So, I’ve felt this pain. This sense of something leaking out, slower and slower as time goes on. This feeling that I can’t quite understand. This pressure upon my heart that feels as though someone is squeezing it like an empty ketchup packet trying to get the last of me out. I can’t help but feel ashamed for having this sort of uneasy connection with everyone. But why? Why is it that I feel this way? Why is it that I and so many others struggle daily and must put a face on but can’t explain why? My understandings of it, my solutions of this problem, and why this all begun in the first place.

A natural chemical imbalance in the brain. The medication to go along with it, to sort of help this “chemical” become balanced again. The medication makes you feel great. Helps you get in a good mindset and distracts your thoughts from the negativity. Pain arrives again, and the doses go up. Relieves you for a while and look. Pain again. Still lots of it.

I have learned that there are nine different causes and two of them, being biological. Genes can also have an impact. But most of these factors don’t have to do with biology. The main reasons of depression and anxiety are the factors in the way we live our lives. If you are alone. You are more likely to become depressed. If you have a job where nothing changes and you must do exactly what somebody tells you to do, you are more likely to become depressed. If you are never out in the natural world and you are disconnected from nature, you are more likely to become depressed. All these things are quite obvious.

We also have these basic needs. Food, water, shelter, and if that were to be taken away from us, we would suffer, and our species would be gone. So obviously those are things that we actually need. But everybody also has psychological needs. Everyone needs to feel as though they belong. That their life has a meaning and a purpose. Everybody wants and needs to feel as though people see and value them. Everybody wants a future that makes sense. But as time has went on, these needs have gotten much harder to meet. That is the reason that this crisis keeps rising and is so common. As you can see, we went from a chemical imbalance in our brains to a psychological imbalance in the way we live our lives.

We can be prescribed medication again and again. Anti-depressants, anti this and anti that. Sure, those anti-depressants work for lots of people. But I believe that the connection between another person, or people is the real anti-depressant. If you sit and listen and stay with somebody. Not necessarily giving advice or trying to help in any way you can, but the simple action of staying and listening is where the anti-depressant relieves and works for somebody. If you receive or take something that you love, that could turn into an anti-depressant for you. I believe that the mix of what medications work for you, and the people around you who listen is what’s going to benefit you the most.

If you are depressed, if you are anxious, you are not weak. You are not crazy. You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are just a human, with unmet needs. I hear too often, “Hey, pull yourself together, it is your job to fix this problem on your own.” But it should not be like this. It should be, “I am here to pull yourself with you. I am here to fix this problem by your side.” That is something that every depressed person deserves and needs to here. Talk less about the chemical imbalances and more about the imbalances in the way we live.

Drugs. They give real relief for some people, but precisely because the problem goes deeper then their biology. Meaning that the solution is going to be deeper than the surface. But the question is, how can we find that solution? Often times the things that are making us depressed are more complex than what is actually going on.  I have two causes. Two solutions. The first cause being that we are the loneliest society in human history. A recent study on Americans asked, “Do you feel like you are no longer close to anybody?” 39% said that this described them.

Here is the next question. Why do we exist? Our ancestors were very good at one thing. They weren’t bigger than the animals they took down a lot of the time. They were not faster. But they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating. One of my favorite realistic quotes being, “Just like bees evolved to live in a hive, humans evolved to live in a tribe.” We are the first humans to disband our tribes and separating ourselves from each other and it’s making us feel awful. But it does not have to be this way. 

Drugs and anti-depressants give major relief to some people. But here is the underlying problem. Drugs and medication can be kept but talking to somebody about situations that they can relate to help best. Not talking about how miserable you are, but to figure out something meaningful you can do together so you don’t have to think life is all about rehabilitation and nothingness.

There is a term called social prescribing. That is referring somebody to a group of people to improve health and well-being. This is the real and meaningful falls in depression and feeling anxious. So often when people are down in this culture and world, we say, “You just need to be you. Be yourself.” But no. Don’t. Don’t be you. Don’t be yourself. Be us. Be we. Be part of this group. Being an isolated individual does not lie in drawing more and more on our resources, that’s what gets you into a depressed state. It relies on reconnecting with something we’ve already had.

Moving on to the next plausible cause. Junk food has taken over our diets and made our culture incredibly physically sick. A kind of junk values have taken over our minds and have made us mentally sick. For thousands of years, philosophers have said if you think life is about money and status and showing, you’re going to feel like crap. 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.

As a society, we have become driven by these beliefs. We’ve been trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places. Just like how junk food doesn’t meet your nutritional needs and makes you feel terrible, junk values don’t meet your psychological needs, and they take you away from a good life. But isn’t this kind of obvious? None of us are going to lie on our deathbeds and think about the amount of money we spent on clothes or the number of likes we got on an Instagram photo. We are going to think about the moments of love and memories and connections in our life. This sounds so cliché but at some level we all know these things, but in this culture, we do not live by them.

We live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life. But can we disrupt the machine?  Meeting up with a group of people and sharing a time in your life where you felt meaning and purpose can be very beneficial.  How can you dedicate more of your life to pursuing these moments of meaning and purpose and less too buying stuff you don’t need, putting in on social media and trying to get people to say, “I’m jealous of that.” Or, “I wish I had that.” Peoples values will change once you find a group of people to realize these things with you.

This sort of thing takes 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 that depression. But why does it take so long to see these insights? It isn’t rocket science, but we have to change our understanding of what depression and anxiety actually are.

There are very real biological contributions, but if we allow the biology to become the whole picture, as our culture has done for so long, we are saying, “Your pain doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a malfunction, like a glitch in a computer program.” But it is not a malfunction. It is a signal, and it is telling you something.

This is all sort of difficult to wrap our heads around, but with the right help we can see these problems and fix them together. We have to stop insulting these signals by saying they are a weakness or purely biological or some type of sickness. We need to instead hear, honor and respect these signals, then we will begin to see the nourishing solutions.