Jordan Petersons Advice For People With Depression
the first thing i would say is that if
you’re dealing with someone who’s
depressed and they’re really depressed
you should try giving them
antidepressants because if they die
you can’t help them okay so if you’re
suffering
you are obligated in a sense to hold on
to whatever rope someone throws you
and one of the things i do with my
clients all the time especially if
they’re really in trouble is to tell
them look
i don’t know exactly what’s going to hap
help you but don’t arbitrarily throw out
any possibilities because you might not
have that luxury
antidepressants help a lot of people and
there are technical reasons why that’s
the case
so that’s a simple answer it’s not
relevant to what i already described
except that if you’re offered a gift by
your society and it works
try it i don’t care what your
presuppositions are
apart from that
lots of the lots of time lots of the
time you see people who are suffering
with depression for example there’s a
multitude of reasons but i’ll take one
common reason
um you could think about it as
associated with the story of peter pan
a peter pan is someone who won’t grow up
right now the problem with peter pan is
he gets to be king
but it’s king of neverland neverland
doesn’t exist
so being king of nothing isn’t that
helpful
well one of the things that you often
see with people who suffer from
depression
and and i’m not making a blanket
statement about the cause of depression
because there’s lots of them
is that people who don’t have enough
order in their life tend to get
overwhelmed
so for example if someone comes into me
and sees to see me
and they say they’re depressed i always
ask them a very standard set of
questions
do you have a job if you don’t have a
job you’re really in trouble in our
society
first of all you your biological rhythms
tend to go off the rails right away
because there’s no reason to go to bed
at any particular time and there’s no
reason to get up and
for many people if they don’t get up at
the same time
they follow up the functioning of their
circadian rhythms and that’s enough to
make them depressed right off the bat
especially if they start napping during
the afternoon
they don’t also don’t have a purpose
people aren’t good without a purpose and
this isn’t
this isn’t hypothesizing we absolutely
understand the circuitry that underlies
positive emotion
we know how it works almost all the
positive emotion that any of you are
likely to experience
in your life will not be a consequence
of attaining things
it will be a consequence of seeing that
things are working as you proceed
towards a goal you value
that’s completely different and you need
to know this because people are often
stunned for example they finish their
phd thesis
and their presupposition is that they’re
going to be elated for a month and
often instead they’re actually depressed
and they think what the hell i’ve been
working on this for seven years and
i handed it in and what do i do now and
that’s what depresses them right it’s
the what do i do now
well they’re fine if they enjoyed it
pursuing the thing as long as it was
working out they get a lot of enthusiasm
and excitement out of that because
that’s how our nervous systems work
most of your positive emotion is goal
pursuit emotion
if you take drugs like cocaine or
amphetamine the reason they’re enjoyable
is because they turn on the systems that
help you pursue goals
that’s why people like them so if you
don’t have a job you got no structure
that’s not good plus you tend not to
have a point
so you’re overwhelmed by chaotic lack of
structure and you don’t have any
positive emotion
well do you have any friends so
sometimes you see people who are
depressed they have no job
they have no friends they have no
intimate relationship they have an
additional health problem
and they have a drug and alcohol problem
my experience has been if you have
three of those problems it’s almost
impossible to help you
you’re so deeply mired in chaos that you
can’t get out because
you make progress on one front and one
of your other problems pulls you down
so one of the things i tell people who
are depressed is like don’t
sacrifice your stability get a job
even if it’s not the job you exactly
want get a damn job you need a job
find some friends get out in the dating
circuit
see if you can establish an intimate
relationship put together some of the
foundational items that
that are like pillars that your life
rests on well that’s the practical thing
to do
so that’s one example with regards to
depression
well the thing is you don’t just launch
it on them you know you’ve got to
negotiate with the person
and you also got to teach them to
negotiate with themselves and this is
something that’s very useful to know
you know um you can tyrannize yourself
into doing things but i wouldn’t
recommend it
what i would recommend instead is that
you ask yourself what you’re willing to
do
it’s a really effective technique it’s
like a meditative technique so for
example
you can get up in the morning and you
can think well you know i’d like to have
a good day today so i’d like to go to
bed tonight without feeling guilty
because i you know didn’t do some things
i said i was going to do and i you know
i’d like to have kind of an interesting
day so you got to fulfill my
responsibilities and i want to you know
enjoy the day
then you can ask yourself well okay what
would i have to do in order for that to
happen that i would do
and the probability if you practice this
for three or four days is your brain
will just tell you’ll say well you know
there’s that piece of homework that you
haven’t done for
like three weeks you should knock that
sucker off because it would only take
you 10 minutes and you’ve been avoiding
it and torturing yourself to death for
you know like like 72 hours straight and
if you do that here’s a little
interesting thing you can do and
you know maybe this is little
obligations you should clean up and
so what what you do in a situation like
that is you teach
the person to negotiate with themselves
say well let’s figure out what your aims
are you got to have some aims
whatever they are and they might say
well i’m so depressed i don’t have any
aims and then i say well pick the least
objectionable of the aims and act it out
for a while and see what happens because
sometimes your emotions
your emotional systems are so followed
up that you have to pretend
you have to act the thing out before you
can start to believe it i mean people
always assume they have to believe and
then act but
but that’s sometimes that’s true and
lots of times it isn’t
so the trick if you’re doing therapeutic
work with somebody and you’re helping
them establish a structure is to find
out what they’ll do
now if they want to get better which is
not a given
because there are often payoffs for not
getting better
that’s basically the payoffs of being a
martyr or maybe the payoffs of doing
what your
entirely pathological family members
want you to do because they actually
want you to fail assuming you want to
get better there’s usually
something you can figure out that would
constitute a step towards some sort of
concrete goal
and my presumption it’s a behavioral
presumption fundamentally is that
small accruing gains that repeat
are unbelievably powerful so you know
and this is another thing to know about
in your own life it’s something i
learned in part from reading the
writings of alexander solzhenitsyn who’s
a great
russian philosopher and novelist you
know he said you can look at your life
and you can see
what isn’t right about it i mean all you
have to do is look
and then you can start to fix that and
the way you fix it is by
noticing what you could in fact fix
you know people are often trying to fix
things they can’t fix which i would not
recommend because if you try to fix
something you can’t fix you’ll just ruin
it
like you can find all sorts of
undergraduates who are perfectly willing
to restructure the
uh you know the the international
economic system who cannot keep their
room clean
and there’s actually a gap there you
know which and it’s surprising that
people don’t actually notice
so i would say if you pay attention you
can see things that you could fix
they yell at you they really do we even
know how that happens
let me let me give you an example
because rooms are full of stories
and the stories have have effects on you
so here’s a classic experiment
so you take two groups undergraduates
you bring them into your lab
and you give one group on a multiple
choice test that has a bunch of words in
it that are associated with being old
and you give the other group the same
multiple choice test except the words
are associated with being young
this is independent of the content of
the test it’s just
descriptions and then you time the
undergraduates as they walk back to the
elevators
the ones who read the ones who completed
the multiple choice tests that had more
words associated with aging
walk slower back to the elevators and
they don’t know that
and they don’t know they’re doing it and
that that study has been replicated in
various forms
many many times you’re unbelievably
sensitive to the story that your
environment is telling you
because your environment is not made out
of objects that’s just wrong
your environment is basically made out
of something like tools and obstacles
you’re a tool-using creature
you’re a tool perceiving creature the
things you like if i take you out of
this room and i say well what was in the
room
you’re not going to say uh you know
random patterns in the carpet because
they’re
they’re real they’re just as good an
object as anything else you’re going to
see
chairs because you can sit on them and
you’re going to say hand rails because
you can hold them you’re going to say
stairs because
you can walk down them that’s what you
see and that’s what you interact with
and if you pay attention to your
environment
which is you by the way extend it all of
your experience is you
it will tell you all the time what you
should do all you have to do is do it
but then you have to decide if you want
to do
it one of the things i’ve noticed about
people because i’ve wondered once i
started studying these mythological
stories and i got this idea about
the the fact that life can be meaningful
enough to justify its suffering i
thought god that’s such a good idea
because it’s not optimistic exactly you
know some people tell you well you can
be happy it’s like those people are
idiots
i’m telling you they’re idiots there’s
going to be things that come along
that flatten you so hard you won’t
believe it and you’re not happy then and
so if life is to be happy well in those
situations
what are you doing why even live but
that isn’t life isn’t to be happy
if you’re happy you’re bloody fortunate
and you should enjoy it you should
because it’s the grace of god so to
speak
with regards to to meaning i thought
well
people know when they’re doing something
meaningful they can tell so why the hell
don’t they do meaningful things all the
time it seems obvious you could do it i
mean it’s hard
you know because other people want you
to do other things and it’s a struggle
but
everything’s a struggle and then i
thought well oh i get it i see why it
took me about 10 years to figure this
out
people have a choice choice number one
nothing you do means anything
well that’s kind of a drag right
meaninglessness of life and all that
existential angst
you know that’s kind of a pain but the
upside of nothing that you do be mean
is meaningful is you don’t have to do
anything you’ve got no responsibility
now you have to suffer because things
are meaningless but that’s a small price
to pay
for being able to be completely useless
the alternative the alternative is
everything you do matters
really if you make a mistake it’s a real
mistake
if you betray someone you tilt the world
a little more sharply towards evil
rather than good
it matters what you do well if you buy
that then you can have a meaningful life
but there’s no mucking around it means
responsibility
it means that the decisions you make are
important it means that when you
do something wrong it’s wrong
well do you want that
you