Johann Hari: How to Find Connection in a Lonely World

35:00It was a scrub land, basically, where dogs would go and do their business. And they were like, well, we could turn Dogshare Alley into a garden, right? So they started to get books out the library, started to watch videos on YouTube. They started to get their fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. The way Lisa put it to me, you know, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom, right? There's a lot of evidence that disconnection from the natural world causes depression and anxiety and reconnection with nature can be profoundly healing and restorative. It gives you a sense of awe, it lifts you out of your sense of ego, it gives you a sense that you are small and the world is big and you're part of this beautiful big tapestry.

35:41There's also a debate about what's called biophilia that we do seem to actually love looking at green stuff but they start to do something even more important. They started to form a tribe, they started to form a group, they started to care about each other. If one of them didn't show up the others would go looking for them be like hey what's wrong it was a bit like Cottey right in Berlin um and there's a growing body of research it's still small but growing one study um I think in Norway found that it was social prescribing was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants in reducing depression and anxiety I think for a kind of obvious reason right it's dealing with the actual reasons why people are depressed and anxious and this is something I saw in the research for lost connections all over the world from Sydney to Sao Paulo to San Francisco, not just cities, begin with letter S.

36:26I don't know why that happened in my head there. The best strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons why we feel so bad in the first place. And disconnection from nature is a really profound one. So we talked about belonging and we've talked about kind of crisis of attention. To what extent do you think those two things are linked? How are they sort of part of the same story, would you say? Oh, in so many ways. I mean, I'll give you an example of one. every time you open Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, which I refuse to call X, those companies begin to make money out of you in several ways.

37:04The most important is you're scrolling down, you see advertising, they make money from ads. Everyone knows how that works, you don't need me to explain it. The second way they make money is much more important, and this was explained to me when I spent a lot of time for Stoll & Focus in Silicon Valley, interviewing the people who designed this machinery. And they explained to me, everything you do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are and what makes you tick, what makes you happy, what makes you angry, what makes you horny, what makes you sad.

37:35And it's figuring this out for lots of reasons. But the main one is to figure out what to show you next to keep you scrolling. Because every time you open the app and begin to scroll, they begin to make money because you see ads. The longer you scroll, the more money they make because you see more advertising. Every time you close the app, that revenue stream disappears. So all of this genius in Silicon Valley or this AI or these algorithms, when it's applied to social media, is designed to do one thing and one thing only to figure out how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible.

38:05That's it, right? So they've produced machines designed to hack and harvest our attention. Now that makes us less present in our everyday surroundings, which obviously undermines the sense of belonging and home. But I think there's a deeper mechanism that's even more worrying. So the algorithms were set up to figure out what does actually keep people scrolling, right? And they don't care what it is. They're agnostic about what it is. They just want you to scroll. And the algorithms discovered something that's actually been known about by psychologists for nearly 100 years now. The fancy term for it is negativity bias.

38:42It's very simple. Human beings will stare longer at things that make us angry and upset than we will at things that make us feel good. If you've ever seen a car crash on the motorway, you know exactly what I mean. You stared longer at the car wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. This is very deep in human nature. It's always been part of us. But when it combines with algorithms that learn what makes you specifically angry and pissed off, it leads to a disastrous effect. So imagine a situation, what would be a good example? Picture two girls who go to the same party and they go home on the same bus, right?

39:18And they both open TikTok and make videos. And one of them goes, the first girl goes, that was such a great night. We danced all night to Taylor Swift and BTS, loved it. Amazing, right? The algorithm is scanning for the kind of words you use and it's going to put that video into a few people's feeds. Now imagine the next girl opens her TikTok and goes, Karen was an absolute skank at that party and her boyfriend's a prick and just angrily denounces everyone I don't think teenagers still say skank but we'll set that aside angrily denounces everyone right the algorithm is scanning for those words because it knows about negativity bias if it's enraging it's engaging you'll stare longer it's something that makes you angry it's going to put that video into far more people's feeds right so the more mean and negative your videos are the more shocking they are the more the more they get promoted the more people get to see them now that is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls on a bus we all know what's happened to the mental health of teenage girls in this society in reaction to these technologies but now imagine that happening to a whole society where the kind people the people who want to get along people who want to say nice things are muffled and pushed to the back and the mean hostile and aggressive people are given a megaphone and pushed to the front now you think about how that relates to a sense of home to sense of home you've got to have a sense that you like things that your sense of home comes from positivity think about your wider sense of home our country for example right i love britain right i i'm like comically patriotic i love our sense of humor i love the way british people are with each other like especially i'm away so much i just love it when i get back right it's a sign of how british i am that i want to hug people because i love it so much and of course i don't because we're British.

41:02And that sense of positivity about our country is being completely, which most British people feel, right? It's been completely driven out by this. And we have plenty of problems as a country, don't get me wrong. But this mad apocalyptic hate filled narrative, where we're being constantly primed to despise and hate each other. Now, that's catastrophic for individual mental health. That's catastrophic for our sense of home. It's in the long term, you just can't have a democracy if you're constantly being primed to hate each other in bubbles of rage and fury. I've seen this happen to so many people I know, I'm sure you have as well, where they just end up hating everyone or tied to narrower, narrower positions where they think everyone who doesn't hold those narrow positions is repulsive and evil.

41:55So yeah, that's one of the many ways it poisons the well of a sense of home in my view yeah okay i want to take us back to uh something we touched on at the beginning of the podcast which is your own experiences of depression and anxiety and you said that you've largely lifted yourself out of that that you have moments when you feel anxious as we all do in modern life but that it sounds like it's not affecting your life in the way it did before what do you put that down to would you say i'm very careful with and you're not priming me to do this but i just want to be careful to say so lost connections and the huge amount of research i did for it is very much not one of those like books so i get a kind of self-help books goes well dear reader i did this and now you can too yeah depression anxiety are extremely complex the scientific event for nine different causes right if i tell you a story for about two minutes you're gonna think what the fuck is he talking about what's this got to do with my question bear with me i promise you it does answer your question in the early 1980s there was a doctor in san diego called vincent felitti who was approached he got got an offer so he was contacted by kaiser permanente who are one of the big not-for-profit medical providers in california and they said look we've got a problem we know what to do the problem was that obesity was rising at the time it was hugely rising actually it was pretty low compared to today but it was going up and they were like look nothing we do is working we give people diet plans it doesn't work we give people personal trainers it doesn't work can we give you money to just do blue skies research and figure out what would what would work so he's like yeah okay it takes the money he's like oh what we're gonna do so he started to work with 250 very obese people people who weigh more than 300 pounds and had for a long time and he's working with them and he's like well what could we do and he has this idea that sounds and in fact is quite stupid he said what would happen if really obese people literally stopped eating and we gave them like vitamin c shots and get scurvy or whatever would they burn through the fat supplies in their body and get down to a healthy weight so with a ton of medical supervision they try it and incredibly at first it works so there's a woman i'm going to call her susan it's not a real name who went down from being more than 300 pounds to 138 pounds incredible her family were phoning dr fliti and saying wow you've saved her life there was huge weight loss in this program and then one day something happened that no one expected susan cracked she went to kfc or something like it and she started very heavily eating and she started to gain a lot of weight not not quite where she was but gained a lot of weight and Dr.

44:37Felitti called her in he said Susan what happened she looked down she's really ashamed she said I don't know I don't know and he said well tell me about the day you cracked anything in particular happened that day it turned out something happened that day that had actually never happened to Susan before she was in a bar and a man started chatting her up not in a horrible way in a nice way but she felt really freaked out when it started overeating that's when Dr. Felitti asked her a question he hadn't asked his patients before he said well tell me about when you first started to gain weight how old were you in her case it was she was 11 I think he said well did anything in particular happen when you were 11 that didn't happen when you were like 10 or 14 anything in particular happened that year and Susan looked down and she said well that's when my grandfather started to rape me and Dr.

45:26Felitti interviewed everyone in the program and discovered that 60 % of the women have made their extreme weight gain in the aftermath of being sexually abused or assaulted. And at first he's like, what's this about? And Susan explained it to him really well. She said, overweight is overlooked and that's what I need to be. Dr. Felitti realized this thing that seems so dysfunctional, gaining a lot of weight, and obviously is bad for your health in one way, was performing a profoundly positive function for these women. But this was a small study, right? It's 200 people. It seems like such a weird finding, 60%, like such a huge number.

46:00So Dr. Valuti went to the Centers for Disease Control, who fund a lot of medical research in the US, and got money to do a much bigger study. And this is where it led to an incredible breakthrough in depression and anxiety that later helped me. So every single person who came to Kaiser Permanente for healthcare in the city of San Diego across the whole year, doesn't matter what force, schizophrenia, broken leg, anything, was given a questionnaire. And the first part said did any of these bad things happen to you when you were a kid things like neglect sexual abuse physical abuse and it was gonna ask at the end just about your weight but luckily for us at the last minute they had a load of other stuff like have you had an addiction problem have you attempted suicide are you depressed that kind of thing and when they added up the figures at first they thought i know we've made a mistake these figures don't make sense do it all again they added them up the figures were correct for every category of childhood trauma you experienced you were two to four times more likely to be depressed, anxious, addicted, obese.

46:55I mean, but when you went into the multiple categories of childhood trauma, the figures were extraordinary. If you had experienced six categories of childhood trauma, you were 3 ,100 % more likely to have an addiction problem and 4 ,600 % more likely to have attempted suicide, which is just, I mean, you don't really get figures like that in medical science very often. And I remember when I first, when I interviewed Dr. Valuti the first time in San Diego, he's a super nice man. You'd like him if you met him. He was quite an old guy when I met him. I could see that this was good research. I'd read it in advance, obviously.

47:36And I felt really angry with him. And I actually ended the interview early. And I remember walking on the beach in San Diego and thinking, why am I so angry with this really nice old guy who's like done all this good research what i heard from it because i had experienced some very extreme things when i was a child what i heard him as saying is so if you've been through this childhood trauma you're broken you're fucked you're like a cursed person right of course that is not the tone in which he was saying it or indeed the substance in what he was saying but that's how i heard it but i'm really glad i went back because what what they discovered next in their research was really important for me.

48:17So after they'd finished this research, this wave of the research, they suddenly had all these people in San Diego who'd indicated that they'd been abused as children. And they were like, well, what do we do with all this data? Right. It seems like quite a big deal. So their doctors were told, don't call them back in. But next time they come in, say to them something like, I see that when you were a child, you were abused. I'm really sorry that happened to you that should never have happened you should have been protected would you like to talk about it and 40 % of people said no I don't want to talk about it but 60 % of people did want to talk about it and they wanted to talk about it on average for five minutes and then it was random randomly assigned that some of them could see a therapist and talk about it more what was incredible was just those five minutes of an authority figure saying I'm so sorry that should never have happened to you that alone led to a significant fall in depression and anxiety and the people who were randomly assigned one got a therapist got bigger for it's not the trauma that screws you over it's the shame about the trauma you know people who are abused are almost always told by their abuser they deserve it they internalize these ideas because you're a child we mentioned this before releasing shame is profoundly healing so for me I think understanding that my feelings of depression anxiety were signals that something had gone wrong in my childhood that my needs had not been met that I've been subject to things I should not have been subjected to and that that wasn't my fault right and I would never look at a child and think it was their fault that these crazy things happened to them so why would I think that about myself that was profoundly healing for me in addition to lots of other things that I write about in Lost Connections that connect you know I've got very meaningful work I've got very secure and stable and loving relationships and friendships um you know so many of the factors that cause depression anxiety kind of I think I was able to heal them partly because of this deeper healing um different people need different things of course I'm this is not for everyone but the yeah for me I think that was really important so you know I mean I have mild mildly anxious sometimes but i mean a human being who didn't feel mild anxiety would in fact be impaired right like that that would be a bad thing if you couldn't feel any anxiety so no but my anxiety is always within normal and healthy ranges now and i don't ever feel depressed now um so i really feel it has been a kind of healing journey and i think to find your way anywhere you need maps i came here to the studio and i've been here before i i used google maps right if that map had been wrong i would not be here but i think what's happened is we've been given inaccurate or or oversimplified maps of our pain and our distress for a very long time now when i went to my doctor when i was a teenager my doctor lovely person said we know what's wrong with you there's just some problem with your brain chemistry and you just need some drugs now there are real biological factors that can contribute to depression and anxiety the science on that is very clear and chemical antidepressants give some relief to some people but that was a ludicrously oversimplified story right actually she told me that there was a chemical imbalance in my brain which is not true there's never been any evidence that depressed people have a chemical imbalance in their brains incredibly that that's a concept that's actually invented by drug company marketers it was never even a scientific concept but people are still being told that all the time by their their doctors who should know better by now which is Not to say there aren't biological factors.

51:56There are. There are real brain changes that happen when you become depressed that can make it harder to get out. And your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems that they don't right your destiny. Yeah, to what extent is it genetic? Is there a percentage on that? So your genes interact with your environment. So you may be genetically more predisposed to these problems. A better way to think about it is genetically more sensitive to these problems. But you can't assess the genetic sensitivity in the absence of environmental stimuli that trigger it. What we do know is no one is just predestined by their genes to just whatever the environment and whatever happens in their psyche and whatever happens in their life to be like this.

52:35That is not true, right? There used to be this debate where they would talk about exogenous and endogenous depression. We've moved on from that. The genetic debate has moved on. So it is similar with attention, right? Some people are genetically more sensitive to the factors that are screwing up our attention. But that just means they're like canaries in the coal mine. we have to be even more important in dealing with the environmental factors, like social media companies invading our attention for them. The genes aren't a reason to not deal with it. They're an even greater reason to deal with it, because they're going to be more sensitive.

53:06So, yeah, it's... I mean, actually, the genetic debate was completely thrown off for many years by many factors. But, yeah, that's now what we know. Okay. Can we circle back to... Sure. Something that we brought up at the beginning, and where I suggested that this idea of the home is somehow connected to the way that you feel inside of yourself and I said, you know, perhaps when you were going through that period of depression, you somehow didn't feel at home within your own body and mind. What do you think about that now after what we talked about today? I mean, do you feel at home inside yourself as a human being now and do you think you always have done and how would you see that link between this word home and your physicality it's a really interesting question i think the honest answer is i don't know but a few things come into my mind i feel much less confident about answering this than i do anything else we talked about i think and i've noticed this with several people i know this is not a scientific this is an anecdotal observation i think people whose homes when their children are very violent or disturbed can develop an odd sense of home because for most people home is the place of safety and the outside world is the place of like danger that you need to navigate and learn and i didn't and don't feel like that like i'm just i've just finished this book that'll be out next year where for 15 years intermittently i've been going to there's there's underneath las vegas there's 600 miles of drainage tunnels and there are many homeless people who live in these drainage tunnels and the homeless population of las vegas have been being targeted by serial killers and the book is the story of the people who live in the tunnels and the serial killers who murdered them and it's funny for my fact checking i had to go back and listen to a recording from years and years ago so there's an amazing charity run by my friends robin paul and george and danika called shine a light and they're people who used to live in the tunnels who got out and now help the people who still live in the tunnels they're the most heroic people i know one time i was i think it was rob and he said uh we were in a sketchy part of the tunnels and um and rob said to me something like you know yeah and i've noticed but you're a bit different to the other journalists we've taken down here most people we bring down here they're quite nervous like they're crying but you seem so relaxed and i said i'd completely forgot i said i said oh rob if you met my family this feels just like home to me right so there's um i think it gave me an odd sense of relationship to home i think it meant that i had a high threshold for being in dangerous places or danger in my own life so which was very good for me in terms of it's enabled a lot of my work some which was not so good for me um in terms of like putting yourself in dangerous positions could obviously lead to you being hurt and it did sometimes i think in relation to my own body i think again about what v um even slur said v wrote this amazing book about the called the apology had her father sexually abused her when she was starting when she was eight and it gave her this um impaired relationship with her body and then many many years later when she was in her 50s she got a very serious form of cancer which she writes about in her book in the body of the world and she actually discovered a love for her body through this cancer and a kind of healing because she realized her body's capacity to heal took her back to this or gave her a sense of admiration for for its its capacities that really healed some of the disengagement from her body that happened when she was sexually abused and V always has talked to me about my relationship my body is urging me to have a healthier relationship with it but the I think in my case because some of the abuse i experienced was very physical abuse for violence um i do think when you're a child if you experience violent abuse it can cause a separation from the body and a sense of sort of disembodiment or dissociation from the body so yeah i think that's probably i'm not going to sound very californian probably a journey i'm still on but the uh i think journey I'm still on to some degree I think it's a sense of re-embodiment and or re-inhabiting your own body I do feel quite disconnected from that I'm not someone who gets other than I think through sex I don't think I really get many bodily pleasures my pleasures are sort of pleasures of the mind or of connecting with people or they're not so yeah you've you've correctly identified something I need to think about more it's interesting isn't it but you're very cerebral aren't you so you're clearly spending a huge amount of time in your own head you're writing books you're thinking about things a lot you're researching you're interviewing talking to people and then of course when you when you publish a book you're then you know you're talking about what you've learned I think it's really interesting what you're saying because I think if if you if you suffer abuse at an early age I'm sure that you learn absolutely to to take yourself out of your own body i mean that that makes so much sense to me and i think also that doubleness of not only are you being hurt but you're being told that you you caused this hurt that it's your fault right so it's not just a disconnection of the body but then a blaming of yourself and your body yeah and i think it's not enough to just have it's an essential stage i suspect but it's not enough to have the intellectual insight of oh right that's what happened there you can know that and i believe that is extremely helpful but i don't think that on its own it heals it have you tried meditation i can't do it i did for a while i did the only form meditation i can do and i still do i do about once a month is loving kindness meditation do you know about it no go on this was taught this by my friend rachel schubert who teaches it if people want to look her up so we live in environments which are so primed to make us feel envious and covetous right and And it's a really simple meditation.

59:21So what you do is you close your eyes and you begin. You picture someone. The first bit is very easy. Picture someone you love and you imagine something nice happening for them. And you feel the pleasure. You feel loving kindness towards them. That's easy. Then you picture someone you slightly know. I live on a street where there's a corner shop at the end. there's a guy who works on the corner shop and i used to pitch him but i had to stop because i realized that i was being overly friendly tim after these meditations because it was like because i've done it for too long but you picture that person right so i don't i don't even know this person's name right uh you know someone i see i go in there every day but i don't know his name um i couldn't tell you five facts about his life and i would picture him and i tried to imagine something happening uh for him and feeling genuinely happy for him right and then this is where it gets harder picture someone you don't like it could be someone who's harmed you or someone who you just don't like in the world and you try to imagine something happening good happening for them and the pleasure and joy they're feeling you try to really feel the happiness happy for them right um and it's a nice way of trying to reset your disposition towards the world we live in an environment that's so priming us to feel envious and you know but just individual meditation the significant numbers of people very often by the way survivors of childhood trauma for whom meditation is not the right thing.

1:00:50It's fabulous for lots of people. I'm in favour of it. People try it. But if I do it for more than five minutes, my brain starts to spin out. So I'm exactly the same. Oh, interesting. Which is why I asked you about it because I had a feeling that you would say that. And I suppose I bring it up because I think for people listening or watching, I think it's actually quite important to pass that message on because I think we're sort of all told that we should be able to do this and it's the thing that's going to make us feel better. I mean people disagree with this but I personally don't think we're all necessarily wired that way and I for me for example going for a run uh there's it's a very meditative act because there's the repetition of putting one foot in front of the other you're out outside in the air um but even going for a walk in London and you know I was like peering down you know at dusk when you see people going about their lives through sweaty windows you know that's quite meditative I don't think you have to necessarily sit in a in a corner and try and resolve yourself in stillness I still think there are there are ways of doing it through movement I suppose and I think if you're naturally a movement person I think that's okay so what happens to you when you try to do the still bit I've always thought that my worst job would be being an extra in casualty where you know you're sprawled out on hospital bed with with various why it's coming out of you because I my body does not like to be still it's just the way that I am right so I just immediately feel the urge to sprint out of the room and I've had the same you know I've tried acupuncture that's exactly the same for me acupuncture is like being sort of nailed into a bed you know uh you know we're all different and that's okay anyone who's interested in this debate I would really recommend my friend Ronald Purser's book mcmindfulness okay it's a really interesting and he's of course in favor of mind meditation mindfulness for whoever wants to do it and he sees there are benefits to it for many people but i'm pretty sure he gives an example of a company in the u.s that threw their employees off their health insurance but then gave them free meditation classes to deal with the anxiety yeah i think there's like a perfect example of like or a perfect example of like uh a kind of general trend which is we'll make people's lives worse and then we'll tell them the job is on them to fix it by not being so anxious.

1:03:04He introduced me to a great concept by a historian called Lauren Berlant. Cruel optimism, it's called. So cruel optimism is where you take something with really big and deep causes, obesity, depression, attention problems, and you say, hey buddy, great news. I got the answer for you. You've got all these attention problems. All you need to do is meditate 10 minutes a day on this app. You're going to be fine, right? Or, you know, obesity because this environment is poisoning us all and making us sick from the moment we're born. Hey, just do this little diet plan. You're going to be great. And it sounds like optimism because you're presenting the person with a solution.

1:03:39It's in fact cruel because nine times out of 10, you're setting them up to fail. Not that there aren't benefits to these things, of course there are, but you're setting them up to fail. And generally when you fail, you think, oh shit, there must be something wrong with me because I did the thing that was the solution and here I am still feeling like shit um so the alternative to cruel optimism is not pessimism i do not want pessimism i'm not a pessimistic person and i don't feel pessimistic about any of the problems that we've dealt with in fact i learned through my books there are solutions being put into practice all over the world to all of these problems the alternative to cruel optimism is authentic optimism where you scale the solutions to the size of the challenge so think about what we're about social prescribing or think about regulating social media companies these are problems which are matching the size of the problem right in addition to lots of individual changes that we can make in the interim because it's going to take a while to achieve those collective solutions though they've already begun um you know i sometimes think about this i think one of the reasons why it's easier for me to see this than some people is because uh i'm a 47 year i'm gay and i'm 47 and i think you know often people will say look you're right about these social problems that are making people feel terrible, but we're never going to solve those problems.

1:04:50So we just need to focus solely at an individual level. And I say, I'm absolutely in favour of individual changes. We're together a hundred step on the way. But, you know, if you went back to the 1950s and you were talking to a gay person who was depressed and you've gone, you know what? I think we can actually overthrow homophobia, right? Good luck with that, mate. We've had 2000 years of gay people being imprisoned, burned alive, beheaded. Yeah, yeah, you do. you focus on your overthrowing homophobia and we'll just cope psychologically with the living in the closet and actually it's the people who overthrew homophobia who turn out to be right i think a lot about an amazing friend of mine andrew sullivan who um in 1994 andrew was diagnosed as hiv positive this is the height of the aids crisis he thought he had a couple of years to live his best friend patrick had just died of aids and he thought okay i'm dying what am i going to do.

1:05:42So he quit his job. He was the editor of the New Republic magazine and went to a place I know well, Provincetown in Cape Cod, to die. And he thought, okay, I'm going to die. I'm going to do one last thing before I die. And he wrote a book, the first book ever to argue for a mad utopian idea, one that no one had ever written a book about before. And the crazy utopian idea that Andrew wrote a book advocating was gay marriage. And he thought, I'm never going to live to see this. No one alive today. I'll ever live to see it. But maybe somewhere down the line, someone's going to pick up this idea. And when I get depressed about the scale of problems we face, and I'm using the word depressed colloquially, when I get down about the challenges we face, I try to imagine going back in time to 1994 and saying to Andrew as he's finishing Virtually Normal, that book, okay, Andrew, you're not going to believe me, but 24 years from now, A, you'll be alive that would have completely blown his mind because he didn't know that protease inhibitors were about to come on you'll be married to a man because that'll be legal and I'll be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States makes a ruling that quotes from your book that makes it mandatory for every state in the United States to introduce gay marriage and the day after that you're going to be invited to have dinner with the president in a White House lit up in the colours of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you and so many other people have achieved oh and by the way that president he's going to be black right yeah i mean it would have sounded like the most ludicrous preposterous science fiction well it happened it happened because enough people banded together in a spirit of love and compassion didn't smash anything up and burn anything down they didn't kill anyone they appealed in a spirit of love and compassion for these changes incredible changes are possible they're possible when individuals are brave and when people are brave together and um none of these things that we've talked about are inevitable we can remember a time before lots of them and we're not a thousand years old right um whatever my nephews say that i am uh that you know so we can deal with these problems if we want to they are comprehensible there are places in the world that are solving them we can join that fight so i think as the last question i'd like to just bring us back to belonging if if someone listening or watching feels slightly disconnected from the people around them.

1:08:00They feel like they don't belong in the place that they live in. So many of us, I think, are wrestling with this rootlessness and this kind of idea of we don't really know where we should be and why. Do you have any words of wisdom for them on that? I don't know if it's wisdom, but I would say that's not a problem in you. that's the product of us living in a weird distorted environment you know i would tell them about an amazing guy i interviewed just up the way from here as well actually called dr derrick sommerfeld who had this moment of epiphany so dr sommerfeld was in cambodia in 2001 i think when they first introduced chemical antidepressants for the people in cambodia they'd never had those drugs in that country before and the local cambodian doctors had never heard of them so they were like what are antidepressants he wasn't there to work on this he just happened to be there and so he told them and they said to him we don't need them we've already got antidepressants and he was like what do you mean and he thought they were going to talk about some kind of like herbal remedy likest john's war or something instead they told him a story there was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields and one day he stood on a landmine left over from the war with the US and he got his leg blown off.

1:09:16So they gave him an artificial limb and after a while he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently it's super painful to work underwater 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 a lot. After a while he refused to get out of bed. He got what we would call you know classic depression. The doctors, the Cambodians said to him well that's when we gave him an antidepressant and Dr. Sommerfeld was like, what is it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him.

1:09:46They realized that his pain made sense, right? And I talked to the guy for five minutes to see why he was so distressed. One of the doctors 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. So they bought him a cow. The community bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression was gone. It never came back. So they said to Dr. Sommerfeld, so you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right? Now, you've been raised to think the way we have about our feelings of dislocation and despair.

1:10:17That sounds like a joke. I went to my doctor for an antidepressant. She gave me a cow. But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what the leading medical body in the whole world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, if you're dislocated, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not in the remain a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is love and practical support to get those needs met. And what I think that story tells us is depression and anxiety are not malfunctions.

1:10:50They are signals, right? They're telling us something. They're very painful signals. I remember that very well. But they are telling us something so important. And we need to stop insulting those signals by saying they're a sign of weakness or craziness or purely biological malfunctions and start listening to them and honoring them. So that feeling of dislocation you experience is the product of a dysfunctional environment. It's not a flaw in you and it's a necessary signal. And it's one that, by the way, huge numbers of people all around you are experiencing. So let's honor that signal. Let's listen to it.

1:11:27Let's figure out what it means because by following that signal, we can get to the solution to the signal, which is a rebuilding of home and belonging and community. Fantastic. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much, Johan. What a pleasure. Great questions. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Hooray. Thanks, everyone, for listening along today. And thanks very much, of course, to the brilliant Johan. If you're interested in the themes we talked about today, I can recommend Johan's book, Lost Connections, which is very interesting on the subject of belonging and how it affects our mental health in general.

1:12:03I thought it was really interesting. You can watch, of course, the video version of this podcast on YouTube and keep up to date with what we're doing over on Instagram. Homing members on Patreon, as you know, get access to all of our behind-the-scenes house tours with our guests as well. So the handle for all of those platforms is at homingwithmat. This episode was produced by Podshop with music by Simeon Walker. Thanks again, folks, and talk to you next time. Bye-bye. Amen.