WEBVTT

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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)

NOTE Paragraph

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(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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?

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

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He's a general practitioner
in a poor part of East London,

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where I lived for many years.

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And Sam was really uncomfortable,

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because he had loads of patients

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coming to him with terrible
depression and anxiety.

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And like me, he's not opposed
to chemical antidepressants,

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he thinks they give
some relief to some people.

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But he could see two things.

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Firstly, his patients were depressed
and anxious a lot of the time

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for totally understandable
reasons, like loneliness.

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And secondly, although the drugs
were giving some relief to some people,

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for many people,
they didn't solve the problem.

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The underlying problem.

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One day, Sam decided
to pioneer a different approach.

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A woman came to his center,
his medical center,

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called Lisa Cunningham.

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I got to know Lisa later.

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And Lisa had been shut away in her home
with crippling depression and anxiety

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for seven years.

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And when she came to Sam's center,
she was told, "Don't worry,

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we'll carry on giving you these drugs,

00:11:13.701 --> 00:11:16.498
but we're also going to prescribe
something else.

00:11:16.522 --> 00:11:19.965
We're going to prescribe for you
to come here to this center twice a week

00:11:19.989 --> 00:11:22.767
to meet with a group of other
depressed and anxious people,

00:11:22.791 --> 00:11:25.601
not to talk about how miserable you are,

00:11:25.625 --> 00:11:29.172
but to figure out something
meaningful you can all do together

00:11:29.196 --> 00:11:32.299
so you won't be lonely and you won't feel
like life is pointless."

NOTE Paragraph

00:11:32.323 --> 00:11:35.098
The first time this group met,

00:11:35.122 --> 00:11:37.378
Lisa literally started
vomiting with anxiety,

00:11:37.402 --> 00:11:39.323
it was so overwhelming for her.

00:11:39.347 --> 00:11:41.981
But people rubbed her back,
the group started talking,

00:11:42.005 --> 00:11:43.680
they were like, "What could we do?"

00:11:43.704 --> 00:11:45.998
These are inner-city,
East London people like me,

00:11:46.022 --> 00:11:48.070
they didn't know anything about gardening.

00:11:48.094 --> 00:11:50.339
They were like, "Why don't we
learn gardening?"

00:11:50.363 --> 00:11:52.529
There was an area
behind the doctors' offices

00:11:52.553 --> 00:11:53.704
that was just scrubland.

00:11:53.728 --> 00:11:55.610
"Why don't we make this into a garden?"

00:11:55.634 --> 00:11:57.809
They started to take books
out of the library,

00:11:57.833 --> 00:11:59.318
started to watch YouTube clips.

00:11:59.342 --> 00:12:01.501
They started to get
their fingers in the soil.

00:12:01.844 --> 00:12:04.887
They started to learn
the rhythms of the seasons.

00:12:04.911 --> 00:12:06.241
There's a lot of evidence

00:12:06.265 --> 00:12:07.894
that exposure to the natural world

00:12:07.918 --> 00:12:09.894
is a really powerful antidepressant.

00:12:09.918 --> 00:12:12.927
But they started to do something
even more important.

00:12:13.347 --> 00:12:15.377
They started to form a tribe.

00:12:15.401 --> 00:12:17.212
They started to form a group.

00:12:17.236 --> 00:12:19.260
They started to care about each other.

00:12:19.284 --> 00:12:20.958
If one of them didn't show up,

00:12:20.982 --> 00:12:23.502
the others would go
looking for them -- "Are you OK?"

00:12:23.526 --> 00:12:26.137
Help them figure out
what was troubling them that day.

00:12:26.161 --> 00:12:27.964
The way Lisa put it to me,

00:12:27.988 --> 00:12:30.585
"As the garden began to bloom,

00:12:30.609 --> 00:12:31.876
we began to bloom."

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:32.474 --> 00:12:34.506
This approach is called
social prescribing,

00:12:34.530 --> 00:12:36.045
it's spreading all over Europe.

00:12:36.069 --> 00:12:38.370
And there's a small,
but growing body of evidence

00:12:38.394 --> 00:12:41.274
suggesting it can produce real
and meaningful falls

00:12:41.298 --> 00:12:43.276
in depression and anxiety.

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:43.300 --> 00:12:47.021
And one day, I remember
standing in the garden

00:12:47.045 --> 00:12:49.526
that Lisa and her once-depressed
friends had built --

00:12:49.550 --> 00:12:51.134
it's a really beautiful garden --

00:12:51.158 --> 00:12:52.349
and having this thought,

00:12:52.373 --> 00:12:56.244
it's very much inspired by a guy
called professor Hugh Mackay in Australia.

00:12:56.268 --> 00:13:00.649
I was thinking, so often
when people feel down in this culture,

00:13:00.673 --> 00:13:03.737
what we say to them -- I'm sure
everyone here said it, I have --

00:13:03.761 --> 00:13:06.985
we say, "You just need
to be you, be yourself."

00:13:07.742 --> 00:13:10.692
And I've realized, actually,
what we should say to people is,

00:13:10.716 --> 00:13:11.866
"Don't be you.

00:13:12.306 --> 00:13:13.639
Don't be yourself.

00:13:14.218 --> 00:13:16.427
Be us, be we.

00:13:16.765 --> 00:13:18.090
Be part of a group."

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:18.114 --> 00:13:21.820
(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:21.844 --> 00:13:24.423
The solution to these problems

00:13:24.447 --> 00:13:27.598
does not lie in drawing
more and more on your resources

00:13:27.622 --> 00:13:29.061
as an isolated individual --

00:13:29.085 --> 00:13:31.125
that's partly what got us in this crisis.

00:13:31.149 --> 00:13:33.902
It lies on reconnecting
with something bigger than you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:33.926 --> 00:13:36.347
And that really connects
to one of the other causes

00:13:36.371 --> 00:13:39.268
of depression and anxiety
that I wanted to talk to you about.

00:13:39.292 --> 00:13:40.982
So everyone knows

00:13:41.006 --> 00:13:44.752
junk food has taken over our diets
and made us physically sick.

00:13:44.776 --> 00:13:46.982
I don't say that
with any sense of superiority,

00:13:47.006 --> 00:13:49.405
I literally came to give
this talk from McDonald's.

00:13:49.429 --> 00:13:52.942
I saw all of you eating that
healthy TED breakfast, I was like no way.

00:13:52.966 --> 00:13:58.109
But just like junk food has taken over
our diets and made us physically sick,

00:13:58.133 --> 00:14:02.243
a kind of junk values
have taken over our minds

00:14:02.267 --> 00:14:03.745
and made us mentally sick.

00:14:04.157 --> 00:14:07.261
For thousands of years,
philosophers have said,

00:14:07.285 --> 00:14:11.873
if you think life is about money,
and status and showing off,

00:14:11.897 --> 00:14:13.420
you're going to feel like crap.

00:14:13.444 --> 00:14:15.511
That's not an exact quote
from Schopenhauer,

00:14:15.535 --> 00:14:17.307
but that is the gist of what he said.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:17.331 --> 00:14:20.357
But weirdly, hardy anyone
had scientifically investigated this,

00:14:20.381 --> 00:14:24.030
until a truly extraordinary person
I got to know, named professor Tim Kasser,

00:14:24.054 --> 00:14:26.347
who's at Knox College in Illinois,

00:14:26.371 --> 00:14:28.934
and he's been researching this
for about 30 years now.

00:14:28.958 --> 00:14:31.974
And his research suggests
several really important things.

00:14:31.998 --> 00:14:35.189
Firstly, the more you believe

00:14:35.213 --> 00:14:39.578
you can buy and display
your way out of sadness,

00:14:39.602 --> 00:14:41.793
and into a good life,

00:14:41.817 --> 00:14:44.729
the more likely you are to become
depressed and anxious.

00:14:44.753 --> 00:14:46.046
And secondly,

00:14:46.070 --> 00:14:50.658
as a society, we have become
much more driven by these beliefs.

00:14:50.682 --> 00:14:52.095
All throughout my lifetime,

00:14:52.119 --> 00:14:56.312
under the weight of advertising
and Instagram and everything like them.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:56.871 --> 00:14:58.244
And as I thought about this,

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.

00:15:04.053 --> 00:15:07.926
We've been trained to look for happiness
in all the wrong places,

00:15:07.950 --> 00:15:10.720
and just like junk food
doesn't meet your nutritional needs

00:15:10.744 --> 00:15:13.042
and actually makes you feel terrible,

00:15:13.066 --> 00:15:16.208
junk values don't meet
your psychological needs,

00:15:16.232 --> 00:15:18.874
and they take you away from a good life.

00:15:18.898 --> 00:15:21.521
But when I first spent time
with professor Kasser

00:15:21.545 --> 00:15:23.022
and I was learning all this,

00:15:23.046 --> 00:15:25.633
I felt a really weird mixture of emotions.

00:15:25.657 --> 00:15:28.347
Because on the one hand,
I found this really challenging.

00:15:28.371 --> 00:15:31.633
I could see how often
in my own life, when I felt down,

00:15:31.657 --> 00:15:36.922
I tried to remedy it with some kind of
show-offy, grand external solution.

00:15:37.441 --> 00:15:40.131
And I could see why that
did not work well for me.

00:15:40.930 --> 00:15:43.812
I also thought,
isn't this kind of obvious?

00:15:43.836 --> 00:15:45.581
Isn't this almost like banal, right?

00:15:45.605 --> 00:15:46.930
If I said to everyone here,

00:15:46.954 --> 00:15:49.097
none of you are going to lie
on your deathbed

00:15:49.121 --> 00:15:52.437
and think about all the shoes you bought
and all the retweets you got,

00:15:52.461 --> 00:15:54.144
you're going to think about moments

00:15:54.168 --> 00:15:56.279
of love, meaning
and connection in your life.

00:15:56.303 --> 00:15:58.248
I think that seems almost like a cliché.

00:15:58.272 --> 00:16:00.621
But I kept talking
to professor Kasser and saying,

00:16:00.645 --> 00:16:02.998
"Why am I feeling
this strange doubleness?"

00:16:03.022 --> 00:16:06.829
And he said, "At some level,
we all know these things.

00:16:06.853 --> 00:16:09.228
But in this culture,
we don't live by them."

00:16:09.252 --> 00:16:11.331
We know them so well
they've become clichés,

00:16:11.355 --> 00:16:12.633
but we don't live by them.

00:16:12.657 --> 00:16:15.866
I kept asking why, why would we know
something so profound,

00:16:15.890 --> 00:16:17.176
but not live by it?

00:16:17.200 --> 00:16:20.604
And after a while,
professor Kasser said to me,

00:16:20.628 --> 00:16:23.049
"Because we live in a machine

00:16:23.073 --> 00:16:26.806
that is designed to get us to neglect
what is important about life."

00:16:27.260 --> 00:16:28.847
I had to really think about that.

00:16:28.871 --> 00:16:30.276
"Because we live in a machine

00:16:30.300 --> 00:16:33.978
that is designed to get us
to neglect what is important about life."

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:34.299 --> 00:16:38.077
And professor Kasser wanted to figure out
if we can disrupt that machine.

00:16:38.101 --> 00:16:39.974
He's done loads of research into this;

00:16:39.998 --> 00:16:41.553
I'll tell you about one example,

00:16:41.577 --> 00:16:45.077
and I really urge everyone here
to try this with their friends and family.

00:16:45.101 --> 00:16:48.443
With a guy called Nathan Dungan,
he got a group of teenagers and adults

00:16:48.467 --> 00:16:52.680
to come together for a series of sessions
over a period of time, to meet up.

00:16:52.704 --> 00:16:54.467
And part of the point of the group

00:16:54.491 --> 00:16:57.791
was to get people to think
about a moment in their life

00:16:57.815 --> 00:17:00.561
they had actually found
meaning and purpose.

00:17:00.585 --> 00:17:02.728
For different people,
it was different things.

00:17:02.752 --> 00:17:06.369
For some people, it was playing music,
writing, helping someone --

00:17:06.393 --> 00:17:09.196
I'm sure everyone here
can picture something, right?

00:17:09.220 --> 00:17:12.101
And part of the point of the group
was to get people to ask,

00:17:12.125 --> 00:17:14.887
"OK, how could you dedicate
more of your life

00:17:14.911 --> 00:17:17.595
to pursuing these moments
of meaning and purpose,

00:17:17.619 --> 00:17:20.569
and less to, I don't know,
buying crap you don't need,

00:17:20.593 --> 00:17:23.315
putting it on social media
and trying to get people to go,

00:17:23.339 --> 00:17:24.606
'OMG, so jealous!'"

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:24.958 --> 00:17:26.601
And what they found was,

00:17:26.625 --> 00:17:27.959
just having these meetings,

00:17:27.983 --> 00:17:31.093
it was like a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous
for consumerism, right?

00:17:31.807 --> 00:17:34.760
Getting people to have these meetings,
articulate these values,

00:17:34.784 --> 00:17:37.315
determine to act on them
and check in with each other,

00:17:37.339 --> 00:17:40.196
led to a marked shift in people's values.

00:17:40.220 --> 00:17:44.633
It took them away from this hurricane
of depression-generating messages

00:17:44.657 --> 00:17:47.291
training us to seek happiness
in the wrong places,

00:17:47.315 --> 00:17:50.656
and towards more meaningful
and nourishing values

00:17:50.680 --> 00:17:52.680
that lift us out of depression.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:53.347 --> 00:17:56.649
But with all the solutions that I saw
and have written about,

00:17:56.673 --> 00:17:59.412
and many I can't talk about here,

00:17:59.436 --> 00:18:00.807
I kept thinking,

00:18:00.831 --> 00:18:04.530
you know: Why did it take me so long
to see these insights?

00:18:04.554 --> 00:18:06.570
Because when you explain them to people --

00:18:06.594 --> 00:18:09.038
some of them are more
complicated, but not all --

00:18:09.062 --> 00:18:12.306
when you explain this to people,
it's not like rocket science, right?

00:18:12.330 --> 00:18:14.425
At some level, we already
know these things.

00:18:14.449 --> 00:18:17.086
Why do we find it so hard to understand?

00:18:17.110 --> 00:18:19.044
I think there's many reasons.

00:18:19.475 --> 00:18:23.744
But I think one reason is
that we have to change our understanding

00:18:23.768 --> 00:18:27.188
of what depression
and anxiety actually are.

00:18:27.776 --> 00:18:29.958
There are very real
biological contributions

00:18:29.982 --> 00:18:31.715
to depression and anxiety.

00:18:32.117 --> 00:18:35.871
But if we allow the biology
to become the whole picture,

00:18:35.895 --> 00:18:37.141
as I did for so long,

00:18:37.165 --> 00:18:41.230
as I would argue our culture
has done pretty much most of my life,

00:18:41.254 --> 00:18:45.111
what we're implicitly saying to people
is, and this isn't anyone's intention,

00:18:45.135 --> 00:18:48.172
but what we're implicitly
saying to people is,

00:18:48.196 --> 00:18:50.498
"Your pain doesn't mean anything.

00:18:50.522 --> 00:18:51.958
It's just a malfunction.

00:18:51.982 --> 00:18:54.451
It's like a glitch in a computer program,

00:18:54.475 --> 00:18:57.142
it's just a wiring problem in your head."

00:18:58.061 --> 00:19:01.168
But I was only able to start
changing my life

00:19:01.192 --> 00:19:05.257
when I realized your depression
is not a malfunction.

00:19:06.620 --> 00:19:07.770
It's a signal.

00:19:08.684 --> 00:19:10.691
Your depression is a signal.

00:19:11.077 --> 00:19:12.918
It's telling you something.

NOTE Paragraph

00:19:12.942 --> 00:19:17.553
(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

00:19:17.577 --> 00:19:19.966
We feel this way for reasons,

00:19:19.990 --> 00:19:22.705
and they can be hard to see
in the throes of depression --

00:19:22.729 --> 00:19:25.339
I understand that really well
from personal experience.

00:19:25.363 --> 00:19:28.846
But with the right help,
we can understand these problems

00:19:28.870 --> 00:19:31.344
and we can fix these problems together.

00:19:31.368 --> 00:19:32.560
But to do that,

00:19:32.584 --> 00:19:34.322
the very first step

00:19:34.346 --> 00:19:36.964
is we have to stop insulting these signals

00:19:36.988 --> 00:19:41.180
by saying they're a sign of weakness,
or madness or purely biological,

00:19:41.204 --> 00:19:43.139
except for a tiny number of people.

00:19:43.163 --> 00:19:46.789
We need to start
listening to these signals,

00:19:46.813 --> 00:19:50.085
because they're telling us
something we really need to hear.

00:19:50.514 --> 00:19:55.537
It's only when we truly
listen to these signals,

00:19:55.561 --> 00:19:59.576
and we honor these signals
and respect these signals,

00:19:59.600 --> 00:20:01.847
that we're going to begin to see

00:20:01.871 --> 00:20:06.029
the liberating, nourishing,
deeper solutions.

00:20:07.133 --> 00:20:11.206
The cows that are waiting all around us.

NOTE Paragraph

00:20:11.585 --> 00:20:12.766
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:20:12.790 --> 00:20:16.478
(Applause)