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Um, for a really long time, I had two mysteries that were hanging over me. I didn't understand
them and to be honest, I was quite afraid to look into them. The first mystery was, I'm
40 years old, and all throughout my lifetime, year after year, serious depression and anxiety
have risen in the United States, in Britain, and across the Western world. And I wanted to
understand, why? Why is this happening to us? Why is it that with each year that passes more
and more of us are finding it harder to get through the day? And I wanted to understand this
because of a more personal mystery. When I was a teenager, I remember going to my doctor
and explaining that I had this feeling like pain was leaking out of me. I couldn't control it,
I didn't understand why it was happening. I felt quite ashamed of it. And my doctor told me
a story that I now realised was well-intentioned, but quite oversimplified, not totally wrong.
My doctor said, well, we know why people get like this. Some people just naturally get a chemical
imbalance in their heads. You're clearly one of them. All we need to do is give you some drugs
that will get your chemical balance back to normal. So I started taking a drug called Paxil,
or Seroxide, it's the same thing with different names and different countries. And I felt
much better. I got a real boost, but not very long afterwards, this feeling of pain started to come
back. So I was given higher and higher doses until the 13 years I was taking the maximum
possible dose that you're legally allowed to take. And for a lot of those 13 years and pretty
much all the time by the end, I was still in a lot of pain. And I started asking myself, well,
what's going on here? Because you're doing everything you're told to do by the story that's
dominating the culture. Why do you still feel like this? So to get to the bottom of these two mysteries
for a book that I've written I ended up going on a big journey all over the world. I traveled over
40,000 miles. I wanted to sit with the leading experts in the world about what causes depression
and anxiety and crucially what solves them. And people who've come through depression and anxiety
and out the other side in all sorts of ways. And I learned a huge amount for the amazing people I
got to know along the way, but I think the heart of what I learned is so far we have scientific evidence
for nine different causes of depression and anxiety. Two of them are indeed in our biology.
Your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems, though they don't write your destiny.
And there are real brain changes that can happen when you become depressed,
that can make it harder to get out. But most of the factors that have been proven to cause depression
and anxiety are not in our biology. They're factors in the way we live. And once you understand them,
it opens up a very different set of solutions that should be offered to people alongside the
option of chemical and to depressants. For example, if you're lonely, you're more likely to become depressed.
If when you go to work, you don't have any control over your job, you've just got to do what you're
told. You're more likely to become depressed. If you very rarely get out into the natural world,
you're more likely to become depressed. And one thing unites a lot of the causes of depression and
anxiety that I learned about, not all of them, but a lot of them. Everyone here knows, you've all
got natural physical needs, right? Obviously, you need food, you need water, you need shelter,
you know, clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd all be in real trouble real fast.
But at the same time, every human being has natural psychological needs. You need to fill
you belong. You need to fill your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you
and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And this culture we built is
good at lots of things. And many things are better than in the past, I'm glad to be alive today,
but we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs.
And it's not the only thing that's going on, but I think it's the key reason why this crisis keeps
rising and rising. But I found this really hard to absorb. I really wrestle with the idea,
shifting from thinking of my depression as, you know, just to problem in my brain to one with many
causes, including many in the way we're living. And it only really began to fall into place for
me when one day I went to interview a South African psychiatrist named Dr Derek Summerfield,
who's a great guy. And Dr Summerfield happened to be in Cambodia in 2001 when they first introduced
chemical antidepressants for people in that country. And the local doctors, the Cambodians,
had never heard of these drugs so they were like, what are they? And he explained and they said to him,
I we don't need that. We've already got anti-depressants. And he was like, what do you mean?
He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy, like, I don't know,
St. John's War, Jing Ho below, but something like that. Instead, they told him a story.
There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day he stood on a
landline left over from the war with the United States and he got his leg blown off. So they gave
him an artificial leg and after a while he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently
it's super painful to work underwater when you got an artificial limb. And I'm guessing it was
pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where he got blown up. The guy started to cry
all day. He refused to get out and beddy, developed all the symptoms of classic depression.
The Cambodian doctors said, this is when we gave him an anti-depressant. And Dr Summerfield said,
what was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him.
They realized that his pain made sense. It was hard for him to see it in the throws of his
depression. But actually, it had perfectly understandable causes in his life.
One of the doctors, talking to the people in the community, figured,
you know, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this
position that was screaming up so much. He wouldn't have to go and work in the rice fields. So they bought
him a cow. Within a couple of weeks his crying stopped. Within a month his depression was gone.
They sent a doctor to some of the field. So you see Dr that cow. That was an anti-depressant.
That's what you mean, right?
If you've been raised to think about depression the way I was, the most of the people here
were that sounds like a bad joke, right? I went to my doctor for an anti-depressant. She gave
me a cow. But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively, based on this individual unscientific
anecdote, is what the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization,
has been trying to tell us for years based on the best scientific evidence.
If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not in the
man and machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs. And it's just as
important to think here about what those Cambodian doctors and the World Health Organization are not saying.
They did not say to this farmer, hey buddy, you need to pull yourself together. It's your job
to figure out and fix this problem on your own. On the contrary what they said is, we're here as a
group to pull together with you. So together we can figure out and fix this problem.
This is what every depressed person needs and it's what every depressed person deserves.
This is why one of the leading doctors at the United Nations in their official statement
for World Health Day, a couple of years back in 2017, said we need to talk less about chemical
imbalances and more about the imbalances in the way we live. Drugs give real relief to some
people they gave relief to me for a while. But precisely because this problem goes deeper than
their biology, the solutions need to go much deeper too. But when I first learned that, I'm
the thinking, okay, I could see all the scientific evidence already a huge number of studies,
interviewed a huge number of the experts who were explaining this. I kept thinking all right,
but how can we possibly do that? The things that are making us depressed are in most cases,
more complex than what was going on with this Cambodian farmer. Where do we even begin with that insight?
But then, in the long journey for my book, all over the world, I kept meeting people who were
doing exactly that from Sydney to San Francisco to Sao Paulo. I kept meeting people who were
understanding the deeper causes of depression and anxiety and as groups fixing them.
So obviously I can't tell you about all the amazing people that I got to know and wrote about
all of the nine causes of depression and anxiety that I learned about. I'm because they
won't let me give a 10-hour TED talk, you can complain about that to them. But I want to focus on
two of the causes and two of the solutions that emerge from them if that's all right. Here's the first.
We are the lonelier society in human history. There was a recent study that asked Americans,
do you feel like you're no longer close to anyone? And 39% of people said that described them,
no longer close to anyone. In the international measurements of loneliness, Britain and the
rest of Europe are just behind the US in case anyone here is feeling smug. And I spent a lot of
time discussing this with the leading expert in the world on loneliness and incredible man named
Professor John Cassie Opo who was at Chicago and I thought a lot about one question his work poses
to us. So Professor Cassie Opo asked, why do we exist? Why are we here? Why are we alive? One key
reason is that our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren't
bigger than the animals they took down a lot of the time. They weren't faster than the animals
they took down a lot of the time. But they were much better at banding together into groups
and cooperating. This was our superpowers and species. We band together just like bees evolved to
live in a hive. Humans evolved to live in a tribe. And we are the first humans ever to disband our
tribes and it's making us feel awful. But it doesn't have to be this way. One of the heroes
in my book and in fact in my life is a doctor named Sam Everington. He's a general practitioner in
a poor part of East London rather than many years. And Sam was really uncomfortable because he had
loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety. And like me he's not opposed to
chemical anti-depressancy things they give some relief to some people. But he could see two things.
Firstly, his patients were depressed and anxious a lot of the time for totally understandable
reasons like loneliness. And secondly, although the drugs were giving some relief to some people
for many people they didn't solve the problem. The underlying problem. So one day Sam decided to
pioneer a different approach. A woman came to his centre, his medical centre called Lisa Cunningham.
I got to know Lisa later. And Lisa had been shot away in our home with crippling depression and anxiety
for seven years. And when she came to Sam's centre, she was told, don't worry. We'll carry on
giving you these drugs. But we're also going to prescribe something else. We're going to prescribe
you to come here to this centre twice a week to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious
people not to talk about how miserable you are. But to figure out something meaningful you can
all do together so you won't be lonely and you won't feel like life is pointless. The first time
this group met, Lisa literally started vomiting with anxiety. It was overwhelming for her.
But people rubbed her back. The group started talking. They were like, what could we do?
These are in a city, East London people like me. They didn't know anything about gardening.
They were like, why don't we learn gardening? There was an area behind the doctor's offices
that was just like scrub land. They were like, why don't we make this into a garden? So they
started to take books out the library. They started to watch YouTube clips. They started to get their
fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. There's a lot of evidence
that exposure to the natural world. There's a really powerful antidepressant. But they started
to do something even more important. They started to form a tribe. They started to form a group.
They started to care about each other. If one of them didn't show up, the others were going
looking for them. So how you okay out then figure out what was troubling them that day? The way Lisa
put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom. This approach is called social
prescribing. It's spreading all over Europe. There's a small but growing body of evidence,
suggesting it can produce real and meaningful falls into pressure and anxiety. One day, I remember
standing in the garden that Lisa and her wants to press friends to build. It's a really beautiful
gardener. Having this thought, it's very much inspired by a guy called Professor Hugh McCuy and
Australia. I was thinking, so often, when people feel down in this culture, what we say to them,
I'm sure everyone here said it, I have, is we say, you just need to be you, be yourself.
And I realised, actually what we should say to people is, don't be you. Don't be yourself.
Be us. Be we. Be part of a group.
The solution to these problems, just not lying, drawing more and more on your resources,
as an isolated individual, that's partly what got us into this crisis, it lies on reconnecting
with something bigger than you. And that really connects to one of the other causes of depression
and anxiety that I wanted to talk to you about. So everyone knows, junk food has taken over our
and made us physically sick. I don't say that with any sense of superiority,
I literally came to give this talk from McDonald's. But I saw all of you eating that healthy
Ted breakfast, I was like, no, no. But just like junk food has taken over our diets and made us
physically sick, a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick.
The thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money and status
and showing off, you're going to feel like crap. That's not an exact quote from shop and
however, that is the gist of what he said, right? But weirdly hardly anyone had signed typically
investigated this until a truly extraordinary person I got to know named Professor Tim Kasser,
who's at Knox College in Illinois. And he's been researching this for about 30 years now.
And his research suggests several really important things. Firstly, the more you believe,
you can buy and display your way out of sadness and into a good life. The more likely you
are to become depressed and anxious. And secondly, as a society, we have become much more driven by
these beliefs all throughout my lifetime under the way of advertising and Instagram and everything
like them. And as I thought about this, I realized it's like we've all been said since birth,
a kind of KFC for the soul. We've been trained to look the happiness in all the wrong places.
And just like junk food doesn't meet your nutritional needs and actually makes you feel terrible.
junk values don't meet your psychological needs and they take your way from a good life.
But when I first spent time with Professor Kasser and I was learning all this,
I felt a really weird mixture of emotions because on the one hand, I found this really challenging.
I could see how often in my own life when I felt down, I tried to remedy it with some kind of
showoffee, grand external solution. And I could see why that did not work well for me.
But I also thought, isn't this kind of obvious? Isn't this almost like banana, right? If I said
to everyone here, none of you are going to lie on your deathbed and think about all the shoes you
bought and all the retweets you got, right? You're going to think about moments of love and meaning
and connection in your life. I think that seems almost like a cliche, but I kept talking
to Professor Kasser and saying, you know, why am I feeling this strange double-ness? And he said,
well, at some level we all know these things, but in this culture we don't live by them.
We know them so well they become cliches but we don't live by them.
I kept asking, well why? Why would that be why would we know something so profound but not live by it?
And after a while Professor Kasser said to me, because we live in a machine
that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life. I had to really think about that
because we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life.
And Professor Kasser wanted to figure out if we can disrupt that machine.
He's done loads of research into this. I'll tell you about one example and I really urge everyone
here to try this with their friends and their family. So with a guy called Nathan Duncan,
he got a group of teenagers and adults to come together for a series of sessions over a series
of a period of time to meet up and part of the point of the group was to get people to think
about a moment in their life they have actually found meaning and purpose. For different people
it was different things. Some people it was playing music, writing, helping someone, I'm sure everyone
here can picture something, right? And part of the point of the group was to get people to ask,
okay, how could you dedicate more of your life to pursuing these moments of meaning and purpose
and less to, I don't know, buying crap you don't need, putting it on social media and trying
to get people to go OMG so jealous, right? And what they found was just having these meetings.
It was like a kind of alcoholics and anonymous for consumerism, right? Just getting people to have
these meetings articulate these values, determine to act on them and check in with each other,
led to a marked shift in people's values. It took them away from this hurricane of depression,
generating messages, training us to seek happiness in the wrong places and towards more
meaningful and nourishing values that lift us out of depression. But with all the solutions that I
saw and were written about and many I can't talk about here, I kept thinking, you know, why did
it take me so long to see these insights, right? Because when you explain them to people,
I mean some of them are more complicated but not all. And when you explain to people it's not like
rocket science, right? At some level we already know these things. Why, why do we find it so hard
to understand? I think there's many reasons. But I think one reason is that we have to change our
understanding of what depression and anxiety actually are. There are very real biological
contributions to depression and anxiety. But if we allow the biology to become the whole picture
as I did for so long as I would argue our culture has done pretty much most of my life.
What we're implicitly saying to people is, and this isn't anyone's intention,
but what we're implicitly saying to people is, your pain doesn't mean anything. It's just a
malfunction. It's like a glitch in a computer program. It's just a wiring problem in your head.
But I was only able to start changing my life when I realized your depression is not a malfunction.
It's a signal. Your depression is a signal. It's telling you something.
We feel this way for reasons and they can be hard to see in the Rosa Depression I understand that
really well from personal experience. But with the right help we can understand these problems
and we can fix these problems together. But to do that the very first step is we have to
stop insulting these signals by saying they're a sign of weakness or madness or purely
biological except for tiny number of people. We need to start listening to these signals because
they're telling us something we really need to hear. It's only when we truly listen to these signals
and we honor these signals and respect these signals that we're going to begin to see
the liberating, nourishing deeper solutions, the cows, the awaiting all around us. Thank you.