Depression & Anxiety Official Trailer

So we could start by talking about [Music].

Depression—depressed people are sad, frustrated, and disappointed. They tend to feel all negative emotions simultaneously in a manner that's paralyzing. Depression is fundamentally a biochemical disorder.

One of the things I tried to determine as a good behaviorist was whether the person who was suffering was suffering because they were ill in the strictly physiological sense, or whether they were suffering from the cumulative micro and macro catastrophes of life.

The probability that tossing an antidepressant into the mix is all of a sudden going to fix your life that are absolutely catastrophically out of order is zero. The more unstable your life is, the less serotonin your brain produces. That makes you hypersensitive to negative emotion and suppresses positive emotion.

You take the problem—I'm suffering—and then you think, well, why are you suffering? It's exposure therapy. Then you can practice encountering the obstacles that are stopping you, and it'll make you braver. It'll help you deal with your problems.

Voluntary confrontation with the forces of darkness and chaos is the fundamental story of life.