The Joe Rogan experience what do you say.
To someone who is happy with what they do lives a fulfilled life exercises and is still depressed yes I thought a lot about this but let me to come back to think about useless I know this is an issue with a lot of people I know people that worship at the altar of science and modern medicine that firmly believe that all depression is because of some sort of Bipolar Disorder chemical imbalance in the brain and anything debates that or anything disputes that notion is pisses them off you know I understand that and I would have been like that for me yeah of course I was like many years do you get that don’t I get some people responding that way sure of course I think so the World Health Organization is the leading medical body in the world right they did a study of all the best evidence and they explained very clearly that the mental health is a social indicator right it has French Revolution social causes that need social solutions well as individual solutions the science is overwhelming you won’t get many scientists who say in fact struggle to find any scientists who say depression is purely a biological phenomenon right.
Pretty much everyone agrees there’s some social and psychological component I think when we this weird disconnect between what the scientists know and what the public is told right I don’t know anyone who went to their doctor who apart from this wonderful doctor Elise London we can talk about who went with depression as I think was told anything other than a biological story I mean there may be asked you know there’s some of the more asked about childhood you know what was your childhood like and refer to a therapist but no one was taught about these wider Civil War social causes no one’s told like do you feel controlled at work why it’s fact that could be making make you depressed but in terms of the people who are depressed but doan because was a real mystery to me right I knew people I thought but this guy’s got everything and he feels it’s still depressed what’s going on here I think there’s two to say about that one is I started to for Behind Inequality various reasons research for something else I was reading some like feminist text from the early 60s right and a really common thing that happened in the early sixties is women would go.
To their doctor and they’d say doctor there’s something really wrong with my nerves people took talked about in terms of nerves then we don’t do that anymore so really wrong with my nerds because I’ve got everything a woman could possibly want I’ve got a husband who beat me I’ve got a car got a Front Load washing machine I’ve got two kids but I right and the doctor will go right and give a valium now if we could travel back in time and speak to those women what we’d say is right you’ve got everything you could possibly want by the standards of the culture but it’s down as the culture is just wrong right I as a woman as a human being you need more than just a Semi Automatic washing machine in a car right you need a fulfilling life you need speed of meaning purpose and a very similar thing I think is happening today if you suffer than when I speak to people you say I’ve got everything I could want but I feel like share so tell me about your life very often they’re working really hard in prestigious jobs that they don’t like they don’t enjoy by hour to buy that don’t give them pleasure it.
Comes back to this hijacking by junk values that we’re talking about that Professor Tim kasih discovered so what you’ve got is because we’ve been told a totally misleading story about what makes us satisfied and happy as human beings I think comes up and again in the interviews you do because we’ve been taught in different ways because we’ve been told a misleading story about that we live our lives according to the wrong script we feel like and rather than question the script we think there must be something wrong with us biologically now there are biological contributions it’s supported to say that but one of these that really believed my mind on this was Angley this woman amazing social scientist called dr. Brett forward in Berkeley she did this research it’s kind of simple research it just asked if you consciously decided you were going to spend more hours a day trying to make yourself happier would you actually become happier right and they did this research to them do alone obviously with their colleagues in the United States Japan Russia Taiwan and what they found was in the US if you try to make yourself happier consciously.
You do not become happier in the other countries if you try to make yourself happier you do become happier and they will like what’s going on so they did more research and what they discovered was in the US and it’s been a lot more time here but in Britain as well if you try to make yourself happier you try to do something generally for yourself you buy something for yourself your big yourself are up here try to get a promotion in the other countries generally if you try to make yourself happier you do something for someone else right you try to help friends family your community I mean where what countries just restin Russia and China it’s most of the rest this that if you this is a part of their culture that if you want to be happy you do something for someone else it’s so implicit in the culture that they live collectively that it’s not even just like we wouldn’t even if you said do you think happiness is an individualistic thing we’d be like what are you even talking about isn’t that sort of an extrinsic idea as well the idea that you’re going to be happy by trying to make other people happy but there’s a.
Thing so intrinsic values are not about just internal to yourself they’re that you value so your interests you could be spending time with your kids right that was probably most people’s strongest intrinsic value if their parents is being with their kids bonding with their kids like is if your goal is to get happy and the way you’ve chosen to get happy I’m gonna get happy by making other people happy that’s that seems very strange and I think so if you think about where humans live but shouldn’t you just make other people happy because you love them but that is a way loving people in being present with them is where but not as like a specific for with a specific goal of making yourself happy that’s C no that’s not why they did it it’s not like when they were told make yourself happy and they had an implicit script in their culture which is like oh right I want to make myself happy I’ll spend time with other people I’ll do with other people but if you think about it in terms of human evolution it makes total sense right think about our ancestors mm-hmm where they evolved if you were a group if our ancestors had been.
Individualist who were out too big up themselves as individuals we wouldn’t be having this conversation right so it makes us we evolved as a species with instincts that no it’s not argument there the motivation of trying to get happy by helping other people is so implicit in the culture for most people in say China that they wouldn’t even articulate it that way it’s only if you force them to say look try to make yourself happier that they then the script becomes obvious it’s implicit but this script that we have this idea that the way you make yourself happier is as an individual you know just doing something for yourself and how you would start because there is not in this country of how to make yourself happy and I think that’s sort of disingenuous this idea that the only way to make yourself happy is to do that what that’s not what people are trying to do what people are trying to do is be successful and I don’t think they necessarily equate success with happiness but what they do equate success with is an alleviation of debt and alleviation of problems and.
Alleviation of a lot of the issues that people face early and they think of that as if you look at the problems that you have when you’re growing up you look at the prospect if you grow up in a poor family one of the main problems that you face is you’re worried about paying your bills so you say someday I’m gonna get to a point where that is no longer an issue I’m going to make it I’m going to be successful they’re not doing it thinking this is going to make me happy I very rarely see that and which is one of the reasons why people even people’s parents and this freaks me the out will tell them to not pursue their dreams but instead to pursue something that’s more likely to happen like don’t pursue your dream of becoming an actor or a singer or whatever it is instead pursue your dream of being the foreman at the company you work at because that’s attainable I think you’re totally right now yeah there’s a lot of evidence that you’re right that the financial anxiety is a massive driver of depression and anxiety obviously that there’s a interesting study that found people who have an income from property of ten times less likely to develop an.
Anxiety disorder than people who don’t and there was a really interesting experiment in how we can respond to that it’s one the president obama said late in his term he thinks would have to happen across the country in the next 20 years for International Business various reasons so canada in 70s the Travel Advisory canadian government chose a town at random seems to genuinely been random its town called ofan it’s am anyone who knows canada it’s about four hours at a Winnipeg and they said to a big group of people in this town we’re going to give you guys for the net for the foreseeable future we’re going to give all of you a guaranteed basic income we’re going to give you the equivalent of in today’s money fifteen thousand US dollars right there’s nothing you can do that means we’ll take it away from you and there’s nothing you have to do in return for it we’re just your citizens of our country we want you to have a good life right it was partly because they had a kind of system but it was a lot of people were falling through the cracks and they wanted to do a little experiment to see what this work better and this was studied very carefully by a woman I.
Interviewed dr. Evelyn 4j to see what happened had loads of interesting happened people spent more time with very few people quit work but a lot of people turned down jobs so actual overall work standards improved because employers had to attract people with better standards but for me the most interesting thing is there was a huge fall in depression and anxiety right depression and anxiety that was so severe people had to be hospitalized fell by 9 which is remarkable in just three years and then the program ended dr. 4j said to me I thought so much about that what land about the cow dr. Voss they said and you know that’s an antidepressant right we should expand our idea of an antidepressant to be anything that reduces depression and that should include pills but also so you’re totally right I mean look I grew up dad my dad’s a bus driver my mum worked in a shelter my grandmother clean toilets financial anxiety is a massive driver of the despair this I mean more than half of all Americans have not because of the incredible financial pressure they’ve been put under got five.
Hundred dollars set aside for if a crisis comes along right so you’re talking about that’s a huge drop and again that’s really important cuz explain to people if that’s making you depressed and anxious don’t let a doctor tell you you’ve just got a Causes Depression chemical imbalance in your brain right that’s do doctors still say that all the time my nephew’s best friend just literally a couple of weeks ago went to the doctor I was told yeah you got a dopamine imbalance the doctor said is migrated in the 20 years since I went there for a service in England or in England don’t I get contacted constantly by people who were being told they’ve got chemical it they’re told they got Panic Attacks chemical imbalances in their brain are they just as likely to prescribe antidepressants in English as their American slightly lower but it’s still exceptionally high yes still scary yeah there’s narrative that an antidepressant must be in some sort of a pill form and that neiva even the expression and antidepressant it’s a very confusing thing that we’ve sort of adopted very quickly in this country and it’s a relatively recent you know over.
The last 60 70 years and the people that have antidepressants in their body that take them all the time and swear by them boy if you try to tell them in any way that there’s a better option they get extremely defensive I have a friend she’s very smart and she’s one of the one of the people that will you know very aggressively debate this idea that it’s anything but a chemical depression Clinical Depression chemical imbalance you know but she take care of her body she’s not exercise all the time you know she’s slightly overweight she eat the best foods you know it’s a weird thing and she’s living in a society and culture that has all these forces that are rising that yes this will feel terrible right yeah it’s a big thing for me is when I’m talking to this because I’ve had some of that reactions well not too much but I’ve had some of that reaction as well the first thing for me – I always say I want to expand the menu of options I don’t want to take anything off the table right it’s not about you say that and I think you’re probably being pretty honest but you really do want to you want to.
Eliminate me but just by the standard of improvement you do probably want to take most people off of antidepressants don’t you want my brother they have a victorian-era choice yeah I would draw an analogy obesity is massively risen in the Western world it hasn’t risen because people suddenly became greedy and lazy it’s risen because our food system is terrible the way food supply system is terrible and we’ve built cities that people can’t walk and bicycle around right and they’re really stressed all the time and they get home from work exhausted so they don’t have time to exercise a lot of them in that context some people will do what’s a good Gastric Bypass stomach stapling liposuction that kind of thing right now I’m not against that but if we changed the society in the way that I would want to with obesity so that people could walk cycle and you know they had access to healthy food far fewer people would need Side Effects stomach stapling or liposuction right draw it’s not a perfect analogy but I’d says if the social changes that I want to happen if we follow the places that have succeeded in reducing depression and anxiety over time you.
Would see fewer people feeling they needed and chemical antidepressants.