what if depression isn't just some brain defect or a chemical imbalance but it's actually a message
to you that there's something not right in your environment for your life right what
if depression isn't simply broken neurons firing with depleted serotonin but it's an
actual signal that there's something that needs to be fixed that's the hypothesis behind Johann
hari's best-selling book lost connections and in my opinion there's an element of truth to it
thank you [Music] okay so in my last video I discussed how Johann Hari in his book
lost connections demolishes the overly simplistic idea that depression is just a chemical imbalance
he addresses how the pharmaceutical companies use marketing campaigns to spread this overly
simplistic idea and to oversell the effectiveness of the medication that they were selling and
I discussed how the causes of depression are actually quite a bit more complicated than both
the messaging that the pharmaceutical companies were selling and also the message that Johan was
putting out right but but that being said he does an excellent job addressing one side of the common
three-sided approach to depression that most mental health providers adhere to this is the bio
psychosocial approach this means that depression and most mental health concerns are a combination
of biological psychological and social factors this approach is pretty well researched backed
and Johan does a pretty great job explaining the social factors that contribute to depression
okay so now we're 70 pages into the book and Johan begins to address what he calls the true causes of
depression the environmental causes of depression he says that the myth of the chemical imbalance
is comforting but it also causes despair because it convinces us that our pain is meaningless that
it's simply a chemical defect in our brain and there's no logical reason that it exists but that
the only logical solution is antidepressant medication and just coping but he asks the
question in his book what if our pain makes sense what if pain has meaning and he says your
pain does make sense pain and depression serve a function to message you about something not being
right in the world so so real quick let's talk about the grief exception right so for a long time
in the DSM the DSM is kind of like the Bible the diagnostic and statistical manual mental disorders
it's what everyone references to determine what to diagnosis basically for a long time in the DSM
there was this long list of symptoms of depression and you qualified for a depression diagnosis if
you had X number of these symptoms except if you were grieving the recent loss of a loved one this
was a weird caveat so basically the psychologist handbook said your depression is a mental illness
except in This One Singular unique situation where all of a sudden the symptoms of sadness and pain
make sense and then in that situation it's not a disorder it's an outcome of your experiences and
here's where Johan calls the BS he says there are so so many other factors that make sense to feel
pain that it makes sense to feel depressed he says that our pain sends a message that there's
something wrong with our environment with our society and to find real effective healing we
need to change our society so here's what Johan identifies are the nine true causes of depression
and I would call them the nine social causes of depression uh because there's a lot of real
causes of depression so number one disconnection from meaningful work this is feeling helpless
feeling controlled by other people feeling meaningless so a lot of us have menial jobs
jobs with little to no say about how the company runs and no ownership of the process and this
can lead to feelings of discouragement Despair and and feelings like everything is pointless
okay number two disconnection from other people and Johan shared studies where participants were
rejected or shunned by people planted into their experiment and they tested the level
of these people's stress hormones and found that becoming acutely lonely the experiment found was
as stressful as experiencing a physical attack and basically our society is the Loneliest it has ever
been in the history of the world people live in their own homes they don't interact nearly as much
they're far less likely to have many close friends or a local community to support them and this
unnatural State leads to depression okay number three is this connection from meaningful values
so essentially this point he makes is about materialism and how advertising makes us feel
inadequate until we buy something he shared a lot of stories about how marketing and
advertising affects children's brains and and basically leaves us feeling emptier and emptier
okay number four disconnection due to Childhood trauma uh he talks about the aces study that
showed that childhood trauma makes it much more likely that you develop depression the aces
questionnaire asked about 10 types of childhood trauma things like abuse neglect and loss of a
parent and found that if you experienced uh six of them as a child you were five times more likely
to develop depression than If you experience seven of them you were 31 times more likely
to attempt suicide as an adult so basically this impact of childhood trauma and childhood
abuse is so overwhelming that um it has to be counted as one of the real causes of depression
okay number five is disconnection from status and respect Johan shares the example of a group
of wild chimpanzees that researchers observed for a long time and the alpha champ the boss
Champion was a strong happy guy who enjoyed the first access to food and the lovely lady chimps
more opportunities to make babies because of his status he was healthier than the other
monkeys but he got older and Along came a younger stronger chimp who started doing it with all the
ladies and eventually the two of them fought the younger chimp won the older chimp sank in status
and at that point he seemed depressed right he stopped eating as well he stayed on the sidelines
of the community and eventually wandered off alone into the wild where he presumably died
now we see this happen in human society as well a loss of status and respect contributes
to depression for many in our society and there's so many people who are marginalized the young the
old the poor and you know people marginalized by race or gender or education or other situations
now for us to be mentally healthy we need a group of people who respect us who we belong to who we
have influence with and I I don't mean that the only people who can be mentally healthy are the
powerful or the rich but the opposite of that is certainly an obstacle to mental health in
our society okay number six disconnection from the natural world now here Johann cites a prison study
inmates who could see out the windows were 24 less likely to get physically or mentally ill
so essentially our separation from nature makes us sick and being in nature can make us healthier
Johann says here is a treatment that has very few side effects it's not expensive it doesn't require
a trained or licensed professional to prescribe it and has pretty good evidence of efficacy
so far but the research is very hard to find funding for he said because a lot of the shape
of modern biomedical research has been defined by the pharmaceutical industry and they're not
interested because it's very hard to commercialize nature contact you can't sell it so they don't
want to know we haven't seen advertisements on TV saying are you feeling depressed it might be in
nature imbalance go spend 15 extra minutes a day in nature and your brain chemistry might change
okay number seven disconnection from a hopeful or secure future
there were some really interesting studies in the book that that Johan shared showing that people
with depression were not able to visualize the future compared to non-depressed people
so as we get disconnected from our our future it's easy to become more depressed okay causes
eight and nine uh he calls this the real role of genes and brain changes so the chemicals in
your brain the structure of your brain it changes depending on how you use it depression isn't just
a simple chemical imbalance it's an interaction of biology an environment and how you think and act
so Johan discusses neuroplasticity which is one of my favorite topics Johan describes how when
you're depressed your brain physically changes and how when you recover your brain physically changes
so let me just read you this part imagine he told me that your marriage just broke up and you lost
your job and you know what your mother just had a stroke it's pretty overwhelming because you
are feeling intense pain for a long period your brain will assume this is the state in which you
are going to have to survive from now on so it might shed the synapses that relate to the things
that give you joy and pleasure and strengthen the synapses that relate to fear and despair
that's one reason why you can often start to feel you have become somehow fixed in a state
of depression or anxiety even if the original causes of the pain seem to have passed John
kachippo one of the scientists that Johan worked with called this a snowballing effect so while
depression shows up in your brain and you can't just magically make it go away when you change
how you think and you act or when you find other ways to treat it your brain can change back to
a more normal brain a healthier brain now Johan also addresses some of the genetic factors behind
depression they're just different than we assumed it's just not so simple as just low serotonin or
chemical imbalance so he says with the best twin research according to the National Institutes of
Health that for depression 37 of it is inherited while for severe anxiety it's between 30 and 40
percent to give you a comparison how how tall you are is 90 inherited whether you can speak English
is zero percent inherited so people who study the genetic basis for depression and anxiety have
concluded that it's real but it doesn't account for most of what's going on Hari then shares some
fascinating studies explaining the interaction of environment and genes so he says we are all
born with a genetic inheritance but your genes are activated by the environment they can be switched
on or off by what happens to you and ab Shalom discovered as Professor Robert sapoloski explains
that if you have a particular flavor of five HTT you have a greatly increased risk of depression
but only in a certain environment if you carried this Gene the study showed you were more likely to
become depressed but only if you had experienced a terribly stressful event or a great deal of
childhood trauma so those are the nine social causes of depression according to Johann Hari
and here are his proposed Solutions number one reconnection to other people one of my favorite
studies in the book was a study on what happens when people try to be happier I'm making a video
on this but the short version is that when people try to be happy by doing something for themselves
it makes them feel worse but when people try to be happier by connecting with others by making
others happier they actually do feel happier okay number two social prescribing so when loneliness
is rampant you can't just tell someone with depression oh you should get out more you can't
just put the burden on the depressed person so instead you create an environment where
they build social connection they build social support and he tells about a program in England
where people with depression are prescribed by their physician to join a structured group
and the example he gave was like a woman who was assigned to join a gardening group and how that
led to her recovery from depression okay number three is reconnection to meaningful work and he
tells the story of workers in a bike shop who are not being treated well they left they formed their
own Cooperative bike shop where every worker had a chance to become a partner everyone got a say in
the meeting everyone had a chance to contribute to the success of the business and their voices
were heard and how that dramatically increased their mental well-being it decreased their stress
and basically his proposal is that governments or businesses work to make the workplace more
democratic where people have a say where they feel like their work is Meaningful and and
they can contribute number four reconnection to meaningful values basically he thinks we should
decrease our exposure to advertising which is designed to make us feel inadequate and
to believe that the solution to our problems is buying more stuff okay number five his solution
is reconnection to sympathetic Joy meditation and loving kindness practices were described
as valid treatments and then he also tosses in psychedelics as an emerging treatment option so
this is really fascinating and they're starting to build up some evidence as to the effectiveness of
psychedelics and I'm definitely going to make some more videos that address the topic of psychedelic
medication okay number six is reconnection to trauma so Johan follows up on the aces study
with a pretty astounding story from Kaiser so that's the same company that asked people about
their trauma and Then followed up by giving them a chance to talk about it all that Kaiser did was
at the next doctor visit they had the doctor say I see that when you were a child this happened to
you I'm sorry would you like to talk about it and for some people that was the first time in their
lives that they had ever told anyone their trauma story and it helped them break down the shame they
found out that these patients they were 50 percent less likely to come back to the doctor saying they
felt physically ill or seeking drugs and and no you might be wondering it wasn't because they
had a bad experience they received literally no complaints about this so basically Johan
suggests that to treat the depression epidemic we need to create change on the societal level
we need to make trauma treatment more accessible we need to spend more time in nature and less time
around advertising we need to spend more time with real people and make real connections instead of
being isolated or in our ego Pursuits and that's where he comes to his point number seven which
is basically believing that social change can really happen so overall Johan one solution to
depression really addresses the environmental and social causes of depression and and his solution
is very communal he basically says we need a societal change to address this and I I agree
with this but it's also really difficult for me to wait for so I personally I really like small
actionable steps that individuals can take to address depression so when a client comes in to
see me I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on the society level difficulties that they
face we just focus on the things they can change things like building a support network getting
some exercise uh and some sunlight and changing some thinking patterns practicing gratitude or
mood tracking you know these really basic things that just they don't seem as overwhelming for
someone with depression as you know the need to change our entire Society but that being said I
can totally see where Johan is coming from our society our culture is a leading contributing
factor to depression and overall I enjoyed this book immensely especially those first four
chapters where he kind of systematically tears down the pharmaceutical advertising campaigns
and I think his approach is not particularly well-rounded when it comes to addressing all
of the effective treatment options for depression I mean he gives therapy and CBT about one sentence
and he doesn't really mention the physical factors contributing to depression but he does add a
powerful perspective to the conversation about depression that I think is a helpful addition to
take us past the overly simplistic explanations of depression as just being a chemical imbalance
okay I hope you found this helpful I hope you found one area of your life that you
could consider creating change thank you for watching and take care this episode is sponsored
by betterhelp betterhelp is an online therapy provider they match you to a licensed therapist
in your area who can help you with depression anxiety trauma grief and other concerns it's
really easy to just sign up and try therapy from the comfort of your own home and one of the best
parts is you can use their service to message your therapist anytime from anywhere therapy starts
at about 65 a week so check out the link in the description for 10 off your first month [Music]