The Real Causes of Depression | Johann Hari

Before we begin, I would have to confess something that would be awkward: I have only used this type of microphone once before and, in a slightly strange circumstance, I had to give the TED talk that John referred to and, as the technician put it . About me that time I said to him, you know, if he makes me wear this, I'll feel like Madonna and he looked at me very intensely and said you should always feel like Madonna, so I'm trying to inhabit my full Madonna if there are 19-year-old Cuban dancers in the audience be afraid, sorry, it was a bit of a slow Madonna, actually let's start with that.

I also want to apologize for the rest, which is that and it's a bit like a stressful dream where they say: okay, they're going to fill Conway Hall with people, we want you to go out and talk to them about your most painful feelings, so all I need now for a stressful dream is to look down and

real

ize that I'm not wearing pants, I'm not even going to show off, so I may be a little less skilled than I normally am and I apologize, it's hard talk about these things and the whole time I was researching this book I kept thinking about something.

That happened to me and I didn't understand why at first it would seem irrelevant. I was researching another book around the same time, right when I started doing this, which I'm not actually written yet and I was in Vietnam and One day, on the side of the road in Hanoi, I bought an apple from a vendor. I'm

real

ly bad at haggling, so I paid like five dollars for an apple and went back to the hotel room. It's called the lovely Hanoi hotel and it was very lovely and I ate it and I was very tired and while I was eating it it tasted like they remember those nuclear movies after the nuclear war like threads, it was what I imagined as a child that food would taste like this, right, but?

I was so lazy and tired that I ate about half of it and then threw it away anyway, you can guess what happened next. I was like a sick volcanic Li for about three days. I was lying in front of CNN and on the fourth day I told my repairman. a look, I only have a limited amount of time in Vietnam, I have to go meet the people I was going to interview, just take me, so I had to meet the survivors of the war, the American invasion of Vietnam and we drove. The whole way there is about five hours into the countryside and we were interesting and a woman who was the only person with her children who survived from her entire village the war and the shocking image were already clear, you know, it was the late 80s, like a spotted shad. red lips from consuming something she was moving on a table she turned this reading she was a historian when she started talking I just exploded right I'm not going to go see more details but I think you understand what I'm talking about and and they caught me lying on the floor, I thought worse than I had ever felt physically and this woman told my translator, he is very sick, you have to take him to a hospital and I said, no, no, no, look, I lived. with fried chicken for ten years in east London.

I know what food poisoning is. Just take me back to Hanoi. I'll lie down in my hotel bed. This will just pass and he was like, yeah, man, this is the only woman who survived. Vietnam War from his town I'm going to listen to his medical advice before his, they're taking us to the hospital, so I get to the hospital and I walk in and my translator starts saying completely false things, but I was the only Westerner I talked to. they said. treated there and he starts saying that this is a really important westerner, if he dies, he will disgrace our country, then at that moment I felt like the whole room was moving around me, spinning and I felt really very strange and they started making me all these questions and they told me what you ate and I mentioned the apple.

Then I found out that being a parent, this is a useful travel tip, parent, you can't just wash an apple in Vietnam, you have to cut the peel off because it's so soggy. in fertilizers and I remember when he told me what he said and not chemical fertilizers pesticides and I remember when he said I think it would be really interesting research a piece and I thought oh now I'm about to die I'll never get the writer and then I thought I had the most insufferable thought ever have had. I thought, oh, I'm about to die from a poisoned apple.

I'm like Eve, Snow White, and Alan Turing, and then I thought, as evidenced by your last thought. you are pretentious twice ok anyway I had very strong nausea extreme nausea the whole room was spinning and I told the doctors please give me something for this nausea I can't stand this feeling and they were crusty questions in the translator the doctor explained to me the doctor was telling me you need your nausea is a symptom he will tell us what is wrong with you we have to listen to him anyway they gave me treatment it turns out what happened is that because I had not absorbed any liquid inside me for four days I was extremely dehydrated as if a person If I had been in the desert they put me on a drip that I struggled with for a couple of days and they told me when I left if you had done it if you had actually returned to Hanoi, he tried to drive that so that you would have died on the way so that sign , that signal that I didn't want to hear saved my life.

I'll come back to why I thought about that much later, the reason I wrote lost. connections because there were two mysteries hanging over me and I was too afraid to investigate them. The first was why I was still depressed as a teenager. I went to my doctor and explained that I had a sensation like pain. he was running away from me and I couldn't regulate it and I couldn't control it and I felt very embarrassed and my doctor told me a story. My doctor said: we know why you feel this way. Scientists have shown that there is a chemical called serotonin in people's brains some people just lack it clearly you are one of them if you take this trip these medications that I will give you will increase your serotonin levels you will feel good I felt fantastic when I was I told this story I went I left not far from here I actually swallowed my first pill I remember it very clearly and it was a small white pill and as I swallowed it I felt like a kind of chemical kiss and I thought this tremendous feeling of relief and even when I didn't it could be the chemicals because yeah, it doesn't work like that, you don't feel it in the second, you will have the feeling the moment you swallow it and for a few months.

I felt significantly better and then the pain started to come back, we started bleeding again so I went back to my doctor and he told me to think clearly about your dose being high enough, we will give you a higher dose and again I felt. It was a real relief and again the pain began to bleed. I went back again and he gave me a higher dose. This pattern continued until for thirteen years with a couple of short breaks I was taking the maximum possible dose and at the end of it all I was. I'm still depressed and I was very reluctant to admit it because I thought there must be something wrong with me because I'm doing what our culture tells me to do and I still feel that way.

The biggest mystery, which is much more important, is why so many other people feel this way: one in eleven people in Britain are taking antidepressants; There are a large number of people who are depressed and anxious while not taking antidepressants; this seemed to be a huge increase in

depression

and anxiety, which I later found out is proof. and I started to think, can it really be that we all have some kind of chemical malfunction in our brain? If that's true, why does our brain start to malfunction more, what could be going on here and is it a sign of how reluctant I was looking because If you have a story about your pain and your heartbreak, even if that story doesn't work very well For you, structure your pain well.

It's like putting a leash on a rabid animal. At least you think well. I can know where it is. and if that history seems threatened it is an extraordinarily destabilizing feeling and is a sign of how reluctant I was to investigate this. I wanted to start writing this seven years ago. I decided it would be easier to write a book that required me to go meet. hitmen for the Mexican drug cartels. I found it less scary and ended up, excuse me, saying I ended up doing this research, so it ended up being a really long trip.

I traveled over 40,000 miles. I went to many places every ten. I revved up the world's leading experts on the

causes

of

depression

and anxiety and went to places that had really different perspectives from an Amish village in Indiana because the Amish have extremely low levels of depression to a city in Brazil but they banned advertising for see If that would make people feel better, know of a lab at a major US university where they were giving people the active ingredient in magic mushrooms to see if it worked for depression, ask me later if you want and and I learned many things.

I think the most destabilizing and difficult thing was what I suspected I might learn from the beginning, very early. I learned that the story my doctor told me is not true, so Professor Andrew Skal of Princeton University says that the idea that depression is caused simply by low levels of serotonin is deeply misleading and unscientific those were his words dr . David Healy, one of the experts here in Britain, told me that you can't even say that story was discredited because there was never a time when it was credited, there was never a time when half the scientists in the field had attributed to people's depression. just at low serotonin levels and that was really shocking because for all kinds of reasons and I can go into some of them, you want to ask about them, but then I looked at this more and so, depression is measured by something called next I would say the The fact that the depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance, which is the position of the wall.

The United Nations Health Organization, does not mean that the medications I took have no value. We could actually measure how much value they have. Depression is measured by something called Hamilton. scale I've always felt a little sorry for whoever Hamilton was because that's all he remembers playing, you know how much misery people have, but it's how scale goes from scratch, where you did it, where you basically took a tab off a 251 where It would be profoundly suicidal and to give you a sense of movement on that scale, if you improve your sleep patterns you would get a six point movement on the Hamilton scale or if your sleep patterns really deteriorated, like when you have a baby, you would get six points. points the other way and chemical antidepressants on average place us as average, it is not for everyone on average they give you a movement of one point eight points on the Hamilton scale so that is very true that it is above a placebo which is a real effect but for most people it is relatively minor, true, not for everyone, but I thought I was a weirdo for taking these medications and still being depressed; in fact, what I learned from Professor Erlin Kirsch at Harvard University and the incredible research that he did and that I later talked about with his critics. also and I really feel that the opening research shows that antidepressants should be one of the things on the menu.

I don't want to remove anything from the menu. I don't judge anyone. An eight point is better than no point. of the people I love taking chemical antidepressants. I've never aged them out of it, but that's not enough for most people, right, we need a lot more things on the menu, but that really threw me because I thought, well, how do we think? On that note, I was very surprised when the World Health Organization, the world's leading medical institution, made its statement in 2011, when I started the book, saying that mental health is socially produced, is a social indicator, and needs social solutions. , and it really surprised me. thrown by that, this is very different from history, but what does that mean?

What's going on here? I mean, I interviewed a lot more people as I was studying this science in depth and I was trained to be able to study the social scientific research that was my training and I learned there I was able to find evidence for nine

causes

of depression and anxiety two of them are biological there are real biological contributions supports that some people deny the biological aspects express that they are wrong but seven of them are factors in the way we live and I think not all, in a significant number of them, this good evidence has been increasing and that is why we have this epidemic and the solution requires a very different way of thinking about it, so I tell you it might sound a little strange and summary, so one of the things that connected a lot of these things as I was talking to the scientists was this understanding, so we all In this room they know that you have physical needs, right, you need food, water in every shelter, you need clean air, if I took any of that.

Far from you you would be in trouble very quickly. There is equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs.to feel like you belong you need to feel like your life has meaning and purpose you need to feel like people see you and value you you need to feel like you have a future that you understand and our culture is good at many things. I'm glad I'm alive today, but we've become less and less good at meeting people's deep underlying psychological needs and I think that's one of the key drivers of our crisis when it comes to depression, anxiety, addiction is actually one of the drivers of Brexit and Trump.

You can ask me about IQ one, but I'll give you a specific example. Something that I think will connect most people in this war room will be understood right away, so I know, is that a lot of people I know who are depressed and anxious depression and anxiety focus on their work, so I start to look for evidence of what we know about how people feel about their jobs. There was this Gallup study that was great opinion poll research for companies. A massive study that took over a year looked at how people feel about their jobs and this is what it found: 13% of us like our jobs most of the time. 63% of us sleepwalk at our jobs, so we don't like it, we don't hate it. and 24% of people hate their job, dread it, and dread it, so if you think about it, this is what we do most of the time: The average person enters their first work email at 7:48 to. m. and closes the clock at 7:15 a.m.

Think about how 87% of us are doing something we don't want to do for most of our waking lives and that you're almost twice as likely to hate your job as you are to love it, and I started thinking how good something could be. There is some relationship between that which is affecting what we do most of the time and our crisis with depression and anxiety and I knew that there was a man who actually discovered this as an amazing Australian social scientist that I interviewed, could it be Professor Michael Marmot ? I can explain to you how, if you want to think it's an important story, I tell it in the book, but I'll just give you the headline of what he discovered, he discovered the fact that the most important factor, there are a few, but the most important factor that makes depressing work if you go to work and feel like you have little or no control over your work, so you're like a machine, you're much more likely to get depressed, you're actually much more likely to have a heart attack and when I learned that in I actually misunderstood what Michael was telling me and what his research was telling me at first because I thought he was saying, "Well, there are some people who manage to have a good job, so we'll be happy and then there are a lot of things." of people are going to be sentenced to miserable jobs I thought about my family right my my my dad was the bus driver my mom worked in a shelter my sister is a nurse my brother is a delivery driver my grandmother cleaned bathrooms for a living I thought what ends to say?

They're doomed to be one and then I kept going back to him and all that and he told me that it's not the work that's depressing, it's the lack of control, so I started thinking about how we could change that, so I went to Baltimore and that an incredible group of people who taught me an important lesson Meredith Keogh was a young woman who had to go to bed every Sunday night sick with anxiety almost physically sick with anxiety she had an office job it wasn't the worst job in office in the world, she wasn't being bullied, but she just couldn't stand the thought that the next 40 years of her life would be something she just didn't want to do and one day, with her husband Josh, she did something bold.

Josh and his sister were teenagers and had worked in bike shops in Baltimore and you know it's an unsafe controlled job, you do what the boss tells you in the US, even worse than here, it doesn't even have things like healthcare suitable and one day. Josh and his friends at the bike shop thought our boss really does good. They liked his boss. He wasn't a bad person, but they said we fix all the bikes and that's why they had the idea of ​​opening a bike shop. would work differently, so instead of having a boss, it's a democratic corporation, it has bike shops in Baltimore, it's a democratic cooperative, they make all the important decisions together by voting, they share the good tasks and the shitty tasks, They obviously share the profits and one of these things that fascinated me was going to Baltimore on a Burke's bike, which fits perfectly with the fixations of Professor Michael Marmots, is that many of them said that in their previous jobs they had been depressed and anxious, but in this new way to work depression still have bad days. depression and anxiety had largely disappeared now, it is important to say that it is not that they left their job fixing bicycles and became like Beyoncé's backup singers, they fix bicycles before fixing them now, what changed is the factor that causes depression, is controlling and As Josh told me after reading a lot about Noam Chomsky, there is no reason why a company should operate like this.

This is causing so much depression, apart from anything else. Companies that are more democratic, according to a study by Cornell University, grow. four times faster, partly because workers are much more motivated, so it's not even efficient, but more importantly, why should we have done it? You, with everyone around you, set the decisions and priorities in which the boss is accountable to you, so that if there is something that is getting you down and a particular task that you can share among everyone else and where you choose your boss if necessary. If you were old enough to have a boss, think how transformative that would be for people's mental health.

I would say it is an antidepressant. Anything that reduces depression should be considered an antidepressant and that is one of them. I think it's one. one of the most important ones, although I looked at many others and one of the things that helped me think about this was that I was a South African psychiatrist called Derek Sommerfeld, who is an incredible man. Derek was in Cambodia at the beginning. of this century when chemical antidepressants were first introduced there and the Cambodian doctors didn't know what they were right because they had heard about them and they told him what they are and Derek explained to him and they said oh we don't need them.

I have antidepressants and Derek said what do you mean and they said, well, they told him a story: there was a farmer in their community who one day had stood on a land mine in the rice fields that had been left over from the American invasion and his His leg was blown off and given an artificial limb and he went back to work in the rice fields, but apparently it is very painful to work underwater with an artificial limb. I imagine it was quite traumatic as you know he obviously exploded there and he just became acutely depressed classic depression and they told Derek so we gave him an antidepressant he said what did you do they said well we went and sat with him and listened to him and we and saw , I'm paraphrasing, we saw what his problem was that we saw that his pain made sense and we thought that if we bought him a cow, he didn't have to go to the water and he had to go to this place where he was traumatized and he could become a dairy farmer, so we buy.

He turned into a cow in a few weeks, since the depression is gone now, if you were raised to think about depression the way we have, your doctors have trained you the same way I have to think about it, that sounds like you're taking What's true, a cow is an antidepressant you're talking about, but what those Cambodian doctors understood absolutely intuitively is what the World Health Organization has shown, what many of the scientists who I could have demonstrated, that is, that our pain and anguish have meaning. It's a response to our needs not being met and if you want to deal with that, the most effective way to do it is to meet people's deep underlying needs, so give yourself an example of someone very close to here who did this when another wonderful person knew dr.

Sam Evering Tim co-runs a medical practice called Bromley by Bo Centre, it's in east London, it's close to where I used to live and although he was never my doctor unfortunately, Sam felt really uncomfortable because people were coming to him with depression and anxiety. He would listen to their stories and they would see that they were really alone, they were really separated from the things that make life meaningful and his training had told him that, even though he knew that science was more sophisticated than this, it told them that they had a chemical substance. . the imbalance drug them at the end right after, they had also had some CBT paper cognitive therapy on the menu, but um, but not then, not when some started doing this and Sam, like me, is not opposed to chemicals and depressants, he prescribes them if I was a doctor and would do it too, but he just thought that this is not enough, this is not adequate for the magnitude of the problem that these people are bringing me, so he decided to try to experiment and tell them about one of The people who participated, named Lisa Cunningham, who I met, had been stuck in our house with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years, barely came out and ran to the store down the street to buy cat food and Ben and Jerry's and he ran back. true and she went to see cough, it's Sam or one of her colleagues and they told her, okay, we're going to continue giving you the medications, don't worry, we're also going to prescribe you to participate in a group behind.

The doctor's office, the doctor's office, backed on to a park, but between the office and the park there was a small piece of land that they called an alley, which gives you an idea of ​​what it was like and they told Lisa and your friends that the group is not your friend I'm sorry, other depressed people who later became my friends, what we want is for you to meet a couple of times a week, you will come and support you and we want you to turn this into something beautiful the first time she went. to the meeting Lisa was physically sick with anxiety, so were a lot of other people in the group, but they persisted, they literally put their fingers in the shop, they didn't know anything about gardening, they're from East London, right, they got a catcall too.

Sorry, the gardeners in East London are going to tell me now, but they, they, and they started teaching themselves gardening and they had something to talk about, that wasn't how they felt and they started listening to the problems of the gardeners. Otherwise, who would be other people? in the group she was taken to sleep on the bus the night bus Lisa was outraged she started calling the town hall to get her a flat she set it on fire she was so proud of herself it was the first thing she had done for someone else in years that was more powerful for her that any self-reflection and the way that Lisa and many other people in the group expressed it is that when the garden began to bloom, they began to bloom.

There was a study in Norway that found it eliminated more than twice as many people. both on the Hamilton scale and on chemical antidepressants why a similar program in Norway why I think because it addresses the reasons some of the reasons they were depressed in the first place is the lesson of the cow applied to our world there are many others lessons from the cow and come to them, but I just want to talk quickly about um, it would be easy for me to talk about the causes of depression, anxiety, I learned about it, it was easier for me to think about it, like loneliness, like being disconnected from the future, it can be explained.

That's later if you want, but I thought I'd force myself to talk about the two that I found most challenging because they played a role in my life, so we all know that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right? I know this better than most people and what I learned is that something similar has happened with our minds, those kinds of junk values ​​have taken over our minds and are making us mentally ill and I learned it from a professor called Tim Caster and this incredible body of research that he started and then has been taken up by many other scientists, so philosophers have said for thousands of years that if you believe that life is about money and status and showing off, you'll feel good, that's not It's exact. quote from Confucius, but that's the gist, um, but strangely no one had researched this scientifically until Professor Caste started about 25 years ago.

I wanted to actually find out how what we value affects how we feel, so I already knew. I didn't realize this, it was already established there, to put it crudely, there are two types of things, the two types of ways we can motivate ourselves to do something, they just develop in each of us, so imagine if you played the piano I can't do it but if you measure you play the piano if you play the piano in the morning because you love playing the piano the experience gives you pleasure and joythat's an intrinsic reason for playing the piano you don't get anything.

You're not doing it to get something else, you're doing it because you want to do that. Well, now imagine that you play the piano because your parents really want you to be like a piano master or to impress a man. I don't know, maybe some piano fetishist or something, or maybe you play it at a bar in a dive bar and you don't like paying the rent, that would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano, right? It's just that you're not doing it. for the thing itself, you're doing it to get something more out of the experience and it turns out that we're all a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic values, right, and we change throughout our lives, but what Professor Cass approved of was how if I want this interesting story: the more you think life is about extrinsic values, the more you think it's about money and status and showing off and looking good externally, the more you will become depressed and anxious.

It's a pretty powerful aesthetic that they've established themselves on. Depression I think there were 22 studies and with anxiety 12 international studies have shown that this effect is correct and Professor Caster has analyzed many reasons why I will only give you a few. One of them is to live extrinsically. Lee does not meet his needs. What he needs is to feel connected. and feeling like you have meaningful relationships, so that could be an example, it's going to sound like a cheating point, but I think it is and milania itch is an extreme example, but Melania.Trump a few years ago, before she was first lady, it was to give a speech at New York University.

I can't imagine why and someone in the audience asked her if she would have married Donald Trump if he wasn't rich and she said do you think he? he would have married me if she wasn't beautiful now, that's a really powerful illustration of extrinsic values, right? So what do you both know? I love your partner because you are you and no matter what happens I love you I value you I enjoy your company because Melania Trump knows if she gets fat and what Donald Trump knows is that if he gets fat he won't stop being rich it's over Think about the insecurity it creates in a relationship.

Extrinsic values ​​make us all more insecure and anxious for those reasons. If you believe that the people around you value you because of something external that you have done, not because they simply like you to be around you. We will be more depressed than anxious. There are many other reasons why these extrinsic values, these junk values, make us feel so bad, but that's just one example and one of the things that has happened is that, as a culture, we have become much more driven by extrinsic values. and as a little experiment that I think tells you how it works, so what the teacher didn't do, case this was done by someone else in 1978, you get a group of five year olds and you put them all in a little sandbox. . and you divide them into two groups, the first group is shown ads for a particular toy, whatever the equivalent of 1978 Dora the Explorer or whatever, and only two ads take a couple of minutes, the second group doesn't shows no ad, then they say to all the children, okay, children, now you have a choice: you can play with a really nice child who doesn't have the toy in the ad or you can play with a really not nice child, who has the toy, kids who have seen the ad choose the nasty guy kids who haven't seen the ad she's the nice guy only two ads prepared those kids to choose an inanimate piece of plastic over kindness and connection right, think again about Melania Trump right, don't think about and no, okay, Trump is a very extreme example if you've ever stayed at a job past the time necessary to make more money and buy something you don't really need, stealing and come home and be with your children in that dynamic of that sandbox. it has developed with you and I realized when I met the professor that I found this really challenging.

I had always had some intrinsic values ​​as everyone knows how much of my life had been driven by these junk values ​​and on some level I had always known it. but you're not going to stay on your deathbed and remember, you know, effect, you know things about the ego, you'll remember moments of kindness and love and connection, but, as Professor Kasih told me, our whole culture is geared toward getting that let's neglect those ideas to make us forget that and live according to garbage values ​​more 18 month old children recognize McDonald's m then they know their own last name we are immersed in this message from the moment we were born and he talked about his profession cancer then I discovered these incredible ways to deprogram what I'm happy to talk about in the book.

You asked me about it. If you want to know, okay, it's a lot harder to talk about the other one, but I'm forcing myself to talk about it for a long time. One specific reason that will become clear is that one of the most difficult people to talk to for this book was a man named dr. Vincent Felitti Vincent discovered this incredible evidence about the role that childhood trauma plays in depression, anxiety, addiction and obesity, and many other things, so I could tell you the story of how he discovered it and it will sound weird, it will sound like was speaking. about something from a completely different book for a minute, but bear with me in the mid-1980s, dr.

Felitti was tasked in San Diego by a group called Kaiser Permanente, which was a medical provider, to find out what was happening with obesity because their obesity found that the costs related to obesity were increasing enormously and it was a disaster and it was costing them very much. of money and it was really bad for people's health and everything they tried, like giving people nutritional advice about what doesn't work, so they told him to just do some research on blue skies and find out what was going on, so He started with a group, I think it's about 300 and less than 350 extremely obese people, people who were over 400 pounds in most cases and he starts talking to them and one day he has this idea that sounds really stupid .

He had seen the hunger strikers in Northern Ireland on television and took They're Ages to Die, Right? Remember? And suddenly he thought that if really obese people stopped eating and we monitored them and gave them nutritional supplements, they would lose a lot, so with a lot of medical supervision they started doing this and the amazing thing was it worked, it turns out that if you weigh 400 pounds and you just stop to eat and they give you all kinds of nutritional supplements, you will actually go back to normal and they celebrated it and then something happened that they did not expect many times. people on the show would drop to a certain weight, get scared and go to KFC or whatever and gain massive weight again, so Vincent liked what happened because they suddenly became the healthiest people on the brink. of death, just because they were so overweight that he sat down with the woman who, because of her medical confidentiality, I'm going to call Susan and he said, well, Susan, did something happen that day that you fell apart?

It turns out that when he was very overweight no man had flirted with her. and one day a man, when she lost a lot of money, a man hit her with a birthing kit, she was in a bar and that was the trigger and they started talking more, they had a very long conversation, Susan said, when did she get like that ? Actually, it was when she was 11 that we started, so did something happen when you were 11 that didn't happen when you were 10, that didn't happen when you were 13 and she said, well, yeah, that's when my grandfather started raping me and Vince was really taken aback.

He started interviewing everyone on the show. 55% of them had started to gain weight after being sexually assaulted or abused and suddenly Vincent realized that he had thought that obesity was a pathology, it was a misunderstanding. She suddenly realized that she actually had a perfectly understandable rational psychological role, which was her way of protecting herself from sexual attention, as one of the women told her, being overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be, so Vincent obviously wants them to tease him a lot more. of really good scientists want to do a lot more research on this they say they commissioned this study on everyone who came to Kaiser Permanente for medical care over the next year because for a year they were giving questionnaires, it doesn't matter where they came in with migraines headache leg broken just gets free access to almost anything and only asked two sets of ten questions.

The first question was: did any of these bad things happen to you when you were a child? things like sexual abuse, gross neglect, that kind of thing and then he said, have you had any? of these problems as an addiction to obesity in adults and at the last minute they added depression when they got the results funded by the Center for Disease Control, the largest agency that funds this in the United States, when the results came in, the people literally couldn't believe it if you had a severely traumatic childhood, you were radically more likely to have all of these problems if you had a severely traumatic childhood, you were three thousand one hundred percent more likely to attempt suicide as an adult, 3,100 percent and Vincent I was really baffled by this, but what he started telling me as one of his colleagues was actually one of the other people who did the study dr.

Robert and I told each other that it made them realize that we had to stop asking you what's wrong with you and start asking what happened to you. The reason I found this so difficult. He made me realize something about myself. I had held on to the chemical imbalance theory of depression for a very long part of my life, longer than I knew, I had these hints of a different way of thinking and I had rejected them and I remember when, after the first time I saw to Vincent in San Diego, I left. and looking out to sea looking for the beautiful city of San Diego and just shaking with anger because as a child I had experienced some very extreme acts of violence by an adult in my life my mother had been sick my father had been in a country different in They were very, very extreme acts and I think one of the benefits of the chemical imbalance theory is that it just cauterizes to think about these things well and what he was saying is no, you actually need to think about this, you need to think about the things that have happened.

It happened to you and I found it really challenging, but then I learned about the next stage of research from him, which I found incredibly empowering. That's why I forced myself to talk about this tonight, when people indicated on their forms that they had had these traumatic experiences. When they were kids, Vincent went to see his doctor the next time they came, they didn't call them, but the next time they came, he just told them a little script that was something like I see that when you were a child you were sexually abused. . I am very sorry for what happened to you and that it should not have happened.

Would you like to talk about it? They usually have it. Some people just say no, I don't want to talk about it. And some people who have five minutes. conversation and in the end the doctors always said that we can recommend you so that you can talk more deeply with someone. What Vincent discovered is the release of shame that comes with seeing an authority figure not judge you, in fact, he said he never should have done that. It happened that in itself it reduced depression and other problems by 35% and people who went to a therapist were less likely to come back with depression balls by 50%, that tells you something now, again, the release of shame It's an antidepressant, right?

It's a really powerful antidepressant. and I learned a lot from all these scientists, but there was one place where a lot of this hit me and I want to finish by telling you a story: I went back to Vietnam for a second and it was something that I stumbled upon and kept remembering many times in the summer of 2011 , in a large anonymous municipal estate in Berlin, a woman named Maria Cheng, I assume she lived on the ground floor, put a sign in her window and said something like "I have received my eviction notice for my apartment, so next Thursday I'm going to kill myself.

This was like in many municipal properties in Britain. People didn't really know each other. Very Aksum eyes. Many people who were also depressed or anxious. and it's a bit of a strange area. She just explained where this municipal property is, so when the map, if you look at the map of the Berlin Wall when it was thrown down in 1961, they obviously threw up Very quickly, this was the West Berlin part. It stuck out from East Berlin like a tooth, so it was like the front line. If the Soviets had invaded, it would have been the first place they occupied, so no one wanted to live there for the entire time. the war was there, except for the recent Muslim immigrants from Turkey like Maria, who put the sign in her window, and the homosexuals and punks, and these three groups had always looked at each other as having the right to have fun and no one knew the urea in this property.almost no one started knocking on her door, they said: can we help you?, she said no, I don't want help and a lot of people on that estate were really angry because when the wall fell, this thing that had been the worst place in Berlin , the tooth suddenly became prime real estate in the center of Berlin, so rents had increased all over Berlin, but they are increasing particularly in this Kotti area and a couple of people started chatting.

Actually, you might remember the summer in Tahrir Square, a lot of uprisings around the world, they had seen the terrace square, a couple of people in the estate said, "You know, there's a big road that goes to the center from Berlin, to MIT, sir, which goes through Kotse, but they said If we just block the road for a day, a bunch of us and we will leave Nuria and we will stay there and protest, we will probably get some media, probably the media will come and do it They'll film, Nuria, you know? And they'll probably let Nuria stay so she might get some attention because our rents are so high, so they did it and they took Maria out and they knew it was like I was going to kill myself off everyone. modes.

I can do this too and they stayed there for a day, one area was completely nice, these people came and stayed with her, she told me I thought they just thought she was a stupid old lady at work in a wheelchair. and she stayed there and the media came and there was news. reports and at the end of the day the police said, well you had fun, take it down and the people there said, wait a minute, you haven't told Maria that she's staying and in fact we want our rent frozen so don't , They're not going to tear it down, but they knew that when they left this kind of makeshift barricade that they built, the police would come, so Tanya, who lives, lived on the block, so I should explain to Tanya that she's one of my favorite people.

She wears tiny miniskirts in the Berlin winters, which is hard, she's a punk, she's just an amazing person and Tanya had what they call a horn in her apartment, so she knocked you down. I said, "Okay, what are we going to do?" Leave a schedule, we're going to man this barricade and when the police come to take it down, if they honk this horn, we'll all get down and stop. They did it right so that people who didn't know each other and had never spoken to each other would start signing up to man the barricade. barricade in kotti Maria was paired with Tanya Maria as I say she is a 63 they are women with the time of 63 they are women in a wheelchair and a hedge I am a very religious Muslim Tanya is not a very religious Muslim and the first nights they were there They just sat there on a laptop, it's very awkward, but as they did the night shift and time went by, they started talking to each other and discovered something about what they had in common.

Both had fled to Kotti. They were both stranded there with small children. Mary had come from a town in Türkiye and came with her children and was there. to raise money to send for her husband and then once she was there for a while she got used to it, her husband had died so suddenly she was stranded in kotti with these kids working every hour she could, she She told Tanya something she had never told anyone. She had always told people that her husband had died of a heart attack, in reality he died of tuberculosis, which was seen as a disease of poverty, she had been ashamed. and he told Tonya that he was really surprised that she told him that Tonya told him how she got to Kotti.

She had been kicked out of her middle-class family when she was 15. She had come to live in a squat Kotti. She became pregnant very early. She was left alone with a son. two people who thought they couldn't be more different realized how much they had in common there were all these couples about kotti there was a young man who was kind of a turkish german turkish hip-hop fan who almost got me kicked out of the school they said he had ADHD, they paired him with a grumpy old white communist who told him that direct action was bad and they just needed communism and they started talking and these pairings were happening everywhere and right in front of this counselor says there's a gay club run by a guy called Rick Hodge Stein and the club is called seblak butts give their sense of Richard Ricardo in his previous cafe it was called Anal Cafe and he died and when they opened it people broke the windows, the local Turkish Muslim community was obviously a lot of them quite anti-gay broke the windows I don't want this around here Ricard donated his furniture - man, this barricade actually weighs ten kilos then with the construction workers small permanent barricade permanent structure and told them, you know what? you can have all your meetings in this gay club, just come, we'll give you free drinks, just do it here and at first, even the lefty guy in kotti was like, look, we're not going to get these conservative muslims to come. and sit under the fist night signs, right, it's not going to happen, but they started having these meetings and, as one of them told me, they all had to take these little steps that we would never have taken, we had to learn to talk between us. another and one day a guy in kotti appeared in the protest camp called tenkai until madness in the early 50s and he has cognitive development problems and has a slightly deformed palate gentlemen, he speaks in a slightly strange way and had clearly been living homeless and said look I can clean things up, you can do anything and he started helping and everyone just loved him, the Turks really loved gay men, they loved it, everyone loved him and they said, Tim, why don't you do you start?

They built this. permanent structure why don't you live here? why don't you stay here? We all know that she started staying there for three or four months. One day she became a staple in the protest camp, so the police used to come to see you. I inspected things and one day the police came and Chung-kai didn't like that he thought people were arguing so he tried to hug them and they thought he was attacking them so they arrested him and took him away and that's when they found out. that Tonka had been locked in a mental hospital in a literally padded cell for twenty years before he came to Kotti and he was taken back to the mental hospital and the whole of Kotti became a free tank of eye movements that descended into this mental hospital. and these psychiatrists were completely baffled that a group of Muslims, gays and punks would demand the release of this guy who they kept in a padded room for twenty years and told people in the mental hospital: "He doesn't belong here, he belongs with you." here". with us we love him, we want him back and the psychic shot he saw was baffled, people have never said this about someone on that stay and they had to go through a lot of bureaucracy, it's Germany, let's go to layers of bureaucracy, but they did it.

Tong Chi moved back in with them and many ups and downs happened, although it took them many years to think that they were not going to win by freezing rents, in the end they launched a referendum initiative and obtained the largest number of written signatures in the history of the city ​​of Berlin for a rent freeze throughout the city and the City Council stole their face from that negotiated referendum and gave them much of what they demanded the last time I went to see María she told me I have to stay in my neighborhood that's great , but I earned much more than that.

I was surrounded by these incredible people all the time and I never knew it and one of the things that impacted me so powerfully at CATI was how the problems that seemed insoluble when we are alone and isolated and yelling at each other through screens and being told that life is about money becomes solvable when we sit together and listen to each other, you know, Mehmet, the guide, the young man he was, he almost got expelled from school, they said that If ADHD had turned out to just have adults sitting with him and helping him with his homework, he did well in the chung-kai school, it was difficult for anyone to take care of him in the area, so they put him in a padded cell, but when he had a community of people. to take care of him, his life became great, many people on that municipal estate had been deeply depressed, Maria was, in fact, suicidal and when she found these other people, they found life, they found the things that make life meaningful and his depression and anxiety largely disappeared.

There was a woman there, one of the Turkish women named Nariman, she told me that when I grew up in Turkey I learned that what you call home is your village, right, it's everyone around you and then I came to the Western world and I learned that what you call What you call home is just your four walls and, if you're lucky, your family and then this protest happened and I started calling this whole place home and what Nariman had realized is that all this time in the Western world he had been without home and in a sense we are homeless in this culture human beings need a tribe we need a place to which we belong that bosnian writer alexander heyman said that home is where people notice when you are not there how many of us if we let ourselves go we would have hundreds of people come to a hospital saying it belongs to us, we love it, it's ours, not as many as a study that asked the average person to ask people how many close friends you have that you can turn to in a crisis when They started doing it years ago.

The most common answer today was five. The most common answer is None. What I felt most deeply about Katya is how wrong my doctor told me. They didn't need to be drugged. They needed to be together. They were needed. They needed each other. a connection, that's not to say there isn't a role for drugs, but I saw Tania put it to me very well, she said: when you're sitting at home and you're alone, you think it's you, you think it's just your fault. , but if you come out of your corner fighting, you feel strong again, you see that it's not just you, it's everyone around you, it's cheap and you go home, you're surrounded by other depressed and anxious people, what we have What to do is build. a home with them that meets our needs until we do, we are going to continue to have very serious depression and anxiety attacks and that brings me back to what I learned.

I realized in Kotti why I had continued to think so much about Vietnam. What that doctor told me so well, the doctor told me, I remember you need your nausea, it's a sign, he's telling us the right thing, we should listen to the nausea, what we've done with depression so far most of the time, not all, not all. At that point, what my doctor basically said is that you're depressed because you're broken and it's just a malfunction. I realized that this depression is, in fact, a function. You know, I spend a lot of time in the US and it's something that totally baffles me.

I in the United States is the existence of perfectly normal people who will give you pills for indigestion, so you will take taneema. Someone I said: would you like a pill for indigestion? and you go, but you wait on digestion, it's a signal from your body to eat too fast, no I don't want to get rid of that because then you will eat too much and get sick right now. Depression is infinitely more agonizing than indigestion, obviously, but what we have done is try to pathologize this signal when we should have done so. honor him, respect him and listen to him well my doctor should have said that's what Sam says ever inton you should have said I think your pain makes sense I think you feel that way for a reason, let's find out what that reason is now I don't blame my individual doctor who He had five minutes to see each patient.

We've only given doctors one or two levers to pull. I don't fault them for just pulling those levers, but as a culture we have to do better. you need your nausea you need your pain it's telling you something okay, shoot two questions yes, thank you. Greetings. So thank you very much. There's a good person with a microphone here that I'm good at. Try alternating between women and men. I'll go with the women first to compensate for the patriarchy so there's a no it's not much compensation apologize hello you're not getting equal pay so you know what to settle for this it's not really a question it's supposed to I must thank you, actually I was.

I was supposed to come with a couple of friends tonight, they couldn't come, they're too anxious, which is really hard because I've been rooting for one of those friends since she was 15 and I'm 46. I think what really What I mean is that this has come at such a valuable time. Now I'm a mother. I have a daughter who will be 13 in a couple of weeks. She is in elementary school and every day she goes to that school. They told her, like they tell everyone, you're brilliant. I worked as a consultant. I specialized in the future of work.

I know they're going to fall off a cliff sometime soon and your point about work really bothers me. and how many people are struggling at work because we have a lot of identity at work, so I'm really just saying, do you know what must have been hard for you?Stand there, say that the entire staff writes the book, follow that journey, but? it's so important that you did this and I love you so much thank you so much oh thank you I give in to the person on the microphone because I feel like you've been judgmental on me so there's a man okay cool how are you doing man ?, not us.

I can make up for it, I can actually see you, so that's not an insult, I'm sorry, hello generic person of any gender, hello, um, I was just wondering if we could take you up on your offer to expand on the connection between increased anxiety and depression and block it and Trump. Yes, okay, I want to emphasize that this is beyond science. The things I said so far are backed up by these people. This is interesting. I had this experience, so in the run-up to the presidential election I was in Cleveland in Ojai. key state with these people who are trying to get out the vote that if anyone has been to Cleveland it is like Detroit without the poetry of the ruins it is shocking, completely dusty I noticed in most places the shocking bet and I was on this long street and it was one of the streets where like a third of the houses had been demolished, a third were abandoned and a third had people living in them literally behind barbed wire and we were knocking on these doors with this incredible guy, Dave Fleischer, who is the chief pollster for At the LGBT Center and this woman opened the door who - really look at her.

I guess she was sixty years old. I actually found out from talking to her that she was the same age as me, she was very articulate, she was quite intelligent, she was incredibly angry and she was full of rage determined not to vote and she made this verbal slip, it meant that she was teaching that the area It used to be like she meant when I was young, well she actually said that's when she was alive and that really set me back. and you know, trying to talk to this woman about you know you're going to get a better tax credit if Hillary Clinton wins, she just said look at my street, look at my life, this woman's psychological needs were totally unmet to the extent that I could. .

Tell him I was terrified and you know I see a lot of people like that, my sister could my brilliant nephew who I love is in the audience who lives near Blackpool in one of the hearts of the Brexit area, although he didn't vote for it, which I am very proud of him for many reasons why I am very proud of him, but you know that and I see it when I go there, right people who and what we have to stop doing is saying that people like them are stupid. or stupid or insulting them that my dad voted for Brexit, right, and you know, I'm going to discreet some of that.

Also, my dad is a European emigrant, which makes him particularly irritating, but you know he's not stupid, right, mental, yes, but not stupid and but. you know trump voters are not stupid and many of them are not racist, in fact, many of them have really deep unmet psychological needs and you know, if we just pathologize them, way below if your life is just not meeting your needs I don't understand why are you voting for the guys who are burning down the house right now I don't agree with that obviously I don't agree with that I think it's an incredible catastrophe the fact that Hillary Clinton was so good The good thing about my book tells you something about me politics, but you know we have to understand what is happening in a culture where people do not have their needs met because very often you are doing well, it is a paradox because the economy is growing. and still people are angry, you think so, but do you know anyone who measures success in life exclusively by economics?

I mean, it's absurd, it's strange, it's almost like an autism that we have culturally, that we can't see, that we don't live. well, that's a completely strange way to think about life, so you get perfectly sensible people, like liberal politics wants people on our side. I suppose most of you know that could actually be a very silly perspective, but the assumption was very wrong there, but there. you know the people on my side who will just be bewildered and gay, but things are going well, by the metrics, if you don't have friends, if you know, if you can't imagine the future, that's not the case.

It's not going well for you and I'm trying to give a shorter answer to the next one sorry, I'll leave it until hello ok hello hello thank you very much I recently interviewed a researcher at Imperial from the psychedelic research group who examined fantastic and interesting things with Generally, the Compounds have been highly stigmatized in the wake of the war on drugs, but they seem to hold a lot of promise in alleviating the symptoms of many of these illnesses, and in particular, it's not just about escaping for a few hours, but this idea of ​​altered traits. . that only altered states.

I'm wondering if you could explain a little about your experience and how we could reduce the stigma and I hope to explore these as possible therapeutic options in the future. I'm so glad you asked about this because I did a lot of research on it. as a chapter in which we can know what I have been asked about it so far, then you are a hero and that is why they caught up with me in this and that is why I went to this debate about psychedelic drugs like LSD or magic mushrooms, as they are called. known in a somewhat pejorative way. and if they can have an effect with things like depression, so I went to interview the scientists who had been doing the awakening, so there was a lot of research on this until the mid-60s and then Nixon shut everything down and really woke up. the last six seven years, so I went to interview the teams at UCLA in Los Angeles, NYU, at Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, in Oslo and in Sao Paulo.

I went here in London, at UCL, and what they discovered is really fascinating, but I think it tells us something about why most people here are not going to want to take psychedelia without drugs. I think it tells you something really interesting that goes way beyond psychedelics, so give me an example, Johns Hopkins, the most prestigious universities in the US took people who were really long-term chronic smokers like my mother, no. They took my mother literally, but my mother there is a photo of me and my mother where she is breastfeeding me smoking and resting the ashtray on my stomach and when I showed her that photo she said that he was difficult baby he needed that cigarette I was I was talking I was talking to her the other day and we mentioned I come and why I mentioned Grenville Tower and she said and I said you know my first memory is actually political memories the king's crossfire she told me that was the worst day of my life and I thought Oh mom, did you know someone who died and she said no, that's the day they ban smoking in the tube anyway for a long time?

Chronic smokers like my mother and people who tried everything and were given, I think it was in six months, three or four doses of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, 80% of them stopped smoking and wondered why. , What's going on here. They did a lot more research and found something really interesting, so it seems like psilocybin has a significant effect early on in testing sport, so there were early, small trials with addiction to depression. This fascinating guy in Alabama who's doing the cocaine study on this and depression. The main research on depression has been done here in London, rubbing shoulders with Carhartt Harris and David Nutt, who were heroes and friends of mine, but there is a subset of this that is reassuring, so first I thought it doesn't like to flip a chemical switch In your head, it's like what they told us about Prozac years ago, it's not what they found, when you take psilocybin, most people (not everyone) have what is basically a spiritual experience, you feel intensely connected to the people you meet. surround and with the natural world. it goes off it's the part of you that is the ego it just breaks down the walls of your ego and you feel very deeply connected and then of course you know the effect wears off but different people have a different intensity of spiritual experiences some people No.

They don't have that at all, a small number of people have that at all and some people have a super intense spiritual experience. What they found is that the positive effects correlate extremely closely with the intensity of your spiritual experience, so if you don't have the spiritual experience you don't quit if you have a super intense one you have a lot of positive benefits and I think that tells you something that I was one of the experts on erasing his name he told me and it's a learning experience what it shows you is you can think that you are deeply connected, you can turn off the ego part of your brain that has to do with junk values ​​and all that and you can feel intensely connected and then when the effect wears off you can try it because no one is good, they get attacked like every day. day unless they're okay, there's a person I know, but let's see how few people are going to make that she's actually a pretty oppressive person, someone anyway and you know then you have to find a way to integrate that perception into your Life is a learning experience and, for example, in the depression trial here in London it seemed to have a really positive effect, but Robin did the study and told me about, for example, a woman who was in the trial who took psilocybin and then achieved a massive reduction in depression. she goes back to her depressing job in a coastal town in an office and she was saying you can't maintain that knowledge in that environment properly and then the depression came back, so I think that reinforces what I'm saying about how we need to restructure. our society in our culture so that more people can live in a deeply connected way so that more people can have experiences like those in court, like those that the Bromley bibo Center has and so on.

I said I would give shorter offers and much more time. Sorry, I have tested the short life of the microphone. I decide it. I trust you. Great, hello, hello, thanks and this is quite a personal question, but following the research you've done and the change in perceptions and approaches to depression and anxiety would you still describe yourself as depressed? I'm anxious, no, and I want to start by saying two things that I think are really important, one is that I have a very close relative who I immediately imagine about this, who is a struggling single mother who is really struggling just to pay the rent. and I don't ever want to be portrayed as saying I did this, you can change like this, it would be actively cruel to tell her hey your job now is to democratize her workplace and fight for the universal, basically I mean she barely has enough energy to see Coronation Street correctly because it is working very hard, so a big part of my argument is that we need to change our society so that more people are liberated. huge margin to change my life because my last book did well, she doesn't write and it would be cruel to say that I did, you can too because, frankly, most people and I don't, you don't have that bigger margin to change my life.

For a change, there are some things that everyone can do and I talk about them in the book, but we need to free up a lot more space and the second thing I would say is that the reason why anyone should follow everything I say in the book if they want to wish, it is not like that. because I did it and it works for me because an individual anecdote isn't worth much, the reason they should do it is because it's based on science from the World Health Organization and some of the world's leading scientists, if you will. to follow that for me, yes, I experienced a really big transformation in my life and some people here really helped me with that, but there was one person in particular, there were a lot of ideas, obviously, but like you said, I think of one person in particular.

I went to interview a person named dr. Brett go ahead: I would see him in Berkeley in California and Brett did this really interesting research, so I really want to know if you deliberately chose right now to spend more time trying to be happy, would you really become happier? And they did this research. In four countries, she didn't do all four countries, but with her colleagues it was the US, Russia, Taiwan and Japan, and they found something really interesting in the US. And I'm sure we would be the same if you tried to make yourself consciously happier.

You don't get happier, but in every other country you do and they asked me what's happening, why? So they did more research and found that in the US and I'm sure in Britain most of the time if you try. make yourself feel better you do something for yourself you make yourself big you try to get a promotion you buy something for yourself whatever in other countries most of the time you did something so that someone else would sing for your family your community your friends us and idea instinctively individualistic idea of ​​what happiness is and they have an instinctively collectivist idea of ​​what happiness is.

In fact, I think what I saw in Katya in Berlin was a transition from an individualistic view of happiness to a collectivist view of happiness and thatIt really taught me something that I used to realize when I was with Breton Berkeley when I felt like I used to, but I could feel the pain coming. What I would do is do something good for myself, not always, but most of the time I aggrandize myself in some way and it wasn't like that. It didn't work, now I realized that it was actually like stepping into quicksand and now I can say that I do it every time, but what I try to force myself to do is force myself to do something for someone else and you know you start, you have to appear. with her, you know, like Oprah with a BMW, for them they just show up and do what I thought of, they just show up and listen to people and be present with them, so few people are listened to in our culture, so few people.

I feel like Pete, anyone sees them just showing up and being present and leaving a phone at home and listening to them and that's really interesting what you said, tell me more, that's the most precious gift you could give, just the gift of presence and I . I've been very lucky to have people who did that with me and I think there are many things that improve our mental health. I think that was one of the keys, to move away from that beginning and try to be present with others. people and trying to do more things for other people Thank you, um, okay, who's next?

I can't really see it very well, but I always feel like I should stop a little bit, you know, like the holding teams when you know. seeing angels but Robbie Williams or something like that but hello hello you saved me from having to sing angels oh thank you oh yeah so bear with me or in stylist magazine today there was a whole article from my Oracle stylus magazine about robots and that one of them you were you I know that we are all going to be taken care of by robots when we are old and sick and that we will have meaningful relationships there and the link to that is the idea of ​​work and robots and what I think I have read about universal basic income, can you ?

Talk a little bit about society's approach to this idea of ​​value and purpose, whether the AI ​​and robot revolution is coming very quickly, and how you think it might affect levels of depression and anxiety. It's a really good and important question. I spoke with the leader. expert in the world on this, he was totally fascinating. I'm glad you asked this, so just people who don't know. I guess most of the people who make robots come because of your work. What is the correct headline? I think the figure is a million people in Britain. making a living by driving within ten years we will have automated cars, it's not those jobs that have been going well, so in a society like ours that is a deep threat because you know your status, your income is completely tied to the market. economy or you know some states um obviously state services as well and there is an experiment that I think he showed us and this is because this is another factor that drives Trump and all of that they are increasing insecurity the movement was an insecure job that was horrendous and it's an experiment that showed us I think how to deal with this has something really important about the depression in the 1970s the Canadian government seemingly at random I can't figure out how they made a decision it really looks like they put a pin in a The map chose a city called Doe Fan, does anyone know Canada, it's four hours from Winnipeg, it's in Manitoba and they told a very large group of people in this city, okay guys, we have something for you from now on in monthly installments .

We will give you the equivalent of £15,000 in today's money a year and there is nothing you have to do for it and there is nothing you can do that will mean taking it away. It's simply yours because we want you to have a good life brilliant experiment correct school universal basic income they wanted to see what would happen much studied in great detail of this incredible woman called dr. Evelyn 4j a lot of things happened people who spent more time studying people spent more time with their children people said not many people I think practically no one left the job but a lot of people said no to shitty jobs so that the job can work standard job employment standards had to improve, but the biggest thing that happened was a really big drop in depression and anxiety mood disorders, which was so severe that people had to be hospitalized at nine percent in just three years, an amazing drop, much more successful than anywhere else where any medication is introduced and again dr.

Fouché told me that it is an antidepressant, true, it is not something you swallow, but it is an antidepressant. People who have property income are ten times less likely to be depressed and anxious than people who don't realize it, they're not rocket science and anyway, The reason this relates to robotization is that the Robertization is going to destroy a huge number of jobs, including middle class ones. I don't think robots are going to be writing books anytime soon, so I'm a little smug, but who knows, but there are plenty of jobs, right? and I made a movie.

I wish 20 years later there was a robot standing here. I would like my new book to know that as well. If we continue with the economy structured as it is, it will be a catastrophe. For people's mental health, there's all this research that shows that your mental health is very tied to your view of the future. If you're sorry, I can explain that if someone wants to ask about it, but if they cut a story short, but if they feel like you don't have a picture of the future or your picture of the future is disturbed, you're actually much more likely to commit suicide than just kill yourself. depressed, so if we continue as we are this will cause a greater mental health catastrophe if we have a universal vision. basic income really cushions the blow, as President Obama said towards the end of his office, you know, I mean this time an office, this is the best way to deal with the uncertainties that are coming because of automation and all those things.

I think you're absolutely right to ask about that and robotization should be an amazing gift. All these jobs you hate you already have to do. A robot will do it. It's surprising that in a healthy society that wouldn't be a threat. It would be an incredible liberation, it frees you to do what they did, to sit down with people to do well the things that really matter in life, but because of the way we structure our society, it won't be experienced that way unless we change. and we fight for it ok, who is the next big hello thank you, thank you Joe, thank you very much?

I had a question: do you think you basically said you come from a disadvantaged background with a lot of trauma? What happened to make you decide? change in your life, what was the trigger and my broader question is the growth that comes from the crisis or can it come from virtue? Your growth or how to take care of yourself, if you prefer, can come from virtue or does it always come from a point of crises like the The example you brought to Berlin with the social turkeys forming is interesting. I would just say I don't come from an economically disadvantaged background at all, my parents were fine but I experienced some of these acts of violence and I think it comes from that about you great thanks for the questions what if it comes from that about the nausea? right, you need your nausea is a signal um, I try to remember that it was Professor John Cacioppo who told me this, he saw that he is the world expert on loneliness at the University of Chicago and he said: "Loneliness is an aversive signal necessary to push you back to the group.

Do you think about how humans evolved? We evolved in tribes of hunter-gatherers, right, no. We were bigger than the animals we killed, but we were better at cooperating and in fact, it has been shown that loneliness is greatly increased and loneliness is one of the main causes of depression and anxiety says that we actually think that loneliness is like a. pathology, but it's actually a sign telling you to go back to the greatness of where we were involved in the savannahs of Africa, if you were separated from the group, you were right to feel anxious and depressed because you were about to be eaten, okay?

Or else, if you got hurt, no one was going to be there to help you, you were in terrible danger and those are all our instincts, right? Humans evolved to live in tribes just as bees evolved. live in hives and we are the first humans to try to live without a tribe and surprise, surprise, we feel that way, and I think that's an example of what you're talking about, which is a painful signal like in digestion. much worse, stale or like the nausea I felt when I was, you know, very dehydrated, it's a painful sign, but it's a sign that must be respected.

Now there are totally too. I don't mean to make it sound like that. was in normal Amman, who said no pain no gain about the 1918 recession, okay, dark political reference there, but I want to be like that, oh if it doesn't hurt, it doesn't hurt, it doesn't work, that's what he said and I. I don't want to, I don't want to talk like that, of course, it doesn't have to reach a crisis point, right? I don't believe in the deeper concept of addiction or anything else that a slight amount of pain can lead to affecting things or you can just be okay and then someone can come and be nice to you and you might be driven to more than just okay, so exhausted as if he has to reach a crisis point, he doesn't, but he is one of the few.

The modern advantages of what has happened in recent years is that all the alarms are ringing. The most powerful man in the world is Donald Trump. The alarm bells couldn't be ringing louder, so we are at this crisis point. We can also recognize it. why the crisis is happening and use that as a reason to reconnect and deal with these deeper issues because you know we can't, the old center is not going to hold up well, it hasn't held up, that's why we have it broken. Alternative to Trump for Deutschland matin lepen those things are not going to hold up, so yeah, anyway, okay, hello, I've been pointed out today, yeah, I feel like you're like heaven and you're hell, right?

I mean, hey, look happier. I want to thank you for your work, my name is Jeff and I actually come from Miami and this is my brother, he lives in London and if you can see the t-shirt, it's actually inspired by your TED talk and the thing earlier about chasing the scream says it contrary to Addiction is not sobriety but rather human connection and I really like how you expanded on this theme in this new book and I look forward to reading it and you may have touched on it, but my question is one of the things I have thought about.

Recently, this term self-care has become very important and you know, if you have any thoughts about that, about how that speaks to our way of dealing with happiness or depression, etc., yeah, you just reminded me that something happened to me that It was around that time that I gave him my latest book and a TED talk was probably about an experiment called Rat Park, which is about addiction, this rat thing, and I was on a streetcar in San Francisco and this guy was sitting in front of me. , he was incredibly handsome. man and he was looking at me, it's like something great, so I smiled back and while I was about to and then, but he didn't say anything and I thought it was a little weird, so I was about to get off the tram. and he said catch me he said you and I said yes and he said addict rats yes and he hugged me so I know your t-shirt made me think about that and thank you for wearing a t-shirt so that's really surreal and nice.

Yes, I also have another story about teachers being talked about and self-care. Yeah I think this concept is a little problematic so one of our relatives went through something bad a while ago and people posted on her Facebook wall I thought it was really interesting they were really trying to cheer her up and they posted and yeah appears, it's a meme that says something like the only person who can help you because you love yourself, baby, right, but you think about how deep this individualism is, so we see. someone is depressed we say you have to engage in self-care, which we often interpret as you have to go away and take care of yourself, even the deepest clichés, how deep is this individualism, be yourself, that's the most banal thing that can you do.

You can tell someone in our culture, even your shampoo bottle says because you're worth it, but the key thing I learned is no, don't be, don't be yourself, don't take care of yourself, let's be us, let's be the group. Well, take care of the others. The best way to take care of yourself is to take care of others. In reality, this individualism is paralyzing. It correlates very closely with depression. It makes us feel terrible. It is not the species we are. So yeah, I'm really against this. I take care of myself personally, as you can see, it's okay, safe, since I take two at the same time, they tell me and I always obey hello, thank you.

I have a quick question, you touched on politics several times and I. I was wondering what is the starting point of politics, how can we change society when many of the things you have been talking about involve at the individual level, so how do you encourage the entire society to changefrom top to bottom? very good question and here it is I can't see the next term oh great hello great hello hello um I think all assassins are incredibly valuable to us at any stage of life, but if we want to get the maximum benefit from learning that you and other people are giving to this, then we really need to incorporate it into our education system, how do you see this happening when the curriculum doesn't really provide for any such learning?

Alright, in terms of change, one of the reasons I'm deeply optimistic about this is because I've lived through change as big as the one I'm advocating. I'm gay. I recently showed not this nephew but one of my other nephews his seventeen things that were on the front page of the Sun newspaper when I was the age he is now about gay people and he literally couldn't believe it. He said: Did anyone call the police today? If the craziest local councilor you have tweeted what used to be on the front page of the Sun they would have to give it up in a few hours like this and we are not talking about a little thing that was actually a thousand years of millennia 32,000 years of homophobia that fell so quick and you know why and how it was This happened thanks to an incredibly brave generation of gay men and women, mostly from a generation older than mine, who appealed to the good-hearted straight people around them and simply appealed to their goodness and decency and in some ways I think this should be easier than that in some sense, you know, homosexuals are a very, very small minority, the number of people who are made to feel like for controlled work, loneliness, all the facts I'm talking about, most of us are right, that's not a way out, obviously not. everyone gets depressed, but on the continuum I think these factors are diminishing the lives of almost everyone, so I think it starts with I think part of this is something I learned at kotti in a sense, the struggle is the solution in the act . to come together and say: you know that what we have been offered is not good enough, it does not meet our needs, in fact, they are alone and that in itself is a healing thing that reflects the kind of alternative we want in the place where we live . in a more connected way, then I would say the gay rights movement, the gay equality movement.

I tell the story and I tell the story in the book of a friend of mine, a wonderful person named Andrew Sullivan, so in 1994 Andrew was diagnosed HIV positive when that was a death sentence, his best friend Patrick died and not long after, And Andrews first thought when he was diagnosed that he deserved this because he had internalized the culture's homophobia and went to Provincetown, a small town on the tip of Kippur on Cape Cod. It's a gay town to do the last thing he thought he would do, he wrote a book, but it's called virtually normal, I really recommend it and it's a book basically an idea that he thought was completely crazy and could happen many generations later, it was the It's the first book that defends gay marriage and every time I get depressed a lot for this I think it's a really big fight.

I tried to imagine going back in time and telling Andrew that I can dream 25 years from now. Good news. to be alive the Supreme Court of the United States is going to quote from this book when they rule that gay marriage is mandatory for the entire country and I will speak to you the next day when the President of the United States invites you to the White House. that will light up in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you accomplished by the way, that president will be black would have sounded like the most ridiculous science fiction, right?

I know, Andrew, I've seen it happen, incredible changes. It can happen when we come together and fight for them in terms of education. I think you're absolutely right and I think, to be honest, this is a much broader issue, but the whole education system is geared towards it. I mean, I see him dead. Ling, my friends, children, I am some kind of mortal, my wonderful nephew, who cannot escape, yes, I think it is terrible, there is this concept, I think Alfie Kohn invented it, it is called hidden curriculum, so every school has an official curriculum, which is like you know history, geography, whatever and like a hidden curriculum that is training you to hold on and a lot of our school system is about training you to sit still.tolerate. boredom and shut up, that's the hidden curriculum, that's why I hated it, that's why I'm sure a lot of you hated it and in a sense, if you have a society where eighty-seven percent of people don't like their jobs, so it makes sense to have a hidden curriculum that prepares people for the internal lethargy that has to be endured, but we should change our system, not our children, because, hey, we should have wonderful, free children who want to cooperate and learn, that should be encouraged and we should change society, so it means the other surprising fact about children, I think, is that the average British child says that a study showed that the British child The average spends less time outdoors than the average maximum security prisoner because by law they have to have 75 minutes a day, so we literally treat our kids worse than we treat murderers when it comes to going outside. street, right, it's a Sikh culture.

There has never been a human society that has attempted to raise children alone in isolated homes and it is no wonder we have such a massive childhood. depression anxiety crisis as a result Cathy, I have time to if you want to touch the back you just have one more great question so you have the last question oh my goodness, well it's probably absolute, so because it has to do with reading. forbidden plant this whatever it is now I want to ask you a question about reading for pleasure which in a sense connects to the right point about education first of all thank you for tonight so I think like anyone , this has been a you've given a brilliant, inspiring talk once again and I'm an editor so I have a great interest in people reading for pleasure, but there have been many and you have a great interest as someone who writes books for let people read them. for pleasure, but I wanted to talk about what reading for pleasure can do and it ties into these ideas of connection and sense of community and one of the people we published, Matt Hagen, whose book Reasons to Stay Alive was also about how dealing with depression and the fact that the medications did nothing for him, on the contrary, in a way it aggravated the problems and he talks in the book about going back to the books of his childhood and re-reading these old ones for pleasure books were the things that did it. start to reconnect and get out of yourself and do a lot of the things that have aligned with some of the things that you've talked about today and I was thinking about another woman, Olivia Languid, the book The Lonely City about her adventures in the art of being alone. and how art, not just reading, but art, was the way she began to reconnect with people outside of herself and overcome these deep feelings of loneliness she felt and celebrate being alone as she realized that, paradoxically, she was never alone because these artists have shared themselves and their loved ones.

The last type of indicator involves that old Hebrew proverb that says: open a book and you will be a pilgrim at the gates of a new city that I have always loved because I have never much celebrated where a book can take you. on the journey and the future possibilities that this allows, first of all I want to thank you, but I also wanted you to talk about the pleasures of reading. Oh, that's a great question, it makes me think of something else I want to talk about. and I'm going to touch on what is very related.

I have to say Jamie's brilliant editor, but also Matt's book is amazing and Olivia Lang. I don't know her, but she is a wonderful writer and I love her. She loved her most recent book, The Lonely City. hmm so there is an interesting debate about how technologies and reading books are a technology, how the technologies we use shape our consciousness, for example in the early 18th century it was very common for people to go and witness public torture , at the beginning of the 19th century it almost completely disappeared and now, when Isis did it, we rightly consider it as the correct public torture in the world, so there is a debate about what happened.

Steven Pinker writes about this very well and the better angels and one of the debates is that people I started reading and what I had read books became much more common and one of the things that books do is give you a sense of the OT within from other human beings, they hone your consciousness, what this other person's mind is like, now contrast that with other technology. which some of you are doing right now and other people are and everyone, including me, is obsessed with social media and the internet. I mentioned how that affects our consciousness and how it affects depression and anxiety, so to understand this I went to the first one. -sometime a rehab center for internet addicts and the United States not as a patient as a journalist I actually got there in Washington state it's in the woods he had to confess like Sue said to try it showed up and I literally got out of the car what I looked at I looked at my phone because I didn't have cell phone reception.

It bothered me a lot, it's like wait, it's a rehab center for people like you, but what was so fascinating is watching how those technologies work, dr. Hillary Cash, she directs, she was an amazing person, we talked to her a lot and, um, I think there are several things that happen there about the course, which is not a real contrast to the books, so part of it I don't want to blame the technology. So one thing worth remembering is that by the time the Internet comes into human history, which is the late '90s and early '00s, many of the forms of disconnection that I'm talking about were already there. massively implemented, we had already had a huge collapse on social networks.

Connections, we had already had a big increase in junk values, all that stuff, but what happens is the Internet comes along and it looks a lot like what we've lost. Online connections look like connections. Facebook friends look like friends. Status updates are seen a bit. I like the status you've lost, but I've actually started to think that in some ways the relationship between social media and social life is like the relationship between porn and sex, as if porn satisfies a certain basic itch. . I'm not against that, right? But your whole sexual life was watching pornography. You will feel really frustrated all the time because your deepest needs and needs are not being met properly.

Nobody after an hour of watching porn, you know, feels satisfied and maintained like you do after you. having sex if it goes well and it's less I had a memory that I won't talk about and then but and and and and then I think that's partly what's happening is that we've turned to this technology because you know because it seems like what we've lost, but It's actually a parody of what we've lost, like Hillary told me, what you need is a face to face connection, you could have watched me on YouTube tonight if you did, you wouldn't feel.

Like we really talk to each other, we don't, it's worthless, I'll get you cheap all the time, but it wouldn't have the same value and I also think once you're in that mode it warns you all the way. you speak and think correctly and if you think about how you read when you read a book, you read Olivia's book about Matt's book or you know great books like these, you develop a deep, complex and nuanced awareness, you follow linear plots and plots. You're engaging with another mind in a profound way if you scroll if you read my book I'd like to think you have some access to my mind if you scroll through my Twitter feed you wouldn't write or you'd get very fragmented By the way, we wouldn't connect in the same way way and I think the transition from reading books to much more domination by these, you know, spending much more time on these on these platforms is a disaster for the way that we.

I think, of course, it's Costin to our conscience, it's diminished our empathy and made us more depressed and anxious, so I think one of the reasons that you were saying when you cited that book sales have increased, I think we can feel the lack that people can feel. If my nephew is a teenager, he left Facebook, right, he reads a lot more, so I really think you're absolutely right and I want to say I was there. I'm a little more interested in promoting books, but I think I keep it scientific. The evidence is also there and everyone should read some of Jamie's books.

Well, thank you all very much for coming. Now I will sign. I should think about all the nonsense someone thought and I'll have to scold myself. Let's say this and I will do it. Sign Burke's Babies' Faces. Something strange had to happen to me, but clearly when I went to Baltimore to sign a book, a woman approached me and told me.He said: I want you to write a message to someone. I told him: Sure. She said: Will you write? Dear Steven, she's over. I never loved you anyway and I said no, so no one wants me to write anything more sensible than that.

I will do that. I'll be there for about five minutes, greetings everyone, thank you.