But he could see two things.
Firstly, his patients were depressed and anxious a lot of the time
for totally understandable reasons, like loneliness.
And secondly, although the drugs were giving some relief to some people,
for many people, they didn't solve the problem.
The underlying problem.
One day, Sam decided to pioneer a different approach.
A woman came to his center, his medical center,
called Lisa Cunningham.
I got to know Lisa later.
And Lisa had been shut away in her home with crippling depression and anxiety
for seven years.
And when she came to Sam's center, she was told, "Don't worry,
we'll carry on giving you these drugs,
but we're also going to prescribe something else.
We're going to prescribe for you to come here to this center twice a week
to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people,
not to talk about how miserable you are,
but to figure out something meaningful you can all do together
so you won't be lonely and you won't feel like life is pointless."
The first time this group met,
Lisa literally started vomiting with anxiety,
it was so overwhelming for her.
But people rubbed her back, the group started talking,
they were like, "What could we do?"
These are inner-city, East London people like me,
they didn't know anything about gardening.
They were like, "Why don't we learn gardening?"
There was an area behind the doctors' offices
that was just scrubland.
"Why don't we make this into a garden?"
They started to take books out of the library,
started to watch YouTube clips.
They started to get their fingers in the soil.
They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons.
There's a lot of evidence
that exposure to the natural world
is a really powerful antidepressant.
But they started 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 -- "Are you OK?"
Help them figure out what was troubling them that day.
The way Lisa put it to me,
"As the garden began to bloom,
we began to bloom."
This approach is called social prescribing,
it's spreading all over Europe.
And there's a small, but growing body of evidence
suggesting it can produce real and meaningful falls
in depression and anxiety.
And one day, I remember standing in the garden
that Lisa and her once-depressed friends had built --
it's a really beautiful garden --
and having this thought,
it's very much inspired by a guy called professor Hugh Mackay in Australia.
I was thinking, so often when people feel down in this culture,
what we say to them -- I'm sure everyone here said it, I have --
we say, "You just need to be you, be yourself."
And I've realized, actually, what we should say to people is,
"Don't be you.
Don't be yourself.
Be us, be we.
Be part of a group."
(Applause)
The solution to these problems
does not lie in drawing more and more on your resources
as an isolated individual --
that's partly what got us in this crisis.
It lies on reconnecting with something bigger than you.
And that really connects to one of the other causes
of depression and anxiety that I wanted to talk to you about.
So everyone knows
junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick.
I don't say that with any sense of superiority,
I literally came to give this talk from McDonald's.
I saw all of you eating that healthy TED breakfast, I was like no way.
But just like junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick,
a kind of junk values have taken over our minds
and made us mentally sick.
For thousands of years, philosophers have said,
if you think life is about money, and status and showing off,
you're going to feel like crap.
That's not an exact quote from Schopenhauer,
but that is the gist of what he said.
But weirdly, hardy anyone had scientifically investigated this,
until a truly extraordinary person I got to know, named professor Tim Kasser,
who's at Knox College in Illinois,
and he's been researching this for about 30 years now.
And his research suggests several really important things.
Firstly, the more you believe
you can buy and display your way out of sadness,
and into a good life,
the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious.
And secondly,
as a society, we have become much more driven by these beliefs.
All throughout my lifetime,
under the weight of advertising and Instagram and everything like them.
And as I thought about this,
I realized it's like we've all been fed since birth, a kind of KFC for the soul.
We've been trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places,
and just like junk food doesn't meet your nutritional needs
and actually makes you feel terrible,
junk values don't meet your psychological needs,
and they take you away from a good life.
But when I first spent time with professor Kasser
and I was learning all this,
I felt a really weird mixture of emotions.
Because on the one hand, I found this really challenging.
I could see how often in my own life, when I felt down,
I tried to remedy it with some kind of show-offy, grand external solution.
And I could see why that did not work well for me.
I also thought, isn't this kind of obvious?
Isn't this almost like banal, right?
If I said to everyone here,
none of you are going to lie on your deathbed
and think about all the shoes you bought and all the retweets you got,
you're going to think about moments
of love, meaning and connection in your life.
I think that seems almost like a cliché.
But I kept talking to professor Kasser and saying,
"Why am I feeling this strange doubleness?"
And he said, "At some level, we all know these things.
But in this culture, we don't live by them."
We know them so well they've become clichés,
but we don't live by them.
I kept asking why, why would we know something so profound,
but not live by it?
And after a while, professor Kasser said to me,
"Because we live in a machine
that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life."
I had to really think about that.
"Because we live in a machine
that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life."
And professor Kasser wanted to figure out if we can disrupt that machine.
He's done loads of research into this;
I'll tell you about one example,
and I really urge everyone here to try this with their friends and family.
With a guy called Nathan Dungan, he got a group of teenagers and adults
to come together for a series of sessions over a period of time, to meet up.
And part of the point of the group
was to get people to think about a moment in their life
they had actually found meaning and purpose.
For different people, it was different things.
For some people, it was playing music, writing, helping someone --
I'm sure everyone here can picture something, right?
And part of the point of the group was to get people to ask,
"OK, how could you dedicate more of your life
to pursuing these moments of meaning and purpose,
and less to, I don't know, buying crap you don't need,
putting it on social media and trying to get people to go,
'OMG, so jealous!'"
And what they found was,
just having these meetings,
it was like a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for consumerism, right?
Getting people to have these meetings, articulate these values,
determine to act on them and check in with each other,
led to a marked shift in people's values.
It took them away from this hurricane of depression-generating messages
training us to seek happiness in the wrong places,
and towards more meaningful and nourishing values
that lift us out of depression.
But with all the solutions that I saw and have written about,
and many I can't talk about here,
I kept thinking,
you know: Why did it take me so long to see these insights?
Because when you explain them to people --
some of them are more complicated, but not all --
when you explain this to people, it's not like rocket science, right?
At some level, we already know these things.
Why do we find it so hard to understand?
I think there's many reasons.
But I think one reason is that we have to change our understanding
of what depression and anxiety actually are.
There are very real biological contributions
to depression and anxiety.
But if we allow the biology to become the whole picture,
as I did for so long,
as I would argue our culture has done pretty much most of my life,
what we're implicitly saying to people is, and this isn't anyone's intention,
but what we're implicitly saying to people is,
"Your pain doesn't mean anything.
It's just a malfunction.
It's like a glitch in a computer program,
it's just a wiring problem in your head."
But I was only able to start changing my life
when I realized your depression is not a malfunction.
It's a signal.
Your depression is a signal.
It's telling you something.
(Applause)
We feel this way for reasons,
and they can be hard to see in the throes of depression --
I understand that really well from personal experience.
But with the right help, we can understand these problems
and we can fix these problems together.
But to do that,
the very first step
is we have to stop insulting these signals
by saying they're a sign of weakness, or madness or purely biological,
except for a tiny number of people.
We need to start listening to these signals,
because they're telling us something we really need to hear.
It's only when we truly listen to these signals,
and we honor these signals and respect these signals,
that we're going to begin to see
the liberating, nourishing, deeper solutions.
The cows that are waiting all around us.
Thank you.
(Applause)