Lifestyle and Emotional Well-Being, with Dr. Andrew Weil | Big Think Mentor

We're seeing an unprecedented epidemic of depression in our society. More people are being diagnosed with depression than ever, including millions of children. The latest statistics I've seen are that more than one in ten Americans is on prescribed antidepressant medication. One in four of us is on psychiatric medication of one sort or another, again, including millions of children.

And I would just say, we really have no idea what these drugs do to developing brains, so we're doing a vast experiment with our nation's children. There's also a great rise in anxiety disorders, which often overlap with depression, with insomnia. So by all indications, mental and emotional health in our population is not good and is declining.

When I ask people why they think this is so, a common answer I get is that, "Well, look at the economy, look at the state of the world." But my parents grew up in the Great Depression, which makes our economic troubles look pretty tame. And they also lived through World War II, which is probably the most horrific human experience in history. And by all accounts American emotional wellbeing was much better during those periods.

So something's happened. And I think it really cries out for explanation. The conventional way of dealing with this is all focused on correcting imbalances in brain biochemistry. This is the biomedical model which sees all mind processes as being the results of brain biochemistry, and therefore the only intervention that's thought of is to use pharmaceutical drugs to change brain chemistry.

I think that model has proved very limited in its effectiveness. There's a growing body of evidence that the most commonly used antidepressant drugs, the SSRIs, work no better than placebos in most cases of mild to moderate depression. So, I would say that model has really failed us...