Some ideas that I think are important or have feelings are marked with bold diagonal lines or quoted separately.
I suggest reading the following manuscript while listening to the audio.
Voice link:/talks/Johann _ Hari _ this _ be _ why _ you _ re _ depressed _ or _ anxiety
Speaker: John Harry Reporter (John Harry is the author of two best-selling books in The New York Times. )
Topic: This may be the reason why you are depressed or anxious.
When I was a teenager, I remember going to my doctor and explaining that I had this feeling, like pain leaking from me. I can't control it. I don't understand why this happened. I'm ashamed of it.
My doctor said, "We know why people become like this. Some people are just born with a chemical imbalance in their brains-you are obviously one of them. All we need to do is give you some medicine, which will bring your chemical balance back to normal. "
So I started taking a drug called Paxil or Seroxat, which has different names in different countries. I feel much better. I'm really inspired. But not long after, this feeling of pain came back. So I was given higher and higher doses until 13 years, and I took the maximum dose allowed by law. For most of this 13 year, and almost all the time to the end, I was still in great pain. I started asking myself, "What's going on? Because you are doing the story of the dominant culture and telling you everything to do-why do you still feel this way? " ?
But I think the core of what I have learned is that so far, we have nine different scientific evidences of the causes of depression and anxiety. Two of them are really in our biology. Your genes will make you more sensitive to these problems, although they do not determine your fate. When you become depressed, there will be real changes in your brain, making it more difficult for you to get rid of depression. However, most of the factors that have been proved to cause depression and anxiety do not exist in our biology. They are factors in our way of life. Once you understand them, it opens up a very different set of solutions that should be provided to people together with chemical antidepressants.
For example, if you are lonely, you are more likely to become depressed. If you have no control over your work when you go to work, you can only do what others tell you, and you are more likely to become depressed. If you have little contact with the natural world, you are more likely to become depressed.
There is one thing that connects many reasons I have learned about depression and anxiety. Not all, but many. Everyone here knows that you all have natural physiological needs, right? Obviously. You need food, you need water, you need shelter and you need clean air. If I take those things away from you, you will all be in big trouble soon. But at the same time, everyone has natural psychological needs. You need a sense of belonging. You need to feel that your life has meaning and purpose. You need people to see you and value you. You need to feel that you have a meaningful future. ?
The culture we have built is good at many things. And many things are better than in the past-I'm glad to be alive today. But we are less and less good at meeting these deep psychological needs. This is not the only thing that is happening, but I think it is the key reason for the deepening of this crisis. I find it really hard to understand. ?
It was not until one day that I interviewed a South African psychiatrist named Derek Sommerfield that I really began to understand this. He is a very nice person. Dr Sommerfield happened to be in Cambodia in 5438+0 in 2006, when they first introduced chemical antidepressants to people in that country. The local doctors, Cambodians, have never heard of these drugs, so they will ask, what is this? He explained. They said to him, "We don't need them. We already have antidepressants." He said, "What do you mean?" He thought they would talk about some kind of herbs, such as St. John's wort and ginkgo biloba. Instead, they told him a story.
If you think about depression like me when you grow up, most people here do. It sounds like a bad joke, right? "I went to my doctor for antidepressants, and she gave me a cow." However, these Cambodian doctors knew intuitively based on this man's unscientific anecdote, which the World Health Organization, the world's leading medical institution, tried to tell us for years based on the best scientific evidence.
If you are depressed, if you are anxious, you are not weak, you are not crazy, and you are basically not a machine with broken parts. You are an unsatisfied person. It is also important to think about what the Cambodian doctors and the World Health Organization didn't say. They didn't say to the farmer, "Hey, man, you need to cheer up. Your job is to find out and solve this problem yourself. " Instead, they said, "We are working with you as a group, so we can find out and solve this problem together." This is what every depressed person needs and deserves.
This is why a leading doctor of the United Nations said in the official statement of World Health Day 20 17 that we need to talk less about chemical imbalance and more about the imbalance of our lifestyle. Drugs have given some people real relief-they have given me a period of relief-but because this problem is deeper than their biology, the solution needs to be deeper.
But when I first knew this, I remember thinking, "Well, I can see all the scientific evidence, I read a lot of research, and I interviewed a lot of experts who explained this," but I kept thinking, "How can we do that?" In most cases, what depresses us is more complicated than what happened to this Cambodian farmer. Where do we start to have such insight?
But later, during my long journey of writing this book, I kept meeting people who were doing the same thing all over the world, from Sydney to San Francisco to S? Sao Paulo. I keep meeting people who understand the underlying causes of depression and anxiety and solve these problems as a group. Obviously, I can't tell you all the great people I know and write about, or all the nine causes of depression and anxiety I know, because they won't let me give a 10 hour TED talk-you can complain to them.
However, if I may, I would like to focus on two reasons and two solutions. This is the first one. We are the loneliest society in human history. A recent study asked Americans, "Do you feel that you are no longer close to anyone?" 39% said it was a description of them. "Never be close to anyone again." In the international measurement of loneliness, Britain and other European countries are second only to the United States, in case someone here is complacent.
I have spent a long time discussing this issue with the top experts who study loneliness in the world. He is an incredible man named Professor John cacioppo. He is in Chicago, and I have thought a lot about his work and asked us a question. Professor cacioppo asked, "Why do we exist? Why are we here and why are we alive? " A key reason is that our ancestors on the African savannah were very good at one thing. They are not bigger or faster than those animals that are often knocked down, but they are better at uniting and cooperating with each other. This is our super power as a species-we are United, just like bees evolved to live in hives and humans evolved to live in a tribe. We were the first humans to disband the tribe. This makes us feel bad. But it doesn't have to be like this.
One of the heroes in my book, in fact, one of the heroes in my life, is a doctor named Sam Everton. He is a general practitioner in a poor area in east London, where I have lived for many years. Sam is really uncomfortable, because many patients come to him with severe depression and anxiety. Like me, he is not opposed to chemical antidepressants. He thinks these drugs can relieve some people's pain. But he saw two things. First of all, his patients often feel depressed and anxious for completely understandable reasons, such as loneliness. Secondly, although these drugs have brought some relief to some people, for many people, they have not solved the problem. Fundamental problem. One day, Sam decided to create a different method. A woman came to his medical center. Her name was Lisa Cunningham. Then I met Lisa. For seven years, Lisa has been kept at home, suffering from severe depression and anxiety. When she came to Sam's center, she was told, "Don't worry, we will continue to give you these drugs, but we will also prescribe some other drugs. We will give you a prescription to come to this center twice a week to meet a group of other depressed and anxious people, not to talk about how painful you are, but to find something meaningful that you can do together, so that you won't feel lonely or feel that life is meaningless. "
This method is called social prescription, and it is spreading all over Europe. There is little but increasing evidence that it can really reduce depression and anxiety.
One day, I remember standing in the garden built by Lisa and her once depressed friends-it was really a beautiful garden-and I had this idea, which was largely inspired by an Australian named Professor Hugh MacKay. I wonder what we will say to people when they are depressed in this culture-I believe everyone here has said it, I have said it-and we will say, "You just need to be yourself, be yourself." I realized that, in fact, we should say to people, "Don't be yourself. Do not be yourself. Be us, be us. Become part of a group. "
The solution to these problems is not to use your resources more and more as an isolated individual-this is part of the reason why we are in this crisis. It depends on reconnecting with something stronger than you.
This is related to another cause of depression and anxiety that I want to talk to you about. So everyone knows that junk food has taken over our diet and made us unwell. I'm not saying that I have any superiority. I really came from McDonald's to make this speech. I saw all of you eating a healthy TED breakfast, and I thought it was impossible. However, just as junk food has taken over our diet and made us sick, a junk value has taken over our thoughts and made us mentally ill. For thousands of years, philosophers have said.
This is not an accurate quotation of Schopenhauer, but this is the main point he said.
Strangely, however, anyone had studied this problem scientifically until I met a really extraordinary person, Professor Tim Cather, who had been studying this problem for about 30 years at Knox College in Illinois. His research shows several very important things. ?
When I think about this problem, I realize that it's like we are fed from birth, just like KFC for the soul. We have been trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places. Just like junk food can't meet your nutritional needs, it actually makes you feel bad. Junk values can't meet your psychological needs. They keep you away from a better life. ?
But when I first spent time with Professor Kasser, I was learning all this, and I felt a very strange emotional mixture. Because on the one hand, I find it challenging. I can see that in my own life, when I feel depressed, I often try to remedy it with some ostentatious and grand external solution. I see why this doesn't apply to me. I thought about it, too. Isn't this obvious? Isn't this a bit old-fashioned, right? If I tell everyone here that none of you will lie on your deathbed thinking about all the shoes you bought and all the forwarding you received, you will think about the moments, meanings and connections of love in your life. I think this seems to be a cliche. But I kept saying to Professor Kasser, "Why do I have this strange double feeling?" ?
He said, "To some extent, we all know these things. But in this culture, we don't live by it. " We know them too well, they have become cliches, but we don't live by them. I keep asking why, why do we know such a profound thing, but we can't make a living from it? After a while, Professor Castle said to me, "Because we live in a machine, this machine is designed to make us ignore the important things in life." I must think it over. ?
Professor Kasser wants to know whether we can destroy that machine. He has done a lot of research on this. I will tell you an example. I really urge everyone here to try it with their friends and family. Together with a man named Nathan Dungan, he called a group of teenagers and adults for a series of meetings over a period of time. Part of the purpose of this group is to make people think about the moments in their lives when they really find meaning and purpose. For different people, this is a different thing. For some people, it is playing music, writing and helping others-I believe everyone here can imagine something, right? Part of the purpose of this group is to get people to ask, "Well, how can you devote more life to pursuing these meaningful and purposeful moments instead of, I don't know, buying junk you don't need, putting it on social media and trying to get people to say,' God, I'm so jealous!' "
They found that just these meetings were like a kind of consumerist anonymous abstinence meeting, right? Let people hold these meetings, clarify these values, decide to take action, and check each other, which leads to obvious changes in people's values. It takes them away from this information hurricane that produces depression. This information trains us to find happiness in the wrong place and move towards more meaningful and nutritious value, so that we can get rid of depression.
But for all the solutions I have seen and written, and many I can't talk about here, I have been thinking: Why did it take me so long to see these insights? Because when you explain them to people-some are more complicated, but not all-when you explain them to people, it's not like rocket science, is it? To some extent, we already know these things. Why do we find it hard to understand? I think there are many reasons. But I think one reason is that we must change our understanding of depression and anxiety. Depression and anxiety have very real biological factors. But if we allow biology to become a whole, as I have always done, as I think our culture has done in most of my life, what we implicitly tell people is that this is not anyone's intention, but what we implicitly tell people is?
There are reasons why we feel this way, and it is hard to see these reasons in the pain of depression-I understand this very well from personal experience. But with the right help, we can understand these problems and solve them together. But to do this, the first step is that we must stop insulting these signals, saying that they are signs of weakness, madness or pure biology, except for a very few people. ?
Looking at anxiety and depression from other angles, I feel much better after watching it several times, but I feel not as good as the original video.
My favorite sentence in the full text:
"It won't be you. Do not be yourself. Be us, be us. Become part of a group. "
Because we live in a machine designed to make us ignore the important things in life. "?
When I realized that your depression was not a fault, I began to change my life. This is a signal. Your depression is a sign. It's telling you something ?