Anna Lembke

but also during which time they gave them no specific or general treatment for major depression.

And what they found is that at the end of those four weeks, 80% of those individuals no longer met criteria for major depressive episode.

In other words, just stopping drinking resolved their depression.

And that is very consistent with what we see clinically.

People who have anxiety, depression, insomnia, inattention, just by stopping their substance or behavior of choice for four weeks largely resolves many of those symptoms in about 80% of patients who come in.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, we're clearly in the midst of a severe mental health crisis, especially affecting our youth.

And there's lots of speculation for why that is.

And a hypothesis that I've put forward is this idea that

The source of our unhappiness is in fact our relentless pursuit of pleasure, the many drugified things in our world today that make that possible, and the ways that our brains are trying to compensate for that by actually going into this dopamine deficit state, which is very similar to clinical depression or anxiety, insomnia, etc.,

It's a hypothesis based on inference, but let me tell you what the data points are.

First of all,

When you look at happiness surveys, about 50 years ago, you could track that people who were living in wealthier nations were more happy than people living in poor nations and that they were getting happier over time.

Starting about 20 years ago, people in the richest countries in the world started to be less and less happy.

Now, what the cause of that is, we don't know for sure, but you could make the inference, as I have done, that we reach some kind of tipping point in terms of abundance, where what started out as a good thing became an overabundance and is actually contributing now to our suffering.

And by the way, that holds true also for increasing rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide all over the world, which are going up all over the world, but which are rising fastest in the wealthiest nations.

So again, this kind of plenty paradox.

You have even here in the United States, rising rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thinking among teenagers.

corresponding specifically with the past 20 years and the increasing amounts of time that people are spending on the internet and consuming digital media.

And then you have a much smaller data point, which is what we see clinically when we intervene and ask people to stop ingesting these high reward substances and behaviors.