depression and bricks it and Trump yeah so okay I want to stress this is going beyond the science right things I said up to now are backed up by these people this is my interesting I had this experience so in the run-up to the presidential election I was in Cleveland in Ojai key swing state with these people who are trying to get out the vote that if anyone's been to Cleveland it's like Detroit without the poetry of the ruins is shocking right completely de dust realized in most places shocking stake and I was on this long street and it was one of the streets where like a third of the houses have been demolished a third were abandoned and a third had people living in them literally behind barbed wire and we were knocking on these doors with this amazing guy Dave Fleischer who's the head of canvassing for the LGBT Center and this woman answered the door who - look at her genuinely I were to guess she was sixty I actually discovered from talking to her she was the same age as me she was very articulate she was quite intelligent she was incredibly angry and she she was full of rage determined not to vote and she made this verbal slip she meant to say she taught the area used to be like she meant to say when I was young well she actually said is when I was alive and it really knocked me back and you know trying to talk to this woman about you know you'll get better tax credit if Hillary Clinton wins you're she just was like look at my [ __ ] Street look at my life this woman's psychological needs were totally unmet as far as I could tell she was terrified and you know I see a lot of people like that my sister might my brilliant nephew who I love is in the audience who lives near Blackpool in one of the heart of the brexit area although he did not vote for it which I'm very proud of for many reasons why I'm very proud of him and but there that you know and I see it when I go there right people who and what we've got to stop doing is saying that people like them are thick or stupid or insulting them that my dad voted for brexit right and you know I'm gonna discrete some of that also my dad is a European emigrate which makes particularly irritating but there but you know he's not thick right mental yes but not thick and but you know Trump voters are not thick and a lot of them aren't racist actually a lot of them have really deep unmet psychological needs and you know if we just pathologize them III well under if your life is just not meeting your needs I don't will understand why you vote for the guys burn the [ __ ] house down right now I don't agree with it obviously I don't agree with that I think it's unbelievable catastrophe the fact that Hillary Clinton's been so nice about my book tells you something about my politics but you know we've got to understand what's going on a culture where people do not have their needs met for really because very often you get to go well it's a paradox because the economy is growing and yet people are angry you think yeah but do you know anyone who measures the success in life exclusively by the economy I mean it's absurd it's a bizarre it's almost like an autism we have culturally that we can't see that we don't live like that that's a completely bizarre way to think about life right so you get perfectly sensible people like liberal policy wants people on our side I've guessing most of you you know actually could be very foolish perspective but the [ __ ] was very wrong assumption there but there you know the people on my side who will just be baffled and gay but things are going well you're like by what metrics may if you've got no friends if you you know if you can't picture the future that's not that's things I'm not going well for you and I try to give a shorter answer to the next one sorry I defer to hi okay hi hi thank you very much I recently interviewed a researcher from Imperial from the psychedelic research group exam fantastic and interesting things with compounds have typically been stigmatized well in the wake of the war on drugs but they seem to show fantastic promise in alleviating the symptoms of a lot of these conditions and in particular it's not just about escaping for a few hours but this idea of altered traits rather than just altered states I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on your experience and how we might reduce stigma and hope to explore those as potential therapeutic options in the future I'm really glad you asked about this because I did loads of research on it as chapter that we can know what is asked me about it so far so you are a hero and so I was reached in this and so I went to this debate about with the psychedelic drugs like LSD or magic mushrooms as they're somewhat pejoratively known and whether they can have an effect with things like depression so I went to interview the scientists who've been doing the reawaken so there was a lot of research on this until the mid 60s and then nixon shut it all down and it's real wakened in the last six seven years so I went to interview the teams at UCLA in in Los Angeles NYU at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in Oslo and in Sao Paulo I went here in London at UCL and what they discovered is really fascinating but I think it tells us something why does most people here are not gonna want to take psych without drugs I think it tells you something really interesting that goes much beyond psychedelics so give me an example Johns Hopkins well most prestigious universities in the u.s. took people who were really chronic long-term smokers like my mother they didn't literally take my mother but my mother there's a photo of me and my mother where she is breastfeeding me smoking and resting the ashtray on my stomach and when I showed her that photo she said he were [ __ ] difficult baby I needed that cigarette I was I was I was speaking I was speaking to her the other day and we mentioned I come and why I mentioned Grenville tower and she said and I said to her you know my earliest memory is actually political memories the king's cross fire she said to me that was the worst day of my life and I thought Oh mom did you did you know someone who died and she said no that's the day they ban smoking on the tube anyway really long time chronic smokers like my mother and people who tried everything and they gave them I think it was across six months three or four doses of psilocybin the active component magic mushrooms 80% of them stopped smoking and they were like why what's going on here so they did a lot of further research and they found something really interesting so it appears that psilocybin gives has a significant effect in his early trial sport so there early and small trials with depression addiction this fascinating guy in Alabama who's doing the cocaine study on this and depression the main depression research has been here in London by rubbing Carhartt Harris and David Nutt who were heroes and friends of mine and and but there's a subset of this it's reassuring so first I thought away it doesn't like to flick a chemical switch in your head is it like what we were told about you know Prozac years ago it isn't what they found is when you take psilocybin most people not everyone have what's basically a spiritual experience you feel intensely connected to the people around you to the natural world what it turns off is the part of you that's ego it just takes down your ego walls and you feel really deeply connected and then of course it you know you the effect wears off and but different people have a different intensity of spiritual experiences some people don't have that at all a small number of people have that at all and some people have like a super intense spiritual experience right what they found is the positive effects correlate extremely closely with the intensity of your spiritual experience so if you don't have the spiritual experience you don't stop smoking if you have a super intense one you have many positive benefits and I think that tells you something I was one of the experts of blanking on his name told me and it's a learning experience what it shows you is you can think of yourself as deeply connected you can shut off the ego part of your brain that's about junk values and all of that [ __ ] and you can feel intensely connected then when the effect wears off you can try to because no one's good takes like attacks every day unless they're well there's one person I know but let's look into that few people are going to do that she's actually quite an oppressive person someone anyway and they're you know you then have to find a way to integrate that insight into your life it's a learning experience and so for example in the depression trial here in London it did seem to have a really positive effect but Robin did the study told me about for example one women who was in the trial takes the psilocybin massive reduction in depression then goes back to her depressing job in a seaside town in an office and she was like you can't maintain those insights in that environment right and so the depression came back so I think that reinforces what I'm saying about how we need to restructure our society in our culture so that more people can live in a deeply connected way so more people can have experiences like the ones at court see like the ones that the Bromley bibo Center and so on I said I'd give shorter offers lots even longer I'm sorry I've tried to the short life time at the microphone person I do you decide I trust you great hello hi hi thank you and this is quite a personal question but following the research that you've done and the change in perceptions and approaches to depression and anxiety would you still describe yourself as being depressed I'm anxious no and I want to preface this by saying two things which I think are really important one is so I have a very close relative who I immediately picture to me about this who's a struggling single mom who's really fighting just to pay the rent and I do not want to ever be represented as saying I did this you can to change like that would be actively cruel to say to her hey your job now is to democratize your workplace and fight for universal basically I mean she she can barely barely got enough energy to watch Coronation Street right because she's working so hard so a big part of my argument is we need to change our society so more people are freed I had a big margin in which to change my life because my last book did well she doesn't write and it would be cruel to say I did it you can too because frankly most people and I can't you don't have that bigger margin to change there are some things everyone can do and I talk about them in the book but we need to free up much more space and second thing I would say is the reason why anyone should follow anything I say in the book if they want to it's not because I did it and it works for me because an individual anecdote isn't worth much the reason they should do it is because it's based on you know the science from the World Health Organization and some of the leading scientists in the world if they want to follow that for me yeah I experienced a really big transformation in my life and some people here he really helped me with that but there was one in particular one person there were many insights obviously but as you said that I think about one person in particular went to interview a person called dr. Brett forward I would see him Berkeley in California and Brett did this really interesting research so actually want to find out if you deliberately chose right now to dedicate more of your time to trying to be happy would you actually become happier right and they did this research in four countries that she didn't do all four countries but with colleagues it was the US Russia Taiwan and Japan and they found something really interesting in the US and I'm sure we would be the same if you try to make yourself happier consciously you don't become happier but in all the other countries you do and they were like what's going on why is that so they did more research what they found is in the US and I'm sure Britain most of the time if you try to make yourself feel better you do something for yourself you big yourself up you try to get a promotion you buy something for yourself whatever in the other countries most of the time you did something for someone else to sing for your family your community your friends we an instinctively individualist idea of what happiness is and they have an instinctively collectivist idea what happiness is I actually think what I saw at Katya in Berlin was a transition from an individualist vision of happiness to a collectivist vision of happiness and that really taught me something used to be I realized when I was with Breton Berkeley when I felt like [ __ ] before but I could feel that pain coming on what I would do is do something for myself right not every time but most of the time i big myself up in some way and it didn't work i realized now it was actually like pulling yourself into quicksand now I can say I do it every time but what I try to make myself do is force myself to do something for someone else and you know you start you have to turn up with her you know like Oprah with a BMW for them just turn up and do the way that came into my head they're just just turning up and listening to people and being present with them so few people are heard in our culture so few people feel that you Pete anyone sees them just turning up and being present and leaving a [ __ ] phone at home and listening to them and that's really interesting what you said tell me more that is the most precious gift you could give just the gift of presence and I've been very lucky to have people who did that with me and so I think that the many things improve our mental health I think that was one of the key ones kind of moving away from that beginning myself up to to trying to be present with other people and trying to just do more more stuff for other other people Thanks um okay who is the next I can't really see very well but I always feel like I should do a little halt you know like the holding teams when you you know like seeing angels but Robbie Williams or something but hi hello you saved me from having to sing angels oh thanks oh yeah so bear with me or in stylist magazine today there was an entire article of my Oracle stylus magazine on robots and that one of them was you know we're all going to be cared for by robots when were old and infirm and we'll have meaningful relationships there and link to that is the idea of work and robots and what I think I've read about universal basic income can you talk a little bit about society's approach to this idea of value and purpose if the AI and robots revolution that is coming upon us very quickly and how you think that might affect depression and anxiety levels it's a really good and important question I spoke to the leading expert in the world on this he was totally fascinating I'm glad you asked this so just people who don't know I guess most people do robots are coming for your job what's the headline right I think the figure is a million people in Britain make a living through driving ten years from now we're going to have automated cars they're not those jobs have gone right so in a society like ours that is a profound threat because you know your status your income is entirely tied towards the market economy or you know some states um obviously state services as well and there's an experiment I think showed us and this is cause this is another factor driving breaks it Trump and all of that they're growing insecurity the movement was insecure work which was horrendous and it's an experiment that showed us I think how to deal with this it has something really important about Depression in the 1970s the Canadian government apparently at random I can't find out how they made a choice it genuinely seems like they put a pin in a map chose a town called doe fan anyone knows Canada it's four hours out of Winnipeg it's in Manitoba and they said to a really big group of people in this town okay guys we've got something for you from now on in monthly installments we're going to give you the equivalent of 15,000 pounds in today's money a year and there's nothing you have to do for it and there's nothing you can do that means will take it away from you it's just yours as right because we want you to have a good life brilliant experiment right school universal basic income they wanted to see what would happen loads of it studied in great detail by this amazing woman called dr. Evelyn 4j loads of things happened people who spent longer studying people spent more time with their kids people said no very people I think virtually nobody gave up work but a lot of people said no to shitty jobs so work can work standard work employment standards had to improve but the biggest thing that happened was a really big fall in depression and anxiety mood disorders that was so severe that people had to be hospitalized spelled by nine percent in just three years an astonishing fall much more successful than anywhere where you introduce any drug and again dr. fouché said to me that's an antidepressant right it's not something you swallow but it's an antidepressant people who have an income from property are ten times less likely to be depressed and anxious than people who don't go figure alright not rocket science and the anyway the reason this relates to robotize ation is robert ization is going to gut enormous numbers of jobs including middle-class jobs I don't think robots are gonna write books anytime soon so I'm a bit smug but who knows but a lot of jobs right and I did a film it would like go 20 years later there would be a robot standing here would like my new book is so good at the know that that so if we continue with the economy structured the way it is that's going to be a catastrophe for people's mental health there's all this research that shows your mental health is very closely tied to your vision of the future if you feel you I can explain that if anyone wants to ask about it but if you cut along a story but if you feel you have no picture of the future or your picture the future is disrupted you're actually much more like to commit suicide then one just become depressed so if we carry on the way we are this will cause a further mental health catastrophe if we have a universal basic income you really cushions the blow as President Obama said in towards the end of his office you know I mean this time an office this is this is the best way to deal with the uncertainties that lie ahead due to automation and all of those things so I think you're totally right to ask about that and robot ization should be an incredible gift all these jobs that you hate you have to do them anymore a robots gonna do it it's amazing in a sane society that wouldn't be a threat that would be an incredible liberation right it frees you up to do what they did it cottage to sit with people to do the things that actually matter in life right and but because of the way we structured our society it won't be experienced that way unless we change and fight for it ok who's the next great hi thanks thank you Joe thank you so much I had a question do you think you basically said you're coming from a disadvantaged background with a lot of trauma what happened for you to decide to change in your life what was the trigger and my more broad question is growth coming from crisis or can it come from virtue his growth or like taking care of yourself if you prefer can come from virtue or does it always come from a crisis point like the example you brought in Berlin with the societal turkeys forming interesting the I would just say I don't come from a financially disadvantaged background at all my parents were fine but I did experience some these acts of violence and I think I think it comes back to that thing about you neat thank you for questions what if it comes back from that thing about nausea right you need your nausea it's a signal um I try to remember it was Professor John Cacioppo said this to me he saw he's the world's expert on loneliness at the University of Chicago and he said um loneliness is a necessary aversive signal to push you back to the group do you think about how human beings evolved right we evolved in hunter-gatherer tribes the only reason why any of us are here is because our ancestors weren't incredibly good at banding together in tribes right we weren't bigger than the animals we took down but we were better at cooperating and and actually he's shown that loneliness is massively increased and loneliness is a major cause of depression and anxiety and he says that actually we think of loneliness is like a pathology but actually it's a signal telling you get back to the great thing about where we involved on the savannahs of Africa if you were separated from the group you were really right to feel anxious and depressed because you were about to be eaten okay or if you weren't if you hurt yourself no one was going to be there to help you you were in terrible danger and those are all our instincts right human beings evolved to live in tribes just like bees evolved to live in hives and we are the first humans ever to try to live without a tribe and surprise surprise we feel like [ __ ] and and and so I think that's an example of what you're talking about which is that's a painful signal right like in digestion much worse obsolete or like the nausea I felt when I was you know so badly dehydrated it's a painful signal but it's a signal that has to be honored now there's totally also I don't want to say you know sound like some kind of was it was in normal Amman who said no pain no gain about the 1918 recession all right obscure political reference there but I want to be like that it's oh if it isn't hurt isn't hurting it isn't working that's what he said and I don't want to I don't want to talk like that of course doesn't have to reach a crisis point doesn't I don't believe in the rock-bottom concept in addiction or anything else a mild amount of pain can drive to affect things or just you can be okay and then someone can come along and be kind to you and you could be boosted up to more than okay so worn out like it has to reach crisis point it doesn't but one of the few advantages of the modern of what's happened in the last few years is all the alarm bells are going off the most powerful man in the world is Donald Trump the alarm bells could not be ringing louder so we are in this crisis point we may as well acknowledge why the crisis is happening and use that as a reason to reconnect and deep with these deal with these deeper problems because you know we can't the old center isn't going to hold right it hasn't held that's why we got breaks it Trump alternative for Deutschland matin lepen that stuff isn't gonna hold so yeah anyway okay hi I've been pointed today yeah I feel like you are like heaven and you are hell do not I mean hey look more cheerful I want to thank you for your work my name is Jeff and I'm actually here from Miami and this is my brother he lives in London and if you can see the shirt it actually is inspired by your TED talk and your earlier about chasing the scream it says the opposite of addiction is not sobriety but rather human connection and I really like how you extended this theme into this newer book and I look forward to reading it and you might you sort of touched on it but my question is one of the things I've thought of recently is this this term self-care has become really big and you know if you have any thoughts about that about how that sort of speaks to our our way of dealing with happiness or depression so forth yeah you just reminded me something happened to me which was then so I gave this my last book and TED talk was probably bout this experiment called rat Park which is about addiction this thing about rats and I was on a tram in San Francisco and this guy was sitting opposite me it was incredibly good-looking man and he was staring at me it's like ah something great so I was kind of smiling back and as I was about and then like but he didn't say anything and I thought was a bit weird so I was about to get off the tram and he said to me catch he said you and I said yes and he said addicted rats yes and hugged me so I know your t-shirt made me think of that and thank you putting on a t-shirt so that's really surreal and nice it's yeah I also have another story about teachers that were talked about and so self-care yeah I think this concept is a bit problematic so um one of our relatives went through a bad thing a while ago and people posted on her Facebook wall I thought was really interesting they genuinely were trying to cheer her up and they posted and if it get it's a meme that says something like the only person who can help you as you love you babe right but you think about how deep this individualism is right so we see someone's down we say you've got to engage in self-care which we often takes mean you've got to go away and look after yourself right even the deepest cliches how deep this individualism goes be you be yourself that's the most banal thing you can say to someone in our culture even your shampoo bottle says because you're worth it and but the key thing I learned is no don't be you don't be yourself don't engage in self-care be us be the group right look after everyone else the best way you can look after yourself is to look after everyone else right actually this individualism is crippling it correlates very closely with depression it makes us feel terrible it's not the species we are so yeah I'm really against this I do self-care as you can tell okay so great sure as I take two at the same time I'm being indicated and I always obey hi hi thank you um I have a quick question you touched on politics quite a few times and I was just wondering what's the starting point with politics how do we shift society when a lot of the things that you've been talking about is engaging on an individual level so how do you encourage the whole of society to shift from the top down that's a very good question and here's I can't see the next term oh great hi great hello hi um I think all of the assassins are incredibly valuable to us at any stage of life but if we want to have the maximum benefit from the learning that you and other people are giving to this then we really need to incorporate it into our educational system how do you see that as happening when the curriculum really makes no provision for any kind of learning of this sort great okay so so in terms of change one of the reasons why I am in my bones optimistic about this is because I've lived through a change as big as the one I'm advocating I'm gay I recently showed not this nephew but one of my other nephews his seventeen the things that were on the front page of the Sun newspaper when I was the age he is now about gay people and he literally couldn't believe it he said did someone call the police today if the most bonkers you keep local councillor tweeted what used to be on the front page of the Sun they would have to resign that within hours right so and we're not talking about a small thing which were actually thousand years of millennia 32,000 years of homophobia that fell so fast and you know because of and how did it happen happen because of an incredibly brave generation of gay men and women mostly generation above mine who appealed to good-hearted heterosexual people all around them and just an appeal to their goodness and decency and in a way I think this should be easier than that in one sense in that you know gay people are a very very small minority the number of people who are being made to feel like [ __ ] by controlled work by loneliness by all the facts I'm talking about that's most of us right that's not an out obviously not everyone becomes depressed but on the continuum I think it's diminishing the lives of almost everyone these factors and so I think it begins with I think part of it one of this is anything I learned at kotti in one sense the struggle is the solution in the act of coming together and saying you know what we've been offered isn't good enough it's not meeting our needs in fact alone you find each other and that that in itself is a healing thing that mirrors the kind of alternative we want where we live in a more connected way so I would say the gay rights movement the gay equality movement I tell the story and I tell story in the book of a friend of mine a wonderful person called Andrew Sullivan so 1994 Andrew was diagnosed as HIV positive when that was a death sentence his best friend Patrick died and not long afterwards and Andrews first thought when he was diagnosed was I deserve this because he'd so internalized the homophobia of the culture and he went to Provincetown a little town on the Kippur tip of Cape Cod it's a gay town to do the last thing he thought he'd ever do he wrote a book it's but called virtually normal that I really recommend and it's a book basically an idea he thought was completely bonkers and might happen many generations down it was the first book to ever argue for gay marriage and whenever I get really depressed about this I think this is a really big fight right I tried to imagine going back in time and saying to Andrew I can dream 25 years from now good news you're going to be alive the Supreme Court of the United States it's going to quote from this book when they rule gay marriage mandatory for the entire country and I'll speak to you the next day when the President of the United States invites you to the White House that will be lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you achieved by the way that president's going to be black it would have sounded like the most ridiculous science fiction right that happened I know Andrew I've seen it happen incredible changes can happen when we band together and fight for them in terms of education I think you're totally right and I think look to be honest and this is a much bigger subject but the whole education system is just geared towards I mean I see it dead Ling my friends children I sort of deadly my wonderful nephew who's no escaping yeah I just think it's terrible there's this concept I think alfie kohn invented it called the hidden curriculum so every school has an official curriculum which is like you know history geography whatever and as a hidden curriculum which what is training you to put up with and a lot of our school system is about training you to sit still tolerate boredom and shut up right that's the hidden curriculum it's why I hated it it's why I'm sure lots of you hated it and in a sense if you have a society where eighty eighty seven percent of people don't like their work well it makes sense to have a hidden curriculum that prepares people for the internal deadening you need to go through that but we should be changing our system not our children for hey we should wonderful free children who want to cooperate and learn that should be stimulated and we should change the society so it means that the other amazing fact about children I think is the average British child says study showed this the average British child spends less time outdoors than the average maximum security prisoner because by law they have to have 75 minutes a day so we we literally treat our children worse than we treat murderers when it comes to going outside right that's a Sikh culture there's never been a human society that tried to raise children alone in shut away houses and it's no wonder we've got such a massive childhood depression anxiety crisis as a result Cathy I've got time for if you want to touch the back just have one more question great so you get to have the last question oh my god well it's probably an absolute one then because it's to do with reading forbidden plant this whatever it is now I want to ask you a question about reading for pleasure which and in a sense connects with the one just the point about education first of all thank you for this evening so I think like any people this has been an inspiring and brilliant talk you've given yet again and I'm a publisher so I have a vested interest in people reading for pleasure but there's been a lot of and you've got a vested interest as someone who writes books for people for reading for pleasure but I wanted to talk about what reading for pleasure can do and it does tie into these ideas of connection and the sense of of community and and one of the people we publishes Matt Hagen whose book reasons to stay alive was also about dealing with depression and the thing that medication did nothing for him quite the opposite it kind of aggravated the problems and he he talks in the book about it was how returning to books from his childhood and re reading for pleasure these old books were the things that made him start to reconnect and get out of himself and do many of the things that have chimed with some of the things you've talked about today and I was thinking about another woman Olivia languorous book the lonely City about their adventures in the art of being alone and how art not just reading but art was the way that she started reconnecting with people outside of herself and overcoming these profound feelings of loneliness she felt and celebrating being alone by realizing paradoxically she was never alone because these artists have kind of shared themselves and the final kind of pointer supposes that old Hebrew proverb which says open a book and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city which I've always loved as a way I've never had lots of celebrating where a book can take you in the journey and the possibilities of the future that it allows so first of all want to say thank you but also wanted you to talk about the pleasures of reading oh that's a great question it makes me think about something else that I want to talk about and get to touch on which is very related I should just say Jamie's brilliant publisher but also Matt's book is amazing and Olivia Lang I don't know her but she's a wonderful writer and I love I loved her her most recent book the lonely City and mmm so there's this interesting debate about how the technologies and reading books is a technology how the technologies we use shape our consciousness so for example in the early 18th century it was very common for people to go and witness public torture by the early 19th century it's almost completely gone and now when Isis to it we rightly regarded as the in the world right public torture so there's a debate about well what happened right it steven pinker writes about this really well and the better angels and and one of the debates is that people started to read and what had read books became much more widespread and one of the things that books do is give you a sense of the interior OT of other human beings they hone your consciousness what is this other person's mind like now contrast that with another technology that some of you are doing right now and other people are and we all including me become obsessed with which is social media and the internet I mentioned how that affects our consciousness and how that affects depression and anxiety so to understand this I went to the first-ever rehab center for internet addicts and the United States not as a patient as a journalist actually I arrived there in Washington State it's in the woods that had to confess as sue said to try it turned up and literally I got out the car I looked at my phone over as it didn't have any mobile phone reception I was really annoyed it's like wait it's a rehab center for people like you but what was so fascinating there is is looking at so both how that technologies dr. Hillary Cash she runs it was an amazing person we talk to her a lot and um so I think it several things going on there about the course not which is a real contrast to books right so partly I don't want blame it on the technology so one thing it's worth remembering is the moment the internet arrives in human history right it's the late 90s the early 2000s loads of the forms of disconnection that I'm talking about were already massively in place we'd already had a huge collapse in social connections we'd already had a huge increase in junk values all of those things but what happens is the internet appears and it looks a lot like the thing we've lost online connections look like connections Facebook friends look like friends status updates look a bit like the status you've lost but actually I began to think that in a way the relationship between social media and social life is like the relationship between pornography and sex like porn will meet a certain basic itch I'm not against it right but if your whole sex life was looking at porn you're going to be really frustrated all the time because your needs and deeper needs are not being met right no one after an hour looking porn you know feels satisfied and held the way that you do after you have sex if it goes right right and it's less I had a memory that I won't talk about and then but and and and and so I think that's partly what's going on is we've turned to this technology because you know because it seems like the thing we've lost but it's actually a parody of the thing we've lost as Hillary said to me what you need is face-to-face connection you could have watched me on YouTube tonight if you had you wouldn't feel like we'd really talk to each other it's not there has no value I'll get you cheap all the time but it wouldn't have the same value and but I also think once you're in that mode it cautions the whole way you talk and think right and if you think about how you read when you read a book you read Olivia's book on Matt's book or you know great a great books like them you develop a deep complex and nuanced consciousness you follow argument and linear' argument you're engaging with another mind in a deep way if you scroll through if you read my book I'd like to think you've got some access to my mind if you scroll through my Twitter feed you would not write or you get very fragmented jangly you we wouldn't be connecting in anything like the same way and I think the transition from reading books to much more domination by these you know much more time spent on these on these platforms is a bit of a disaster for the way we we think of course it's Costin to our consciousness it's it's lowered our empathy and it's made us more depressed and anxious so I think a return things one of the reasons was saying in citing book sales are up right I think we can feel the lack people can feel it my nephew's a teenager he quit Facebook right he reads a lot more and the so I really think that you're totally right and I mean I was there I'm have a slightly best of interest in promoting books but I do think the scientific evidence is there as well and everyone should read some of Jamie's books well thank you all very much for coming I will now sign I should just every crap I was someone think and I will have to they tell me off there let's say this and I will sign Burke's babies faces I had over a weird thing to happen to me but clearly when I went to Baltimore a book signing a woman came up to me and she said I want you to write a message to someone I said sure she said will you write dear Steven it's over I never loved you anyway and I was like no so anybody wants me to write anything more sane than that I will do it I'll be out there like five minutes cheers everyone thank you [Applause]

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

Views: 407,705

Rating: 4.7885156 out of 5

Keywords: Johann Hari, How to: Academy, how to academy, Hari, author, Conway Hall London, TED Talk, Dr Max Pemberton, Naomi Klein, Russell Brand, Brian Eno, Davina McCall, Elton John, Alastair Campbell, depression, anxiety, driftwood pictures, book, london, Conway Hall

Id: Hfl3Yh7fS4g

Length: 85min 50sec (5150 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/__Parallax__]

Great, all we have to do is restructure society and problem solved!

[u/[deleted]]

Hari is a fraud.

[u/princip1]

submission statement: Johann Hari argues that depression isn’t caused by a chemical imbalance in our brains but by crucial changes in the way we have structured society.

He claims that the cure for depression, for most people, is not a pill, but their reintegration into society through meaningful relationships, friendships and networks and that the modern world has torn down so many of the networks we once had, leading to an epidemic of depression and lonliness.

[u/Galileotierraplana]

I mean they could a self inforcing loop: from society to mind and viceversa