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For a really long time,

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I had two mysteries
that were hanging over me.

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I didn't understand them

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and, to be honest, I was quite afraid
to look into them.

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The first mystery was, I'm 40 years old,

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and all throughout my lifetime,
year after year,

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serious depression and anxiety have risen,

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in the United States, in Britain,

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and across the Western world.

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And I wanted to understand why.

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Why is this happening to us?

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Why is it that with each year that passes,

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more and more of us are finding it harder
to get through the day?

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And I wanted to understand this
because of a more personal mystery.

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When I was a teenager,

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I remember going to my doctor

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and explaining that I had this feeling,
like pain was leaking out of me.

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I couldn't control it,

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I didn't understand why it was happening,

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I felt quite ashamed of it.

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And my doctor told me a story

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that I now realize was well-intentioned,

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but quite oversimplified.

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Not totally wrong.

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My doctor said, "We know
why people get like this.

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Some people just naturally get
a chemical imbalance in their heads --

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you're clearly one of them.

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All we need to do is give you some drugs,

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it will get your chemical
balance back to normal."

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So I started taking a drug
called Paxil or Seroxat,

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it's the same thing with different names
in different countries.

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And I felt much better,
I got a real boost.

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But not very long afterwards,

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this feeling of pain started to come back.

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So I was given higher and higher doses

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until, for 13 years, I was taking
the maximum possible dose

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that you're legally allowed to take.

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And for a lot of those 13 years,
and pretty much all the time by the end,

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I was still in a lot of pain.

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And I started asking myself,
"What's going on here?

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Because you're doing everything

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you're told to do by the story
that's dominating the culture --

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why do you still feel like this?"

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So to get to the bottom
of these two mysteries,

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for a book that I've written

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I ended up going on a big journey
all over the world,

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I traveled over 40,000 miles.

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I wanted to sit with the leading
experts in the world

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about what causes depression and anxiety

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and crucially, what solves them,

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and people who have come through
depression and anxiety

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and out the other side
in all sorts of ways.

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And I learned a huge amount

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from the amazing people
I got to know along the way.

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But I think at the heart
of what I learned is,

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so far, we have scientific evidence

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for nine different causes
of depression and anxiety.

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Two of them are indeed in our biology.

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Your genes can make you
more sensitive to these problems,

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though they don't write your destiny.

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And there are real brain changes
that can happen when you become depressed

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that can make it harder to get out.

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But most of the factors
that have been proven

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to cause depression and anxiety

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are not in our biology.

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They are factors in the way we live.

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And once you understand them,

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it opens up a very different
set of solutions

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that should be offered to people

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alongside the option
of chemical antidepressants.

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For example,

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if you're lonely, you're more likely
to become depressed.

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If, when you go to work,
you don't have any control over your job,

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you've just got to do what you're told,

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you're more likely to become depressed.

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If you very rarely get out
into the natural world,

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you're more likely to become depressed.

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And one thing unites a lot of the causes
of depression and anxiety

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that I learned about.

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Not all of them, but a lot of them.

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Everyone here knows

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you've all got natural
physical needs, right?

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Obviously.

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You need food, you need water,

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you need shelter, you need clean air.

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If I took those things away from you,

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you'd all be in real trouble, real fast.

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But at the same time,

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every human being
has natural psychological needs.

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You need to feel you belong.

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You need to feel your life
has meaning and purpose.

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You need to feel that people
see you and value you.

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You need to feel you've got
a future that makes sense.

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And this culture we built
is good at lots of things.

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And many things are better
than in the past --

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I'm glad to be alive today.

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But we've been getting less and less good

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at meeting these deep,
underlying psychological needs.

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And it's not the only thing
that's going on,

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but I think it's the key reason
why this crisis keeps rising and rising.

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And I found this really hard to absorb.

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I really wrestled with the idea

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of shifting from thinking of my depression
as just a problem in my brain,

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to one with many causes,

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including many in the way we're living.

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And it only really began
to fall into place for me

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when one day, I went to interview
a South African psychiatrist

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named Dr. Derek Summerfield.

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He's a great guy.

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And Dr. Summerfield
happened to be in Cambodia in 2001,

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when they first introduced
chemical antidepressants

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for people in that country.

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And the local doctors, the Cambodians,
had never heard of these drugs,

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so they were like, what are they?

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And he explained.

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And they said to him,

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"We don't need them,
we've already got antidepressants."

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And he was like, "What do you mean?"

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He thought they were going to talk about
some kind of herbal remedy,

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like St. John's Wort, ginkgo biloba,
something like that.

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Instead, they told him a story.

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There was a farmer in their community
who worked in the rice fields.

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And one day, he stood on a land mine

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left over from the war
with the United States,

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and he got his leg blown off.

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So they him an artificial leg,

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and after a while, he went back
to work in the rice fields.

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But apparently, it's super painful
to work under water

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when you've got an artificial limb,

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and I'm guessing it was pretty traumatic

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to go back and work in the field
where he got blown up.

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The guy started to cry all day,

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he refused to get out of bed,

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he developed all the symptoms
of classic depression.

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The Cambodian doctor said,

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"This is when we gave him
an antidepressant."

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And Dr. Summerfield said,
"What was it?"

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They explained that they went
and sat with him.

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They listened to him.

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They realized that his pain made sense --

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it was hard for him to see it
in the throes of his depression,

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but actually, it had perfectly
understandable causes in his life.

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One of the doctors, talking to the people
in the community, figured,

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"You know, if we bought this guy a cow,

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he could become a dairy farmer,

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he wouldn't be in this position
that was screwing him up so much,

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he wouldn't have to go
and work in the rice fields."

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So they bought him a cow.

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Within a couple of weeks,
his crying stopped,

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within a month, his depression was gone.

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They said to doctor Summerfield,

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"So you see, doctor, that cow,
that was an antidepressant,

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that's what you mean, right?"

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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If you'd been raised to think
about depression the way I was,

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and most of the people here were,

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that sounds like a bad joke, right?

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"I went to my doctor
for an antidepressant,

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she gave me a cow."

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But what those Cambodian
doctors knew intuitively,

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based on this individual,
unscientific anecdote,

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is what the leading
medical body in the world,

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the World Health Organization,

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has been trying to tell us for years,

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based on the best scientific evidence.

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If you're depressed,

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if you're anxious,

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you're not weak, you're not crazy,

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you're not, in the main,
a machine with broken parts.

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You're a human being with unmet needs.

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And it's just as important to think here
about what those Cambodian doctors

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and the World Health Organization
are not saying.

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They did not say to this farmer,

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"Hey, buddy, you need
to pull yourself together.

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It's your job to figure out
and fix this problem on your own."

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On the contrary, what they said is,

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"We're here as a group
to pull together with you,

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so together, we can figure out
and fix this problem."

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This is what every depressed person needs,

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and it's what every
depressed person deserves.

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This is why one of the leading
doctors at the United Nations,

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in their official statement
for World Health Day,

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couple of years back in 2017,

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said we need to talk less
about chemical imbalances

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and more about the imbalances
in the way we live.

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Drugs give real relief to some people --

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they gave relief to me for a while --

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but precisely because this problem
goes deeper than their biology,

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the solutions need to go much deeper, too.

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But when I first learned that,

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I remember thinking,

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"OK, I could see
all the scientific evidence,

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I read a huge number of studies,

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I interviewed a huge number of the experts
who were explaining this,"

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but I kept thinking, "How can we
possibly do that?"

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The things that are making us depressed

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are in most cases more complex
than what was going on

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with this Cambodian farmer.

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Where do we even begin with that insight?

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But then, in the long journey for my book,

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all over the world,

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I kept meeting people
who were doing exactly that,

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from Sydney, to San Francisco,

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to São Paulo.

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I kept meeting people
who were understanding

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the deeper causes
of depression and anxiety

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and, as groups, fixing them.

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Obviously, I can't tell you
about all the amazing people

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I got to know and wrote about,

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or all of the nine causes of depression
and anxiety that I learned about,

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because they won't let me give
a 10-hour TED Talk --

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you can complain about that to them.

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But I want to focus on two of the causes

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and two of the solutions
that emerge from them, if that's alright.

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Here's the first.

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We are the loneliest society
in human history.

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There was a recent study
that asked Americans,

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"Do you feel like you're no longer
close to anyone?"

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And 39 percent of people
said that described them.

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"No longer close to anyone."

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In the international
measurements of loneliness,

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Britain and the rest of Europe
are just behind the US,

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in case anyone here is feeling smug.

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(Laughter)

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I spent a lot of time discussing this

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with the leading expert
in the world on loneliness,

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an incredible man
named professor John Cacioppo,

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who was at Chicago,

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and I thought a lot about one question
his work poses to us.

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Professor Cacioppo asked,

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"Why do we exist?

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Why are we here, why are we alive?"

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One key reason

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is that our ancestors
on the savannas of Africa

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were really good at one thing.

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They weren't bigger than the animals
they took down a lot of the time,

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they weren't faster than the animals
they took down a lot of the time,

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but they were much better
at banding together into groups

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and cooperating.

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This was our superpower as a species --

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we band together,

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just like bees evolved to live in a hive,

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humans evolved to live in a tribe.

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And we are the first humans ever

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to disband our tribes.

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And it is making us feel awful.

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But it doesn't have to be this way.

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One of the heroes in my book,
and in fact, in my life,

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is a doctor named Sam Everington.

251
00:10:21,993 --> 00:10:24,731
He's a general practitioner
in a poor part of East London,

252
00:10:24,755 --> 00:10:26,334
where I lived for many years.

253
00:10:26,358 --> 00:10:28,045
And Sam was really uncomfortable,

254
00:10:28,069 --> 00:10:29,625
because he had loads of patients

255
00:10:29,649 --> 00:10:32,093
coming to him with terrible
depression and anxiety.

256
00:10:32,117 --> 00:10:34,839
And like me, he's not opposed
to chemical antidepressants,

257
00:10:34,863 --> 00:10:37,085
he thinks they give
some relief to some people.

258
00:10:37,109 --> 00:10:38,482
But he could see two things.

259
00:10:38,506 --> 00:10:42,061
Firstly, his patients were depressed
and anxious a lot of the time

260
00:10:42,085 --> 00:10:45,823
for totally understandable
reasons, like loneliness.

261
00:10:45,847 --> 00:10:49,291
And secondly, although the drugs
were giving some relief to some people,

262
00:10:49,315 --> 00:10:51,583
for many people,
they didn't solve the problem.

263
00:10:51,607 --> 00:10:53,140
The underlying problem.

264
00:10:53,871 --> 00:10:56,522
One day, Sam decided
to pioneer a different approach.

265
00:10:56,546 --> 00:10:58,998
A woman came to his center,
his medical center,

266
00:10:59,022 --> 00:11:00,489
called Lisa Cunningham.

267
00:11:00,513 --> 00:11:02,387
I got to know Lisa later.

268
00:11:02,411 --> 00:11:06,495
And Lisa had been shut away in her home
with crippling depression and anxiety

269
00:11:06,519 --> 00:11:07,669
for seven years.

270
00:11:08,898 --> 00:11:11,823
And when she came to Sam's center,
she was told, "Don't worry,

271
00:11:11,847 --> 00:11:13,677
we'll carry on giving you these drugs,

272
00:11:13,701 --> 00:11:16,498
but we're also going to prescribe
something else.

273
00:11:16,522 --> 00:11:19,965
We're going to prescribe for you
to come here to this center twice a week

274
00:11:19,989 --> 00:11:22,767
to meet with a group of other
depressed and anxious people,

275
00:11:22,791 --> 00:11:25,601
not to talk about how miserable you are,

276
00:11:25,625 --> 00:11:29,172
but to figure out something
meaningful you can all do together

277
00:11:29,196 --> 00:11:32,299
so you won't be lonely and you won't feel
like life is pointless."

278
00:11:32,323 --> 00:11:35,098
The first time this group met,

279
00:11:35,122 --> 00:11:37,378
Lisa literally started
vomiting with anxiety,

280
00:11:37,402 --> 00:11:39,323
it was so overwhelming for her.

281
00:11:39,347 --> 00:11:41,981
But people rubbed her back,
the group started talking,

282
00:11:42,005 --> 00:11:43,680
they were like, "What could we do?"

283
00:11:43,704 --> 00:11:45,998
These are inner-city,
East London people like me,

284
00:11:46,022 --> 00:11:48,070
they didn't know anything about gardening.

285
00:11:48,094 --> 00:11:50,339
They were like, "Why don't we
learn gardening?"

286
00:11:50,363 --> 00:11:52,529
There was an area
behind the doctors' offices

287
00:11:52,553 --> 00:11:53,704
that was just scrubland.

288
00:11:53,728 --> 00:11:55,610
"Why don't we make this into a garden?"

289
00:11:55,634 --> 00:11:57,809
They started to take books
out of the library,

290
00:11:57,833 --> 00:11:59,318
started to watch YouTube clips.

291
00:11:59,342 --> 00:12:01,501
They started to get
their fingers in the soil.

292
00:12:01,844 --> 00:12:04,887
They started to learn
the rhythms of the seasons.

293
00:12:04,911 --> 00:12:06,241
There's a lot of evidence

294
00:12:06,265 --> 00:12:07,894
that exposure to the natural world

295
00:12:07,918 --> 00:12:09,894
is a really powerful antidepressant.

296
00:12:09,918 --> 00:12:12,927
But they started to do something
even more important.

297
00:12:13,347 --> 00:12:15,377
They started to form a tribe.

298
00:12:15,401 --> 00:12:17,212
They started to form a group.

299
00:12:17,236 --> 00:12:19,260
They started to care about each other.

300
00:12:19,284 --> 00:12:20,958
If one of them didn't show up,

301
00:12:20,982 --> 00:12:23,502
the others would go
looking for them -- "Are you OK?"

302
00:12:23,526 --> 00:12:26,137
Help them figure out
what was troubling them that day.

303
00:12:26,161 --> 00:12:27,964
The way Lisa put it to me,

304
00:12:27,988 --> 00:12:30,585
"As the garden began to bloom,

305
00:12:30,609 --> 00:12:31,876
we began to bloom."

306
00:12:32,474 --> 00:12:34,506
This approach is called
social prescribing,

307
00:12:34,530 --> 00:12:36,045
it's spreading all over Europe.

308
00:12:36,069 --> 00:12:38,370
And there's a small,
but growing body of evidence

309
00:12:38,394 --> 00:12:41,274
suggesting it can produce real
and meaningful falls

310
00:12:41,298 --> 00:12:43,276
in depression and anxiety.

311
00:12:43,300 --> 00:12:47,021
And one day, I remember
standing in the garden

312
00:12:47,045 --> 00:12:49,526
that Lisa and her once-depressed
friends had built --

313
00:12:49,550 --> 00:12:51,134
it's a really beautiful garden --

314
00:12:51,158 --> 00:12:52,349
and having this thought,

315
00:12:52,373 --> 00:12:56,244
it's very much inspired by a guy
called professor Hugh Mackay in Australia.

316
00:12:56,268 --> 00:13:00,649
I was thinking, so often
when people feel down in this culture,

317
00:13:00,673 --> 00:13:03,737
what we say to them -- I'm sure
everyone here said it, I have --

318
00:13:03,761 --> 00:13:06,985
we say, "You just need
to be you, be yourself."

319
00:13:07,742 --> 00:13:10,692
And I've realized, actually,
what we should say to people is,

320
00:13:10,716 --> 00:13:11,866
"Don't be you.

321
00:13:12,306 --> 00:13:13,639
Don't be yourself.

322
00:13:14,218 --> 00:13:16,427
Be us, be we.

323
00:13:16,765 --> 00:13:18,090
Be part of a group."

324
00:13:18,114 --> 00:13:21,820
(Applause)

325
00:13:21,844 --> 00:13:24,423
The solution to these problems

326
00:13:24,447 --> 00:13:27,598
does not lie in drawing
more and more on your resources

327
00:13:27,622 --> 00:13:29,061
as an isolated individual --

328
00:13:29,085 --> 00:13:31,125
that's partly what got us in this crisis.

329
00:13:31,149 --> 00:13:33,902
It lies on reconnecting
with something bigger than you.

330
00:13:33,926 --> 00:13:36,347
And that really connects
to one of the other causes

331
00:13:36,371 --> 00:13:39,268
of depression and anxiety
that I wanted to talk to you about.

332
00:13:39,292 --> 00:13:40,982
So everyone knows

333
00:13:41,006 --> 00:13:44,752
junk food has taken over our diets
and made us physically sick.

334
00:13:44,776 --> 00:13:46,982
I don't say that
with any sense of superiority,

335
00:13:47,006 --> 00:13:49,405
I literally came to give
this talk from McDonald's.

336
00:13:49,429 --> 00:13:52,942
I saw all of you eating that
healthy TED breakfast, I was like no way.

337
00:13:52,966 --> 00:13:58,109
But just like junk food has taken over
our diets and made us physically sick,

338
00:13:58,133 --> 00:14:02,243
a kind of junk values
have taken over our minds

339
00:14:02,267 --> 00:14:03,745
and made us mentally sick.

340
00:14:04,157 --> 00:14:07,261
For thousands of years,
philosophers have said,

341
00:14:07,285 --> 00:14:11,873
if you think life is about money,
and status and showing off,

342
00:14:11,897 --> 00:14:13,420
you're going to feel like crap.

343
00:14:13,444 --> 00:14:15,511
That's not an exact quote
from Schopenhauer,

344
00:14:15,535 --> 00:14:17,307
but that is the gist of what he said.

345
00:14:17,331 --> 00:14:20,357
But weirdly, hardy anyone
had scientifically investigated this,

346
00:14:20,381 --> 00:14:24,030
until a truly extraordinary person
I got to know, named professor Tim Kasser,

347
00:14:24,054 --> 00:14:26,347
who's at Knox College in Illinois,

348
00:14:26,371 --> 00:14:28,934
and he's been researching this
for about 30 years now.

349
00:14:28,958 --> 00:14:31,974
And his research suggests
several really important things.

350
00:14:31,998 --> 00:14:35,189
Firstly, the more you believe

351
00:14:35,213 --> 00:14:39,578
you can buy and display
your way out of sadness,

352
00:14:39,602 --> 00:14:41,793
and into a good life,

353
00:14:41,817 --> 00:14:44,729
the more likely you are to become
depressed and anxious.

354
00:14:44,753 --> 00:14:46,046
And secondly,

355
00:14:46,070 --> 00:14:50,658
as a society, we have become
much more driven by these beliefs.

356
00:14:50,682 --> 00:14:52,095
All throughout my lifetime,

357
00:14:52,119 --> 00:14:56,312
under the weight of advertising
and Instagram and everything like them.

358
00:14:56,871 --> 00:14:58,244
And as I thought about this,

359
00:14:58,268 --> 00:15:04,029
I realized it's like we've all been fed
since birth, a kind of KFC for the soul.

360
00:15:04,053 --> 00:15:07,926
We've been trained to look for happiness
in all the wrong places,

361
00:15:07,950 --> 00:15:10,720
and just like junk food
doesn't meet your nutritional needs

362
00:15:10,744 --> 00:15:13,042
and actually makes you feel terrible,

363
00:15:13,066 --> 00:15:16,208
junk values don't meet
your psychological needs,

364
00:15:16,232 --> 00:15:18,874
and they take you away from a good life.

365
00:15:18,898 --> 00:15:21,521
But when I first spent time
with professor Kasser

366
00:15:21,545 --> 00:15:23,022
and I was learning all this,

367
00:15:23,046 --> 00:15:25,633
I felt a really weird mixture of emotions.

368
00:15:25,657 --> 00:15:28,347
Because on the one hand,
I found this really challenging.

369
00:15:28,371 --> 00:15:31,633
I could see how often
in my own life, when I felt down,

370
00:15:31,657 --> 00:15:36,922
I tried to remedy it with some kind of
show-offy, grand external solution.

371
00:15:37,441 --> 00:15:40,131
And I could see why that
did not work well for me.

372
00:15:40,930 --> 00:15:43,812
I also thought,
isn't this kind of obvious?

373
00:15:43,836 --> 00:15:45,581
Isn't this almost like banal, right?

374
00:15:45,605 --> 00:15:46,930
If I said to everyone here,

375
00:15:46,954 --> 00:15:49,097
none of you are going to lie
on your deathbed

376
00:15:49,121 --> 00:15:52,437
and think about all the shoes you bought
and all the retweets you got,

377
00:15:52,461 --> 00:15:54,144
you're going to think about moments

378
00:15:54,168 --> 00:15:56,279
of love, meaning
and connection in your life.

379
00:15:56,303 --> 00:15:58,248
I think that seems almost like a cliché.

380
00:15:58,272 --> 00:16:00,621
But I kept talking
to professor Kasser and saying,

381
00:16:00,645 --> 00:16:02,998
"Why am I feeling
this strange doubleness?"

382
00:16:03,022 --> 00:16:06,829
And he said, "At some level,
we all know these things.

383
00:16:06,853 --> 00:16:09,228
But in this culture,
we don't live by them."

384
00:16:09,252 --> 00:16:11,331
We know them so well
they've become clichés,

385
00:16:11,355 --> 00:16:12,633
but we don't live by them.

386
00:16:12,657 --> 00:16:15,866
I kept asking why, why would we know
something so profound,

387
00:16:15,890 --> 00:16:17,176
but not live by it?

388
00:16:17,200 --> 00:16:20,604
And after a while,
professor Kasser said to me,

389
00:16:20,628 --> 00:16:23,049
"Because we live in a machine

390
00:16:23,073 --> 00:16:26,806
that is designed to get us to neglect
what is important about life."

391
00:16:27,260 --> 00:16:28,847
I had to really think about that.

392
00:16:28,871 --> 00:16:30,276
"Because we live in a machine

393
00:16:30,300 --> 00:16:33,978
that is designed to get us
to neglect what is important about life."

394
00:16:34,299 --> 00:16:38,077
And professor Kasser wanted to figure out
if we can disrupt that machine.

395
00:16:38,101 --> 00:16:39,974
He's done loads of research into this;

396
00:16:39,998 --> 00:16:41,553
I'll tell you about one example,

397
00:16:41,577 --> 00:16:45,077
and I really urge everyone here
to try this with their friends and family.

398
00:16:45,101 --> 00:16:48,443
With a guy called Nathan Dungan,
he got a group of teenagers and adults

399
00:16:48,467 --> 00:16:52,680
to come together for a series of sessions
over a period of time, to meet up.

400
00:16:52,704 --> 00:16:54,467
And part of the point of the group

401
00:16:54,491 --> 00:16:57,791
was to get people to think
about a moment in their life

402
00:16:57,815 --> 00:17:00,561
they had actually found
meaning and purpose.

403
00:17:00,585 --> 00:17:02,728
For different people,
it was different things.

404
00:17:02,752 --> 00:17:06,369
For some people, it was playing music,
writing, helping someone --

405
00:17:06,393 --> 00:17:09,196
I'm sure everyone here
can picture something, right?

406
00:17:09,220 --> 00:17:12,101
And part of the point of the group
was to get people to ask,

407
00:17:12,125 --> 00:17:14,887
"OK, how could you dedicate
more of your life

408
00:17:14,911 --> 00:17:17,595
to pursuing these moments
of meaning and purpose,

409
00:17:17,619 --> 00:17:20,569
and less to, I don't know,
buying crap you don't need,

410
00:17:20,593 --> 00:17:23,315
putting it on social media
and trying to get people to go,

411
00:17:23,339 --> 00:17:24,606
'OMG, so jealous!'"

412
00:17:24,958 --> 00:17:26,601
And what they found was,

413
00:17:26,625 --> 00:17:27,959
just having these meetings,

414
00:17:27,983 --> 00:17:31,093
it was like a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous
for consumerism, right?

415
00:17:31,807 --> 00:17:34,760
Getting people to have these meetings,
articulate these values,

416
00:17:34,784 --> 00:17:37,315
determine to act on them
and check in with each other,

417
00:17:37,339 --> 00:17:40,196
led to a marked shift in people's values.

418
00:17:40,220 --> 00:17:44,633
It took them away from this hurricane
of depression-generating messages

419
00:17:44,657 --> 00:17:47,291
training us to seek happiness
in the wrong places,

420
00:17:47,315 --> 00:17:50,656
and towards more meaningful
and nourishing values

421
00:17:50,680 --> 00:17:52,680
that lift us out of depression.

422
00:17:53,347 --> 00:17:56,649
But with all the solutions that I saw
and have written about,

423
00:17:56,673 --> 00:17:59,412
and many I can't talk about here,

424
00:17:59,436 --> 00:18:00,807
I kept thinking,

425
00:18:00,831 --> 00:18:04,530
you know: Why did it take me so long
to see these insights?

426
00:18:04,554 --> 00:18:06,570
Because when you explain them to people --

427
00:18:06,594 --> 00:18:09,038
some of them are more
complicated, but not all --

428
00:18:09,062 --> 00:18:12,306
when you explain this to people,
it's not like rocket science, right?

429
00:18:12,330 --> 00:18:14,425
At some level, we already
know these things.

430
00:18:14,449 --> 00:18:17,086
Why do we find it so hard to understand?

431
00:18:17,110 --> 00:18:19,044
I think there's many reasons.

432
00:18:19,475 --> 00:18:23,744
But I think one reason is
that we have to change our understanding

433
00:18:23,768 --> 00:18:27,188
of what depression
and anxiety actually are.

434
00:18:27,776 --> 00:18:29,958
There are very real
biological contributions

435
00:18:29,982 --> 00:18:31,715
to depression and anxiety.

436
00:18:32,117 --> 00:18:35,871
But if we allow the biology
to become the whole picture,

437
00:18:35,895 --> 00:18:37,141
as I did for so long,

438
00:18:37,165 --> 00:18:41,230
as I would argue our culture
has done pretty much most of my life,

439
00:18:41,254 --> 00:18:45,111
what we're implicitly saying to people
is, and this isn't anyone's intention,

440
00:18:45,135 --> 00:18:48,172
but what we're implicitly
saying to people is,

441
00:18:48,196 --> 00:18:50,498
"Your pain doesn't mean anything.

442
00:18:50,522 --> 00:18:51,958
It's just a malfunction.

443
00:18:51,982 --> 00:18:54,451
It's like a glitch in a computer program,

444
00:18:54,475 --> 00:18:57,142
it's just a wiring problem in your head."

445
00:18:58,061 --> 00:19:01,168
But I was only able to start
changing my life

446
00:19:01,192 --> 00:19:05,257
when I realized your depression
is not a malfunction.

447
00:19:06,620 --> 00:19:07,770
It's a signal.

448
00:19:08,684 --> 00:19:10,691
Your depression is a signal.

449
00:19:11,077 --> 00:19:12,918
It's telling you something.

450
00:19:12,942 --> 00:19:17,553
(Applause)

451
00:19:17,577 --> 00:19:19,966
We feel this way for reasons,

452
00:19:19,990 --> 00:19:22,705
and they can be hard to see
in the throes of depression --

453
00:19:22,729 --> 00:19:25,339
I understand that really well
from personal experience.

454
00:19:25,363 --> 00:19:28,846
But with the right help,
we can understand these problems

455
00:19:28,870 --> 00:19:31,344
and we can fix these problems together.

456
00:19:31,368 --> 00:19:32,560
But to do that,

457
00:19:32,584 --> 00:19:34,322
the very first step

458
00:19:34,346 --> 00:19:36,964
is we have to stop insulting these signals

459
00:19:36,988 --> 00:19:41,180
by saying they're a sign of weakness,
or madness or purely biological,

460
00:19:41,204 --> 00:19:43,139
except for a tiny number of people.

461
00:19:43,163 --> 00:19:46,789
We need to start
listening to these signals,

462
00:19:46,813 --> 00:19:50,085
because they're telling us
something we really need to hear.

463
00:19:50,514 --> 00:19:55,537
It's only when we truly
listen to these signals,

464
00:19:55,561 --> 00:19:59,576
and we honor these signals
and respect these signals,

465
00:19:59,600 --> 00:20:01,847
that we're going to begin to see

466
00:20:01,871 --> 00:20:06,029
the liberating, nourishing,
deeper solutions.

467
00:20:07,133 --> 00:20:11,206
The cows that are waiting all around us.

468
00:20:11,585 --> 00:20:12,766
Thank you.

469
00:20:12,790 --> 00:20:16,478
(Applause)