Joe Rogan - Depression Isn't a Chemical Imbalance?

What do you say to someone who is happy with what they do, lives a fulfilled life, exercises and is still depressed? Yes, I thought a lot about this. Remind me to come back to the thing about East London. I know this is an issue with a lot of people. I know people that worship at the altar of science and modern medicine that firmly believe that all depression is because of some sort of chemical imbalance in the brain and anything that debates that or anything that disputes that notion pisses them off. You know, I understand that and I would have been like that for many years. Do you get that? Of course, I was like that for many years. Do you get that? Do I get some people responding that way? Sure, of course. Of course. I think the World Health Organization is the leading medical body in the world, right? They did a study of all the best evidence and they explained very clearly that mental health is a social indicator, right? It has social causes, it needs social solutions as well as individual solutions. The science on this is overwhelming. You won't get many scientists who say, in fact, you struggle to find any scientists who say depression is purely a biological phenomenon, right? Pretty much everyone agrees there's some social and psychological component. I think when we, there's a weird disconnect between what the scientists know and what the public is told, right? I don't know anyone who went to their doctor who, apart from this wonderful doctor in East London who we can talk about, who went with depression and anxiety, was told anything other than a biological story. I mean, there may be asked, you know, some of them were asked about what was your childhood like and referred to a therapist, but no one was told about these wider social causes. No one was told like, do you feel controlled at work? Well, okay, it's a fact that could be making you depressed. But in terms of the people who are depressed but don't, because there was a real mystery to me, right? I knew people, I thought, but this guy's got everything and he feels he's still depressed. What's going on here? I think there's two things to say about that. One is I started to, for various reasons, for research, for something else, I was reading some like feminist texts from the early sixties, right? And a really common thing that happened in the early sixties is women would go to their doctor and they'd say, doctor, there's something really wrong with my nerves. People talk about themselves as nerves then, we don't do that anymore. Something really wrong with my nerves because I've got everything a woman could possibly want. I've got a husband who doesn't beat me. I've got a car. I've got a washing machine. I've got two kids. But I feel like shit, right? And the doctor would go, you're right. And give a valium. Now, if we could travel back in time and speak to those women, what we'd say is, right, you've got everything you could possibly want by the standards of the culture. But standards of the culture are just wrong, right? As a woman, as a human being, you need more than just a washing machine and a car, right? You need a fulfilling life. You need to have meaning and purpose. And a very similar thing I think is happening today. If you, so for example, when I speak to people, they say, I've got everything I could want, but I feel like shit. So tell me, tell me about your life. Very often they're working really hard in prestigious jobs that they don't like. They don't enjoy hour by hour to buy things that don't give them pleasure. It comes back to this hijacking by junk values that we're talking about that Professor Tim Casser discovered. So what you've got is, because we've been told a totally misleading story about what makes us satisfied and happy as human beings, I think this comes up again and again in the interviews you do, because we've been taught in different ways, because we've been told a misleading story about that, we live our lives according to the wrong script. We feel like shit and rather than question the script, we think there must be something wrong with us biologically. Now, there are biological contributions. It's important to say that, but one of the things that really blew my mind on this was this amazing social scientist called Dr. Brett Ford in Berkeley. She did this research. It's kind of simple research. It just asked, if you consciously decided you were going to spend more hours a day trying to make yourself happier, would you actually become happier, right? And they did this research, she didn't do it alone, obviously, with her colleagues, in the United States, Japan, Russia, and Taiwan. And what they found was, in the US, if you try to make yourself happier consciously, you do not become happier. In the other countries, if you try to make yourself happier, you do become happier. And they were like, what's going on? So they did more research. And what they discovered was, in the US, and I obviously spend a lot of my time here, but in Britain as well, if you try to make yourself happier, you try to do something generally for yourself. You buy something for yourself, you big yourself up, you try to get a promotion. In the other countries, generally, if you try to make yourself happier, you do something for someone else, right? You try to help your friends, your family, your community. Wait a minute. Where? What countries? Japan, Russia, and China. Most of the rest of the world. They stress this, that if you, this is a part of their culture, that if you want to be happy, you do something for someone else? It's so implicit in the culture that they live collectively, that it's not even, just like we wouldn't even, if you said, do you think happiness is an individualistic thing, we'd be like, what are you even talking about? Isn't that sort of an extrinsic idea as well? The idea that you're going to be happy by trying to make other people happy? Well, this is the thing. So intrinsic values are not about just internal to yourself. They're things that you value. So your intrinsic value could be spending time with your kids, right? That was probably most people's strongest intrinsic value if their parents is being with their kids, bonding with their kids, bonding with their kids. My point is, if your goal is to get happy, and the way you've chosen to get happy is, I'm going to get happy by making other people happy. That seems very strange. I don't think so. If you think about where humans are, shouldn't you just make other people happy because you love them? But that is a way, loving people and being present with them is a way of... But not as like a specific, with a specific goal of making yourself happy. That seems... That's not why they do it. When they were told, make yourself happy, they had an implicit script in their culture which was like, oh right, if I want to make myself happy, I'll spend time with other people, I'll do things with other people. But if you think about it in terms of human evolution, it makes total sense, right? Think about our ancestors, where they evolved. If you were a group... If our ancestors had been individualists who were out to big up themselves as individuals, we wouldn't be having this conversation, right? So it makes sense that we evolved as a species with instincts that are instinctive. No, there's no argument there. My question is the motivation of trying to get happy by helping other people. Yeah, so it's so implicit in the culture for most people in, say, China, that they wouldn't even articulate it that way. It's only if you force them to say, look, try to make yourself happier, that they then... The script becomes obvious, it's implicit. But this script that we have, this idea that the way you make yourself happier is as an individual, you know, just doing something for yourself and how you look to other people. Let's stop there because there is not one script in this country of how to make yourself happy. I think that's sort of disingenuous, this idea that the only way to make yourself happy is to do that. That's not what people are trying to do. What people are trying to do is be successful. And I don't think they necessarily equate success with happiness, but what they do equate success with is an alleviation of debt, an alleviation of problems, an alleviation of a lot of the issues that people face. And they think of that as... If you look at the problems that you have when you're growing up, you look at the... Especially if you grow up in a poor family, one of the main problems that you face is you're worried about paying your bills. So you say, someday, I'm going to get to a point where that is no longer an issue. I'm going to make it. I'm going to be successful. They're not doing it thinking, this is going to make me happy. I very rarely see that, which is one of the reasons why people, even people's parents, and this freaks me the fuck out, will tell them to not pursue their dreams, but instead to pursue something that's more likely to happen. Don't pursue your dream of becoming an actor or a singer or whatever it is. Instead pursue your dream of being the foreman at the company you work at because that's attainable. I think you're totally right. And I think there's a lot of evidence that you're right that the financial anxiety is a massive driver of depression and anxiety, obviously, that there's an interesting study that found people who have an income from property are 10 times less likely to develop an anxiety disorder than people who don't. And there was a really interesting experiment in how we can respond to that. It's one that President Obama said late in his term, he thinks it would have to happen across the country in the next 20 years for various reasons. So in Canada in the 70s, the Canadian government chose a town at random. It seems to genuinely have been random. It's a town called Dauphin. It's anyone who knows Canada. It's about four hours out of Winnipeg. And they said to a big group of people in this town, we're going to give you guys, for foreseeable future, we're going to give all of you a guaranteed basic income. We're going to give you the equivalent of, in today's money, $15,000. There's nothing you can do that means we'll take it away from you. And there's nothing you have to do in return for it. We're just your citizens of our country. We want you to have a good life. It was partly because they had a kind of welfare system, but it was a lot of people were falling through the cracks and they wanted to do a little experiment to see would this work better. And this was studied very carefully by a woman I interviewed called Dr. Evelyn Forger to see what happened. Interesting things happened. People spent more time with their kids. Very few people quit work, but a lot of people turned down shitty jobs. So actual overall work standards improved because employers had to attract people with better standards. But for me, the most interesting thing is there was a huge fall in depression and anxiety, right? Depression and anxiety that was so severe, people had to be hospitalized fell by 9%, which is remarkable in just three years. And then the program ended. Dr. Forger said to me, I thought so much about that. I'd learned about the cow. Dr. Forger said, you know, that's an antidepressant, right? We should expand our idea of an antidepressant to be anything that reduces depression. That should include pills. But also, so you're totally right. I mean, look, I grew up, my dad's a bus driver. My mom worked in a shelter. My grandmother cleaned toilets. Financial anxiety is a massive driver of the despair. I mean, more than half of all Americans have not, because of the incredible financial pressure they've been put under, got $500 set aside for if a crisis comes along, right? So you're talking about that's a huge drop. And again, that's really important because explain to people, if that's making you depressed and anxious, don't let a doctor tell you, you've just got a chemical imbalance in your brain, right? That's what do doctors still say that all the time, my nephew's best friend, just literally a couple of weeks ago, went to the doctor and was told, yeah, you got a dopamine imbalance. The doctor said it's migrated in the 20 years since I went there from a serot It's not a perfect analogy. But I'd say if the social changes that I want to happen happen, if we follow the places that have succeeded in reducing depression and anxiety, over time, you would see fewer people feeling they needed and chemical antidepressants.