[00:13] For a really long time,
[00:14] I had two mysteries
that were hanging over me.
[00:18] I didn't understand them
[00:20] and, to be honest, I was quite afraid
to look into them.
[00:24] The first mystery was, I'm 40 years old,
[00:27] and all throughout my lifetime,
year after year,
[00:30] serious depression and anxiety have risen,
[00:34] in the United States, in Britain,
[00:37] and across the Western world.
[00:39] And I wanted to understand why.
[00:43] Why is this happening to us?
[00:45] Why is it that with each year that passes,
[00:48] more and more of us are finding it harder
to get through the day?
[00:51] And I wanted to understand this
because of a more personal mystery.
[00:55] When I was a teenager,
[00:56] I remember going to my doctor
[00:58] and explaining that I had this feeling,
like pain was leaking out of me.
[01:03] I couldn't control it,
[01:04] I didn't understand why it was happening,
[01:06] I felt quite ashamed of it.
[01:09] And my doctor told me a story
[01:10] that I now realize was well-intentioned,
[01:12] but quite oversimplified.
[01:14] Not totally wrong.
[01:15] My doctor said, "We know
why people get like this.
[01:18] Some people just naturally get
a chemical imbalance in their heads --
[01:22] you're clearly one of them.
[01:24] All we need to do is give you some drugs,
[01:26] it will get your chemical
balance back to normal."
[01:28] So I started taking a drug
called Paxil or Seroxat,
[01:30] it's the same thing with different names
in different countries.
[01:33] And I felt much better,
I got a real boost.
[01:36] But not very long afterwards,
[01:37] this feeling of pain started to come back.
[01:39] So I was given higher and higher doses
[01:41] until, for 13 years, I was taking
the maximum possible dose
[01:45] that you're legally allowed to take.
[01:47] And for a lot of those 13 years,
and pretty much all the time by the end,
[01:50] I was still in a lot of pain.
[01:52] And I started asking myself,
"What's going on here?
[01:55] Because you're doing everything
[01:56] you're told to do by the story
that's dominating the culture --
[02:00] why do you still feel like this?"
[02:02] So to get to the bottom
of these two mysteries,
[02:05] for a book that I've written
[02:06] I ended up going on a big journey
all over the world,
[02:09] I traveled over 40,000 miles.
[02:10] I wanted to sit with the leading
experts in the world
[02:13] about what causes depression and anxiety
[02:15] and crucially, what solves them,
[02:17] and people who have come through
depression and anxiety
[02:19] and out the other side
in all sorts of ways.
[02:21] And I learned a huge amount
[02:23] from the amazing people
I got to know along the way.
[02:26] But I think at the heart
of what I learned is,
[02:29] so far, we have scientific evidence
[02:32] for nine different causes
of depression and anxiety.
[02:35] Two of them are indeed in our biology.
[02:38] Your genes can make you
more sensitive to these problems,
[02:41] though they don't write your destiny.
[02:43] And there are real brain changes
that can happen when you become depressed
[02:46] that can make it harder to get out.
[02:48] But most of the factors
that have been proven
[02:50] to cause depression and anxiety
[02:52] are not in our biology.
[02:55] They are factors in the way we live.
[02:58] And once you understand them,
[02:59] it opens up a very different
set of solutions
[03:02] that should be offered to people
[03:04] alongside the option
of chemical antidepressants.
[03:07] For example,
[03:09] if you're lonely, you're more likely
to become depressed.
[03:12] If, when you go to work,
you don't have any control over your job,
[03:15] you've just got to do what you're told,
[03:17] you're more likely to become depressed.
[03:19] If you very rarely get out
into the natural world,
[03:22] you're more likely to become depressed.
[03:23] And one thing unites a lot of the causes
of depression and anxiety
[03:27] that I learned about.
[03:28] Not all of them, but a lot of them.
[03:30] Everyone here knows
[03:32] you've all got natural
physical needs, right?
[03:34] Obviously.
[03:35] You need food, you need water,
[03:38] you need shelter, you need clean air.
[03:40] If I took those things away from you,
[03:42] you'd all be in real trouble, real fast.
[03:44] But at the same time,
[03:46] every human being
has natural psychological needs.
[03:50] You need to feel you belong.
[03:52] You need to feel your life
has meaning and purpose.
[03:55] You need to feel that people
see you and value you.
[03:57] You need to feel you've got
a future that makes sense.
[04:00] And this culture we built
is good at lots of things.
[04:03] And many things are better
than in the past --
[04:05] I'm glad to be alive today.
[04:07] But we've been getting less and less good
[04:09] at meeting these deep,
underlying psychological needs.
[04:13] And it's not the only thing
that's going on,
[04:16] but I think it's the key reason
why this crisis keeps rising and rising.
[04:20] And I found this really hard to absorb.
[04:24] I really wrestled with the idea
[04:26] of shifting from thinking of my depression
as just a problem in my brain,
[04:31] to one with many causes,
[04:32] including many in the way we're living.
[04:34] And it only really began
to fall into place for me
[04:36] when one day, I went to interview
a South African psychiatrist
[04:40] named Dr. Derek Summerfield.
[04:41] He's a great guy.
[04:43] And Dr. Summerfield
happened to be in Cambodia in 2001,
[04:46] when they first introduced
chemical antidepressants
[04:50] for people in that country.
[04:51] And the local doctors, the Cambodians,
had never heard of these drugs,
[04:55] so they were like, what are they?
[04:56] And he explained.
[04:58] And they said to him,
[04:59] "We don't need them,
we've already got antidepressants."
[05:02] And he was like, "What do you mean?"
[05:04] He thought they were going to talk about
some kind of herbal remedy,
[05:07] like St. John's Wort, ginkgo biloba,
something like that.
[05:11] Instead, they told him a story.
[05:14] There was a farmer in their community
who worked in the rice fields.
[05:18] And one day, he stood on a land mine
[05:20] left over from the war
with the United States,
[05:22] and he got his leg blown off.
[05:23] So they him an artificial leg,
[05:25] and after a while, he went back
to work in the rice fields.
[05:28] But apparently, it's super painful
to work under water
[05:30] when you've got an artificial limb,
[05:32] and I'm guessing it was pretty traumatic
[05:34] to go back and work in the field
where he got blown up.
[05:36] The guy started to cry all day,
[05:39] he refused to get out of bed,
[05:40] he developed all the symptoms
of classic depression.
[05:43] The Cambodian doctor said,
[05:45] "This is when we gave him
an antidepressant."
[05:47] And Dr. Summerfield said,
"What was it?"
[05:50] They explained that they went
and sat with him.
[05:53] They listened to him.
[05:56] They realized that his pain made sense --
[05:59] it was hard for him to see it
in the throes of his depression,
[06:01] but actually, it had perfectly
understandable causes in his life.
[06:05] One of the doctors, talking to the people
in the community, figured,
[06:09] "You know, if we bought this guy a cow,
[06:11] he could become a dairy farmer,
[06:13] he wouldn't be in this position
that was screwing him up so much,
[06:16] he wouldn't have to go
and work in the rice fields."
[06:18] So they bought him a cow.
[06:20] Within a couple of weeks,
his crying stopped,
[06:22] within a month, his depression was gone.
[06:24] They said to doctor Summerfield,
[06:25] "So you see, doctor, that cow,
that was an antidepressant,
[06:28] that's what you mean, right?"
[06:30] (Laughter)
[06:31] (Applause)
[06:34] If you'd been raised to think
about depression the way I was,
[06:37] and most of the people here were,
[06:38] that sounds like a bad joke, right?
[06:40] "I went to my doctor
for an antidepressant,
[06:42] she gave me a cow."
[06:43] But what those Cambodian
doctors knew intuitively,
[06:46] based on this individual,
unscientific anecdote,
[06:49] is what the leading
medical body in the world,
[06:53] the World Health Organization,
[06:55] has been trying to tell us for years,
[06:57] based on the best scientific evidence.
[07:00] If you're depressed,
[07:02] if you're anxious,
[07:04] you're not weak, you're not crazy,
[07:08] you're not, in the main,
a machine with broken parts.
[07:12] You're a human being with unmet needs.
[07:15] And it's just as important to think here
about what those Cambodian doctors
[07:19] and the World Health Organization
are not saying.
[07:21] They did not say to this farmer,
[07:23] "Hey, buddy, you need
to pull yourself together.
[07:26] It's your job to figure out
and fix this problem on your own."
[07:29] On the contrary, what they said is,
[07:31] "We're here as a group
to pull together with you,
[07:35] so together, we can figure out
and fix this problem."
[07:40] This is what every depressed person needs,
[07:44] and it's what every
depressed person deserves.
[07:47] This is why one of the leading
doctors at the United Nations,
[07:50] in their official statement
for World Health Day,
[07:53] couple of years back in 2017,
[07:54] said we need to talk less
about chemical imbalances
[07:57] and more about the imbalances
in the way we live.
[08:00] Drugs give real relief to some people --
[08:02] they gave relief to me for a while --
[08:05] but precisely because this problem
goes deeper than their biology,
[08:09] the solutions need to go much deeper, too.
[08:12] But when I first learned that,
[08:15] I remember thinking,
[08:16] "OK, I could see
all the scientific evidence,
[08:19] I read a huge number of studies,
[08:20] I interviewed a huge number of the experts
who were explaining this,"
[08:23] but I kept thinking, "How can we
possibly do that?"
[08:26] The things that are making us depressed
[08:28] are in most cases more complex
than what was going on
[08:30] with this Cambodian farmer.
[08:32] Where do we even begin with that insight?
[08:34] But then, in the long journey for my book,
[08:38] all over the world,
[08:39] I kept meeting people
who were doing exactly that,
[08:42] from Sydney, to San Francisco,
[08:44] to São Paulo.
[08:45] I kept meeting people
who were understanding
[08:48] the deeper causes
of depression and anxiety
[08:50] and, as groups, fixing them.
[08:52] Obviously, I can't tell you
about all the amazing people
[08:55] I got to know and wrote about,
[08:57] or all of the nine causes of depression
and anxiety that I learned about,
[09:00] because they won't let me give
a 10-hour TED Talk --
[09:03] you can complain about that to them.
[09:04] But I want to focus on two of the causes
[09:06] and two of the solutions
that emerge from them, if that's alright.
[09:10] Here's the first.
[09:12] We are the loneliest society
in human history.
[09:15] There was a recent study
that asked Americans,
[09:18] "Do you feel like you're no longer
close to anyone?"
[09:21] And 39 percent of people
said that described them.
[09:25] "No longer close to anyone."
[09:26] In the international
measurements of loneliness,
[09:28] Britain and the rest of Europe
are just behind the US,
[09:31] in case anyone here is feeling smug.
[09:33] (Laughter)
[09:34] I spent a lot of time discussing this
[09:36] with the leading expert
in the world on loneliness,
[09:38] an incredible man
named professor John Cacioppo,
[09:40] who was at Chicago,
[09:42] and I thought a lot about one question
his work poses to us.
[09:44] Professor Cacioppo asked,
[09:47] "Why do we exist?
[09:48] Why are we here, why are we alive?"
[09:50] One key reason
[09:53] is that our ancestors
on the savannas of Africa
[09:56] were really good at one thing.
[09:58] They weren't bigger than the animals
they took down a lot of the time,
[10:01] they weren't faster than the animals
they took down a lot of the time,
[10:04] but they were much better
at banding together into groups
[10:07] and cooperating.
[10:09] This was our superpower as a species --
[10:11] we band together,
[10:12] just like bees evolved to live in a hive,
[10:15] humans evolved to live in a tribe.
[10:17] And we are the first humans ever
[10:22] to disband our tribes.
[10:24] And it is making us feel awful.
[10:27] But it doesn't have to be this way.
[10:29] One of the heroes in my book,
and in fact, in my life,
[10:31] is a doctor named Sam Everington.
[10:33] He's a general practitioner
in a poor part of East London,
[10:36] where I lived for many years.
[10:38] And Sam was really uncomfortable,
[10:40] because he had loads of patients
[10:41] coming to him with terrible
depression and anxiety.
[10:44] And like me, he's not opposed
to chemical antidepressants,
[10:46] he thinks they give
some relief to some people.
[10:49] But he could see two things.
[10:50] Firstly, his patients were depressed
and anxious a lot of the time
[10:54] for totally understandable
reasons, like loneliness.
[10:57] And secondly, although the drugs
were giving some relief to some people,
[11:01] for many people,
they didn't solve the problem.
[11:03] The underlying problem.
[11:05] One day, Sam decided
to pioneer a different approach.
[11:08] A woman came to his center,
his medical center,
[11:11] called Lisa Cunningham.
[11:12] I got to know Lisa later.
[11:14] And Lisa had been shut away in her home
with crippling depression and anxiety
[11:18] for seven years.
[11:20] And when she came to Sam's center,
she was told, "Don't worry,
[11:23] we'll carry on giving you these drugs,
[11:25] but we're also going to prescribe
something else.
[11:28] We're going to prescribe for you
to come here to this center twice a week
[11:31] to meet with a group of other
depressed and anxious people,
[11:34] not to talk about how miserable you are,
[11:37] but to figure out something
meaningful you can all do together
[11:41] so you won't be lonely and you won't feel
like life is pointless."
[11:44] The first time this group met,
[11:47] Lisa literally started
vomiting with anxiety,
[11:49] it was so overwhelming for her.
[11:51] But people rubbed her back,
the group started talking,
[11:53] they were like, "What could we do?"
[11:55] These are inner-city,
East London people like me,
[11:58] they didn't know anything about gardening.
[12:00] They were like, "Why don't we
learn gardening?"
[12:02] There was an area
behind the doctors' offices
[12:04] that was just scrubland.
[12:05] "Why don't we make this into a garden?"
[12:07] They started to take books
out of the library,
[12:09] started to watch YouTube clips.
[12:11] They started to get
their fingers in the soil.
[12:13] They started to learn
the rhythms of the seasons.
[12:16] There's a lot of evidence
[12:18] that exposure to the natural world
[12:19] is a really powerful antidepressant.
[12:21] But they started to do something
even more important.
[12:25] They started to form a tribe.
[12:27] They started to form a group.
[12:29] They started to care about each other.
[12:31] If one of them didn't show up,
[12:32] the others would go
looking for them -- "Are you OK?"
[12:35] Help them figure out
what was troubling them that day.
[12:38] The way Lisa put it to me,
[12:39] "As the garden began to bloom,
[12:42] we began to bloom."
[12:44] This approach is called
social prescribing,
[12:46] it's spreading all over Europe.
[12:48] And there's a small,
but growing body of evidence
[12:50] suggesting it can produce real
and meaningful falls
[12:53] in depression and anxiety.
[12:55] And one day, I remember
standing in the garden
[12:59] that Lisa and her once-depressed
friends had built --
[13:01] it's a really beautiful garden --
[13:03] and having this thought,
[13:04] it's very much inspired by a guy
called professor Hugh Mackay in Australia.
[13:08] I was thinking, so often
when people feel down in this culture,
[13:12] what we say to them -- I'm sure
everyone here said it, I have --
[13:15] we say, "You just need
to be you, be yourself."
[13:19] And I've realized, actually,
what we should say to people is,
[13:22] "Don't be you.
[13:24] Don't be yourself.
[13:26] Be us, be we.
[13:28] Be part of a group."
[13:30] (Applause)
[13:33] The solution to these problems
[13:36] does not lie in drawing
more and more on your resources
[13:39] as an isolated individual --
[13:41] that's partly what got us in this crisis.
[13:43] It lies on reconnecting
with something bigger than you.
[13:45] And that really connects
to one of the other causes
[13:48] of depression and anxiety
that I wanted to talk to you about.
[13:51] So everyone knows
[13:52] junk food has taken over our diets
and made us physically sick.
[13:56] I don't say that
with any sense of superiority,
[13:58] I literally came to give
this talk from McDonald's.
[14:01] I saw all of you eating that
healthy TED breakfast, I was like no way.
[14:04] But just like junk food has taken over
our diets and made us physically sick,
[14:10] a kind of junk values
have taken over our minds
[14:14] and made us mentally sick.
[14:16] For thousands of years,
philosophers have said,
[14:19] if you think life is about money,
and status and showing off,
[14:23] you're going to feel like crap.
[14:25] That's not an exact quote
from Schopenhauer,
[14:27] but that is the gist of what he said.
[14:29] But weirdly, hardy anyone
had scientifically investigated this,
[14:32] until a truly extraordinary person
I got to know, named professor Tim Kasser,
[14:36] who's at Knox College in Illinois,
[14:38] and he's been researching this
for about 30 years now.
[14:40] And his research suggests
several really important things.
[14:43] Firstly, the more you believe
[14:47] you can buy and display
your way out of sadness,
[14:51] and into a good life,
[14:53] the more likely you are to become
depressed and anxious.
[14:56] And secondly,
[14:58] as a society, we have become
much more driven by these beliefs.
[15:02] All throughout my lifetime,
[15:04] under the weight of advertising
and Instagram and everything like them.
[15:08] And as I thought about this,
[15:10] I realized it's like we've all been fed
since birth, a kind of KFC for the soul.
[15:16] We've been trained to look for happiness
in all the wrong places,
[15:19] and just like junk food
doesn't meet your nutritional needs
[15:22] and actually makes you feel terrible,
[15:25] junk values don't meet
your psychological needs,
[15:28] and they take you away from a good life.
[15:30] But when I first spent time
with professor Kasser
[15:33] and I was learning all this,
[15:35] I felt a really weird mixture of emotions.
[15:37] Because on the one hand,
I found this really challenging.
[15:40] I could see how often
in my own life, when I felt down,
[15:43] I tried to remedy it with some kind of
show-offy, grand external solution.
[15:49] And I could see why that
did not work well for me.
[15:52] I also thought,
isn't this kind of obvious?
[15:55] Isn't this almost like banal, right?
[15:57] If I said to everyone here,
[15:58] none of you are going to lie
on your deathbed
[16:01] and think about all the shoes you bought
and all the retweets you got,
[16:04] you're going to think about moments
[16:06] of love, meaning
and connection in your life.
[16:08] I think that seems almost like a cliché.
[16:10] But I kept talking
to professor Kasser and saying,
[16:12] "Why am I feeling
this strange doubleness?"
[16:15] And he said, "At some level,
we all know these things.
[16:18] But in this culture,
we don't live by them."
[16:21] We know them so well
they've become clichés,
[16:23] but we don't live by them.
[16:24] I kept asking why, why would we know
something so profound,
[16:27] but not live by it?
[16:29] And after a while,
professor Kasser said to me,
[16:32] "Because we live in a machine
[16:35] that is designed to get us to neglect
what is important about life."
[16:39] I had to really think about that.
[16:40] "Because we live in a machine
[16:42] that is designed to get us
to neglect what is important about life."
[16:46] And professor Kasser wanted to figure out
if we can disrupt that machine.
[16:50] He's done loads of research into this;
[16:51] I'll tell you about one example,
[16:53] and I really urge everyone here
to try this with their friends and family.
[16:57] With a guy called Nathan Dungan,
he got a group of teenagers and adults
[17:00] to come together for a series of sessions
over a period of time, to meet up.
[17:04] And part of the point of the group
[17:06] was to get people to think
about a moment in their life
[17:09] they had actually found
meaning and purpose.
[17:12] For different people,
it was different things.
[17:14] For some people, it was playing music,
writing, helping someone --
[17:18] I'm sure everyone here
can picture something, right?
[17:21] And part of the point of the group
was to get people to ask,
[17:24] "OK, how could you dedicate
more of your life
[17:26] to pursuing these moments
of meaning and purpose,
[17:29] and less to, I don't know,
buying crap you don't need,
[17:32] putting it on social media
and trying to get people to go,
[17:35] 'OMG, so jealous!'"
[17:36] And what they found was,
[17:38] just having these meetings,
[17:39] it was like a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous
for consumerism, right?
[17:43] Getting people to have these meetings,
articulate these values,
[17:46] determine to act on them
and check in with each other,
[17:49] led to a marked shift in people's values.
[17:52] It took them away from this hurricane
of depression-generating messages
[17:56] training us to seek happiness
in the wrong places,
[17:59] and towards more meaningful
and nourishing values
[18:02] that lift us out of depression.
[18:05] But with all the solutions that I saw
and have written about,
[18:08] and many I can't talk about here,
[18:11] I kept thinking,
[18:12] you know: Why did it take me so long
to see these insights?
[18:16] Because when you explain them to people --
[18:18] some of them are more
complicated, but not all --
[18:21] when you explain this to people,
it's not like rocket science, right?
[18:24] At some level, we already
know these things.
[18:26] Why do we find it so hard to understand?
[18:29] I think there's many reasons.
[18:31] But I think one reason is
that we have to change our understanding
[18:35] of what depression
and anxiety actually are.
[18:39] There are very real
biological contributions
[18:41] to depression and anxiety.
[18:44] But if we allow the biology
to become the whole picture,
[18:47] as I did for so long,
[18:49] as I would argue our culture
has done pretty much most of my life,
[18:53] what we're implicitly saying to people
is, and this isn't anyone's intention,
[18:57] but what we're implicitly
saying to people is,
[19:00] "Your pain doesn't mean anything.
[19:02] It's just a malfunction.
[19:03] It's like a glitch in a computer program,
[19:06] it's just a wiring problem in your head."
[19:10] But I was only able to start
changing my life
[19:13] when I realized your depression
is not a malfunction.
[19:18] It's a signal.
[19:20] Your depression is a signal.
[19:23] It's telling you something.
[19:24] (Applause)
[19:29] We feel this way for reasons,
[19:31] and they can be hard to see
in the throes of depression --
[19:34] I understand that really well
from personal experience.
[19:37] But with the right help,
we can understand these problems
[19:40] and we can fix these problems together.
[19:43] But to do that,
[19:44] the very first step
[19:46] is we have to stop insulting these signals
[19:48] by saying they're a sign of weakness,
or madness or purely biological,
[19:53] except for a tiny number of people.
[19:55] We need to start
listening to these signals,
[19:58] because they're telling us
something we really need to hear.
[20:02] It's only when we truly
listen to these signals,
[20:07] and we honor these signals
and respect these signals,
[20:11] that we're going to begin to see
[20:13] the liberating, nourishing,
deeper solutions.
[20:19] The cows that are waiting all around us.
[20:23] Thank you.
[20:24] (Applause)