Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Kanojia

There are two reasons that you could be depressed.

One is that your life is pretty good, okay?

But you have a cognitive distortion or you have something like a chemical imbalance, okay?

And if you have a cognitive distortion, if your brain isn't working right and that causes your depression, that is something that we can potentially fix with a medication to restore your serotonin levels.

Or we can use something like cognitive behavioral therapy to correct your cognitive distortions.

There's basically a problem with the way that your brain is functioning, the way that you're seeing the world, which is why you're depressed.

Things are not actually that bad.

It's just your brain is messed up so you can't see how good things are.

OK, that's option number one.

And that's what a lot of our psychiatric treatment is oriented towards.

But there is a second possibility, which is that the world is becoming increasingly uncertain.

You genuinely look into the future and don't know what to do.

You don't see a whole lot of hope.

And this is not like you're hopeless because your brain is messed up.

This is like a genuine objective assessment.

of your future and discovering that like basically things are not hopeful from like a logical sense.

And if you have this kind of depression, which by the way is skyrocketing, right?

So we see existential depression increasing so much because the world is becoming a worse place.

There's a lot of uncertainty around careers, like is AI going to replace your job?

People are buying houses later.