Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 183: Fighting Depression with Social Connection, Johann Hari

Episode Date: April 17, 2019

Suffering from his own long battle with depression, social scientist and author Johann Hari yearned for a greater understanding of what caused it and what might help combat it. Hari set out on a journey to not only meet the leading experts on depression, but to observe how other parts of the world treat it. He breaks down his research into the biological, psychological and social causes of depression and presents several fascinating studies from around the world. The Plug Zone Website: https://2018.johannhari.com/ Twitter: @johannhari101 ***VOTE*** Please vote for your favorite Health & Wellness podcast in the 23rd Annual Webby Awards. Vote Here: http://bit.ly/10webby ***VOICEMAILS*** Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail: 646-883-8326 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to baby. This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, I'm really excited about our guest this week. He's going to take you on quite a ride. He is a character and a fascinating human being, Johann Hari, coming up. First, three quick items of business, the first item. We have, as I mentioned last week, been nominated for a Webby Award.

It's apparently a big deal. They call it the Oscars of the internet. And we would love if you would go vote for us. You can do so in 30 seconds by going to 10% happier.com. You click on the banner at the top of the page. There's a link. There's also a link in the show notes. You can do so in 30 seconds by going to 10%happier.com. You click on the banner at the top of the page. There's a link. There's also a link in the show notes.

And you just got to register and vote. Anyway, do me a solid vote for us. That would be awesome. Number two on my list of items of business is that yesterday, the fifth anniversary edition of 10% happier, the book came out. It's in bookstores all over, at least good bookstores all over, we'll be carrying it.

It's got a new preface and a whole bunch of new guided meditations in the back of the book from people like Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzburg. And if you buy the book, you will be able to get access to the audio versions of those meditations for free in the 10% happier app. If you're already a subscriber, you'll get those meditations because you're a subscriber.

And if you want to order it online, you go to hc.com slash happier. It is a great gift. It's a great frisbee and a great doorstop. And third item of business is we'll be doing the two voicemails that we do every week at the end of the show, as always, when that's a recent alteration we've made. And I want to remind you, if you want to ask a question,

here's the number, 646-883-836-646-883-836, you can leave a voicemail there. That number is also up in our show notes. It's also you can you can post us questions if you go to 10%happier.com slash podcast as well. All right, that's the business. All right, so let's get to Johan Hari here. He has a deeply personal and I think deeply useful story. On one level, he's a guy who had it all. He's an award-winning newspaper writer for such publications as The New York Times and LA Times. He's also a best-selling author. He's got a TED Talk that's been viewed 21 million times, and he's a regular panelist on Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO.

But he's been struggling for decades with deep, deep depression. And he decided a little while ago to use his skills as a journalist and also as a social scientist to try to figure out why we're seeing epidemic levels of depression and anxiety, addiction and suicide. And what he found in his new book, which is called Lost Connections, what he found may change your view of depression. His argument is that we need to see it not just as a chemical imbalance as it's often

seen and sometimes he will concede, of course, that sometimes it is the result of that. But he argues that the bigger cause is how we're living today. And while he's not anti-depressants, and he spent a lot of time on anti-depressants personally, he does think we need to expand our concept of what an anti-depressant is. So you can hear him talk about the power of social connection, which has been lost in our tech drenched world

in many ways. He's also going to talk about the power of nature. And he has a series of Incredibly rich stories from his reporting around the planet on how people are attacking this problem of depression So for example, what is an anti-depressant in Cambodia? The answer may surprise you Well, he also talks about Canada's experiment with giving people $12,000 a year and he gets really emotional when he talks about what happened in Germany in one community When people rallied around one of their neighbors who most of them did not know who was suicidal a woman who was suicidal and really galvanized

Some change in one place in Germany and course, he talks about his own meditation practice and that's where we begin. So here we go, Johann Hari. Great to meet you. All right, so happy to be here, Dan. I always start with the same question and I'm curious in your case what the answer will be. How did you get interested in meditation?

I came to it in a slightly weird way. I was very resistant to it for a long time. I came to it because of this book that I was working on. So, I wrote my book about depression, lost connections because there were these two mysteries that were really hanging over me. And I was really afraid to look into them actually for a long time. And it's related to my resistance to looking into meditation. The first mystery was, I am 40 years old. And every year that I've been

alive, depression and anxiety have increased here in the United States and across the Western world. And I wanted to understand why, like why is this happening to us? Why has so many of us, with each year that passes finding it harder and harder to get through the day? The second mystery was more personal. When I was a teenager, I remember going to my doctor and explaining, I think the way I put it was that I had a feeling like pain was leaking out of me. I couldn't control it, I couldn't regulate it. I didn't understand what was going on. And my doctor told me a story which I now realize wasn't totally untrue but was really

oversimplified. My doctor said, well, we know why people get like this, there's just a problem in their brains. The way he put it, was some people have a natural chemical imbalance in their brains, or they're just lacking a chemical called serotonin. All we need to do is give you these drugs you're going to be fine. So I started taking an antidepressant called Paxil, and it did give me significant relief for a few months. And then this feeling of pain started to come back. So I went back to the doctor, he said, I didn't give you a high enough dose. Again, I felt better again, the feeling of pain came back.

And I was in a cycle of jacking up the dose until the 13 years I was taking the maximum possible dose. At the end of which I was really depressed still. And I could see around me, more and more people were becoming depressed. So I ended up going on this big journey. And I could see around me, more and more people were becoming depressed. So I ended up going on this big journey. I wanted to use my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to kind of meet the leading experts in the world about what causes depression and anxiety and crucially what solves them.

And just people with really different perspectives from an armaged village in Indiana, because the armaged have very low levels of depression, to a city in Brazil Brazil that banned advertising to see if that would make us feel better to allow them Baltimore where they were giving people psychedelics to see if that would help. And I learned lots of things, but the heart of what I learned is there's scientific evidence for nine causes of depression and anxiety. Two of them are indeed in our biology. Your genes can make you somewhat more sensitive to these problems, and there are real brain changes that happen when you become depressed that can make it harder to get out. But most of the factors that cause depression and anxiety are not in our

biology, they're factors in the way we live. And once you understand them, that opens up a very different way, a different set of solutions that should be offered as part of a menu on which chemical anti-depressant should totally remain on the menu, but there should be one of a very broad range of options for people. Well, I want to stop you for just one second because I know we're ultimately going to get how this led you to meditation, but I'm just interested in several of the things you've already said. So I apologize.

It's on me for derailing you, but we talk about the nine factors. Is that your analysis or is that scientifically accepted? Because I had always been of the view having been in a family where depression and anxiety have been widespread, that it made me prone to it. And of course, there are lifestyle factors too, but that the genetic part of it was huge. So, there's a very broad scientific agreement that there are three kinds of cause of depression and anxiety. There are biological causes like the ones you were led to. There are psychological causes and there are social causes and they all play out to some degree in all forms of mental

illness, right? To different degrees with different mental illnesses and with different individuals. So you're right that there is a real genetic component, but it's too simplistic to think you're genes right, you're destiny. One of the best pieces of research, and nothing I've said is none of what I've just said is controversial. There are other aspects of what are the scientific evidence that I present from scientists that are disagreed with about by other scientists, but no serious scientists disputes. This is called the biopsychosocial model, right? Biological, psychological, social causes. That's positioned, for example, of the World Health Organization, the leading medical body in the world, who've also been telling us

that while the biology is very real, it has dominated too much of the debate as the leading expert of the World Health Organization put it, but World Health Day two years ago, we need to talk less about chemical imbalances, more about power imbalances, about the imbalances in the way we live. But in terms of the genes which you raised, because it's very important like you, I had depression and my family also had quite a lot of addiction in my family as well. And I was actually told this quite disempowering biological story that you kind of inherit these problems. That's not true. So a good analogy.

Well, partly true. And it's not true that you inherit them. You may inherit something of a greater sensitivity to them. That's a big difference, right? So think about an analogy that everyone understands. Some people find it hard to put on weight and some people find it easy to put on weight. I'm one of these people who find it really easy to put on weight, right? Some people, you know, I just have to eat a snickers bar and my chin swell and some people get to eat, some people I despise, get to eat a whole fun-size pack and, you know, they're fine.

So, that, I've got a greatest sensitivity to it, but that's not my destiny, right? I have a plenty of times in my life where I wasn't fat because I changed the way I live, right? In a similar way, so I'll give you an example, this guy called Professor Absalom Cassby, who did the most detailed study, one of the most detailed studies we have of the genetics of depression. He found that it was a massive population study in New Zealand. He found that there was a specific gene, it's called the H5TT gene,

that does make you more vulnerable to depression, but, and this was really interesting, if you had that gene, you were more likely to become depressed, but only if you became acutely lonely or you experienced serious childhood trauma. If you didn't experience those problems, you were no more likely to become depressed than someone who didn't have the H5 TT gene. So that's a good illustration right now. There's a lot of other things going on the genetics. He doesn't claim that's the only thing no one does, but that's a really good illustration. You can see it increases your sensitivity, but it doesn't write your destiny.

You don't inherit it. You can't, just like you don't inherit being fat, but you can inherit being slightly more prone to putting on weight. You inherit the propensity. Yeah, you can inherit some greater sensitivity is how I would put it. Yeah.

Okay, you were, I derailed you. You were talking about how researching this book led you to meditation. Oh yeah, so so learning about all these different causes. Because I would have put it for such a long time, I had been told the kind of approved story that I was told by my doctor and that many of us are told in this culture is this is just a problem in your brain, solve it in your brain just with drugs. And I want to stress again that to give me some relief. Didn't solve the problem for me.

And so I was kind of looking for these wider solutions. And the last third and my bit lost connections is really these kind of alternative solutions that flow from once you understand this much wider range of causes you can find a wider range of solutions and they're assigned to all over the world who are pioneering this. I actually came to the meditation through quite well actually obviously I knew about meditation for a long time and had tried it at various points in my life. And I found it for a really long time upsetting.

You know, I was in this kind of maelstrom of depressed feelings and then coping mechanisms to deal with depressed feelings that were very often, I would regard as manic forms of activity, right? Often very productive and meaningful forms of activity to me. So I don't wanna dismiss them. But I think they came from I had grown up in an environment that was chaotic and sometimes violent. It was addiction in my family. I had family who were wonderful people in many ways, but there was a lot of

problems there as well, and I had actually experienced some quite extreme acts of abuse from an adult in my life. My mother had been very ill and my dad was in a different country. And my way of coping with that, the way I had built was from a very young age, read, write, work, right? Your way of not being present with this chaos and these frightening situations, which I had no control over, was, okay, you're going to create a world through writing, through reading, I mean, from when I was like five, I was writing hours a day, right? And that in some senses worked well. I don't think I would have got through that situation and I not had that coping mechanism.

But that meant that I associated moments of calm, moments of kind of repose, moments of non-manic production, of stepping away from manic production production as moments in which I was intensely vulnerable and frightened. I remember interviewing an amazing man who'd be a great person to have on your show, a guy called Bill Richardson, Professor Bill Richardson, who's a key figure in psychedelic research. He's the only figure who was involved in the psychedelic research in the 60s when it was shut down, the academic research, when it was shut down by Nixon that, and then are still around and takes part in the rear-way cunning of the psychedelic research. And it's happening all over the world now.

And I remember him saying to me, one aspect of depression, anxiety, addiction, a lot of the problems that are rising at the moment, is he described them as partially addiction to the self, addiction to the ego, which I thought was a really interesting way, I'd never thought of it that way. I was talking to Bill at his home in Baltimore about this and him saying, you know, partly what that is is a feeling that you are trapped in your own ego, your thoughts are rattling around and you've got no way of getting out of that ego, out of that moment, out of that sense that you're stuck in yourself. And he said what a lot of these techniques like meditation as psychedelics are, is they

can give you a sense of release from that feeling of being trapped in the ego. And I remember listening to him and the same old aningsly thinking, you're right, that sounds really good, I could never do that. And I remember some time afterwards being with my friend Isabel Benke, also being an amazing guest speaker. She's one of the most amazing people I know. She's a Chilean, a pro-metologist, an extraordinary person. I mean, people should look up as well.

Her TED talk is amazing as well. It was a good place to start. And as well as teaching me about the role that exposure to the natural world can play in reducing depression. So we know there's loads of evidence. If you are cut off in the natural world, you're much more likely to become depressed. Animals in zoos go crazy, right? It's called zucosis.

Parents will rip out their feathers. Horses will grind their tusks, which are a great source of pride in the wild, down to bloody stumps. Horses will start obsessively swaying. Depriving an animal of its natural habitat will drive it mad, so you're sclerosis. There's all sorts of evidence that a similar thing is happening with us. So, for example, I mean, there's loads of evidence about this that go through in the book, but for example, this is an accidental discovery, but the state prison in Michigan is random where you are signed, but there has one part that looks out of a beautiful greenery, green fields, lush trees, and one part that looks out over a concrete parking lot. And there was a study of this, and it found

that even though it was random where you were signed, the people who looked out over lush greenery were 20% less likely to have mental illness of any kind. They actually had lower physical illnesses as well. Right? Totally fits with it. It's called bio-philia, the idea that species evolved to live in certain habitats. We love those habitats. You do private of those habitats and it will really screw you up. So I remember Isabelle saying to me,

I will explain this to you, provided you walk up a mountain with me. All right, I had to illustrate this. We were in BANTH in Canada at the time. So she takes me up this mountain and I really have avoided natural landscapes in my life. I didn't know why. And it's very related to actually why I was avoiding

and meditation. So we go to the top of this mountain in Bant. And Isabelle's talking to me about biofillion. And again, I'm intellectually agreeing with her and I'm thinking, yeah, I don't want any of this, right? I don't, I don't, this is not for me. And I was standing at the top and Isabelle's explained to me the various reasons why exposure to the natural world

is reduces depression and anxiety. And one is biofillion, but another one is, and again, there's very good evidence for this. Generally, what people get in beautiful scenes of the natural world is a feeling of awe. And a feeling of awe is a moment when you feel really small and the world feels big and you are released from your ego, you realize that your part of this huge tapestry, it's not all about you. You actually, you're just a really small dot in this beautiful, big cosmos, right? And when you are psychologically healthy, that experience, you can experience that as a

great relief, right? Oh, but if you bring to that, what I was bringing to it, which was the kind of legacy of childhood trauma, at that point, I could not feel that because actually, if your formative experiences, some of your formative experiences were, well, actually, if you're small and the world is big, then you're really vulnerable, then the world can come in and just do terrible things to you. So to get to the point where you can experience those liberatory things from nature, and then, of course, this led me to meditation. So it's a long answer to your question of others. I love it. I keep going. This is a rabbit hole by design, so feel free. To get to the point where to have these insights, you have to feel secure.

You have to have a baseline of security. We know this about psychedelics and the debate about bad trips, right? So we know psychedelics and I interviewed the leading scientists who've been doing amazing work, reviving this in UCLA and Los Angeles in UCL in London, in Sao Paulo, in Arhus and Denmark and loads of other places.

So we know that psychedelics can have an extraordinarily positive impact on people in terms of reducing depression, addiction, smoking, all sorts of, smoking is a form of addiction, of course, and all sorts of other things. But some people have really bad experiences and minority, but some people have really bad experiences. What's the difference? When people don't feel safe, where they don't feel secure, that's when they have bad experiences. Because of course, the experience of lowering your ego

walls and realizing you can flow into the world and the world can flow into you is an extraordinarily positive thing. If you know that that environment is safe, if you think that environment is dangerous, it is beyond terrifying because your ego walls are the thing that defend you. So I realized one of the things I had done is I had entirely rationally in the context of this trauma, I had built up these very substantial ego walls, and I was very resistant to lowering those ego walls because those were the things that had kept me alive and sane for so long. But that was no longer a productive way to live. Living behind walls is not as an adult when you're no longer in that kind of danger,

is not a happy or healthy way to be. So actually, to get to those insights, to get to the point where I felt safe to lower those ego walls, it was partly about changing lots of aspects of my life. But one was I came to, so it was suggested to me by my friend Rachel Schubert, who does really great work on this. A particular kind of meditation that really helped me. So she, it's called sympathetic joy meditation. I know you're a lot of... Yeah, so how would you, do you want to explain to listen to what, what that is then? Because I think it's really useful for people to know

So sympathetic joy is it's like the opposite of shaden Freud so shaden Freud is when you take pleasure And other people suffering sympathetic joy is when you take pleasure in their success the ancient Indian subcontinental word for that in the language of poly is mu dita and mu d i t a and it's a type of practice in the Buddhist tradition. And I can let you take it from there. I can say more. It's up to you. Yeah, the technique, as Rachel taught it to me, and she teaches it to people in Illinois, if people want to look around, was, so we live in an environment that I think of as basically like pouring ego itching powder

on us the whole time, right? That's super good. We are constantly being provoked and stirred to think egotistically partly by advertising, partly by social media. If I just, as I did before, I'm not necessarily as a superiority, literally just before I walked into me then, I quickly looked through Instagram. You immediately feel that jab to send, so, oh my God, these people look so much better

than I'm ever gonna look. They're having more fun than I'm ever gonna, you can just feel, or even that people you love and admire, you're like, oh, they've got, oh, they're following it's gone up, or whatever. You know, you get a party and you're not invited. Exactly, there's this constant kind of ego jamming, or ego itching, that this environment creates, It's designed to create. It's not accident.

It's designed to create that. Some of our Rachel, I got to know Rachel here in New York, we took a course together at NYU. And when we met, we both bonded. We're had slightly rough periods in our life. Rachel's marriage was ending and it ended in quite an unpleasant way and I had gone through some rough things. We bonded in this rather kind of, I mean, she's a great person, this is no disrespect to her, she's a wonderful person, but we bonded in a rather negative way. We'd make jokes about other people in the class that were a bit bitchy, you know, that kind of thing.

And then I didn't see Rachel for a while, about three years and I went to visit her in Illinois. And she seemed completely different. I'm just like, oh, she's just all that kind of envy that we've both been experiencing, she seemed to be gone and I said, oh, Rachel, what happened? And she said, oh, every day I do this thing. So she taught me how to do it.

So, some of the day, joy meditation is really, Oh, every day I do this thing. So she taught me how to do it. So sometimes you join meditation is really the way I do it as she taught it to me is kind of simple. So you start, you close your eyes calm yourself and you start by picturing someone you love and you picture something great happening to them and you just feel the joy of that. And that's relatively easy, right? Someone you love, nice thing happens to them, you're naturally gonna feel joy. Then you picture someone you like, but don't love. You picture something great happening to them,

you imagine their physical reaction, they look like, imagine how they feel, how it'll change their life, and you try to feel joy for that. And again, that's not so hard. Then you picture someone you know, but neither like nor dislike. I picture that someone who works in a store around the corner from where I live, who seems perfectly pleasant by, I know them, right?

I don't even know this person's name. And you picture something wonderful happening to them. And again, you try to feel the joy of that. Then, and this is where it gets hard, you picture someone you don't like. And then you picture something really great happening for them. And you imagine how happy they will be. And you try to feel a sense of joy for them. And then you picture someone you really don't like.

And you imagine something good happening for them. And you try to feel joy for them. And it's hard. It's really hard to genuinely do it and not feel shardon, Freud, anger, resentment is difficult. But over time, it gets easier. And as Rachel put it to me, it's a way of, she does it in the morning and that's when I try to do it. It's a way of setting your intentions to how you intend to go through the day. Are you going to go through the day in this ego-witching powder mode of, which the environment sets us up to do, which is your gain is my loss.

We're in a race for scarce resources and I've got to cry out, it's like we're rushing out of a burning building, I've got to clamber over you, I've got to fight for every moment of what I get and if you get ahead of me, that places me in danger. Instead of priming yourself on that mentality, which frankly, just skimming through Instagram does to you, what loving kindness meditation or sympathetic,, doing meditation is very schools of Buddhist meditation do is they say, my intention is I'm gonna go through the day trying to feel joy for the people around me. By the way, I certainly don't do this all the time.

I don't want to make any big claims for having suddenly become enlightened. This is an attempt to set an intention. It doesn't guarantee you do it. And, and, and, and. I remember Rachel saying to me, you know, This is an attempt to set an intention. It doesn't guarantee you do it. I remember Rachel saying to me, you know, your life, anyone's life, you know, your joy is gonna ebb and flow, right? There's gonna be things that happen to you

that are tragedies and just ordinary bad stuff. You're always gonna be surrounded by some joy. And if you can find a way as these techniques and other show to take joy in the joy of others and not just yourself, not just your own ego, that that will give you that it's like why would you not tap this incredible fuel and happiness that is all around you. She gave me a really good example. She one of the days I saw her, she said I came in in from... Maybe she had happened to a few weeks before I forget, but she said, oh, yeah, I was walking in the park and I saw a bride that were taking their wedding photos.

There was a bride in her groom. And she said years ago, when she first met me, she would have looked at that and she would have been scanning for, well, how does this compare to my wedding, right? Or, oh, look, she's scanning for imperfections in the bride or the groom or to defend herself against those feelings of, you know, despair and pain. And she said, she'd been doing something during the meditation like she looked at this bride and she just thought, you look so happy. This is so beautiful. These people are having such a beautiful moment and it gave her joy rather than scratching at her and irritating her precisely because of that that released from ego. And by the way, I actually think the release from ego and people build up ego for all sorts of understandable reasons.

It's not about reproaching people for that. I did lots of people did. I did lots of people did. Actually, in a funny way, taking joy in the tribe is actually more true to life. No one is an isolated individual, right? Anyone listening to this, if you've been left as an isolated individual as a child, you wouldn't be listening to this, you'd be dead, right? Almost all of our activities are in fact in some way collective. Individualism and egotistical ways of thinking don't only, excessively egotistical, you need to have some sense of ego, but excessively egotistical ways of thinking, they aren't,

they don't just make us miserable. They're actually not true in some very basic way. You are not unisolated, despite what American culture encourages to think that we're all John Wayne marching across the Wild West By the way, even those cowboys would have died that they not been part of a tribe, right? Even even the icon of individualism is a lie But we all encouraged I think we're this isolated cowboy in the searches or whatever Oh man exactly and what happened to him right the we're're all encouraged to think we are that, but that's not, it doesn't just make it miserable, it's not even true to what we are. I mean, it's, yeah, it's also why people go crazy in solitary confinement. But let me ask you about

your experience with this kind of meditation, because you said quite, I thought, pointantly, that giving your history of trauma, the lowering of the ego walls that could happen through powerful connection with nature, or through sort of basic mindfulness meditation where you're just watching your breath and then every time you get distracted, you start again. Why is it that you think this sympathetic joy meditation helped lower your ego walls in a way that didn't create a Fighter flight response? Yeah, that's a really important question. It's one that I tried to think about a lot now. So I think it's partly Did it was happening in concept with a lot of other things in my life a kind of more general reorientation? I remember having a moment I went to

Berkeley to interview a really wonderful academic called Dr. Brett Ford who is his name in Toronto actually but who did this piece of research in some ways is really obvious and yet I actually found quite profound and helped me to understand something I've been getting wrong a lot at the time. So that her and lots of her colleagues in different places did this research. It's kind of basic research. Or rather it's answering, asking a very basic question. If you decided, or anyone listening to this show, decided, you were going to spend more time every day consciously and deliberately trying to make yourself happier. Would you become happier? It shows good time for some happier, right? You decided you were

going to try and do that. Consciously as an act of will, you can dedicate more time to that. Would you become happier? I would say it depends on the modality. You're exactly right. And I think this research really reinforces a lot of what you talk about in your work. So they did this research in four places. The United States, Japan, Russia and Taiwan. And what they found at first seems really weird. In the United States, if you try and make yourself deliberately happier, you do not become happier. In the other countries, if you try to make yourself happier, you do. And at first, they're like, well, what are the main sense? What's going on? So they looked at the research more, what they found was,

and this goes exactly to what you're saying. In the United States, in the main, not you, not people listening to a podcast I expect, but most Americans, if you try to make yourself happier, generally you do something for yourself, for your ego, right? You buy something, you go shopping, you treat yourself, whatever it is. In the other, you crush your enemies at work.

Yeah, that's a really good. So yeah, or exactly that's actually more important. Or you exactly, you, you, what I would regard as negative achievements, you try to distance yourself from the, the kind of people bike, exactly doing them down. Um, in the other countries, in general, if you tried to make yourself happier, you did something for someone else. You're saying for your friends, your family, your community.

So we kind of fancy way of putting it is, we have an implicitly individualistic conception of what happiness is. They have an instinctively collective idea of what happiness is. And it turns out, I'm a vision of happiness just doesn't work, right? In individualistic, we are a social species, right? I expect a lot of time interviewing a wonderful man called Professor John Cassiopo, who was the leading expert in loneliness on the world. He was a professor in Chicago.

Who's saying to me, why do we exist? The key reason why we exist is because our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren't bigger than the animals they took down, they weren't faster than the animals they took down, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating, just like bees evolved to need a hive, humans evolved to need a tribe. We are the first humans ever to disband our tribes. There's a study that asks Americans, how many close friends do you have

who you could turn to in a crisis? I mean, they started doing it years ago. The most common answer was five. Today, the most common answer is none. Half of all Americans ask how many people know you well say nobody, right? So you think about we have disbanded our tribes. And of course that makes us feel terrible. And I thought about this in relation to Dr. Ford's work because you know, I realized that for a long time, and it wasn't all, I've probably even most of the time, but a big part of how I would respond to my depressed feelings was through this individualistic conception of happiness. I would try to, I would feel bad, I would try to, I would show off, I would make some egotistical achievement, I would do something

clever, I would do something impressive in inverted commas, or I would try to do someone else down or, exactly, those kind of, the ego pleasures, the individualistic ego pleasures. And I see now, that was a bit like I always think about, I'm not able to find this online, but I'm pretty sure, I remember seeing it years ago, I think it's Buster Keaton, the silent movie star. Anyone who knows this, please send it to me. It's some silent movie star anyway, where he's sinking in Quick Sand. His legs are sinking. So to get out of the Quick Sand, he reaches in with his arms to pull out his legs, which of course means he's sitting faster, and then he reaches in with his head to pull out his arms and then he's gone. And I realized in a way that's what I would do, right? This

individualistic ego-driven way of living made me feel bad. And when it's not the only thing that was going on, but it was one of the things that made me feel bad. And then to get out of that, I would double down on it, right? I would, that way, living made me feel bad. So I would try to pursue that way even more. And of course, it meant I sank even faster as the quicksand. Does that make sense? Yeah. So what I'm just curious listening to you talk, I mean, it's, it's very, very, very compelling. What would the proper strategy be? What would that have been for you as opposed to writing a book or that gets you positive reviews that you think after the success

of the book, you should feel great, just like people who become famous and find themselves miserable, etc. What would the proper route to happiness look like? So this, but the opposite is a big part of the book and I want to stress that what is, was essential for me at that time is not what would be essential for every listener. So in, in, in lost connections, my book, I tried to talk about the scientific evidence for all these, these causes and then scientists who pioneered solutions based on them. So some of those courses played out for me and others didn't, but they will play out for a lot of listeners. So I'm talking about you're

asking about myself. So I'm answering that, but I don't want to over generalize from my own experience. I would say there's two aspects. So one relates to the trauma and prompt me to talk about that in a minute if we go in another direction. One relates to, it's very close to what Dr Ford discovered, I think, in many ways, but slightly at a right angle. It's worked on by a completely incredible man called Professor Tim Casso, who's at Knox College in Illinois. So, everyone knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick. As you can see from my chins, I don't say that with any superiority. I came here from McDonald's.

Wait. You've made two references now to multiple chins. Not entirely. You're not a large man. Well, I just had a real low point once with my diet. It led me to change my diet. In 2009, I, on Christmas Eve at lunchtime, I went to my local KFC, in East London,

and I lived at the time, and I'm going in and saying my order, which is so disgusting, I wouldn't repeat it. And the guy behind the counter said, oh yeah, and I'm really glad you're here, wait a minute. And he goes off behind like where they fry the chicken and everything. And he came back with every member of staff

who was there and a massive Christmas card in which they'd written to our best customer. And they'd all written like little lovely notes about, and what are the reasons my heart sank as I suddenly thought, this isn't even the fried chicken shop I come to the most. Right?

It's like a nightmare. So anyway, that was like a bit of a change. But so we all know why that's bad, right? Junk food appeals to the part of us that needs nutrition, but actually poisons us. In a similar way, a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. So for thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're going to feel crap, right? That's not an exact quote from Confucius, but that is the gist of what he said, right?

But weirdly, it's exactly, but weirdly nobody had scientifically investigated this Until Professor Cassar started to do it about 25 years ago. No one in investigate it in as much depth as Professor Cassar So Professorassar explained, everyone listening to your show, everyone in the world, is a mixture of two kinds of motive. So imagine if you play the piano in the morning, if you play the piano because you love it and it gives you joy, that experience gives you joy, that's called an intrinsic motive to play the piano, right? You're not doing it to get anything out of it. You're doing it because that is what matters to you.

That's an experience that is profound. Okay, now imagine you play the piano not because you love it, but in a dive bar that you hate to play the rent or because your parents are massively pressuring you to be a piano maestro because that's their dream or to impress a woman. I don't know. There might be some piano fetishes out there or to post the clips on Instagram, whatever it is. That would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano. You're not doing it because that's the thing you love. You're doing it to get something out of it further down the line. You're removed from the experience. You're trying to get something out of it that's not just the flow and pleasure of it. Now, of course, we're all a mixture of both of these motives, right? Obviously, you're trying to get something out of it. That's not just the flow and pleasure of it. Now, of course, we're all a mixture of both of these motives, right?

Obviously, you have to be to get through life and you should be. But Professor Kassa showed a few things. And firstly, the more you are driven by these extrinsic values, what I came to think of as the equivalent of junk food, like junk values, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious. By quite a significant amount, we can talk about why in a minute, he also showed as a society, as a culture, we are much more driven by these extrinsic values, by these junk values. It's been a really big shift every year. In fact, he showed with Professor J. Twanghi, who does fantastic work, that every year that the spending of American GDP gross domestic product, every year that the percentage of American GDP spent on advertising goes up, teenage anxiety and depression go up. So we've got this kind of domination, growing domination of our minds by junk values.

I think this relates to, actually I'm not going to be on Professor Kassahe grays at this, I think this relates to a kind of deeper way of thinking about the crises and problems we face. Or stress, this isn't the only thing that's going on, but I think it's a big thing, which is, everyone listening to your show knows they have natural physical needs. Obviously, you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air.

If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble real fast. But 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 you have a future that makes sense. And this culture we've built is good at lots of things. I had to go to the dentist the other day. I'm glad to be alive in 2019. But we have been getting less and less good at meeting these

deep underlying psychological needs. And it's not the only thing that's going on, but I think it's the key reason why this crisis is going up and up. And in relation to that, these junk values don't meet your deep needs as a human being. In some ways, it's almost banal, right? Everyone listening knows you're not going to lie on your deathbed and think about all the likes you got on Instagram and all the shoes you bought. You're going to think about moments of love and meaning and connection in your life. And yet as Professor Kassapur to me, I thought really profoundly, we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life.

The more 18 month old children know what the McDonald's M means, the know their own last name to give you a sense of how deeply imprinted. So partly it's, you know, advertising is the ultimate frenemy. It's saying to you, oh, Dan, I think you're great. I love you. I think you're brilliant. If I need you to stink. I mean, I think you're great, right?

If I need you to want a bit more to the other end. I think you're great, right? You can see how that machinery works. And that's not the only thing, again, I'm going to stress it's not the only factory in junk values. And it's certainly not the only factory in depression. But I think so we've had this disconnection from meaningful values that is very deep in the culture, the spreading of junk values that's made us seek happiness

in all the wrong places. That had definitely happened to me. I don't want to say that was all of my motivation because it wasn't. Very few people are 100% those things. But one of the reasons why I could feel safe enough to lower my ego walls and do things like loving kindness meditation was because I went through a process of profoundly reorienting my values. So I was much more connected to meaningful work. I wrote a book about addiction, which is called chasing the scream, and then I wrote my other book, Lost Connections.

And that, it's not that my previous work wasn't meaningful to me, it was. But the process of just having three years where you can set aside all the kind of ego jabbing and all the kind of selling yourself and all the, you know, how many people liked this, what's going on there and just really go in depth and go all over the world and me for lost connection, so I went over 40,000 miles and just really connect with this deep question and try to find answers from these extraordinary and amazing people who I got to know all over the world That was so meaningful to me, right? that I had

Whatever that process was it was the opposite of junk values Now I'm not saying there are moments when ego comes in and even in this situation where I think you know You're trained by your publicist mentioned the name of your book three times, you know I can and it's funny I don't want it for you, but you're trained by your publicist, mention the name of your book three times. You know, it's funny. I don't for you. But it's actually isn't it? When I do that, when I hear that voice coming to my head, I can feel myself becoming anxious. In a way that I don't feel anxious when I'm explaining these, when we were talking about

the nature thing and it's about banking, when I'm talking about these amazing people and that's not ego, I want everyone to go and learn about Isabella, I want everyone to learn about Tim Kasser, I want people to look up all the people I talk about, that I feel safe and affirmed. I feel like I'm doing a good thing. And then when I have to go into that mode, which you have to do a lot when you're promoting a book,

which is not all bad, of course, partly a big part of why I want people to read the book is altruistic, I think. I want them to know these things about altruistic reason, but there's also an ego thing, right? For all the obvious reasons, I want the obvious ego reasons, and commercial reasons, I want people to read my book. And yet I can feel even in this interview and even in this switch between those modes, I

suddenly feel anxious because when I'm affirming Isabelle or Tim, or loads of the other people we've talked about, and the amazing insights that come from them, there's no doubt in my mind, they are amazing people, right? And the people, and I have this expectation that people listening will clock. These sound like great people, right? When I'm in the self-promotion mode, you start to think, but what if they don't like me? What if they don't? And you're selling myself right, am I doing this right? And that is a mode of anxiety.

And in a sense, one of the things I learned from Professor Kassar is we've all been moved much more into that selling mode in our daily lives, right? That we're all trained to be in that. Even if you think about my friend Naomi Klein has done incredible work on this for years, when she wrote No Logo about how branding was contaminating us, she says, she never even dreamed we get to the mode where everyone would be taught to talk about their personal brand. You know, she thought she was identifying this heinous, corporate

thing that was trying to hijack our consciousness, but she said it hijacked our consciousness to degree. She couldn't have imagined 22 years ago when she wrote, no, no, logo. So I think a big part for me to go back to the question you asked a million years ago before I go to the six-room and long answer, part of it was one of the reasons I could feel safe enough to do this was I had a profound reconnection with meaningful values for me and I stepped away from, not entirely, but I very significantly reduced the kind of ego-witching powder that I was, if I think about, you know, periods when I would be on Twitter for an hour a day, two hours a day, in my previous work, when I was a newspaper journalist, I mean that, the constant ego jabbing and

male stream of that was awful. So partly that. The second thing is a different thing in relation to Charter Trauma. It's like, okay, if I tell you a story about how this was discovered by someone? Absolutely. Yeah. And for a minute, you have shown at a remarkable pension to go, it to take us on big, big loops and then come back to the original question. So at this point, you have my deep trust. So go, go, go.

So if I take the story, your listeners for a minute are going to think, why is he telling us this? Has nothing to do with what you're talking about. But I don't think you can understand it if you don't understand how this amazing man discovered this. So in the mid 1980s in San Diego, a doctor who I got to know later called Dr Vincent Feliti, was asked to do a quite difficult job. He was approached by Kaiser Permanente, the big not-for-profit medical provider in California. And they were like, look, we've got a big problem.

I hope you can help us. Obesity was going up and up every year, and nothing they were trying was working. So they said to him, they gave him quite a substantial budget, and they said, just do Blue Sky's research, figure out what the hell we can do. So he starts to work with 250 severely obese people, people who weighed more than 400 pounds who were in real, real physical danger of death,

and certainly of all sorts of health complications. And he starts to work with them, and one day Dr. Fletti had an idea that seems, and in many ways is, as he would tell you, quite stupid. He asked himself, what would happen if really obese people just stopped eating and we gave them like vitamin C shots so they didn't get scurvy, we gave them loads of medical support. Would they actually burn through the fat supplies in their body and get down to a healthy weight? So obviously with a ton of medical supervision, he started to do this with these 250 people. And incredibly, in one sense at first it worked. So there was a woman who I'm going to call Susan to protect her medical confidentiality who went down from

being more than 400 pounds to 138 pounds. Incredible, right? And people have family are saying, like you've saved her life, she's thrilled. And then one day something happened that no one expected Susan Cracked. She went to KFC, actually, I don't think she did go to KFC, that's projection on my part.

She went to some fast food place and she starts obsessively eating her quite quickly. She's not back where she was, but she's back at her dangerous weight and Vincent got to Phileetie called her in and he's like, season what happened? She looks down, she's very ashamed, she says I don't know, I don't know. And he said, tell me about that day that you cracked. Did anything happen that day that didn't happen any other day? It turns out, it was something happened that day that you cracked. Did anything happen that day that didn't happen any other day?

It turns out that was something happened that day that had never happened to Susan. She'd been in a bar and a man had hit on her, not in a horrible predatory way, quite a nice way. But she felt really frightened and she'd gone and started obsessively eating. That's when curte-adopted to fillity to ask something you'd never asked a patient. He said, when did you start to put on your weight? For Susan it was when she was 11. He said, well, did anything happen when you your weight? For Susan it was when she was 11. He said, well did anything happen when you were 11,

that didn't happen when you were 9 or 14, anything that year? Susan looked down and she said, yeah that's when my grandfather started to rate me. Dr. Feliti interviewed everyone in the program. He discovered that 55% of them have put on their extreme weight in the aftermath that being sexually abused or assaulted, which is such a high number, obviously so much higher than the general population who've been sexually abused. He's just like, what is this? How can that be?

Susan explained it to him really well. She said, overweight is overlooked, and that's what I need to be. Dr. Filiety discovered that this thing that seems so irrational, obesity, and obviously his bad view, was performing a positive function, right? It was protecting these people from sexual attention, that they had very good reason to be afraid of. But this is a small study. It's 250 people. You don't want to make huge generalizations based on that. So Dr. Feliti went to the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, who fund the huge medical research. And he got a really big budget to do a much bigger study. Everyone who came for medical help to San Diego, in San Diego, two kinds of permanent

attain, for an entire year, for anything, headaches, schizophrenia, a broken leg, the whole lot, was given two questionnaires. First questionnaires said, did any of these bad things happen to you when you were a child, things like physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, extreme cruelty? Second part asked, have you had any of these problems as an adult? Initially, it was just going to say obesity, but then they added a load of other things like depression, suicide attempts, injecting drug use. When the CDC added up the figures, I spoke to some people who did this, at first they were

like, there's some mistake here. Every category of chance to trauma your experience, you were two to four times more likely to be obese, depressed, addicted, but when they got into the multiple categories, the figures Every category of child to trauma you experience, you were two to four times more likely to be obese, depressed, addicted, but when they got into the multiple categories, the figures were just staggering. If you had had six categories of child to trauma, you were 3,100% more likely to have attempted suicide and 4,600% more likely to be injecting drug user. I mean, you just don't get figures like that very often in science.

I remember Dr. Robert Ander, one of the scientists who worked on this said to me, it made him I mean, you just don't get figures like that very often in science. I remember Dr. Robert Ander, one of the scientists who worked on this said to me, it made him realize when you're confronted with someone who appears to be doing something so irrational depression, anxiety, addiction, we need to stop asking what's wrong with you and start asking what happened to you. But the reason this leads to this question about how I came to be able to meditate is, remember the first time I went to see Dr. Feliti in San Diego, in his, I think he's in his early 80s now, he was when I met him, a little bit older now. If you met Dr. Feliti, you would really like him down. He is a lovely good man.

Like one of the most admirable people I've met. And I remember being so angry at what he was saying that I actually ended the interview early because I was worried I was going to start shouting. And I remember going to the beach in San Diego, which is obviously gorgeous, and walking up and down the beach and thinking, why are you so angry with this lovely old man who's done all this amazing work that's helped so many people? And like we were talking about before, I had experienced these very extreme acts from

an adult in my life over a long period of time when I was a child. And in me, I realized on the beach in San Diego, one of the reasons why I had been so committed to this overly biological story about depression and anxiety, right? I want to stress this real biological components, but I had been drawn to this story, so it's all about the biology. It's just a problem in your brain. And I realized there, it's like, oh, you don't wanna think about this stuff, right? I don't wanna think about it at all.

I don't wanna give this individual power over me now. I don't wanna think this was, these experiences of abuse was still playing out in my life. But one of the reasons I'm glad I stayed with this deeper way of thinking about depression is because of what Dr. Flety discovered next. If you had indicated on your form that you had experienced some form of childhood trauma, your doctor was told, don't call them back, but next time the patient comes back in,

say to them something like this, it was a script. I see that when you were a child, you were sexually abused or whatever the nature of the abuse was. I'm really sorry that happened to you. That should never have happened. Would you like to talk about it? And 40% of people didn't want to talk about it, but 60% of people did, and they wanted to talk about it on average for five minutes. And then it was random, some of them were told I can refer to a therapist to talk about it more.

What was incredible in the follow up research was just those five minutes of an authority figure saying, I'm really sorry this happened to you, that should never have happened. That alone led to a really significant fall in depression and anxiety and the people who referred to a therapist got even more. Number one old woman wrote to Dr. Feliti, she was in her 80s, she'd been sexually abused as a child, she said, I'm so glad you asked, I thought I was going to die and no one would ever know. And the reason why this causes a fall in depression and anxiety, the best evidence, Jess, is part

of a growing body of evidence from people like Professor Steve Coles, UCLA, who I just saw, or Professor James Pennebaker at Florida State University. It's related to this research about shame. It's not the trauma that destroys you. It's the shame about the trauma. And giving people a place where they can release that shame Is an antidepressant right one of the things I want to argue is we need to expand our concept of what an antidepressant is Anything that reduces depression and anxiety should be regarded as an antidepressant and God knows we need them and for some people that will include chemicals

but We need to if that was the only solution that we needed, we wouldn't be seeing this crisis rising year after year, because we've been massively increasing chemical antidepressants year after year, prescriptions year after year, and they're giving some relief to some people to be sure, but they're clearly not solving the problem as we can see by looking around us. And we need to expand our concept of what an antidepressant is. So for example, people have been through severe childhood trauma, giving them a place where

they will see they'll be loved and held and they can release that shame is an antidepressant. And I think it's been quite hard that my book came out, whatever it was, a bit over a year ago now. And at first, it was really difficult. it was difficult writing that part of the book, it was by far the hardest part of the book to write and it's been difficult. Talking about it, but one of the reasons why I do talk about it is because you can see, I can see when I talk about this, that no sane person reacts to hearing these things with the voice of the abuser, right? Of course, when you're abused, you internalize these voices, right? You think it's your fault, you put it on yourself, you don't deserve good

things, you don't deserve to be treated well. And of course, only mad people, or not mad, terribly damaged people, react that way when they hear people talk about it. Most people react with the lovely sympathetic face you're doing now, right? And you can feel the internalized shame reduces you do that. So it is in itself healing. So I think part of why I could come to meditation was having learned these things. I could talk about it to other people.

I could release this feeling of shame. And that made me feel safer, right? When you see, oh, you're not actually in an environment where these, and of course, at some level intellectually rationally, I knew that, of course, there was never a time as an adult when I would have thought most of the people or even a significant proportion of the people around me would have supported or condoned child abuse, of course not. But when you kind of feel that emotionally, you feel you are in a safer environment. And when you feel you're in a safer environment emotionally, you can be more receptive to lowering your ego walls because you don't feel

you're in a place that's gonna... yeah, savagy the minute you allow yourself to be vulnerable. More 10% happier after this. Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke and we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast Even the Rich where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newer series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance, but the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Rue, of course. In our series Rue Paul Born Naked, we'll show you how Rue Paul

overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. You've spoken quite movingly about the fact that you've struggled with depression for so long, which sends you off on this quest to solve the mystery of why are we seeing epidemic levels of depression, what can be done about it, how's your level of depression now as we sit here? I'm trying to be quite careful in the book and how I talk about this publicly because

some of the causes of depression and anxiety that I was taught by these amazing people are quite deep in our culture and we're going to have to have deep cultural change in order to challenge them. So for example, because of deep structural changes in the economy, through no for all their own half of all Americans have less than $500 in savings for if a crisis comes along. Now that is going to make you really depressed, right? A lot of people, it's going to make pretty much

everyone in that situation more unhappy than they should be and some people it's going to make really depressed. And then they go for help and they're told, this is just a problem in your brain, some of them, they're told that. And they're of course better doctors who give more sophisticated answers. So I try to be careful in both truthfully telling my story and the journey that I went on, but also not saying, well, I did this dear reader and you can too, because the truth is, I mean, one of my closest relatives is the struggling single mother who works every hour she can to keep her kids in their

home, gets home and is so tired she can barely watch the television. So for me to say to her, well, the main thing you need to do now is this list of pursuing all these social changes or exactly. Well, she's like, yeah, I'd love to do that. Tell me when in the 45 hours a week that I work and don't get to see my children that I'm meant to go and be on a beach, right? Great. I'd love to do it, right? So part of... So I want to be careful, it would be an insult to her. It would be an insult to some people listening to your show. So go, well I did this dear reader and you can too because I had a lot of resources to change my life. So a big part of the book is about how do we change our society so that more people are set free to make the changes they need to make.

And I'll talk about one specific example in a minute. There's many. But in my own case, yeah, I haven't been depressed for quite a long time now. I think based on the site, and you know. So no more bet, no more packs on the more med. I know I stopped them in 2011. Cause for me, I mean, my experience was quite normal. I was surprised to learn from the research, the best long-term research into chemical antidepressants

is called the STARDE trial, which follow, it's really simple trial, actually. It's one of the best ones, because it's a pharmaceutical company's can't rig it. You just follow people who go to their doctor with depression and are given chemical antidepressants to see what happens over time. And some people do get relief, and it's really important to stress that and

my advice is not that people stop if they're getting relief from it, which some people really are, but most people do become depressed again. I think, and I'm going beyond what the study trials shows now, but I think precisely because this is a problem that goes deeper than biology, dealing with some of the biological aspects, give some relief, but isn't solving the problem, right? And I remember, I found that, again, after the child to trauma, that was the hardest part to learn, because I was like, well, this is the one solution this culture has given me to feeling so bad, and you're telling me, some of the leading experts

are Harvard Medical School and other places who've done the best research on the same rate. You're telling me it does give some help, but and some people really do get relief from it, but I'm not that unusual. In actually, I got relief initially, but over time, I just became depressed again. That was quite shocking.

One person really helped me to think about this differently. I went to interview the South African psychiatrist, I love Dr. Derek Summerfield, who happened to be in Cambodia in 2001 when they first introduced chemical antidepressants in that country. And Derek was like, the local Cambodian doctors didn't know what antidepressants were. So they asked him and he said, what are you explaining to them? And they said, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants.

And he said, what do you mean? He thought they were going to talk about a herbal remedy, right? Like St. John's watch and cobala, something like that. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day he stood on a landmine left over by the war with the United States. And he got his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial limb, they're good at that in Cambodia, and he goes back

to work in the rice fields a few months later. Apparently, it's really painful to work underwater when you've got an artificial limb. I'm guessing it was fairly traumatic, but obvious reasons he's back in the field we get blown up. The guy started to cry all day. Didn't want to get out of bed. He developed classic depression right. Refused to get out of bed. At which point the Cambodian doctors explained to him. Some of them went, then we gave him an anti-depressant and he said, what was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his depression had causes in his life. They figured

if they bought him a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was causing him so much distress. So they bought him a cow within a couple of weeks is crying, stopped when a couple of months his depression was gone. They said to Doctor Summerfield, so you see Doctor that cow. That was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right? Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that it's entirely or primarily a problem with your biology, that sounds like a joke. I went to my doctor for an antidepressant, she gave me a cow. But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization has been trying to tell us for years. Your pain makes sense. If you're depressed, if you're anxious,

you're not crazy, you're not weak, you're not a machine with broken parts, you're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is a lot of love and practical support to get those deep needs met as a society. If you go to a doctor, our system is not set up. You said before, if all you've got is $500 and you're in your life savings, our system is not set up to give you a healthy 401k as your prescription. All we can do, as far as I understand, is give you Paxill or the like. So I think there's two things to say in response to that. Firstly, and it's important to not

criticize doctors over this, we have given doctors one lever to pull, and that lever does give some relief to some people. Well, too, because there's talk therapy, and then there's also. I mean, a lot of people can't get taught therapy because of their insurance packages. Yeah, you're right. Talk therapy is an option for some people in this country, actually, shockingly few, but some. And mostly what they're referred to is cognitive behavioral therapy, which has some value,

but is based on a philosophy that the problem is the way you think about your life, and you need to adjust your thought patterns. There's some truth in that for some people, but imagine saying to that guy in the rice field in Cambodia, you know, the issue here is you need to change your thought patterns. Well, maybe, but what he needed was a cow, right? In a similar way.

Is there not a third level, can you not send people to a social worker who can help you with your life situation if you're gotten, if you're in a with an abusive spouse or something like that? Yeah, all the budgets for that have been massively cut year after year. Some people are lucky to get that help. There's not no social provision in this country. But I mean, look at even very extreme cases, let's think about Adam Lanza, who carried out the horrific San Diego massacre. I mean, his family, this guy had very severe mental illness, much, much more extreme than what we're talking about.

His family begged for help and anything. So even if you're, you know, literally afraid that your son might carry out a massacre, you don't get any help. So that gives you a sense of how much people who have got more kind of ordinary depression. And they were wealthy. Yeah, exactly. So I think there's two aspects of in response to what you said about, you know, doctors can't give this help.

So firstly, I would say, think about the biggest cause of death in this country, although it's about to be overtaken by suicide, no pure deaths, which is cars, right? So everyone listening will know someone who's died in a car accident. And as a society, how do we deal with car accidents? Partly what we do is when people are in car accidents, they go to the emergency room and the doctors and nurses do incredible and heroic work,

patching them back together if they possibly can. As people are heroes, they deserve a huge amount of credit, but that is not our primary response as a society to the problem of car accidents. We have driving tests, we have speed limits, we have seatbelts, we have airbags, we arrest DUIs, right? So, actually, we see with car accidents, while doctors are part of the picture, actually driving people who give people driving tests, save far more people than doctors, right? Because we deal with the problem downstream as much as we can. It doesn't deal with it enough,

and I'm a favourable source of other car safety things. I like what Bill de Blasio has done here in New York, for example, on that. But, you know, this is precisely because this is a social problem. We have a big social solution, not just an individual medical solution. If you look back at the debate about cars when they first come in, it was just an individual solution. They said, well, we'll teach people to drive safely and they just need to be responsible. Now we have a much bigger response. We don't just leave it to the individual. I think one of the cruelest things we do with depression and anxiety is we leave it just to isolated, depressed people and if they're lucky, their families and their doctors to solve the problem. When actually, you know, it's not that, I mean,

depression is along with opioid addiction and suicide Unbelievably high in West Virginia at the moment. That's not because people in West Virginia are individually Biologically broken, although some of them will have greater biological sensitivity to these problems That's because look at what we've done to West Virginia It people there have been deprived of the most elementary things that make like meaningful to them, meaningful work, financial security, meaningful, all sorts of things, right? So, I would say firstly, doctors can't solve the problem because it's a much bigger than just an issue of individual medicine. But even within that, one of the heroes of my book is a doctor who's pioneered a different

approach that's spreading gradually over many one of the heroes of my book is a doctor who's pioneered a different approach that's spreading gradually over many parts of the world. And I think doctors here should be really championing some wonderful doctors are. So he's called Dr. Sam Everington. And he's a general practitioner in East London, a poor part of East London where I lived for a long time, as you can tell from my weird dance and Abbey accent. And Sam was really uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming

to him with depression and anxiety. And like me, he's not opposed to chemoclenty to depressants, but he could see two things. Firstly, loads of the people he was treating were depressed and anxious for perfectly understandable reasons. Like, they were really lonely, for example. And secondly, he could see that most of the people he was giving these drugs to were getting a bit of relief, but it wasn't solving the problem.

So Sam decided to pioneer a different approach. One day a woman came to see him called Alisa Cunningham, who I got to know pretty well later. And Alisa had been shot away in our home with just crippling depression and anxiety for seven years. And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'm going to carry on giving you these drugs. I'm also going to prescribe something else. There was an area behind the suite of doctors' offices that was just scrubbed land. He said to Lisa, what I'd like you to do is come and turn out a couple of times a week. I'm going to come to because I've been quite anxious.

We're going to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people. And together, we'll turn this scrubland into something nice maybe. We'll figure out something to do together. And first time the group met, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety. But the group starts talking and they're like, what could we do? These inner-city, East London people, they don't know anything about gardening, they decide to learn gardening. They get to teach themselves gardening, they start watching YouTube videos, they start reading books. And as we were talking about before, there's a lot of evidence exposure

to the natural world, even gardening doesn't have to be, you know, the desert or the beach or the rain or the park. Exactly. There's some evidence that lots of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a really powerful anti-depressant. There's something even more important to happen. They start to form a tribe. They start to form a group. They start to care about each other.

If one of them doesn't go up, show up. They go looking for him or her. And they did what we do when we're tribes as human beings. They started to solve each other's problems to give you an extreme example. It's just the most extreme examples, it's not typical, but one of the people in the group had been thrown out by his wife

and he was sleeping on the local bus at night, right? They were just drivers who let him sleep on it. They were like, everyone else was like, of course you're depressed. If you're sleeping on a bus, they started, they helped him to get a home, right? It was the first time they had done something for someone else in years and it made them feel really good. The way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom. There was a study in Norway, a very similar program that found it was more

than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants in moving people on the measure of depression, which is called the Hamilton scale. I think for a kind of obvious reason, right? It was dealing with some of the reasons why they were so depressed and anxious in the first place. And this is something I saw all over the world from San Francisco to Sydney to San Paolo. The most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons why we feel this way in the first place. And so that is something that a doctor could do.

And of course, an individual doctor listening to this constantly choose to do that. You have to have a choice within the system to do that. But it's much cheaper than drugging people, much cheaper cost almost nothing, much cheaper than drugging people, and actually the evidence shows more effective in a huge number of cases. So you end up with this question of, why don't we have a system built around those insights, right? So what we've done is, with mental health, we've basically taken the model from infectious disease. So, which by the way,

is a staggeringly successful and brilliant model that I admire more than I can say, right? So, individual disease, how it works, you identify a pathogen, let's say you've got a strep throat or something, and you treat that problem with medicine, right? That is amazingly effective. Think about smallpox.

Smallpox killed tens of millions of human beings. Through an amazing vaccination campaign, there hasn't been no human being since whatever it is the 1970s, who was even caught smallpox, right? So that model of infectious diseases is hugely successful. It has not worked that well when transferred to mental health, because mental health isn't like that, right? It's not worked that well when transferred to mental health because mental health isn't like that

Right, it's not based on just identifying a simplistic biological pathogen and getting rid of the biological pathogen There's these much more complex causes actually Far from being a kind of aberration These responses Things like depression and anxiety, while agony are meaningful, right? They're in fact meaningful signals. This is one of the key things, key reorientations that I made while working on lost connections.

I came to think, and this was a hard insight to come by because my memories of depression were so bad. But I think these crises, these rising crises, depression, anxiety, you and I are speaking a week after the Center for Disease Control announced that we now have the highest level of suicide in American history. And that doesn't include opioid related deaths, which are measured separately. So think about how big that crisis is. As the Sagan-Gastatin has done one of the best studies on this, we're professor Anke said, these are deaths of despair, right? The opioid deaths. What we've been doing up to now is we've been

taking these signals that people are sending us, that they are in terrible pain. And I think we've been insulting those signals, often with the best of intentions. We've been either saying these signals are signs of weakness, or that they're just a problem with people's brains. And how mysterious that the brains of the people in West Virginia just mysteriously malfunctioned so much more than the brains of the people on the faculty at Harvard.

And I think we need to stop insulting these signals and start listening to them because they're telling us something. I think if we had listened to these signals, if we had listened to the fact that it's recent, you know, 10, 15 years ago, we were at the point where almost a third of all middle age women in the United States were having to drug themselves to get through the day. If we had listened to that, I don't think we would have gotten to the terrible political situation we're in now, for example.

I certainly don't think we would have gotten to the terrible political situation we're in now, for example. I certainly don't think we would have got to the opioid crisis. If we've got all, why are so many people in such pain? How can we deal with it? Through a big program of deep reconnection, right? People need to be reconnected with meaning, they need to be reconnected with the people around them, they need to be reconnected with security of all kinds. Can I give you a specific example of a kind of policy?

Well, just curious because this is what you're talking about, as I said here, be reconnected with security of all kinds. I can give you a specific example of a kind of policy. Just curious because like this is what you're talking about, you know, as I sit here, it makes a lot of sense. It's a very powerful point that this should be looked at as a signal. But what you're calling for a big, I guess, society wide, I suppose, I suppose Paid for by the government program of Reconnection what what does that look like you have any optimism that actually happened outside of maybe Scandinavia? Yeah, I have a lot of optimism about this. I think a lot about So as everyone listening will have noticed this and he needs me to tell them the center of American politics has collapsed, right? What was regarded as the center?

I remember, as a woman I think about all the time, in the run up to the 2016 election, I was in Cleveland in Ohio, with a group of people who were trying to get out the boat. And there was this street in West Cleveland that we were going down, and a third of the houses were abandoned A third still had people living in them and a third had actually been demolished and there's this woman we knocked on her door

As woman I would have guessed by looking at her was 60. I discovered by talking to her that she was the same age as me. I was 37 at the time And she was quite articulate, extremely angry. And she made this, she said this thing that I thought about a lot. She was talking about what the area used to be like for her parents and grandparents how they left school when they were 16. They got good jobs. They had reasonable lives. And she meant to say when I was young, what she actually said is when I was alive. And it really knocked me back. She didn't even

notice she'd done it. I remember I was with this wonderful guy called Dave Fleischer, who's from the Los Angeles LGBT center and I remember me and Dave just kind of reeling back. And I thought, yeah, that's how a lot of people feel in this culture when I was alive. And they're not wrong. That's not some irrational spasm. She has been deprived of the things that make life meaningful through no thought of her own. She's right, gap between her grandparents, her decent lives in her. She didn't do anything to choose that, right? And one of the advantages of the political system where I'm sure people can guess what my politics are for listening to this, but one of the advantage... So I'd step back for that for another second. One of the disasters of what's been happening in the last few years is we have been responding to that woman

and many people like her by just saying, you're stupid and racist, right? And I think that's really, I think it's cruel to her. And I think it's deepening the problem, right? That woman is in a lot of pain for perfectly good reasons. Now I don't agree with the political option she wanted for all the reasons that are obvious and we don't need to talk about. But the political center collapsed because the system is not working. We've created a society that doesn't meet people's psychological needs right across the board. And I was stressed out, there are good things about the society, there's lots of good things. And it's why I'm here.

But if you create a society where people psychological needs are not met, that will manifest in all sorts of ways. Now, one of the good things about that situation is, if the house is on fire and all the alarms are going off, the case for change becomes easier to make, right? It's not like what's happening is most Americans are saying I think things are just great the way they are I like having less than $500 in the bank for if an emergency comes along Things are working out well for nobody who does me well exactly

It's not like you've got a situation where most people are satisfied in the case for radical change, sounds like some kooky, you know, thing coming from left field, right? Actually, most people are open to quite radical ideas about how we need to change the way we live. And actually, there's a broader degree of agreement across the left-right spectrum on a lot of things than people think, right? And that we can go through a whole range of them if you want, but let me give you a specific example of a specific policy that, I mean, for, and by the way, I want to stress, you talk about government spending, social prescribing, for example, which is a very powerful answer present, cost less than what we do now, right?

That it is cheaper to get people to do gardening programs than to drug them. Now, there are sectional interests who lose out in that. There's a $10 billion industry in getting that woman Lisa and people like her to take a pill and there's a $0 billion industry in getting her to go gardening. Maybe it's not $0 billion because there are some people make money out selling plants or whatever. I'm deep on me., but I'm deep, both doesn't have the same lobbying power as a black social myth client, right? The, I don't think that's, by the way, I want to stress, I don't think big farmers,

the only reason why we've gotten into this, and I'm happy to talk about the other, I think big farmers are relatively small part of how we end up in this kind of cul-de-sac. But, but, but, so let me give you an example of a specific thing, right? So having stress that some things are actually cheaper than what we're doing, this thing is more expensive than what we do now, but the very good evidence that it has a powerful, antidepressant effect, and I think it's worth doing for all sorts of reasons.

In the 1970s, the Canadian government chose a town, seemingly genuinely at random, which I think is kind of amazing. It's a town called Dwarf Inn in Manitoba, people who know it, it's about three hours at a Winnipeg. And they decided to do an experiment. They chose a really big group of people in Dwarf Inn and they said, from now on, we're going to give you a guaranteed basic income. There is nothing you have to do in return for it, and there's nothing you can do that means we're going to take it away unless you commit a crime or go to prison. We just want you to have a secure life. We want you to be happy.

You're a citizen of our country. And so they started giving them, it was the equivalent, if you were just for inflation and you translate it into US dollars, about 12,000 US dollars a year. So you're not going to live well on 12,000 dollars a year, but you're also not gonna become homeless, you're not gonna be so insecure that you're not gonna be able to eat or... And if you have a job, you can save

and get beyond the $500. Exactly, because you wanna stress this isn't like a top up, you get this whether you work or whether you don't. And this was monitored, a person who later calculated that, or the figures who were interviewed was a totally amazing person called Dr Evelyn Forgey. And they found many things, actually nobody gave up work, which I thought was interesting. Partly because it's not such a huge amount of money, but partly because people want to

work, right? Some people took slightly longer to look for jobs because they had the luxury that they could like hold out for a better job. Overall work standards improved because bosses knew people could leave, right? More, the only falling employment was some women spent longer studying and some younger people spent longer studying than they had before, which I saw obviously a positive thing for this assigning. The most interesting thing for the purposes of what we're talking about is, let's look at severe mental illness. Mental illness that was so bad that people had to be shut away in mental hospitals.

Even that fell by 9%. Right? That's pretty big fall. You won't find a drug that causes that level of fall, right? And of course, in some level, I feel like some of what I'm doing with this is giving people permission to know unbelievably obvious things. If you are really financially insecure, it turns out you're more likely to be depressed and anxious, right? And in some ways, if you'd asked my grandmother who was working class and really struggled her job was to clean toilets.

I had been diving when she was very young and he was very young. You know, my grandmother was a hard life. If I said to my grandmother, hey, do you think being financially insecure makes you more or less happy? She would have, you know, why are you asking me such a stupid question, she would have said, right? And I think a lot of the things I learn, not all of them,

but a lot of the things I learn, my grandmother would have regarded as really, and your grandmother, I suspect, would have regarded as really, really obvious, right? But, so if you think about that, that universal basic income program, Dr. Fouche said to really, really obvious, right? But, but so if you think about that, that universal basic income program, Dr. Fouche sent me studied it. That's an anti-depressant, right? And talking about, you know, and now that is expensive, but let's remember, this is a country where the as Bernie Sanders keeps pointing out, the three richest people in this country now have

more money than the bottom half of the country. Right? Now that is not a sensible distribution of wealth that anyone including Republicans, who are many, you know, many of them are very admirable people. That, I mean, ordinary Republican voters would not choose that, right? If we were starting from scratch and we were designing a society, I don't think most people would say you've got a seesaw. Let's put three people at one end

and make them even with the bottom 170 million people or whatever the figure is. So again, that is proven to be a very effective antidepressant. I think most people when they hear that, see why for obvious reasons. That's a big change. But everyone listening to this podcast has lived through big changes, right? It's easy to think, ah, you know,

this is all very nice, but nothing's ever gonna change. When people say that to me. Look what I have with gay marriage and how fast that moved. Well, that was not always gonna say. When people say it to me, I think about one of my closest friends, a wonderful person who lots of you will listen to this one. No, his work called Andrew Sullivan.

He's a great journalist. Yes, he is. I've a long wanted to have him on the show. Oh, you'd love to have. Yeah, I put you in touch them because he's, yeah, he would love to do it. So in 1994, Andrew was diagnosed as HIV positive, right? People will remember this is the height of the AIDS crisis. And there's no hope in sight.

People are dying all around. Andrew's best friend Patrick had just died of AIDS. And Andrew quit his job and he goes to a little town, Loggay Town and Cape Cod called Provinced Town to die. And he decides in Provinced Town he's going to do one last thing before he dies. He's going to write a book about a crazy utopian idea, an idea that no one's ever written a book about a crazy utopian idea, an idea that no one's ever written

a book about before. And he's like, look, I'm not going to live to see the server happen, no one alive now, whatever lived to see happen, but maybe somewhere down the line, someone will pick up this idea. The idea he wrote the first book to ever propose, ever proposing, was gay marriage. And when I get dispressed about the political situation, as I obviously, typically often at the moment, I try to imagine going back in time, you're saying to Andrew, okay, Andrew, you're not going to believe me, but what is it? 23, 24 years from now, A, you're going to be alive. That would have seemed inconceivable to him. B, you'll

be married to a man. They will have introduced that. See, I will be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States quotes from this book you're writing now, making it mandatory for every state in the United States to introduce gay marriage. And the next day, you will be invited to dinner with the president of the United States at a White House lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you and so many other people have achieved. Oh, and by the way, that president you're going to have dinner with, he's going to be black, right? Every aspect of that story would have sounded like ludicrous science fiction. It happened Andrews available to be a guest on your show, right? I can go and get married now, as a gay man.

Everyone listening to this program has lived through incredible changes in this attemptation to discount the positive change and only notice the negative, and people will have noticed there've been lots of negative changes of late. But that is a very disempowering story and not a truthful story.

I mean, I think about something as simple as the women listening don't need me to mansplain this to them, but my grandmothers, when they got married, weren't allowed to have bank accounts in their own names, right? They had to have a joint one with their husband. That's not that long ago, and in the scale of human history, that's like yesterday, right? Things that would be unthinkable to us now. If you explain to a 15-year-old girl, you can't have a bank account of your own when you grow up. They would have been, you know, I mean, they wouldn't understand how you were talking

about, right? Because we've had so much progress. So progress happens when people band together and fight for something better. And everyone listening to this program is much more powerful than they have been told they are. And one thing I really think we need to do is take all these indicators of distress, depression, anxiety, addiction and use them as fuel to fight for something better. Because if this pain is just pathologized, what can you do with that? If you're just told, yes, just problem in your brain, right? And you can drug yourself, but most people who drug themselves will become depressed. Again, you'll get some relief. But where can you go with that, right?

But apart from the fact that it's only a very limited part of the truth, right? It's real. There are real things that happen in your brain, of course, and I write about them in lost connections. But, you know, can I just tell you about... I was taught so much for this book by so many scientists and doctors, but the people who taught me the most were not scientists and doctors. It was a particular place.

Can I tell you what happened there? Because in the summer of 2011, on a big anonymous housing project in Berlin, a woman called Nuria Chenghis climbed out of her wheelchair and put a sign in her window. She lived on the ground floor and the sign said something like, I got a notice saying I'm going to be evicted from my apartment next Thursday night, so on Wednesday night I'm going to kill myself. Now, like a lot of housing projects in the United States, this is a big, anonymous, slightly scary place.

It's called Kotty. No one knew anyone. It's actually kind of weird area. It's a poor neighborhood where there are only three kinds of people who really live there. There were recent Muslim immigrants like this woman, Nuria. There were gay men and there were punk squatters. And as you can imagine, these three groups don't want to get to know each other. No one really knew anyone.

So people are walking past Nuria's window. They see this sign. Lots of people are concerned, they knock on her door, they say, do you need anything. Nuri said, screw you, I don't want any help, I'm going to kill myself. She shut the door in their faces. People start talking outside her apartment, people who've never met. And one of them had an idea, you might remember this is the summer of Tyra Square, the uprising in Egypt. One of them had seen it on the news, and suddenly had this idea.

And lots of the people who live in Coty were pissed off because their rents were going up and up and up and up as well. And lots of people were being evicted. This was very personal to them. And one of them had an idea. There's a big thoroughfare that goes through the centre of Coty into the centre of Berlin.

And one of them said, you know, if we just blocked the road for a day, and we protest, the media will probably come, there'll be a bit of a fuss about Nuria's story, there might even be some pressure to keep our rents down, why don't we try it. So the Saturday came and they blocked the road, and loads of the residents of Coty protest, and Nuria was like, I'm going to kill myself, I might as well let them wheel me

into the middle of the street, she's wheel me into the middle of the street. She's wheeled into the middle of the street and they protest that day. And the media do come and it's a bit of a fuss and Nuria gives these slightly bemused interviews. And it gets to the end of the day and the police say, okay, you've had your fun, take it down.

But the people in Cotty knew, well, hang on a minute. You haven't told Nuriye she gets to stay. Actually, we want a rent freeze for our entire housing project. When we've got those guarantees, then we'll take this down. But of course, they knew the minute they left this little makeshift barricade they'd built, the police would just tear it down and that would be that. So one of my favorite people at Cot, a woman called Tanya Gartner.

Tanya, she's one of the punk squatters. She wears tiny little mini skirts, even in Berlin winters. Tanya is quite hardcore. She had this idea. She goes up to her apartment, she comes down, she brought a claxon, you know, there's things that make loud noises at soccer matches.

And she said, okay, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna drop a timetable to man this barricade. We're gonna man it 24 hours a day until we get what we want. If the police come to take it down before we got what we want, let off this claxon, we'll all come down from our apartment and some will stop them. So people started signing up to man this barricade.

People who had never met would never have met. Very unlikely pairings. So Tanya, in her tiny little mini skirt, was paired with Nuria, who's a very religious Muslim in a full-hage ab. And they get one of the night shifts. I think it was Wednesday night. And they're sitting there, and they're like,

this is super awkward. We got nothing to talk about. We couldn't be more different. And the first few nights, they're there, they're like, this is embarrassing. As the nights go on, they start to talking. Tanya and Nuria discovered they had something incredibly powerful in common. Nuria had come to Berlin when she was 16 from her village in Turkey with two young children. And she was meant to raise enough money to

send back home for her husband who's in Turkey so he could come and join her. After she'd been in Berlin for 18 months, she got word from home that her husband was dead. She'd always told people he died of a heart attack, sitting there in the cold in Kotti with Tanya, she told something, she told her something she'd never told anyone in Germany, actually her husband had died of tuberculosis which had been seen as a kind of shameful disease of poverty, Nuria had never told anyone. That's when Tanya started to talk about something

she rarely talked about. She had come to Cotty when she was 15. She'd been thrown out by her middle class family. She'd come to Cotty and she started living in one of the squats there, the punk squats. And quite quickly after she arrived, she got pregnant. They realized they had both been children with children of their own in this place they had been quite afraid of. They realized they were incredibly similar. These pairings were happening all over

Coty. Directly opposite this housing project, there's a gay club called Zublock. It's a pretty uncompromising gay club and it opened about a year before the protests began and as you can imagine, there's a lot of very religious Muslims in this neighborhood. Some people have been really appalled. They'd actually smashed the windows. It'd been pretty bad. And when the protests began, the people who worked in the club there gave all their furniture. They started helping.

And after the protests, they'd been going on for about three months. The people at the club were like, you should have all your meetings in our club. We'll give you free drink. We'll give you free food. We want you to win. And even the kind of left-wing people at Kotie were like, we're not going to get these very religious Muslims to come and have meetings underneath posters for things that are so obscene.

I can't even mention them on your podcast, right? It did start to happen. As one of the Turkish German women there said to me, we all realized we had to take these small steps to understand each other. After the protest to be going on for a full year, and this blockage they'd built was a permanent structure with a roof, a really nice structure,

one day, a guy turned up at the protest called Tung Kai, who was in his early 50s, and he'd been living homeless. And it's clear when you meet Tung Kai, he's got some kind of cognitive difficulties. But he also has an amazing energy about him. He's really affirming and lovely. And everyone liked him. And after he'd been hanging around for about a week and people there clocked that he was homeless, they were like, you should come and live in this thing we've built.

We don't want you to be homeless. So Tung Kai started to live there and he became a much loved part of the, the, the Cotty protest. And after Tung Kai had been around for about, I think it was nine months. One day, the police came to inspect, they would do this every now and then. And Tunkai doesn't like it when people argue. He thought the police were arguing, so he went to try to hug one of the police officers, but they thought he was attacking them. So they arrested him. That was when it was

discovered. Tonkai had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital for 20 years, often literally in a padded cell. He'd escaped one day, he'd been on the streets for a few months and he found his way to Koti. So the police took him back to the psychiatric hospital who shut him away again. At which point, the entire Koti protest

turned into a kind of free Ton tongue-high movement, right? They descend on this psychiatric hospital at the other end of Berlin. And these psychiatrists are like, what is this? They've got this person they've had shut away for 20 years. And then suddenly, they've got these women in their jabs, these very camp gay men, and these punks demanding his release.

They're like, who are you? And I remember Uly Hartman, one of the protestors later told me that Women in his jabs, these very camp gay men and these punks demanding his release. They're like, who are you? And I remember Uly Hartman, one of the protesters later told me that he should have said to the psychiatrist, you know, you don't love him. He doesn't belong with you. We love him. He belongs with us.

And I remember in Kotty thinking, how many of us, if someone carried us away to a psychiatric hospital, would have so many people turning up and saying, no, we love this person. We want to look after this person, not you. So many things happened at Kotty. They got Tonkai back. He lives there still. They got a rent freeze for their entire housing project. They

then launched a referendum initiative to keep rents down across the whole city. They got the largest number of written signatures in the long history of the city of Berlin. But I remember the last time I saw Nuria. She said to me, look, I'm really glad I got to stay in my neighborhood. That's great. I Gamed so much more than that. I was surrounded by these incredible people all along and I would never have known I'm I'm speaking to one of the other Turkish German women there Naremen Tanker Who who who said to me? You know when I grew up in Turkey I grew up in a village and I called my whole village home

And then I came to live in the Western world and in a village and I called my whole village home. And I came to live in the Western world and I learned that what you're meant to call home here is just your four walls. And then this whole protest began and I started to call all these people in this whole place my home. And she said she realized in some sense in this culture we are homeless. The Bosnian writer, the brilliant Bosnion, Bosnian writer, Alexander Heyman said, home is where people notice when you're not there. By that

standard, they were homeless before and they were not homeless afterwards. And I realized many of us in this culture are either homeless or have a sense of homeless is so small it doesn't meet our needs for belonging. And I remember it was really in caughti. I think they think I'm slightly insane because I would just turn up every few months and just be so moved. I would just cry. I remember one time Sandy, one of the people they're just saying to me, Yo Han, I think maybe you have allergies because

my eyes get watering so much. But they're it was so clear to me in caughti what these scientists have been teaching me. These people didn't need to be drugged in the main. They needed to be together. They needed to be seen and loved and valued. They needed to have meaning in their lives. They needed a tribe. They needed security.

And I kept thinking about how, I mean think about how unhappy these people have been before Nuria was literally about to kill herself. Tonkai was shot away in a literally in a padded cell and loads of these people were depressed and anxious and I remember sitting with Tanya one day outside the block this gay club and her saying to me, you know, when you feel like crap and you're all alone, shut away in your home, 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, that was of all the insights

I learned. That was the most important. I think you can tell, I love these people in Koti, but I have to tell you, they are not exceptional. These are randomly selected people. This hunger for reconnection, this capacity for such kindness and goodness is all around us everywhere. It needs to be activated. This is deep in our nature to form tribes to look after each other, to care about people who are sad, to build a sense of meaning together. This is longing to build a sense of home in this homeless, atomized society where we've been taught such sick ideas, like life is about buying things, showing them off and displaying them on Instagram. This hunger is just beneath the surface everywhere.

The book is called Lost Connections because we've lost these connections, but they are waiting for us to pick them up, right? And they're not hard to find. This is not like explaining quantum physics to people, not that I could do that, but if I could, you know, it's not like explaining complex math again. Another thing I definitely couldn't explain, these are insights that are deep in our nature that we all feel them at some level and we feel the lack of them deeply at this moment, but it doesn't have to be like that, right? We can follow the example of the people in Coty, Nuria sends out this distress signal and people came to her. I think you've

explained it beautifully and I think on that rousing note we can we can probably close it out. Very beautiful. You've given me a lot to think about it. I suspect our audience members. I'll thank you on their behalf because I believe they'll be quite moved. Thanks, Tom. Before we fully close it out, and I should point out that if people are hearing emotion in your voice, it shows on your face as well. That story clearly means a lot to you. Can you, I do this little thing that I kind of jokingly refer to as the plug zone at the end of the joke. Can you, can you just, I think I suspect by this point people really want to know how

they can learn more about you. Can you give us again the names of your books? Yeah. This is for your public. Where we can find you on social media. Any other thing that you think we should go look at? Yeah, and they gave me a little script that I meant to read literally, it's like the perfect expression of Jug values. I went to go like, if you'd like to know what, a

range of people from Elton John to Hillary Clinton, to Oprah, to Blah Blah Blah, have said about the book, you can go to, so if you want to know where you can get my book about depression, the physical book, or the audio book, you go to www.TheLostConnections.com. If you want to know where you can get my book about depression, the physical book, or the audio book, you go to www.TheLostConnections.com. If you want to know about my book about addiction, which obviously related to a lot of the themes that we've talked about, it's www.ChasingTheScream as in AaaaScream.com. You can also listen on those, you can take a quiz on those websites to see how much you know about depression anxiety addiction You can also

Listen to audio of loads of the people or in fact all of the people I Interviewed who we we've talked about and hear them say loads more really interesting things and you can see where to follow me on loads of social media can see where to follow me on loads of social media. Um, I had this funny experience where at the end of an interview, a while back, they said to me, you know, what's your Twitter, what's your Facebook blah blah. And they said, what's your Snapchat? And I was like, I am a 40 year old man. Right.

I will go a long way to get my message out, but I'm not joining Snapchat, right? I have a limit. So yeah, I'll do anything for love, but I won't do that. Exactly. Meatloaf. If Meatloaf had known about Snapchat, the song would be even more impassioned than it is now, right? Well, speaking of passion, I appreciate yours.

Thank you so much, Dan. I really admire your work, and I'm really thrilled to be here. Thank you. Great job. All right, thank you. Okay, thanks again to Johann Hari, time now for Voice Males. Here's number one. Hey, Dan.

This is Jeff from Balakin, one Pennsylvania. I'm just calling because I wanted to talk a little bit more about transcendental meditation. I've been listening to your podcast for about two months now and really just playing catch-up with the available episodes. And I feel like many people talk about developing a mantra to help them stay focused during meditation. I've only very recently gotten into meditation. I probably practice about three minutes every morning just focusing on my breath.

But I feel like if I had a mantra to focus on, I might be able to better weed out that monkey mind that comes up so frequently with me. So I'm just wondering if developing a mantra is something that is available to me being that I haven't been to a retreat or anything like that, I did do a little bit of research and I saw some modern day ones that were available online, but I do know that a mantra should also be kind of specific to the individual.

So I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on that and how I can go about identifying one that's personal for myself that I can use regularly throughout my practice. So thanks so much. I love your podcast. You're doing what you're doing. Thank you so much to say so much to you.

You said a lot there, so I want to unpack it. Step by step. First of all, if you're interested in TM or Transcendental Meditation, I think the root there is to go to your local TM center if you have one and do the training, I believe it's four days. We had on the show one of the leading experts in TM Bob Roth who teaches a lot of celebrities how to do it and he really goes, if you want to go back and listen to that, episode he talks a lot about the training for TM,

they don't discuss it super granularly in public because it is something you have to pay for. Although they also, through the David Lynch Foundation, give away a lot of the training to certain groups of people as well. So I would investigate that if you're specifically interested in trans-adetal meditation, they do believe that a mantra you need to be, you know,

transmitted your mantra, your individual mantra they say by your teacher. However, trans-adetal meditation is derived from Hinduism, as I understand it it and is part of what's known as Vedic meditation, which is a kind of meditation, a set of meditation techniques, one of which is using a mantra. And you can use a mantra outside of the formal TM system that doesn't need to be transmitted to you through a TM teacher. And if you don't want to pay whatever it is, I think like 900 bucks or something like that, you can go to a regular Vedic meditation teacher. They're just doing some Googling, you might find one in your neighborhood. They may charge less or you can just read the book, The Relaxation

Response by Herbert Benson, who's a Harvard physician, who did some studies, I think in the 80s or 70s, into Transcendental Meditation and wrote them. What was at the time a mega bestselling book about mantra meditation, and he says you can just use any word you want, like one or piece or something like that. That was actually one of the first books I read about meditation, because it was recommended by my shrink, my psychiatrist. So there's that. So that's what we've got two options on the table, and I'm gonna give you a third.

The first option is go formally, sign up for a TM. The other, a TM class, the other is, just read Benson's book or find a Vedic meditation teacher, and you don't have to pay as much as you might have to do for TM, although I have to say, I don't have anything against TM. A lot of my colleagues here at ABC News signed up for that and have gotten a lot out of it.

You can hear past podcasts with people like George Stephanopoulos and Robin Roberts, who've gotten a lot out of TM. But the third suggestion I have is somebody who's not personally a TM practitioner, but instead a practitioner of Buddhist meditation or mindfulness meditation, is that you can do meditation where you just watch your breath but add in a little mental note. And that can serve, I think, to, and I use a little mental note when I am

meditating as a way to, I think you said before, sort of quiet the monkey mind a little bit to keep me focused on what I want to be focused on, which is the breath often. And so it's the skillful use of thinking to connect you to your object of meditation. In this case, as you said, a couple of minutes of trying to watch your breath coming in and going out. So how would this work? So as you're sitting there and you're feeling your breath, your abdomen rise and fall

or you're feeling the air coming through your nostrils or out and out, you might just use a soft mental note of in and out or rising, rising, falling, falling, if you're at the abdomen. And that can, and then of course when you get distracted, which you will a million times, you just notice you've become distracted and you go back to the breath. And I found that this mental note, mental noting, really helps me stay focused. And so it would alleviate the need for you to go out and get yourself a mantra, and you could just do what I'm suggesting here and see if it works for you. I would say, as some guy named the Buddha used to say, check it

out for yourself. Don't take it on faith just because I'm saying it or the Buddha said it, just see if it works for you in your practice. So maybe start with that and if that doesn't work for you then go take a look at the mantra situation. Hope that helped. Here's Voice Mail number two. Hey Dan, it's Tim from Narrogans. First, let me say thanks, I've been developing my practice since reading your 10% book a few years ago. Very helpful. I find myself in stressful work situations, practicing and trying to be mindful, but I also

worry that I get stuck and I'm not quite on the edge in terms of execution. So in brief, how do I go from mindfulness to execution in a rather high-based environment with a lot of life? Thanks so much. Thank you, Tim. I assume that's an air-gantz at Rhode Island. I used to go there in high school with my buddies and misbehave. So yeah, shout out to air-gantz at. And thank you for calling in, I appreciate it.

If I understand your question correctly, you're saying you're practicing mindfulness, but you're in a stressful work environment and you're not off, you're sometimes caught up in your emotions and you're not always able to be mindful. So, I would say that sounds like you're just a normal human being and welcome to the world of 10% improvement.

Don't expect even once you understand mindfulness both in theory and in practice that you're going to be able to ride every difficult emotion and not get caught up and not maybe act in ways that you later regret. That's just based on my experience of having meditated for about 10 years now, it's just not on the menu, that kind of perfection. Maybe if you're the LeBron James of meditation and you're on the short track to full enlightenment, you could expect that, but I don't think

for most of us mortals, it's, as I said, on the menu. The goal really is to look at this as something that you're going to be able to put into practice, the mindfulness of a difficult emotion and the ability to ride it, to let it pass and not act on it, that you're going to be able to put that into practice, say 10% of the time, maybe 2% of the time. But that over time, as you get better both at your formal meditation practice and at taking that formal meditation practice out into the world, you will improve. And that's what we're talking about here. As I, you know, I've said before, if I, you know, a lot of people beat up on themselves and myself included, I spent a lot of time beating up on myself about the quality of my meditation practice,

both on the cushion and out in the world. But the fact of the matter is this is a skill, and if I, as I've said this before, if I hand you a flute right now, and if you've never played flute before, you're not going to be able to bang out a Jethro Tull solo. That's just not how skills, especially complex skills work. It takes hours and hours and hours of training. So give yourself a break. I assume you are doing way better than you did before. And I assume if I check back with you in six months,

12 months, 18 months, if you carry on practicing, you will be doing better than you are doing now. And that's how the game goes. So I would say just keep on practicing and look at these opportunities, look at the moments where you quote unquote fail in bringing your mindfulness into really difficult situations as opportunities to learn. Just the way you look at moments when you quote unquote fail at meditation on the cushion like when you get distracted as just an opportunity to start again. That's how it goes here.

Thank you Tim, appreciate it, and thank you everybody for listening. I really do appreciate everybody listening, and I want to thank, of course, the folks who make this podcast possible, Ryan Kessler, Samuel Jones, Grace Livingston, many, many others. Again, don't forget to vote for us for the webbies. If you are so inclined, check out 10%happier.com, go to the top and click the link and go vote for us. It'll take 30 seconds. While you're at it, while you're doing me a favor,

if you haven't, rate us, review us, talk about us on social media, that always really helps. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early I'll see you next Wednesday. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.