The biggest problem with telling people the story I was told your depression is
in your head it tells you that the reason you're depressed is you're broken.
Actually you're very sane if you're depressed. It's no sign of good health to
be well adjusted to a sick society. Our pain makes sense. If you're depressed and
anxious you're not a machine with broken parts, you're human being with unmet needs.
You need food, you need water, you need clean air, you need warmth, if I took
those things away from you you would go haywire really quickly.
We just have natural psychological needs. There are things you need as a human being to feel good:
you need to feel you belong, you need to feel you have meaning and purpose in your life,
you need to feel that people value you and see you, you need to feel you
have a secure future that you understand and if you take those things away from
people many of them will be really bad. We've been encouraged to live in ways
that don't meet our human needs that are actually quite sick.
There destructive in all sorts of ways: they're destructive for our psychology, they're destructive to
the planet's ecology, they're destructive for huge numbers of people all over the world.
Depression and anxiety are not pathologies that are about biological
breaks, right, there are biological factors that can make it worse but
that's not the core what's going on. They are responses to your needs not being met.
Pain signals evolved for a reason, they're telling you something's going wrong
and the fact that we have this huge depression anxiety and
addiction epidemic across the Western world, something's gone wrong, well what
is it that's going wrong and how do we actually begin to fix it.
The reason why I'm alive, you're alive, everyone watching this is alive, it's because our ancestors
were really good at one thing: they were really good at banding together and
cooperating. Often they were not bigger or stronger than the kind of beasts they
took down and ate what they were was incredibly good at cooperating compared
to other species. They banded together into hunter-gatherer tribes and they
worked together all the time. In the circumstances were we evolved in the
savannahs of Africa if you got separated from your group and you were off on your
own you have become depressed and anxious for a really good reason,
you were in terrible danger, you could be eaten, if you got injured no one would be
there to help you, you would probably die. Every instinct that we evolved as human beings
is to be part of tribes, of communities. Bees need a hive humans need a tribe.
We've been told this story that we should think of ourselves not like that,
not as this collaborative, cooperative species but as individual economic rationalisers.
The reality is that has produced a society that is lonelier than any human society ever.
We are the first human beings to ever try to disband our tribes and live alone
Well the High Priestesses of neoliberalism Margaret Thatcher told us there's no such thing as society,
there's only individuals and their families. In neoliberalism at the heart of it is
about promoting the idea that you should think of yourself as an individual who's
maximising their rational economic interest and maybe that of your family.
Actually that set of beliefs if it had been followed throughout human history
would have led to the extinction of our species. Neoliberalism has told us this
full story about human nature and we have constructed a society based on that
theory that therefore doesn't meet people's human needs. Just like we know
that neoliberalism created the 2008 economic crash, neoliberalism has also
created the social crash that we are currently living through. At the same
time nearly liberalism creates a story where there's this ten billion dollar
industry that tells us oh no your pain is just because you've got some chemical
problem in your brain and so neoliberalism fucks us up and then tells us a
bullshit story about why we're fucked up which they then get tell us as a reason
to sell us even more things. You know I had this really weird illustration of
this Peter Thiel is the founder of PayPal disgusting right-wing
gazillionaire, who funded the Trump campaign. He has a venture capital fund
that were developing apps to deal with depression anxiety and addiction, I was
invited to go and speak at very much capital fund. It was the most bizarre
experience and if all you knew about depression anxiety and addiction was
this day-long conference you would think that these were just problems inside
people's brains. The whole days spent looking at brain scans the only outside
factor they ever mention was a few people mentioned in passing childhood trauma.
And I was like you could describe the plot of Romeo and Juliet using like
Newtonian physics if you wanted to: the atoms move in Romeo's body this way
and the atoms move in Juliet's body that way, it would all be true but
you wouldn't understand a fucking thing about why Romeo does anything or why
Juliet does anything. You'd be misunderstanding and in a similar way if
you spend your whole time looking what happens in the brain without thinking:
what's happening in the person's life that's changing their brain, you're missing the point.
The reason why this is so connected to neoliberalism is,
if you think about the fact that it's Peter Thiel who's organising this conference to profit from it.
Funding this idea, look, let's go and tell everyone that their distress is
just something wrong with their brains. Their ideology didn't let them see a really basic truth in front of them.
A lot of factors that are causing depression and anxiety had already been rising before the internet came along.
We were becoming much lonelier, we were thinking more and more that life is
about having money and status which makes you depressed,
we were disconnecting from the natural world and then the Internet arrives and
it looks a lot like the things we've lost. It offers you Facebook friends in place of friends
that are in the community. It offers you status updates
in place of status. The average person checks their phone every six-and-a-half
minutes, 42 percent of people never switch off their phone.
Like all addictions it's an attempt to fill a hole. If that takes up too much of a
space you're gonna feel constantly frustrated because it's not meeting that
deeper need: the deeper need we have is the meaningful human contact,
that's face-to-face, that's about a community of people who see you and know you and value you.
There's a Bosnian writer Alexander Heyman who said:
home is where people notice when you're not there. What you need is that sense of
home, people will see you and notice when you're not there. what's happening with
social media is a symptom of the wider disconnection that's happened in the
culture and then in turn it makes it worse.
I was depressed for 13 years, it never occurred to me that there were social causes of my depression.
I was a Thatcherite to my own pain. If you're in a consumerist culture where
you're taught all the time the solution to your problems is to go shopping, I
don't think it's surprising that we will look for cures to our depression that I
like going shopping. That we'll think the solution must be to swallow something,
buy something. The fact that we look for a solution in pills is a symptom of the
wrong direction we've gone in that's made us so depressed and anxious in the first place.
I was taking antidepressants for 13 years and I remained depressed for most of that time.
One thing that was really interesting to me was actually to realise how normal I was.
Actually enormous numbers of people taking these drugs become depressed again.
The average effect of chemical antidepressants is a 1.8 percent improvement on the Hamilton Scale,
about a third of improving your sleep patterns over time.
So that's a real effect right. That's that's above a placebo effect.
I'm not against these drugs, loads of people I love are on them and I don't urge them to stop stop.
but 1.8 points on the Hamilton Scale is not enough.
I don't want to take anything off the menu for depressed and anxious people but we
really need to expand the menu. And one of the things I learned was that there
are loads of different kinds of antidepressant which are actually about
changing the way we live and the way our society works that reduced depression
even more effectively than just drugs alone.
I interviewed this South African psychiatrist called Dr. Derek Summerfield.
Derek was in Cambodia when they first introduced chemical antidepressants in Cambodia in the early
part of this century. And the doctors there, the Cambodian doctors, were like
what are these drugs they had didn't know about them and so Derek explained.
And they said to him "oh we don't need them, we've already got antidepressants."
And they were like "I will tell you a story." So there had been a guy in their
community who one day had stood on a landmine leftover from the American
invasion of Southeast Asia and he'd had his leg blown off.
So they gave him an artificial limb and they send him back into the fields.
It's apparently quite painful to work in water when you've got an artificial limb
and he was pretty traumatised because in the place where he was blown up and he
just became really depressed and they said to Derek well "we gave him an
antidepressant" and Derek was like "well, what did you do?" And they said "well, we
sat, we listened to him, we figured out why he was depressed and so we figured
if he became a dairy farmer he wouldn't be in such pain he wouldn't be in this place
we was traumatised and he might get better." So they bought him a cow.
Once he had the cow within a few weeks his depression went away. So they said to Derek:
"so you see doctor, that cow was an antidepressant."
Now if you've been made to think about depression the way we have, that it's a
biological fault in your brain, that sounds like a joke but what those
Cambodian doctors intuitively knew is depression is overwhelmingly an
understandable response to things going wrong in life and what you need in that
situation is for someone to sit with you and help you get a solution.
Now that guy couldn't afford a cow on his own and most of the people who were depressed
and anxious in Britain can't fix the situation on their own, it needs bigger
social changes but we can fix it together.
One of things I learned researching my book 'Lost Connections' is that there is all this interesting evidence
the inequality is causing depression and anxiety.
One of the stories that really helped me to understand it: Robert Sapolsky went to
live with a troop of baboons when he was in his early 20s. Baboons live in this
really hierarchical system. Say there's like 13 men in the group, number one
knows he's above number two, number two knows he's about number three,
all the way down. Where you are in the hierarchy determines what you get to eat,
who you get to have sex with, whether you get to sit in the Sun or the shade.
Robert Sapolsky wanted to discover: when our baboon's most stressed out.
So what his job was for a while was to dart them in the back to kind of
tranquillise them and then he would take blood test from them.
When you are stressed you're flooded with a hormone called cortisol, that way he could figure
out what was most stressful. And what he discovered is there are two
circumstances which baboons, who are our very close relatives, are most stressed.
One is when their status is threatened, so if you're the top guy but you sense
the other guy's circling then you get really stressed. The other is when your
status is low and this to me is one of the most interesting things.
In Robert's troop that he was following there was this little guy at the bottom, who he
called Job after the most unlucky person in the Bible, who seemed to have like
fits his hair would fall out and everyone would just beat the shit out of him
What Job would do he would keep his body down and his head down, he would put
his bum in the air, and this is what's called a submission gesture.
Any baboon that's pushed to the bottom will do a submission gesture
It's their way of saying "all right, you fucking won, I'm not fighting back, please leave me alone."
They keep their bodies low and their chest low.
It's funny when we talk about being depressed we talk about feeling down.
I realise when I felt depressed I do literally feel down.
I want to keep my body low. So when you feel your status is insecure and when
you think your status is low you are significantly more at risk of depression and anxiety.
I think this is very deep in our biology and our nature.
We're not so different from our cousins and a lot of as a show subordinate gestures
just like that poor little baboon are going: "please, you've beaten me, just leave me alone."
I noticed that a lot of people I know who are depressed,
and suffer from a lot of anxiety, it really focuses around their work.
Gallup, the opinion poll company, did this detailed study about how people feel about their work in our culture.
What they found was 13% of people like their work.
63% of people are what they called: "sleepwalking through their work"
24% of people fucking hate their work. You think about that;
87% of people don't like the thing they're doing most of their lives.
I thought, could this be affecting depression and anxiety?
Seemed like it must but how? I discovered there was this amazing Australian social scientist,
who'd actually discovered the answer in the 1970s.
Michael Marmot discovered the key factors in work that cause depression.
If you feel that you're being controlled at work your being micromanaged,
you are considerably more likely to become depressed. I think this is because human beings,
have an innate need to feel that what we do with our lives is meaningful.
If you're spending from 9am - 6pm five days a week being controlled,
that disrupts your ability to construct purpose out of your life.
In Baltimore I met this woman called Meredith.
Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night just sick with anxiety she had an office job.
it wasn't the worst office job in the world she just brought a lot of anxiety around it.
She just couldn't believe this was gonna be the next 40 years of her life.
One day with her husband Josh they did this quite bold thing.
Josh had worked in bike shops in Baltimore since he was a kid,
working in a bike shopping in the U.S. you're controlled, low-paid, insecure, you don't have any rights at work.
One day Josh and his friends who worked in the shop were like...
What does the boss actually do? We fix all the bikes.
So they decided to do this experiment they opened a bike shop that worked on a different principle;
It was a democratic cooperative they decided we don't want a boss,
what we're going to do is we'll take all the big decisions together,
we'll share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks, we'll share the profits and see how it works.
Many talked about having been depressed and anxious when they worked in this controlled environment,
and how much of their anxiety and depression had gone away.
It's important to say it's not like they quit their jobs fixing bikes and taught surfing in the Florida Keys,
Or got to be a backing singer for Beyonce they fixed bikes before they fix bikes now.
The difference is they went from a controlling and humiliating environment,
to one where they had autonomy where they could construct their own meaning and purpose in their lives.
Josh said to me it's an unbelievable propaganda victory for the kind of capitalist system we live under,
to tell people you're free when you're in fact controlled most of your waking life.
Imagine how fewer people would be depressed if you knew that tomorrow morning,
you were going into a workplace where you elected your boss,
and where you knew your boss was accountable to you as well as the other way around.
Imagine the effect that would have on people's mental health,
it's also better for businesses there was a study at Cornell University that found;
more democratic businesses grow four times faster than top-down businesses.
For the obvious reason: In a democratic business people are more committed,
and you've got more brains on every job, you haven't just got the guy at the top you've got everyone.
When I was learning about how to deal with depression and anxiety,
I spoke to loads of scientists and people. One of the things that most move me,
was this place I kept going back to in Berlin where something incredible happened.
In the summer of 2011 a Turkish German woman called Nuria Chenges,
on a big anonymous council estate in Berlin put a sign in the window of her flat.
The sign said: I got the notice saying I'm going to be evicted today,
next Thursday I'm going to kill myself.
This was a big council estate very few people knew each other.
People start walking past Nuria's window, so they knocked on her door.
Everyone on this council estate was pissed off because everyone's rent had been rising,
lots of people were being evicted
They were like: maybe if we just blocked the road for a day and wheel out Nuria,
she sits there probably some journalists will turn up, they'll probably let her stay in her flat.
So they've blocked the road they wheel Nuria out, Nuria's like: I'm going to kill myself anyway I've nothing to lose.
Loads of people from this council estate stand there and they protest for the day.
It gets a bit of press coverage, at the end of the day the police come and say you've had your fun take it down.
They're like: No! You haven't said that Nuria can stay,
actually we all want a guarantee that our rents gonna be frozen because we can't go on,
being forced out of our neighbourhood.
They were sure the minute they left the police would take it down so a women there woman called Tanya,
Was like well I've got a klaxon we'll all agree to man this barricade,
if the police come to take it down just let off the klaxon we'll all come down and stop them.
So you suddenly how will these shifts,
people who've never met each other, never talked to each other were actually quite frightened of each other,
Start to talk to each other.
For example Nuria who's a conservative religious Muslim wears the hijab,
was paired with Tanya who wears tiny little miniskirts even in the Berlin winters which is hardcore.
At first it's really awkward but as the night's went on they begin talking.
Nuria and Tanya discovered something, they had both come to Kotti as runaways,
Nuria had come when she was 17 she'd grown up in this very poor village in Turkey,
She came with her 2 kids, working every job she possibly could to send home for her husband so he could come.
While there, she got the news that husband had died so she was suddenly just kind of stranded in Germany,
on her own in a place she barely spoke the language.
Then Tanya told her that she had run away to kotti, she had come when she was 15,
she'd basically been thrown out, living in a squat and ended up having a kid when she was very young.
These people who had been so different had both been stuck on their own with young kids lost in this place.
Opposite the council estate there's a gay club called Südblock.
Initially when they'd opened this gay club they said: you guys can have all your meetings about this here.
At first people were like: you're not going to get these very conservative Muslims to come and sit in a club,
underneath posters for fisting nights it's not going to happen.
Actually as one of the people told me, everyone took these small steps,
learning to speak to each other to talk to people who might be different to you in some ways,
but are actually very similar to you in most ways.
So the protest goes on for months and months one day it was about 6 months into the protest,
a guy turns up called Thunkai.
Thunkai is in his early 50s he's got some cognitive difficulties he has a slightly miss shaped pallet,
so he finds it hard to speak sometimes.
Thunkai offered to clean and do stuff for people and people really liked him,
he was very huggy and warm and one day the police came to inspect everything.
Thunkai doesn't like when people argue so he went to hug them,
they thought he was attacking them so arrested him and they took him.
That's when it was discovered that Thunkai has actually been in a psychiatric institution for more than a decade.
He'd escaped and had been living homeless until he came to Kotti.
They took him back to the psychiatric institution and locked him away.
The people at Kotti were just outraged,
the psychiatrists were just completely baffled that suddenly hundreds of people
descend on the psychiatric place and they're like: what is this?
it's a load of Muslims in Hijabs, gay people and punks demanding that they let him go.
They said he belongs with us until eventually they force the psychiatric institutions to release him
How many people in our culture, if someone carried us away,
have hundreds of people who are going to descend on those people to say no he belongs with us.
There were many ups and downs in the protests that happened at Kotti,
there are many times when it seemed very low and people were very disheartened,
they wanted to give up but they ended up doing this petition run.
that got a rent freeze in Berlin that got the largest number of signatures,
of any referendum initiative in the history of the city of Berlin.
I remember when I spoke to Nuria one time she said to me:
I got to stay in my neighbourhood that's great but I gained so much more than,
I was surrounded by all these amazing people that I never knew.
Another one of the Turkish women Nariman said to me when I had grown up in Turkey,
what I called home was my village and then I came to live in the Western world.
And I learned that what you call home is just your four walls and your family if you're lucky.
Then she said this protest started and all of this place became my home again.
She realised that she had been homeless,
all those years she'd been living in the Western world. To some extent we are all homeless,
because our sense of home is not big enough to match the need we have for belonging.
So many of the people at Kotti had been drugging themselves with depression and anxiety,
had been really low when they were broken up and isolated.
They didn't need to be drugged they needed to be together.
So many of the problems that had seemed insoluble when they were broken up;
Like Thunkai in a psychiatric hospital or Nuria who was literally about to kill herself,
what she needed was people saying to her we need you here.
Tania, one of the protesters, put it to me so well, when you're all alone and you feel like this,
you think it's just you, but then you come out of your corner fighting.
And you realise everyone else feels like me too and you stop being weak and you start being strong.
To me that was the main thing I took from kotti.
When we are together we can solve these problems when we are following the neoliberal script;
being broken up, isolated individuals we just can't solve these problems.
We can take the edge off them with some drugs but the core of the solution,
is when people come together and say this isn't good enough,
we deserve better and we demand better.
Problems that seem insoluble begin to be dealt with.