Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #176 BITESIZE | Why We All Need to Feel Connected | Johann Hari

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

CAUTION ADVISED: this podcast contains swearing and themes of an adult nature. ‘When individuals see themselves as part of a connected tapestry of wider meaning, they feel much better about their lives.’ Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my new weekly podcast for your mind, body and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 94 of the podcast with Johann Hari. Johann went on a forty-thousand-mile journey around the world to interview leading experts about what causes depression and anxiety. However, he learnt the most, not from those experts, but from the incredible people on a council estate in Berlin called Kotti. In this clip he shares the heart-warming story of how the residents of this small district of Berlin formed an unlikely community and the profound effects this had on everyone involved. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/94 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More. Bite size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 94 of the podcast with Johan Hari. In this clip, he shares the heartwarming story of how the residents of a small district of Berlin formed an unlikely community and the profound effects this had on everyone involved. When individuals see themselves as part of a kind of connected tapestry of wider meaning, right, which would have happened in the tribes in which humans evolved,

they feel much better about their lives. They feel much more satisfied. And actually, I learned so much from scientists, some of the leading scientists in the world and reading loads of studies. I think the place that taught me the most about depression and anxiety were not those people actually. And I'll just tell you the story of what happened in this place, if that's okay, because it's something I think about every day. In the summer of 2011, on a big anonymous council estate in Berlin, a German-Turkish woman called Nuria Cengiz climbed out of her wheelchair and put a sign in her window. She lives on the ground floor. The sign said something like, I got a notice saying I'm going to be evicted next Thursday. So on Wednesday night, I'm going to kill myself. Now this is

a council estate. It's in a funny area. It's called Kotti. It's a poor part of what used to be West Berlin. And basically no one wanted to live there for years. It was a mixture of recent Muslim immigrants like Nuria, gay men and punk squatters, right? As you can imagine, these three groups didn't get on very well, but no one really knew anyone, right? No one knew who this woman was. People are walking past her window and they're worried about her. And they're also pissed off because their rents are going up. Loads of people are being evicted.

So they know they might be next. People start to knock on Nuria's door. They said, do you need any help? And at first Nuria said, fuck you. I don't want any help. Shut the door in their faces. Right. They're like, well, we shouldn't just leave her. What should we do? And this was actually the summer of the revolution in Egypt. And one of them was watching it on the telly and they had an idea, right? There's a big road that goes through Kotti into the center of Berlin. And he said, you know, if we just blocked the road for a day, it goes right through this

council estate. He said, if we just block the road for a day, it goes right through this council estate. They said, if we just block the road for a day and we protest and we wheel Nuri out, there'll be a bit of a fuss. The media will probably come. They'll probably let us stay. There might even be a little bit of pressure to keep our rents down, right? So they decide to do it. They're like, why not? They block the road. Nuri is like, I'm going to kill myself anyway. I may as well let them push me into the middle of the street. And they sit there and they protest. And the media does come. It's a little bit of a kerfuffle that day in Berlin. And then at the end of the day, the police come and they say, okay, you've had your fun, take it all down. And the people there are like, well, hang on a minute. You haven't told Nuria she gets to stay. Actually, we want a rent freeze for this whole council estate. So when we've got

that, then we'll take it down. But of course they knew the minute they left the barricades that they put up, the police would just tear it down anyway. So one of my favourite people at Cotty, Tanya Gartner, who's one of the punk squatters, she wears tiny little mini skirts even in Berlin winter.

She's quite hardcore. Tanya had this idea. In her flat, she had a klaxon, you know, those things that make a loud noise at football matches. So she went and got it. She came down and she said, okay, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to drop a timetable to man this barricade 24 hours a day until we've got what we want, until Nuria gets told she can stay and until we get a rent freeze. And if the police come to take the barricade down, let off the klaxon, we'll all come down from our flats and stop them. So people start signing up to man this barricade, people who would never have met, right? So this very unlikely pairing. So Nuria, who's very religious Muslim in a full hijab, was paired with Tanya in her tiny little mini skirt, right? And I can't remember what night shift they got. It might be Tuesday nights. So they're sitting there, Tuesday nights, super awkward. They're like, what have we got in common? We've got nothing to talk about. As the the weeks went on they started talking and tanya and

nuria realized there's something really profound in common nuria had come to berlin when she was 16 from her village in turkey and she had two young children and her job was to raise enough money to send back for her husband to come and join her sitting there in the cold in cottage she told tanya something she never told anyone in germany after she'd been in Berlin for 18 months, she got word from home that her husband was dead. And she'd always told people that he'd died of a heart attack. He'd actually died of tuberculosis, which was seen as a kind of shameful disease of poverty. That's when Tanya told Nuria something she never talked about. She'd come to Cottey when she was even younger, when she was 15.

She'd been thrown out by a middle-class family. She'd made her way, she lived in this punk punk squat and she got pregnant not long after she arrived. So they both realized that they had been children with children of their own in this frightening place they didn't understand, right? They realized they had loads in common. There were loads of these pairings happening over Kosi. There was a young lad who kept being a Turkish-German lad who kept being nearly thrown out of school. They said he had ADHD. He got paired with a very grumpy old white German guy called Dieter, who said he didn't believe in direct action because he loved Stalin. But in this case, he'd make an exception, who started helping him with his homework. He started doing much better at school. Directly opposite this council estate, there's a

gay club called Zudblock. It's run by a man I love called Rick Hardstein, who, to give you a sense of what he's like, the previous place he owned was called Cafe Anal. Okay, this is a pretty hardcore gay club, right? And when they opened it, about two years before the protest began, you know, there's a lot of religious Muslims there. Some of them had smashed the windows. People were really pissed off. And when the protest began, Zoodblock, the gay club, gave all their furniture to the protest. And after a while, they said, you know, you guys could have all your meetings in our club. You could, you know, we'll give you drinks, we'll give you free food. And even the lefties at Kotti were like, look, we're not going to get

these very religious Muslims to come and have meetings underneath posters for things so obscene, I won't describe them on your podcast, right? It's not going to happen. But actually it did start to happen. As one of the Turkish German women put it to me, we all realised we had to take these small steps to understand each other. After the protest had been going on for about a year, one day a guy turned up at the protest called Tunkay, who was in his early 50s. And Tunkay, when you meet him, it's obvious he's got some kind of cognitive difficulties and he'd been living homeless, but he has an amazing energy about him. He started asking if he could help out. Everyone liked him. And by this time, they this time, the barricade had turned into a physical structure with a roof, right? A lot of

them are construction workers. So they started saying to Tungkay, you know, you should come and live in this thing we've built, right? It's quite nice. We don't want you to be homeless. He started living there. He became a much loved part of the protest camp. And after he'd been there for nine months, one day the police came. They would come every now and then to inspect. And Tungkay doesn't like it when people argue. So he went to hug one of the police officers, but they thought he was attacking them. So they arrested him. That was when it was discovered.

Tungkay had been shut away for 20 years in a psychiatric hospital, often literally in a padded cell. He'd escaped one day, lived on the streets for a couple of months and made his way to Cottey. At which point the police took him back to the psychiatric hospital. So this entire Cottey protest turned itself into a free

Tunkai movement, right? They descend on this psychiatric hospital at the other side of Berlin. And these psychiatrists are like, what is this? They've got, you know, had this person shut away for 20 years and suddenly they've got all these women in hijabs, these punks and these very camp gay men demanding his release. They're like, oh, they don't understand it. And I remember Uli Hartmann, one of the protesters said to them, yeah, but you don't love him. He doesn't belong with you. We love him. He belongs with us. And many things happened at Cottey. I guess the headline is they got a rent freeze for their entire housing project. They then launched a referendum initiative to keep rents down across the entire city. They got the largest number of written signatures in the history of the city of Berlin. They got T stay in my neighborhood. That's great. I gained so much more than that. I was surrounded by these incredible people all along and I would never have known. And so many of the people there, these insights would just blow the surface.

I remember Neriman Tanker, who's another one of the Turkish German women there, saying to me, you know, when I grew up in Turkey, I grew up in a village and I called my whole village home. And I learned when I came to live in the Western world, that what you're meant to call home is just your four walls. And then this whole protest began and I started to call all these people my home, right? And she said she realised in some sense in this culture, we are homeless, right? There's a Bosnian writer called Alexander Heyman who said, home is where people notice when you're not there. By that standard, lots of us are homeless. And it was so clear to me in Cotty, think about how unhappy these people were, right? Nuria was about to kill herself. Tunkai was shut away in a padded

cell. Loads of them were depressed and anxious. In the main, these people did not need to be drugged. They needed to be together. They needed to be seen. They needed to be loved and valued. They needed to have a sense that they were part of a tribe, that they had purpose and meaning in their lives. And I remember sitting with Tanya one time outside Zublock and her saying to me, you know, when you feel like shit and you're all alone, you think there's something wrong with you. But what we did is we came out of our corner crying and we started to fight. And we realized we were surrounded by people who felt the same way. And to me, this is the most important thing I learned, right? I love these people in Cotty, as I'm sure you can tell, but in one sense, they are not exceptional. They were entirely

randomly selected people, right? Ordinary people have changed the world time and time again. They don't do it by sitting at home alone. They do it by joining up with other people. This hunger for reconnection and for rediscovery of meaning and other people and meaningful values is just beneath the surface for all of us, right? And arguably, it's the most important thing as a society we should be trying to promote. That is profound. I can't stop thinking about it. At home is when someone notices when you are not there. Yeah. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with

my guest. And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across,

and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it at drchastity.com forward slash Friday five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.