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I would argue that we should call it emotional health, not mental health. Obviously I've been thinking a lot about this subject. So the answer to this question is yes, there will be an increase and a lot of distress. But also there's a lot we can do about that distress and there are ways we can use that distress to make life better.Some of the things I learned in the process of writing my book can help us to answer this question. So I wrote my book because there were these two mysteries that I didn't understand. The first mystery was: I'm 41 years old and all throughout my lifetime depression and anxiety have increased in Britain in the United States and across the Western world. I wanted to understand why. Why are so many of us finding it so much harder to get through the day? I waned to understand this because of a more personal reason - when I was a teenager I went to my doctor. I explained that I had this feeling like pain was leaking out of me. I didn't understand why. I was quite ashamed of it. And my doctor said: "Oh, there's just something wrong with your brain and all you need to do is take drugs." And the drugs gave me some relief. I took them thirteen years but for most of that time I was still depressed. And at the end of it I was asking myself: well what's going on here? Why do I still feel like this?So I ended up going on a big journey all over the world interviewing the leading experts in the world about depression and anxiety and just people with very different perspectives on this question.What I learned is that there's actually scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety. Two of them are in our biology but most of them are in fact factors in the way we live. And I think the reason that this is crucial to answering your question about the coronavirus, is that many of those causes, that have been proven by scientists to increase depression and anxiety, are increasing now. But if we listen to this science, we can start finding solutions.That's an excellent question. I think we have to be honest and tell people it's going to be difficult but there's a few things we can do. If something positive can come out of this, it's that we can develop a much more sophisticated understanding of what causes depression and anxiety. So that when we emerge from this crisis we can deal with them more effectively.So I'll give you two examples of things that can be done, things that we can understand now. One is about loneliness. As you know I interviewed the leading expert in the world on loneliness - an amazing man named professor John Cacioppo. I remember him saying to me: "Why are we alive, why do we exist?" One key reason is that our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing: they weren't bigger than the animals, they weren't faster than the animals, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating.And even before this crisisAnd obviously as we have to engage in social distancing, more of us are going to be alone.But Professor Cacioppo explained a really interesting thing. When he began to study loneliness scientifically and he became the leading expert on it, he was trying to define loneliness. Obviously if you say to anyone what is like to feel lonely, everyone knows what it means. But actually defining it was quite difficult. Because instinctively we feel like being lonely is the same as being alone. But actually what Professor Cacioppo discovered is thatSo we've all had the experience of going to a new city, like you go to New York for the first time and you go to Times Square, you're surrounded by other people but you're lonely. Because you don't share anything with them. Or we've all had the experience at the other end, of being in a relationship that's breaking down, and you feel really lonely but the other person is still there. Professor Cacioppo was trying to figure out what's going on here. What he discovered is that. It's a feeling that you share meaning and understanding.So it's going to be challenging. But we can still build ways of having meaning and connection with each other emotionally even as we have to be physically separated.. Phone all the people who helped you in your life and thank them. I've been phoning all my old teachers I haven't spoken to in years and years.When we go forward after this crisis we can see how much of depression is caused by loneliness and we can begin to deal with that.One of the heroes of my book is a doctor named Sam Everington and he's a doctor in East London where I lived for a long time. Sam had lots of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety. Unlike me Sam is not opposed to chemical antidepressant - he thinks they have a real role to play. But Sam could see a few things right. One is that his patients were depressed and anxious for perfectly understandable reasons - they were lonely. Secondly, while the drugs he gave them, had some relief but in many cases they weren't solving the problem.So one day Sam had an idea. A patient came to him called Lisa Cunningham who I got to know later. Sam said to Lisa: "Don't worry. We'll carry on giving you these drugs but we're also going to prescribe something else. I'd like you to turn up a couple of times a week at the doctor's surgery and meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people not to talk about how miserable you feel, but to find something meaningful you can do together." The first time the group met, Lisa literally started vomiting with anxiety - it was so much for her. But a group started talking. They were like: What could we do? And this were inner-city East London people, like me. They didn't know anything about gardening but they decided they were going to learn gardening. There was an area behind the doctor's surgery. They decided they were going to turn it into into a garden. So they started watching YouTube and taking books at the library. They started to get their fingers in the soil, they started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. There's a lot of evidence thatBut they started to do something even more important. They started to form a tribe, they started to form a group. They start to care about each other - if one of them didn't show up, the others would go looking for them and help them figure out what had gone wrong. The way Lisa put it to me:There was a study in Norway in a very similar program that showed that it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants and reducing depression and anxiety. I think for some obvious reason - it was dealing with one of the reasons why these people were depressed and anxious in the first place. I think when we emerge from this crisis, we should start building our sponsors to depression primarily around these things. A lot of people can see that they've suddenly been made lonely and that's going to make them depressed and anxious. When we get out of this,I thinkSo we were talking about things that can be done while people are in quarantine. Let's look at another one of the causes of depression and anxiety, for which there is really strong scientific evidence.in a way that seems so obvious. A lot of people are feeling financially insecure right now. The global economy has effectively stopped. That's why it's so important that our citizens, we, demand that the government reduces the financial insecurity, that people are experiencing right now. El Salvador - one of the poorest countries in the world, the president there has canceled people's rent and utility bills for the duration of this crisis. You can see how that would automatically reduce a lot of the depression and anxiety that people are feeling. Because if you think you're about to lose your home or you're going to get into massive debt that's going to make you depressed and anxious. So one of the other things we should be doing even as we're in lockdown isthat we're all facing. Our countries are still democracies. We can make these demands. I think that's very important.I think so. And if we think about it in relation to mental health it's really worth looking (in the book I described) at a really interesting experiment that happened in the 70's. The Canadian government chose a town at random. It's a town called Dauphin in Manitoba. To a large number of people in this town they said: "From now on we're going to give you a guaranteed basic income"- it is the equivalent of about $10,000 in U.S. dollars in today's money. It wasn't a huge amount of money but it was enough that you wouldn't be homeless. They said to people: "There's nothing you have to do in return to this money. And there's nothing you can do that we'll take it away unless you go to prison. We just want you to have a good life". There were a lot of studies looking at what effect this had. What was interesting was that almost nobody stopped working. There were some mothers who stayed with their babies longer rather to go back to work straight away. There was some young adults who went back to studying. But other than that nobody stopped working. There were lots of other effects. The biggest: there was a massive fall of mental health problems. Indeed mental health problems that were so severe that people had to be shut away in psychiatric hospitals fell by 9% in just three years. You won't find a drug that causes a fall within mental health problems of nine percent in three years. As the wonderful social scientist Evelyn L. Forget - she did the big study, said to me: "A big part of what I'm trying to argue in the book is thatAnd for some people that will mean drugs. ButEven if we weren't in the coronavirus crisis, I'm in favor of the universal basic income, but I think particularly in a moment like this, it's very hard for the government bureaucratically to guarantee people's wages.And just going back to right where we started. This is one reason why I'm keen to call this emotional health rather than mental health. Because when people hear the phrase mental health, I think what they picture, is their biology, their brain, and something going wrong with their brain. Now that does happen sometimes, it's important to stress, but actually we are anxious and depressed now. There hasn't been an increase in depression and anxiety now, because suddenly something went wrong with our brain. Something went wrong with our society - we had to respond to a terrible global pandemic. So I think it's better to talk about emotional health because that helped to see more clearly the environmental causes of this crisis at the moment.I've done those things myself. And I think they're perfectly good advice. But I also want to be very cautious. There's a phrase, a critique of self-help books. It's calledcruel optimism". SoAnd you say: "Oh, this is going to solve your problem". It sounds like a kind thing to do: you're offering them a solution. But the reason why it's cruel, is because the solution for most people won't be enough. A small solution to a big problem generally does not work. And: I did the thing I was meant to do and I still feel terrible. SoI think that's cruel. No, I'm not saying meditation won't help. For some people it will. I'm not saying that limiting your exposure to the news won't help - in some circumstances it will. Actuallywe need to turn on the news and as citizens change the news by demanding that our governments give us financial support.And in democracies we can do that. So don't misunderstand me - I'm in favor of meditation. I'm not in favor of people watching the rolling news the whole time and getting into a panic. But I think. There are individual solutions that will help people but they're not going to be enough.as well.That's a big question. And the honest answer is I don't know. But I think there are things we can learn from this.One of the causes of depression or anxiety that I think this crisis might help with, is. So everyone knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick. But there's equally strong evidence that a kind ofSo for thousands of years philosophers have said: If you think life is about money, and status, and showing off, you're going to feel terrible, going to feel like shit. But weirdly nobody had scientifically investigated this, until an incredible man I got to know named Tim Kasser - professor of Psychology at Knox College in Illinois.He discovered two really important things: firstly,And secondly as a society we have become much more driven by these junk values all throughout my lifetime. Just like you need nutrition to survive, junk food appeals to the part of you that needs nutrition, but actually makes you sick. Everyone needs a system of values to guide them through life and these junk values appeal to that part of us, but they actually trainer us to look for happiness in all the wrong places. And one of the things I think has been helpful aboutThey were always the people who kept us alive. My grandmother was a cleaner. She was always more valuable than any billionaire you'd ever name., who don't contribute very much and are actually quite greedy and selfish, over nurses and cleaners and people working in supermarkets. So if this is a chance to reevaluate our values, that's a positive thing that will emerge from this terrible time.I think it's very hard to tell., we thought that would discredit right-wing politics.. It's very, very hard to know how these big events will affect the global picture.One of the things I learned in the research for my book "Lost Connections" is that, we've been taught for a really long time that depression and anxiety are mainly biological malfunctions in a person's brain or in their genes. And one of the things I learned is there's some biological causes but actually mostlyEveryone reading your article knows that they have natural physical needs - obviously you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you you'd obviously be in trouble really quickly. There is equally strong evidence that. And the culture we have built is good at lots of things - I'm glad to be alive today, but it's been getting less and less good at meeting people's underlying psychological needs. And nowAnd what we've done for a long time now, we've insulted that signal. We've either told people it's a sign of their weakness or just a sign that they're biologically broken, or that they're crazy. What we need to say to people experiencing that signal is:We can change the way we live over time to get those deeper needs met. So one thing that I hope could change is the understanding of what depression and anxiety are. That they are signals, not malfunctions. That we have these feelings for reasons and we need to listen to the signal, and honor the signal, and respect the signal. Because it's telling us something we really need to hear.I think it's a really important question. I would say actuallyThey flow both ways. SoSo I don't think you can separate those things out. I mean it's absolutely true if you're about to lose your home and you're getting really sick with the coronavirus, I can totally understand what people were thinking, but actually it's precisely if we listen to our anxiety, that we can see what our unmet needs are and what we should do about them.If El Salvador can afford, it your government can afford it. This is not some fantasy. A lot of governments all over the world are doing this, including governments in very poor countries.So I think that emotional health and your ability to cope and deal with your problems in the world, to cope with the crisis, are closely related. It's not like we can ignore one to deal with the other: that you've got to have good emotional health in order to survive and thrive.Yeah, it's hard. But like I said one of the things I've been really concentrating on is meaning.It's interesting just before the crisis happened I was in Moscow. I interviewed a really brilliant Russian psychologist called Dmitry Leontiev. He said to me - these are not his exact words, I'm paraphrasing: "There's a big division between philosophy in Britain and America, and philosophy in Russia.Even in the American Constitution the pursuit of happiness is listed". He said: ". He said:. I thought that was so interesting and I've been thinking about that a lot.I've been thinking not so much about how can I make myself happy - it's actually quite hard to do it in these circumstances. I'm thinking a lot about what's meaningful to me and the people I love. Like I said I'm phoning a lot of people I haven't spoken to in years. Just yesterday I spoke to a teacher who taught me when I was 17 - she really changed my life and I'm so grateful to her. I haven't spoken to her in a really long time. I phoned her and she was so happy to hear from me and I was so happy to hear her voice. And I told her how grateful I am to her.My grandmother died twelve years ago. She was in a home and before she died there was a carer who was really kind to her. I called that carer and just said: "You know, I think all the time about how good you were to my grandmother. I'm so grateful to you".So I'm thinking about moments that were meaningful to me in my life. I'm thinking about projects that are meaningful to me. That's been my main reaction.I thinkThink about how you can honor those people. And. I don't mean that on an individual sense. One of the ways I think we should try to build meaning out of this, is think about what can we do as societies. To honor the people who are risking their lives for us right now. What can we do for the doctors and nurses? What can we do for the people who are cleaning our hospitals and our supermarkets? One thing we should fight for, is a really big increase in the minimum wage when this is over to thank and honor the people. They were already underpaid. We should be thinking of how we can thank and honor them for the incredible risks that they're taking right now. Also the people who work in care homes, caring to elderly people, who are really underpaid, who are risking their lives.