Johann Hari - This could be why you're depressed or anxious

• https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_this_could_be_why_you_re_depressed_or_anxious/transcript?language=en

Growing up he was used to taking medicine to solve his depression, and after 13 years he got higher doses but he was still in pain. He then travelled to different places to discover how mental health is being addressed in different countries. A psychiatrist from South Africa went to Cambodia in 2001 to introduce antidepressant drugs. The doctors in Cambodia told him they already have antidepressants. They told him this story, there was a farmer in theri

There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day, he stood on a land mine left over from the war with the United States, and he got his leg blown off. So they him an artificial leg, and after a while, he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently, it's super painful to work under water when you've got an artificial limb, and I'm guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where he got blown up. The guy started to cry all day, he refused to get out of bed, he developed all the symptoms of classic depression. The Cambodian doctor said, "This is when we gave him an antidepressant." And Dr. Summerfield said, "What was it?" They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense -- it was hard for him to see it in the throes of his depression, but actually, it had perfectly understandable causes in his life. One of the doctors, talking to the people in the community, figured, "You know, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer, he wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much, he wouldn't have to go and work in the rice fields." So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped, within a month, his depression was gone. They said to doctor Summerfield, "So you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant, that's what you mean, right?"

If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not, in the main, a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs. And it's just as important to think here about what those Cambodian doctors and the World Health Organization are not saying. They did not say to this farmer, "Hey, buddy, you need to pull yourself together. It's your job to figure out and fix this problem on your own." On the contrary, what they said is, "We're here as a group to pull together with you, so together, we can figure out and fix this problem." This is what every depressed person needs, and it's what every depressed person deserves.

This is why one of the leading doctors at the United Nations, in their official statement for World Health Day, couple of years back in 2017, said we need to talk less about chemical imbalances and more about the imbalances in the way we live. Drugs give real relief to some people -- they gave relief to me for a while -- but precisely because this problem goes deeper than their biology, the solutions need to go much deeper, too.