Dr. Paul Conti

And the vast majority of people who are helped by antidepressants, they don't have clinically severe depression.

Those medicines create more distress tolerance in us.

If you can improve someone's distress tolerance and you can use medicines that take away what clinically is rumination, right?

Not the standard meaning of that word, but the clinical meaning of it, where there are distress centers in our brain that are overactive.

And then we get stuck in these maladaptive negative pathways where we think about something over and over and over again with no real chance of solving it because that's not what's going on inside of us.

So medicines can help that, but we have to have some flexibility around their conception.

And the modern medical system of 15 minute visits to a psychiatrist that are weeks apart, I mean, I don't understand how that goes well.

We use, I think, approximately five times as much medicine, I think, across the board as, say, the Dutch population.

They have a healthcare system and a cultural system that to the best of my understanding is more rooted in taking responsibility for oneself.

So if a person comes in and cholesterol is high, right?

The first order of business is, hey, you take better care of yourself, right?

Like this person really needs to lose some weight, exercise more, right?

They're not just jumping to like, let me give you a medicine and shift you through the healthcare system and out the other side of the door.

So I think medicines get...

overused in large part for systemic reasons.

And also for some of these categorization reasons.

Oh, that person meets some technical criteria for depression.

We got to give them this medicine instead of really thinking, wait, what's going on in this person?

And I see this over and over again.

I see someone who's on seven medicines and they're on seven medicines to treat seven different symptoms.