The One You Feed - Johann Hari on Lost Connections

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

Johann Hari is the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream, which has been adapted into a feature film. Johann was twice named ‘National Newspaper Journalist of the Year’ by Amnesty International UK He has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. His latest book is Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions, In this episode, Johann and Eric discuss his book that proposes a more holistic, societal look at the causes and treatment of depression.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Johann Hari and I Discuss Lost Connections and …His new book, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected SolutionsThe two kinds of human connectionIntrinsic (internal) and extrinsic (external) motivations“Junk” valuesThe more you’re driven by extrinsic values, the more likely you’ll suffer from anxiety and depression in your lifeOur society drives us to live in this extrinsic wayThe whole point of advertising is to make us feel inadequate and our problems can be solved by buyingExtrinsic motives can crowd out the more fulfilling intrinsic motivesThe 9 causes of depression and anxietyThe need to look more holistically at anxiety and depression than just a chemical imbalanceThe loneliest culture that has ever beenThe importance of addressing the deep environmental factors/reasons why we’re so depressed and anxiousOur sense of home and sense of belongingThe problems manifested by being isolated and alone and the benefit of being part of a “tribe”Realizing that you’re not the only one who struggles and feels the way you doGrief and the diagnosis of depressionJust having a chemical imbalance means your pain doesn’t have meaningDepression and not having your needs metFollowing the pain to its sourcePathologizing DepressionJohann Hari Links:Johann’s WebsiteTwitterInstagramFacebookTalkspace is the online therapy company that lets you connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time at a fraction of the cost of traditional therapy. It’s therapy on demand. Visit www.talkspace.com or download the app and enter Promo Code: WOLF to get $100 off your first month.Calm App: The app designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life through meditations and sleep stories. Join the 85 million people around the world who use Calm to get better sleep. Get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription (a limited time offer!) by going to www.calm.com/wolfIf you enjoyed this conversation with Johann Hari, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Johann Hari (2015)Recovering from Depression with Brent WilliansSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In case you're just recently joining us, or however long you've been a listener of the show, you may not realize that we have over seven years of incredible episodes in our archive. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to handpick one of our favorites that may be new to you, but if not, it's definitely worth another listen. We hope you'll enjoy this episode with Johan Hari. More 18-month-old children recognize the McDonald's M than know their own last name. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true.

And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,

how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Johan Hari, and this is his second time on the One You Feed podcast. He's the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream, which has been adapted into a feature film. Johan was twice named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International UK. He's written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others. And he's a regular panelist on HBO's Real Time with

Bill Maher, which is a show I love. His new book is Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions. Hi, Johan. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. It's really good to be back with you. I should just preemptively apologize to your listeners that I'm trying to give up caffeine and failing. Basically, I would ideally have caffeine running into my veins on an IV drip 24-7. So if I seem a little bit lower energy the last time you spoke to me, that is the reason. It's not that I'm slowly lapsing into a coma or something. Wonderful. Well, we're thrilled to have you back. We had you on to discuss your book, Chasing the Scream, and I loved the book and the conversation. And now we're here to talk about your new book,

Lost Connections, uncovering the real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions. And we'll jump into that in a second, but let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start us off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. You know, it's so interesting because I think I think about this parable differently now than I did when we spoke, I guess, three years ago, because it's something I learned in the research for my book. So everyone listening to the show knows that junk food has kind of taken

over our diets and made us physically sick, right? I say this with no sense of superiority as someone who basically lived on KFC for like 10 years in my 20s. But what's interesting is there's equally strong evidence that a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. For thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money and status and how you look to other people, you're going to feel terrible, right? From Confucius to Plato, right on down, right on up. But interestingly, no one had actually scientifically studied this question until an incredible man I got to know called Professor Tim Kasser, who's at Knox College in Illinois, who did this really interesting and important research. So it had already been established before Professor Kasser that there are basically two kinds of human motivation, right? Put it crudely. Imagine you play the piano.

motivation right put it crudely imagine you play the piano if you play the piano in the morning because you love it and it gives you joy that's an intrinsic reason to play the piano you're not doing it to get anything out of it you're doing it because that experience is the experience you want to have okay now imagine you play the piano you know because your parents are really pressuring you to be a piano maestro or in a dive bar that you can't stand to make the rent or to impress a woman. I don't know, maybe there's some piano fetishist out there, right? That would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano, right? You're not doing it for the thing itself. You're doing it to get something out of it, right?

Something external. Something external to the experience. Now, obviously, we're all a mixture of internal and external motivations. But Professor Kasser showed a few really interesting things. One is, as a culture, we have become much more driven by these external, what I think of as junk values. You can see, I mean, he gives lots of evidence, but even something as trivial as, you know, go to a music concert now, and you'll notice about half the people will just spend the whole time not being present at the concert, but just filming it on their phones. A video they will never watch, right? Because if you want to watch Beyonce, there's great clips on YouTube. Why are they doing that? They're doing

that to display that they're having the experience in order to be envied by other people. Rather than having the experience, they're externally displaying that they're having the experience and suppress the castle showed firstly that we've all become much more driven by these external values and secondly and i think really importantly um the more you are driven by these external values these junk values the more you're driven by how you look to other people how much money you've got your status the more you will become depressed and anxious. It's a quite powerful effect. It's been shown in over two dozen studies now. And I think it relates to the parable on which your show is built in a really interesting way, because I think of it not so much in terms of individuals, but as a culture, as a society, what have we chosen to feed, right? And you can see there's an interesting little experiment that was done in the the late

70s uh it's a really simple experiment you take a bunch of five-year-olds and you split them into two groups the first group is shown two advertisements for a specific toy whatever the equivalent like pepper pig was in 1978 i can't remember what it was. Pepper Pig. That must be an English thing. I've never heard of Pepper Pig. Or like Dora the Explorer or whatever. All the kids in my life are slightly too old now for me to know to date with these reference Tally Tubbies, whatever.

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

got the toy. What does that tell you? Just two advertisements primed these kids to choose an inanimate lump of plastic over the possibility of kindness and connection. Everyone listening to your show has seen more than two advertisements today, right? I mean, we're so immersed in this machinery from the moment we're born that feeds the extrinsic parts of us, that tells us the way to be happy is to buy stuff, to consume. More 18-month-old children recognize the McDonald's M than know their own last name. That's how deeply we're immersed in this machinery. And as Professor Kasser put it to me, we're raised from the moment we're born in a machinery that's designed to get us to neglect what's good about life, right? That's designed to get us to live in this extrinsic, hollow way, driven by these junk values. So, in a sense, I'm interested in, obviously, there's a degree to which individuals make some choices within this system and we can choose what to feed or not to feed but to me what's more interesting is how did we build and why maintain

this machinery that feeds the worst parts of us that's designed you know the whole point of advertising is to make us feel inadequate right that's that's what it's designed to do until you buy the product and then it's got to be very careful you've got to quite quickly fill inadequate again right i think a lot about you know where i grew up um you know kind of normal suburb of london you know there's a couple i know who live there still who are people i love people close to me and i go see them they live so purely by these values these these consumerist values so they work really hard to buy this stuff that they see in advertisements and they display it on instagram and on facebook and people comment going omg so jealous and then they're puzzled that they don't feel good and they think oh it's just

i didn't buy the right thing so they work even harder they buy another junk thing they don't need and they display that and they're constantly puzzled by their own despair, their own pain, because although they don't put it quite like this, there's an implicit sense in them, well, I'm doing everything I'm meant to do, right? Why do I feel so bad? There's this sense, I'm doing everything I'm meant to do. Why do I feel so bad? And so that was the kind of first thing that came to mind in a very long

answer in response to the parable you read. Yeah, well, I really identified with that section of the book about junk values. And I also related with, you know, later in the book, you sort of reference back to that and you say, you know what, I've been told how bad these are for us, I understand it, I've done all the research, and yet I feel pulled by them. And I just find that to be so true in my case. It's really the reason that I try and stay away from any sort of commercial TV, because I fall prey to, in a very subtle way, it's not like I suddenly am like, well, I need that Budweiser, right? But what I start to think is what's important is how do I look? How does my girlfriend

look? You know, am I on a beach? Am I, you know, I just suddenly internalize those things in a very stronger way than I would think. And I just kind of noticed it about myself. And I really register with what you're saying with that. That's so true what you're saying, Eric, because before advertising sells us any particular product, it sells us the idea that your problems can be solved through buying, right? That's the kind of under message. And you can see how that often sold in this kind of self-affirmation, you know, even our shampoo bottles tell us you're

worth it right so you can see how this happens there's an absolutely implicit approach to life embedded and as professor caster says our motivation is fragile right we all have intrinsic motives and we all have extrinsic junk motives and of of course you need both, right? Of course. But he said very easily, extrinsic motives can crowd out the more meaningful motives. And it sounds strange because on one level, it's banal. It's a cliche to say, look, no one listening to your show is going to lie on their deathbed and think about all the things they bought, right? They will think about moments of meaning and connection, but we are immersed in a propaganda system that is designed to get us to neglect that insight. And it's not the only thing that's going on, but this is one of the reasons why we have a

depression and anxiety epidemic. And Professor Kasser, along with an academic called Jill Twenge, And Professor Kasser, along with an academic called Jill Twenge, showed that the amount of GDP in the US that is spent on advertising correlates with teenage anxiety. So as GDP spending on advertising goes up, teenage anxiety goes up. As it goes down, teenage anxiety goes down. Now, I want to be clear, this is one of many causes of depression and anxiety I write about in the book. But I do think it's an important one. I mean, actually, there's lots of things in the book that are relevant to the parable you tell, but that's just one thing. So, let's back up a little bit to the idea of the book, and then I want to talk about depression in general, because your book is basically saying that, you know what,

a lot of us have been sold a story that says the reason we're depressed is because there's something chemically wrong in our brain. And so the primary thing that a lot of people are given is an antidepressant for that. that by and large, the biggest contributor to our depression are these nine different causes that you name, and that our brains and our genes and the chemicals are a small part of that, or even to put it slightly different, the horse has already left the barn with these other causes, right? And then the chemical changes come along with that. And I really want to explore that because that did a couple things to me. One is I agree with so much of it wholeheartedly, and I fought with it all through the book. And I think you did too. And I think that's interesting because like you, I have been on antidepressants for a long time. I'm in the process of weaning off of some right now,

but I would say by and large, I think they have been a positive thing for me. And so, right out of the gate, I want to make sure that we say this, because I know you say it too. This is not a conversation that is telling anybody, no matter what the rest of what you hear is, that you should get off your medicine, that medicine is bad, any of that. That's not what we're going to be saying. What we're going to be saying is we need to look more holistically at depression and anxiety and not have all the focus on that one little thing. And then people can draw their own conclusions. But a lot of the criticism I've seen about your book is people who think that's what you're saying. And I agree with you.

You are in no way saying that. But I just want to be really clear with it up front with our audience. No, no, I think that's true. And to be fair to the people who say that, they do admit they haven't read the book. So, yeah. But I think to go to the wider thing, the wider question, which is really important. So there were these two mysteries that were really haunting me that made me write this book. But I think to go to the wider thing, the wider question which is really important. So there were these two mysteries that were really haunting me that made me write this book.

And actually, it's a sign of how, like you say, how much I struggled with this, how afraid I was to write this, to go and investigate this. That actually, I wanted to write this book seven years ago. And I started, in fact, started writing it three and a half years ago. and I started, in fact, started writing it three and a half years ago. And the reason why is I figured it would be easier for me to write a book about the war on drugs that required me to go and spend time with hitmen for the Mexican drug cartels than it would be to look into this story about my own depression. That's how afraid I was of it. And so there were these two mysteries that were really hanging over me. The first was, I'm 39 years old. Every single year that I've been alive, depression and anxiety has increased in the United States and across most of the developed world. And I wanted to understand why, what's going on here, right? And the second thing is,

as you alluded to before, when I was a teenager, I went to my doctor, I explained that I had this feeling like pain was kind of bleeding out of me and I couldn't control it or regulate it and my doctor told me a story that I now know did not match the best science then and does not match the best science now he said we know why people feel this way there's a chemical called serotonin in people's brains makes them feel good some people are naturally lacking it you're clearly one of them all we need to do is give you this drug in my case it was um it's called paxil in the united states and you'll be all right so i started taking paxil and i experienced

a really significant boost in my mood my depression went away a couple of months later maybe three three months later i started to feel the sense of pain coming back. I went back to my doctor. He said, I didn't give you a high enough dose. He gave me a high dose. Again, I felt a significant boost. Again, this feeling of pain came back and I was really in this cycle until I was taking the maximum possible dose that you're legally allowed to take for 13 years, the end of which I was still depressed and I was experiencing all sorts of horrible side effects. And what happened to me fit into this wider picture. So I went on this long journey for the book.

I traveled over 40,000 miles. I wanted to meet the leading experts in the world about what causes depression and anxiety and what's awesome. And also just people with very different perspectives from an Amish village in Indiana, because the Amish have very low levels of depression, to a city in Brazil where they banned advertising to see if that would make people feel better, to a lab in Baltimore where they're giving people psilocybin, the active component in magic mushrooms, to see if that would help. And I think, as you said, that obviously I learned a huge number of things, but to me, the kind of core of it is, until I went to my doctor when I was a teenager, I thought my depression was all in my head,

meaning I was just weak, I needed to man up. And then for the next 13 years, I thought my causes of my depression were all in my head, meaning it was a chemical imbalance in my brain. But what I learned is there's scientific evidence for nine causes of depression and anxiety. Two of them are indeed biological. They're very real and they're important to talk about. They're your genes and there are real changes in your brain that happen. I don't think they should be described as a chemical imbalance for reasons we can talk about. But are your genes and there are real changes in your brain that happen. I don't think they should be described as a chemical imbalance for reasons we can talk about. But the other seven causes are not in our heads. They're actually factors in the way we live. And once you understand them, that opens up very different kinds of antidepressants that are about solving

those problems. We should be offered alongside, not instead of, alongside chemical antidepressants as a way of radically expanding the menu of options and expanding our understanding of what's happening to us I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallyn, really. Yeah. No, really. Go to really, no, really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no, really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to talk about how I've dealt with depression because in some ways it is spot on with what you do. And in one other way, it is very, very different. And I just think it's an interesting conversation. So I have long believed that taking a pill for depression like I need to do to treat depression in my life.

And it's interesting because they line up very much in some ways with your different causes and reconnections. I just sort of stumbled into them over time. I've got like a list of about 12 or 15 things that I keep track of every day. Now, I don't do all 12 or 15 every day. My goal is just to do a good number of them consistently. And I know that that really, really makes the difference in whether I'm depressed or not. So on one hand, totally on board. And, you know, I'm a living proof that trying to work with these causes makes a big difference. So that's where total alignment. And then there's this other way that I deal with it, which is very, very different. And that is that when I inevitably feel like I hit a cycle of feeling a little bit more depressed. So it almost feels physical to me. It almost just

feels like I just can feel it come on. And I'm not really interested in anything, the things that I normally love, I don't care about, you know, I can't think of a book to read, I can't think of a song to listen to. And so what I've learned to do over time with that is almost the exact opposite of look for causes. I've come to treat that and I don't I'm not saying this is right by any stretch. I'm just talking about kind of what I've done. And I've talked about this on the show, that in those moments where it feels like a brief sort of cycle through something, I've learned to treat it like having a cold. And what I've done is I've just sort of said, you know what, let me make sure I'm doing the things that are on my list.

Let me make sure I'm doing the things that I know help my depression. And then what I'm not going to do is fall into an existential crisis let me you know let me make sure i'm doing the things that i know help my depression and then what i'm not going to do is fall into an existential crisis about whether the direction of my life is correct or all of that because of a small cycle of depression so on one hand i treat it very actively and on the other hand so i would say i treat the thing as a whole very aggressively and very actively and And then I treat individual incidents, which are usually a couple days, almost exactly the opposite by going, you know what, I'm not going to make a big fuss out of this. It comes, it goes,

not a big deal. I'm not going to examine all of my life. And I just think it's interesting that I've kind of ended up in that spot with it after having worked with it for so many years. That's a really interesting and eloquent way of putting it. I think that's exactly right about when you change the wider framework, there will still, of course, be fluctuations and how you cope with this. It makes me think about one of the causes and one of the solutions that I write about in Lost Connections. So we are the loneliest culture there has ever been. that I write about in Lost Connections. So we are the loneliest culture there has ever been. You know, there's a study that asks Americans, how many close friends do you have who you can call on in a crisis? And when they started doing the study years ago, the most common answer was

five. Today, the most common answer is none. There are more Americans who have nobody to turn to than any other option when things go wrong. I was thinking about this a lot in the last few weeks because one of the people who taught me so much about this, an amazing man called Professor John Cassioppo at the University of Chicago, sadly just died. He wasn't an old man. It's a terrible loss. He was the leading expert in the world on loneliness.

Professor Cassioppo proved a few really important things. One of them was for a human being, being acutely lonely is as stressful. It releases as much of the stress hormone cortisol as being punched in the face by a stranger and a lot of his work was about why why is that what's going on there and he said to me you know why do we exist one of the reasons that you and i are able to have this conversation eric is because our ancestors on the savannas of af Africa were really good at one thing they weren't bigger than the animals they took down in a lot of cases they often weren't faster than the animals they took down but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating and

just like bees evolved to need a hive humans evolved to need a tribe and if you think about those circumstances if you were separated from the tribe in the circumstances where we evolved you were depressed and anxious for a really good reason right you were flooded with stress for a reason you're about to die probably it was a very powerful signal to get back to the tribe we are the first humans ever to try to live without tribes it's making us feel terrible and professor cassiope proved this was a major factor in causing a depression epidemic. One of the heroes of my book is a wonderful doctor called Sam Everington. As you can tell from my weird Downton Abbey voice, I'm British, although I spend a lot of time in the US. Sam is a doctor in a poor part of East London where I lived for a long time. And Sam was really uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming to him

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

And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs. I'm also going to prescribe something else. There was an area behind the doctor's surgery. It was known as Dog as dog shit alley which gives you a sense of what it was like it backed onto a park and sam said to lisa what i'd like to do is come and turn up twice a week i'm going to turn out and support you there'll be a group of depressed and anxious people we're going to turn dog shit alley into something good right first meeting they had lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety but a couple of things happened first thing was lisa discovered as the weeks went on they had something to talk

about that wasn't how terrible they felt most of the time we offer depressed people drugs or we give them the opportunity to go and talk about their pain both of which have real value but here they decided something else completely different they decided they were going to learn gardening yeah they started to put their fingers in the soil they started to learn the rhythms of the seasons and there's a lot of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a very powerful antidepressant we can talk about that if you want second thing that happened is they began to form a tribe and they did what human beings do when we form tribes. They started to solve each other's problems. To give you the most extreme example, there was a guy in the program who was sleeping on the local public bus at night because he'd been thrown out of his home. People in the group were like, well, of course you're depressed if you're sleeping on a bus.

They started pressuring the local authority to get him a home. They succeeded. It was the first time they'd done something for someone else in years. It made them feel great. The way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom. There's a study in Norway of a very similar program, which is part of a growing body of evidence, that found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants in reducing depression. I think for a kind of obvious reason, it's something I saw all over the world, from Sydney to San Francisco to Sao Paulo. The best and most effective responses to depression were the ones that deal with the

reasons why we're so depressed and anxious in the first place. Now, to relate that to what you're saying, it's not that within that program, Lisa didn't have bad days. She did have bad days. But the difference between having a bad day in a context where you are held and valued and having a bad day in a context when you are isolated and alone is all the difference in the world. causes of depression anxiety i'm right about so i think you're right that certainly no one is suggesting or maybe there are some people but they're foolish that you know if we deal with these massive social and psychological factors that are driving up depression and anxiety that there will still not be profound human distress of course there will be um that you know there are tragedies inherent to the human condition, right? You will die. I will die. We will be forgotten. Everyone we know will die and be forgotten.

You know, there are some things that are just inherently tragic and sad about being a human being that don't go away. But what we can do is deal with many of these deep environmental factors that are driving up this epidemic. Yeah, I think that's so true. And what you just said there about the way that they connected over the garden, I think is really important. I mean, you made a good point there that they didn't go to the garden to talk about their trouble. And we had a woman on, I don't know if you're familiar with her name's Emily White, and she wrote a book called Loneliness. And then her next book was about how she dealt with it by reconnecting to the world. And that was one of her big points was that, you know, we think that the type of

friendship that's going to help us, you know, is the one that it's all about dealing with our problems, etc, etc. And what she realized, you know, kind of to your point was that what was really helpful to her was to form these friendships that did something other than just that. There wasn't so much pressure on them to be like the thing that solves a problem. But, you know, loneliness is such a big thing. And it's something I wrestle with on this show a little bit because, you know, I've exposed that science that, you know, you know, being lonely is worse than smoking, right? And I get some reactions from people, which is like, okay, that's freaking me

out, because I'm lonely, and I don't know what to do. And so it's one of those things that I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about, like, what's the role of something like this, a show that's in a virtual world, with helping people to be less lonely. And I just think it is such a pervasive problem. And I agree with you that there's a big societal issue here. And yet for folks that are wrestling with it, we also need to find our way through it while we hope to address the bigger societal issues. A lot of the things I learned from Lost Connections, I learned from experts, I learned from scientists. And there were lots of places where things fell into place emotionally for me. And there's one place that I went back to again and again. If it's okay, I'll tell your

listeners the story of this place because I think it tells us so much. So in the summer of 2011, on a big anonymous housing project in Berlin, a woman put a sign in her window she lived on the ground floor the sign said something like i got a notice saying i'm going to be evicted next thursday so on wednesday night i'm going to kill myself she was a woman in her early 60s her name was nuria chengish she she was a turkish german woman very religious shawar hijab and this was a housing project in a kind of poor part of berlin where basically three kinds of people lived relatively recent muslim immigrants gay people and punk squatters as you as you can imagine these three groups looked at each other with a lot of incomprehension and no one really

knew anyone right no one like big anonymous housing project like one anywhere in the western world no one knew anyone no one knew who this woman was but people saw the sign in her window and they started to knock on her door and they said do you need any help and she said fuck you i don't want any help i'm gonna kill myself and people started talking outside her corridor and you know they were all kind of pissed off because their rents have been rising and lots of people have been evicted and one of them had an idea he'd actually been watching on the news tariff square that was the summer of the egyptian revolution and there was a big thoroughfare that goes into the center of berlin into mitter uh that goes through this housing project center

of this housing project and then this idea they said if we just block the road for a day uh on a saturday and we wheel nuria out the media will come there'll be a bit of a fuss they'll probably let her stay maybe there'll be a bit of pressure to keep our rents down so they did it they wheeled nuria out she was like well i'm going to kill myself anyway i might as well let them put me in the middle of the street um and the media did come and there were news reports about her and then it got to the end of the day and the media went home and the police came and they said, OK, take it down. You've had your fun. Take it down. And the residents, the people who live in this place, it's called Cotty, said, well, hang on a minute.

You haven't told Nuria she gets to stay. And actually, we want a rent freeze for all of us. So we'll take this down when we've been told we're getting a rent freeze. But of course, they knew the moment they took this barricade down, the police would come and take it away. So one of my favorite people at Cotty, a woman called Tanya Gartner, she's one of the punk squatters.

She, she wears a tiny mini skirt, even in Berlin winters. Tanya is hardcore. She had in her apartment, a klaxon, you know, one of those things you use at soccer matches to make noises.

She went and got it and she said, okay, what we going to do we're going to drop a timetable to man this barricade and when the police come to take it down let off the klaxon and we'll all come down from our apartments and we'll all stop them right so people who would never have met we didn't know each other start to sign up to man this barricade so tanya in her tiny miniskirt was given i think it was the thursday night shift with nuria very religious um muslim in a in a full hijab right and the first nights they sat there it was super awkward they're like we've got nothing to talk about this person is nothing like me but as the nights went on they started talking to each other they discovered they had something incredibly similar in common.

Nuria had come to Berlin when she was 17 years old with her two children from a village in Turkey. And her job was to earn enough money to send back the money for her husband to come. But after she'd been in Berlin for a year, she got word from home that her husband had died. She told Tanya something she'd never told anyone. She'd always told people that her husband died of a heart attack. Actually, he died of TB, which was regarded as a disease of poverty and was quite shameful at that time. Tanya told Nuri something she didn't talk about very often. She had come to Kotti when she was 15. She'd been thrown out of her middle-class home. She'd come there. She lived in a squat with a bunch of other punks she got pregnant when she was 15 they'd actually realized they both had had young children and

been really lost in this place um when they when they were themselves children this was happening all over koti there was a young lad called mehmet who um was turkish german lad really into hip-hop kept being nearly thrown out of school because they said he had ADHD. He got paired with this elderly, grumpy white German who loved Stalin and said he didn't believe in direct action. And they got talking, they had a shift together and the old white guy started helping him with his homework. There were these pairings, these connections that were happening. Across the street from this housing project, there's a gay club called Zudblock, which is run by a man I love called Rickardard strauss and to give you a sense of what this gay club is like the previous place that rickard ran was called cafe anal so it's pretty uncompromising i always

thought you would have a sandwich with cafe ale but anyway um you know pretty uncompromising gay people and you know when they first opened this club um you know it's a lot of religious muslims in this area people some people were really outraged some people have smashed the windows when the protest began this gay club zutblock donated all of their um furniture they said you know you guys should have your meetings in our club come whenever you want and and at first even the kind of left-wing people in Kotti were like, look, we're not going to get these very religious Muslims to come and have meetings underneath, you know, the poster for fisting night, right? But actually, they did start meeting there.

As one of the Muslim women there said to me, we all realized we had to take these small steps to get to understand each other. After the protests had been going on for about six months, one day, a guy turned up called Tungai and when you meet tung kai he was in his early 50s at the time when you meet tung kai it's clear he's got some cognitive difficulties he'd been living homeless and he started saying can i do anything to help here and they started asking him to help and quite quickly all three groups the muslims the gays and the punks loved him right he's got lovely caring energy but this time they had actually turned the thing, the gays and the punks loved him, right? He's got lovely, caring energy. But this time they had actually turned the thing blocking the street into a permanent structure. So they started saying to Tungkay, well, why don't you sleep here? We don't want you sleeping on the streets. You know, Berlin, it can get cold in the fall and the winter. So he started sleeping

there. He became a much beloved kind of staple of the protest camp. And then after he'd been there for about a year, one day the police came to inspect. They would do this every now and then. And Tungkay doesn't like it when people argue. He thought the police were arguing. So he went to try to hug one of the officers, but they thought he was attacking them. So they arrested him. That was when it was discovered Tungkay had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital, often in an actual padded cell, for 20 years. And he had escaped and been lived on the streets for a few months and then found his way to Kotti. So the police took him back to the psychiatric hospital in Charlottenburg,

right the other side of Berlin, at which point the entire Kotti protest movement turned itself into a kind of free Tungkay movement. And they descended on this psychiatric hospital at the other side of the city. And, you know, the psychiatrists are just like, what is this? Suddenly there's all these like Muslims, gays and punks demanding a release of one of their patients. They'd never seen anything like this. And I remember Uli, one of the women at Cottey saying, you know, she said to the protesters, sorry, to the psychiatrist, but he doesn't belong with you. You don't love him. He belongs with us. We love him. And I remember thinking, how many of us, if we were carted away, would have hundreds of people descending on this place saying, no, this person belongs with us. No, we love this person.

It took them a long time, but they got Tung Kai back. He still lives there. And, you know, many things happened at Cottey that I write about in Lost Connections. I mean, obviously the obvious headline is they got a rent freeze for their entire housing project. They then launched a referendum initiative because you have to get a set number of signatures.

It got the largest number of written signatures in the history of the city of Berlin. But, you know, when I went to go and see Nuria, the woman who started the protest, the last time I ever saw Nuria, I remember, you know, she said to me, look, I'm really glad I got to stay in my apartment. That's great. But I gained so much more than that I was surrounded by these amazing people all along and I never knew I remember another another woman Nerman who took part in the protest and a Turkish German woman said to me when I grew up in in Turkey I called my whole village home that I came to live in the western world and I learned that what you're meant to call home is

just your four walls and then this whole protest. And now I call this whole place and all these people my home. And she said she realized that at some level she had been homeless all the time she'd been living in the Western world, that we are at some level homeless. The human beings need to feel we belong. And our sense of home in this culture is not big enough to meet our sense of belonging and this thing about kati and i think they think i'm crazy because i would go there every three months just burst into tears and leave again at one time i remember one of them sandy said to me johan do you think you maybe have allergies or ice water very much but um that you know i remember thinking what was so clear to me in kati is those people think about how distressed they were you

know nuria was suicidal a tongue high was shut away in a padded cell, Mehmet, that young lad, was constantly being nearly thrown out of school because they said he had ADHD. They did not need to be drugged. They needed to be together. The problems that seem insoluble when you are isolated and alone and told that life is about buying shit and screaming at each other through screens those problems are insoluble when you are in that framework but when you are part of a tribe and you reorient your values you can begin to find solutions that you couldn't find when you were alone i remember tanya saying to me outside that gay club she said to me one day you know when you're all alone and you feel like shit you think there's something wrong with you but what happened is we came out of our

corner crying and we started to fight and we realized we were surrounded by so many other people who feel the same way and when you do that you realize how strong you can be and i really felt that so acutely with them that this is just below the surface so those people listening to you who were hearing those messages about loneliness and saying this freaks me out because i because you can feel the truth of it remember you are surrounded by people who feel that and it takes very little it takes very little for that to come to the surface, for that hunger to come to the surface. It didn't take long for people in Kotting to really see what they had and what they

were developing. Do you see what I mean as a response to what you're saying? Absolutely. And that story is incredible. And it reminds me of a slightly more prosaic version of this that has happened over and over and over and over. And it's 12-step programs. And I have some concerns with 12-step programs and some of the things that, you know, they're not perfect by any stretch. They have saved my life a couple times. But what I'm struck by is that all across the world, on any given day, you have this thing where people emerge from, on any given day, you have this thing where people emerge from I'm all alone in this thing into a group of people who all have the same situation, and lives change dramatically. And I often think that, you know, a 12-step program would say, you know, God is the reason

this happens. I actually think the fact that you go into that group is the reason that it happens. But it's another pointer towards this can really happen and does happen. It's not an insoluble problem. Well, the unnatural thing is not that people connect and form tribes. The unnatural thing is that we don't, right? That actually these are our deepest impulses as a species, right? And you're right, I agree with you both. You know, there are some aspects of 12 Steps theology that I don't think are for everyone,

but I think the model of connection and support that is embedded in 12 Steps programs is profound and beautiful. And the fact that, you know, any city anyone in this is listening to, you know, you could go to an AA meeting tonight, listening to you know you could go to an aa meeting tonight you go to a and no one will ask you for any money and you will be welcomed and treated with care and respect that's a yeah that's an extraordinary thing and and you know there are many dark aspects of human nature of course but that is much truer to our nature and who we are as a species than sitting alone you know buying shit on your laptop you know the book is so deep and there's nine causes and we're going to get to almost we're going to get to so very little of it we We're running up on time here soon. You and I are going to talk a little bit afterwards in the post-show conversation. Listeners, you've heard the drill

before. Supporters of the show can hear those over on Patreon. But I want to just touch on a couple of things, because I think the book can be summed up really, really well in one line that you wrote. And it's that depression is itself a form of grief for all the connections we need, but don't have. Yeah, this comes from this thing that was discovered in the 1970s about depression that was so explosive that it had to be kind of brushed under the carpet. So in the 1970s, the APA, the American Psychological Association, decided for the first time to standardize how depression was diagnosed in the United States. So they drew up a list of 10 symptoms of depression that are

pretty obvious things that you could guess, crying a lot, feeling worthless. And they sent them out to doctors all over the country in the the kind of psychiatric bible the diagnostic and statistical manual and they said to doctors if any of your patients experience more than five of these symptoms for more than two weeks diagnose them as depressed as mentally ill do what you can to help them so doctors start using this but sometime later doctors and psychiatrists come back and they're like hey we've got a bit of a problem here if we use this guideline we should be diagnosing every grieving person as depressed because this is what happens to you when someone

you love dies so the apa get together and they're like well that's really not what we meant that's not what we intended um so they invented something that became known as the grief loophole right so what they said is okay use these 10 symptoms to diagnose people as depressed unless someone they love has died in the last year in which case they're not mentally ill it's perfectly understandable response don't diagnose them it's okay so doctors started using that but that started to beg a kind of question that lots of doctors asked which was well hang on a minute we're meant to be telling people that depression is just a brain disease that you identify on a checklist except there's one situation and only one situation in

life where it's perfectly understandable response well why is that the only situation where it's okay to respond this way and understandable? Why not if you lose your job? Why not if you lose your house? Why not if you're stuck in a job you hate for the next 40 years? You can all imagine, you can imagine hundreds of situations. But that, as Dr. Joanne Cassiotore, who's one of the real experts on this. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

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It's an absolutely extraordinary person who lost her own daughter when Cheyenne in childbirth. As Dr. Cassiatori put it to me, that insight would require a whole system overhaul. It would require us to think about the whole life and not just the isolated symptoms or not try to boil it down to being just a problem in the person's brain. The system isn't built to do that. There are lots of good psychiatrists and many admirable and indeed heroic psychiatrists, but the system we've built of psychiatry is not designed to do that, right? And so what happened is the APA got rid of the grief exception. It doesn't exist anymore. So now, if your baby dies at 10 a.m., you can be diagnosed that morning.

If they say to you, well, have you had these symptoms for the last two weeks? Have you been upset? Have you been, yeah, well, then they can diagnose you straight away. In fact, as Dr. Cassiatore has shown, 9% of grieving parents are diagnosed and drugged in the first 48 hours after their child dies. And what she said is that tells us something really profound, right? Because most people instinctively know that just drugging someone for grief, that grief is not an irrational pathology. Grief is a tribute to the person we have loved, right? We grieve because we have loved. And she argues that actually drugging grieving parents disrupts the grieving process in ways that are really damaging but but i think you can see this in a wider context as dr cassiatori herself

she's really a remarkable person applies it in a wider context which is that you know the worst thing for me about what my doctor told me that it was just a chemical imbalance my problem fact that it's not true that it's just a chemical imbalance of people's brains. The worst thing is what that says to people is your pain is meaningless. It's like a glitch in a computer program. But what the World Health Organization, the leading medical body in the world, and so many of the people who've looked at the real evidence have been trying to tell us is your pain has meaning. You're not a machine with broken parts when you're depressed you're not crazy you're not broken you're a human being with unmet needs and what you need is love support and help to get those those those deeper needs met and i think as you say as you quote from the book

it's not a coincidence that depression and grief have the same symptoms i think partly what depression is is a form of grief your own needs not being met and i think that tells us something really profound about how we've been approaching it in the wrong way but one of the other moments when emotionally it fell into place for me was when i went to interview this um south african psychiatrist called derek summerfield he's a wonderful person derek happened to be in cambodia in 2001 when chemical antidepressants were first introduced in that country. And the local Cambodian doctors were like, what are these drugs?

They hadn't heard of them. What is an antidepressant? And Derek explained. And they said to him, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants. And he said, what do you mean? He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy or something. Instead, they told him a story.

There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields, and one day he stood on a landmine and he got his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial limb, and he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently it's extremely painful to work in the rice field, work underwater when you've got an artificial limb. I'm imagining it was traumatic for very obvious reasons. The guy started to cry all day, didn't want to get out of bed, classic depression. So they said to Derek, that's when we gave him an antidepressant. They said, well, he said, what was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him.

They saw that his pain made sense. They figured precisely because they listened to the source of the pain, they began to look for solutions. They figured if we bought him a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be so distressed. So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression had gone. They said to Derek, so you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right? Now, as I say, those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively what the World Health Organization has been trying to tell us.

They understood that your pain has meaning. We evolved a pain impulse for a reason, right? I mean, as a trivial example, you know, as a European who spends a lot of my time in the US, I never fail to be surprised by the existence of indigestion treatments like pepto-bismol right which just don't exist anywhere in europe i've never seen them anywhere in europe i remember the first time i was oh yeah we don't have them there's no such thing i mean maybe they're available i've never seen i've never seen anyone take one i've never seen anyone selling them um because the reaction of a european when you see an indigestion treatment is to say well hang on a minute indigestion isn't a malfunction it's a necessary signal from your

body that you're eating too fast the solution to indigestion is to eat more slowly right because that's a signal that you're eating too much you're eating too fast you're going to make yourself sick you're going to upset your stomach now that's a trivial example because indigestion is infinitely less agonizing than depression, which is the worst thing I've ever gone through. But you can see that principle. We have pain impulses for a reason, right? They are not malfunctions. And the fact that one in five Americans is going to take a psychiatric drug in their lifetime, and average white male life expectancy just fell for the first

time in the history of the American Republic apart from the Civil War. These are signals that are telling us something. And what they're telling us is not that everyone mysteriously just had a serotonin imbalance in their brains, right? There are real things that happen in depressed people's brains, of course. Those things sometimes make it harder to get out of depression that is true and i go through that in the book of course we've been told this ludicrously reductive explanation that to me the problem is not so much with the drugs because the drugs have some benefit for some people they do some harm to some people we can have a complex and a nuanced debate about that but to me the really harmful thing is what the story does to people. What that

story does is it tells you that your pain doesn't mean anything. And what that does is it cuts you off from following that pain to its source, both you as an individual and us as, more importantly, us as a society, and solving the things that are hurting us so much. I agree completely. Like I said early on, for me, you know, what I've described my treating depression is I kind of like throw the kitchen sink at it, right? I recognized it's a, there's a bunch of things that are a factor in it for me, and I need to treat all those different things. And I think that's what you're pointing to so much is that, you know, and I think that's so true that our And so it's a signal, and so to just we've ignored it. I think it's worse. As a culture, we've pathologized it. As a culture, we've said that it's a sign of craziness or malfunction in the individual.

If we'd ignored it, that would be bad enough. What we've done is even worse than ignoring it. Yeah, we've pathologized it. And to me, that's the most damaging thing of all because it makes people then mistrust the impulse. It makes them mistrust the signal. It makes them systematically misread the signal as a culture. And I think if we had listened to these signals about depression, we could have dealt with some of these problems before it became, for example, the opioid crisis, and I've spent time in places like Monadnock, New Hampshire, which are the absolute epicenter of the opioid crisis, where what's happening there, the heart of what's happening there, the core of it. I mean, there are many things going on, but as you know, this was the subject of my previous book, Chasing the Screen, which was about addiction.

But the core of that is, the core of addiction is about trying not to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be. It's not a coincidence that places with the highest levels of opioid use have the highest levels of suicide and have the highest level of antidepressant prescriptions. These are ways of trying to not be present in an unbearably painful reality. And if we had listened to these signals sooner, we wouldn't be having these extreme distress signals. And I have to say, I don't think we would be having the current president either. You know, I remember in the run up to the 2016 election, I was with this fascinating group who I'm writing about for a different project, who do deep canvassing work to try to persuade voters. who do deep canvassing work to try to persuade voters. And we were on this street in Cleveland,

in a part of Cleveland called Slavic City. This has really haunted me as my memory of the election. We were on this long street, and it was this devastated street, kind of like Detroit without the poetry of the ruins. And about a third of the houses had been abandoned. A third had actually been demolished, and a third still had people living in them off and behind barbed wire. And we knocked on one door, and there was this woman who we got talking to. I would have guessed from looking at her, it was 60.

I discovered from the conversation she was actually the same age as me. I was 37 at the time. And we're having this conversation, and she was quite articulate, very, very angry. She wasn't going to vote for Trump. She was going to not vote at all, but really furious. And at one point, she made this verbal slip. She was talking about what the area used to be like for her parents and grandparents, and she meant to say when I was young but what she actually said

is when i was alive and it really she didn't she didn't notice she'd made that verbal slip but it really knocked me back and when i hear people on my side and you can guess my politics when i hear people on my side talking about trump voters or people who didn't vote as stupid or racist or just pathologizing the signal they've sent out and which don't get me wrong I think is obviously a disastrous signal I'm you can guess what I think about that but to pathologize the signal it means you can't hear what they're saying right you can't hear what needs to be heard if we're going to deal with this if we're going to deal with this deep pain um and and the fact that we have so many kind of alarm signals going off

you know the election of very extreme political choices across the world um one in five americans take your psychiatric drug fall in white male life expectancy for the first time, history of the republic. You know, these are interconnected signals that we've built a culture that doesn't meet people's underlying psychological needs in all sorts of crucial ways. But we can deal with that.

There are lots of ways back from that. I've seen them in practice. I've seen how they work. I report the last third of the book is about solutions that are not kind of hypothetical solutions, but places I went, people I interviewed, science I saw, which show ways back. And we've only touched on a very small number of the causes and very few of the solutions. But I think that is, to me, the core of it is it doesn't have to be this way. To me, the core of it is it doesn't have to be this way, but to find your way out of this pain, you have to understand the problem differently. And I wish, in a way, the book is the letter I wish told, which set me off on a path away from the source of my pain and away from understanding these things. I agree. It's a beautiful way to put it. We're out of time here, but I will encourage listeners

to absolutely check out the book. It has so many important points and really summarizes, it has so many important points and really summarizes, I think a lot of things that this show has been about in, in sort of one place. And so I thank you so much for, you know, and for taking the time to come on the show and, and for writing the book. And my publishers always,

I should say my publishers always tell me to, I always feel like a kind of advertising person in one of those bad 1950s movies when I do this. But they've told me, I have to say this at the end of interviews, which is, if anyone would like any more information about where they can get the book or the audio book, if they would like to know what a range of people have said about the book from Hillary Clinton to Tucker Carlson to Arianna Huffington to Russell Brand, if you would like to take a quiz to see how much you know about the real causes of depression and anxiety or if you'd like to hear audio of any of the people we've been talking about like those amazing people in berlin you can go to www.thelostconnections.com it's not lostconnections.com because there's a band called lost

connections don't know anything about um and um yeah, thelostconnections.com. And also on that site, you can see where to follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And I'll absolutely put links to that site in the show notes that go along with the show. So thank you so much. A pleasure, as always, to talk with you. Totally my pleasure, Eric. Thank you so much. Bye.

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