When a person goes to see a doctor because of depression or anxiety, he is likely to be told that this is because there is something wrong with your brain. It cannot produce some necessary chemicals, and you need to take medicine to help the brain return to normal. That’s what the doctor said when I went to see a doctor in my teens.
For more than a decade, I have been convinced of this and have been taking medicine, because I am eager to be saved. Whenever I increase the dose, these drugs will bring me temporary improvement, but then the pain will sweep again. For more than a decade, I took the maximum amount of medicine. Although I was taking medicine, I was still suffering from depression, so I felt that there was something wrong with me.
Depression is not as simple as “brain problems”
No, I have to figure out what’s going on. Because I am so eager to know the answer, I spent three years receiving social science training at Cambridge University to study what causes depression and anxiety, and how to really solve these problems. In the end, I was shocked by many things I learned. First of all, my reaction to the drug is not abnormal, but normal.
The research results show that the improvement effect of changes in sleep patterns on depression is significantly better than that of chemical antidepressants. Drugs can relieve depressive symptoms in a short time, but for most people like me, it is not enough to get rid of depression. Therefore, I understand that it is important to provide more alternative treatments for people with depression and anxiety. I want to know how to do it to really help them.
In addition, I was surprised to find that many famous scientists believe that depression is caused by the imbalance of chemicals in the brain. In fact, research is gradually revealing that there are nine main factors that cause depression and anxiety, two are biological, and the other seven are not biological. These factors are completely different, and they play a different role in the lives of depressed and anxious people. What surprises me more is that the World Health Organisation has been warning us for many years to solve the deeper causes of depression.
These nine causes are very different, and it is also a difficult place for me to investigate, because I have always believed that depression is a brain problem. It was not until I met Dr. Vincent Feliti, an outstanding scientist in San Diego, California, that I finally realised that the cause of depression was not as simple as “brain problems”.
An weight loss program brings amazing discoveries
Dr. Feliti’s research breakthrough can be traced back to the mid-1980s, when it was almost accidental. At first glance, his experience doesn’t sound like much to do with depression, but it’s worth listening to because it can bring a lot of inspiration.
When the patients first came to Feliti’s office, some of them could not enter through the door normally, because they were too fat! Because of this, they were assigned to his clinic, which was their last hope. Felicity was commissioned by the medical supplier Caesar Group to study how to really solve the obesity problem of these people. Dr. Feliti led the team to start from scratch and tried his best to try all possible methods.
One day, Feliti came up with a crazy and simple way: what if these seriously overweight people just stop eating, live on the fat reserves they have accumulated in their bodies, and take nutritional supplements under professional monitoring until they lose their normal weight? What will happen?
He led the team to try cautiously. Under a large number of medical monitoring, surprising results appeared: the patient continued to lose weight and the body gradually returned to normal. The obvious effect is incredible.
But then some strange phenomena appeared. In this project, some patients have a particularly obvious weight loss effect. The medical team and their friends thought they would be happy. Who would have thought that those who did the best would often fall into great depression, panic or anger. Some of them committed suicide. Although they are strong, they often feel incredibly fragile in their hearts. They often run away from the project, devours fast food, and then quickly regain their weight to their original appearance.
Feliti was deeply confused about this. It was not until he later met a 28-year-old woman and had an in-depth conversation with her that he finally solved the mystery. In 51 weeks, Feliti helped her lose from 408 pounds to 132 pounds. However, she suddenly gained 37 pounds in the next few weeks, and no one understood what was going on. It didn’t take long for her weight to recover to more than 400 pounds.
Feliti gently communicated with her to discuss what happened in the process of losing weight, which led to a sudden rise in her weight. At first, both of them seemed to be confused. They talked for a long time. Finally, she talked about one thing: when she was fat, men were never interested in her. But since her weight loss to a normal level, a man has proposed to her. This is the first time she has encountered such a situation in her growth. She was so scared that she ran away, and then there was a compulsive diet that she couldn’t stop.
Feliti asked her a question she had never asked before: “When did you start to gain weight?” She recalled and replied, “When I was 11 years old,” “When I was 11 years old, did anything else happen in your life?” “Well,” she hesitated and replied, “That was the time when my grandfather began to rape me.”
After talking to 183 people involved in the project, Feliti found that 55% had suffered sexual abuse. A woman said, “The reason why I gained weight after being raped is that I don’t care about obesity, and that’s exactly how I need it.”
It turns out that many of these women have been making themselves obese for an unconscious reason: in order to protect themselves from the attention of men, because men will hurt them.
Feliti suddenly realised that what we think is a serious problem of obesity is actually a common means we use to solve problems that are not known to others.
The impact of childhood trauma
This discovery prompted Feliti to launch a large-scale project to study the impact of various childhood traumas on our adulthood. He conducted a questionnaire survey of 17,000 ordinary patients in San Diego, who only came here for general health care – from headaches to leg injuries. The questions covered in the questionnaire include whether you encountered these 10 bad things when you were a child, such as being neglected or emotionally abused. Then you will be asked if you have these 10 psychological problems, such as obesity, depression or addiction. He wants to know the correlation between early trauma and post-adult psychological problems.
The results show that childhood trauma leads to a high risk of adult depression outbreaks. If a person experiences 7 types of traumatic events as a child, he is 3100% more likely to commit suicide as an adult and 4000% more likely to inject drugs.
After a long and in-depth conversation with Dr. Feliti, I trembled all over and walked to the beach in San Diego and spit into the sea several times. This conversation forced me to think about the experience related to depression that I didn’t want to face: when I was a child, my mother was ill, my father was abroad at that time, and there was no family’s care and protection. I experienced some extreme violence from adults: I was strangled by a wire and other major injuries. Events. I try to seal up these memories, hide them in my mind, and don’t let them come out and interfere with my normal life…
I realise that the act of releasing stigma itself is a cure.
Why do so many people who have experienced violence in childhood have similar feelings? Why do these feelings cause many of them to have self-destructive behaviours, such as obesity, addiction or suicide? I spent a lot of time thinking about this problem. Although there is not enough research evidence to prove it, I still want to introduce one of my findings.
“If this is your fault, to some extent, you are the master.”
When you were a child, you had little ability to change your environment. You can’t leave or force others to stop hurting you. Well, you have two choices: 1. You can admit to yourself that there is nothing you can do. At any time, you may be seriously injured, and there is nothing you can do about it. 2. You can tell yourself that it’s your fault. If you do this, you will actually gain some strength – at least your mind will think so. If this is your fault, it means that you could have had different choices. You are not passive, but a master with control. From this perspective, just as obesity protects some women from being raped by men they fear, blaming them for their childhood trauma will prevent you from seeing your vulnerability.
But there is a price to pay. If you are responsible for the harm you have suffered, then to some extent, you must recognise that you should be harmed. If a person thinks that he should be hurt as a child, he will not think that he should be hurt as an adult. Otherwise, how can people live? This is just a choice to help you survive in the early days.
But later I found that Dr. Feliti was the most helpful to me. When it was found through the questionnaire that the patient had experienced childhood trauma, Dr. Feliti asked their doctor to tell them when the patient came for treatment next time, “I saw that you had some bad experiences when you were a child. I’m sorry that it happened to you. Do you want to talk about it?”
Feliti wanted to see if it could help release the patient’s sense of shame by letting the patient discuss these wounds with a trustworthy authority and being told that it was not their own fault. What happened next was shocking. Just discussing trauma is enough to greatly reduce the risk of future illness – in the next year, patients’ demand for health care fell by 35%, and for those who received more in-depth help, it fell by more than 50%. An old woman later wrote a letter and said, “Thank you for asking me those questions… I was worried that until I died, no one knew what terrible things I had experienced.”
I realise that the act of releasing humiliation itself is a cure. So, I began to talk about my early experience to people I trust. They not only didn’t laugh at me or think I was bad, but also showed their love for me and helped me express my sadness about the past.
“If you find that everything you do is meaningless, and you feel that you can’t change anything, then you are likely to become depressed.” When I heard the recording of my long conversation with Feliti, it suddenly occurred to me that if Feliti, like other doctors, told patients that there was something wrong with their brains that caused them to suffer so much, the only solution was to take medicine. They may never understand the deep-seated causes of their own problems, just It can’t really be cured.
To deal with depression, you can’t blindly rely on antidepressants.
The more I research depression and anxiety, the more I find that depression and anxiety is closely related to life events and cannot be simply attributed to brain problems. If you find that everything you have done is meaningless, and you feel that you can’t change anything, you are likely to become depressed; if you feel lonely and can’t rely on the support of people around you, you are likely to become depressed; if you think that your future is not guaranteed, you are likely to become depressed… Many People’s depression may be closely related to their living conditions and ways. Of course, depression is also related to some biological factors, such as your genes, which may make you more sensitive to those effects, but I don’t think physiological factors are the main cause of depression.
This has enabled me to find scientific evidence that we must solve our depression and anxiety crisis in a very different way, instead of relying on antidepressants.
To do this, we need to avoid seeing depression and anxiety as an abnormal pathological state, or simply attributable to the imbalance of brain chemicals. The patient is indeed in pain, but this pain is meaningful. It is not an abnormal physiological disease attack, but a response to what happens to you. To deal with depression, you need to find its root cause. During my long experience of depression and research, I found a new “antidepressant”, an “antidepressant” that eliminates the cause of the disease, rather than just relieves the symptoms – starting with releasing your sense of shame.
One day, Dr. Robert Anda, a colleague of Dr. Feliti, told me something I had been thinking about: when people show obvious self-destructiveness, it’s time to stop asking them “what’s wrong”, and ask them “what’s going through?”
