Robert Sapolsky found that baboons are most stressed in two situations: when their status is insecure (like a top-ranking male facing a challenger) and when they feel pushed to the bottom of a hierarchy and humiliated, measured through elevated cortisol levels.

In Norway, status is relatively secure with less extreme inequality and less movement between status positions, whereas in the United States at current inequality levels (greatest since the 1920s), there is a precarious middle class and a huge swelling bottom, leading to more people showing submission gestures.

When baboons feel pushed to the bottom of a hierarchy, they display a submission gesture—putting their body down, lowering their head, raising their bottom, and covering their head—which communicates 'you've beaten me, just leave me alone.'

Paul Gilbert, Kate Pickett, and Richard Wilkinson have developed the theory that human depression is in part (not entirely) a form of submission gesture—an evolved response signaling inability to cope, particularly when pushed to the bottom of hierarchies or when status feels insecure.

One in five Americans will take a psychiatric drug, and one in four middle-aged women in the United States takes a chemical antidepressant in any given year.

If we talk less about chemical imbalances and more about power imbalances, we will get more at the heart of depression and anxiety and find better solutions.

As inequality grows, depression and anxiety grow in populations, a very robust effect that helps explain why depression rates are rising in wealthy countries if the cause were merely individual chemical imbalance.

Lack of Control at Work Causes Depression

Michael Marmot discovered that the single biggest workplace driver of depression and anxiety is not the work itself but having low or no control over your job; restoring control—as in worker cooperatives—lets people infuse otherwise menial work with meaning and reduces depression.

Distress Is a Sane Signal Not a Pathology

Depression, anxiety, and addiction are largely not internal brain pathologies but signals that something has gone profoundly wrong in our lives and culture; as Krishnamurti said, it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society, so feeling unhappy in a world where Trump is the most powerful person is a sign of sanity, and we should stop pathologizing the signal and instead listen to it.

Three Causes of All Mental Health Problems

There is a broad scientific consensus that all mental health problems have three kinds of cause acting together: biological (genes and brain changes), psychological (how you think about yourself), and social (environment and how we live together), and these play out to some degree in every condition including dementia.

Environment Militates Against Psychedelic Insights

Psychedelic insights of deep connection can fade because people return to environments that make living by those insights impossible—a depressed woman recovered after psychedelics but could not act on a felt connection to others while working as a receptionist in a hostile town—so psychedelics function more like setting a compass toward a connected life than a standalone cure.

Distress Indicators Cluster Geographically

Depression, suicide, addiction, antidepressant use, and political support for Trump cluster together in the same places, which would not be expected if depression were merely an internal chemical imbalance and addiction merely accidental chemical hooks; the clustering implies shared underlying social causes.

Advertising Engineers Dissatisfaction

Advertising is designed to make us neglect what is meaningful: an ad telling you that you are fine as you are would be useless to the industry, so advertising must induce dissatisfaction, and a 1978 experiment showed that just two ads primed five-year-olds to choose a 'nasty boy with the toy' over a 'nice boy without it,' demonstrating how easily marketing makes us value objects over connection.

Deprivation of Meaning Breeds Burn-It-Down Politics

When a culture deprives people of the things that make life meaningful—social connection, meaningful work, meaningful values, access to nature—and instead teaches them to value junk, it produces many people who are chronically dissatisfied without knowing why and who respond by wanting to 'burn it down,' which fuels the rise of Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro, Le Pen, and the AfD.

Worker Cooperatives Restore Meaning

Democratic worker cooperatives, where employees fire the boss, vote on decisions, and share profits and tasks, restore control to workers and, consistent with Marmot's findings, reduce the depression and anxiety members previously experienced, even when the actual tasks (e.g., fixing bikes) remain the same.

Humans Evolved to Need a Tribe

Humans survived not by being faster or stronger than prey but by banding into cooperating tribes, so just as bees evolved to need a hive, humans evolved to need a tribe; separation from the tribe historically meant danger and death, which is why isolation still triggers anxiety and depression, and we are the first humans to try to disband our tribes and live alone.

Loneliness Has Exploded

This is the loneliest society in history: a study asking Americans how many close friends they could turn to in a crisis found the most common answer years ago was five, while today the most common answer is none, reflecting a broad explosion in loneliness and isolation.

Scale of American Psychiatric Drug Use

Indicators of distress in America are extraordinary: one in three middle-aged women is on chemical antidepressants at any given time, one in ten thirteen-year-old boys is on a stimulant, 30% of children in foster care are on at least one psychiatric drug, and more Americans die yearly from opioids than died in the Vietnam War.

Speak to the Wound Not the Symptom

Politically and clinically, we have spent too long raging against the symptoms of pain—racism, populist demagogues, drug use—rather than speaking to the underlying wound; while we should still oppose racism and injustice, the most effective response is to address the actual unmet needs and offer real solutions rather than condemning the manifestations.

Motivated Reasoning Protects Cherished Figures

Even those who pride themselves on responding to facts engage in motivated reasoning to protect emotionally cherished figures—Hari admits screening out Obama's drone strikes on funerals the same way Trump supporters screen out inconvenient facts—and we have a general capacity, documented by Kahneman and others, to suppress inconvenient truths (eating meat, conflict-mineral wars) to stay emotionally comfortable.