 If you feel depressed in America and you go to your physician or psychiatrist, you'll often be prescribed medication that said to regulate certain levels of neurotransmitters in the brain, which leads you to logically believe that depression is just a chemical imbalance. Right? Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. In this video, I thought I would share a very alternate point of view if you're someone who really wants to heal from depression. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hine, author of the health book Master of the Day and Doctor of Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine. So before we jump into this video here today, there's two very important links right below the video. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can reach out and contact my private practice right below this video. And the second is for a free guide, which is four daily rituals that can potentially help you out of your steer life with Chinese medicine. So those are right below. Depression is a particularly interesting illness if you want to call it that or disease. It's one of the oldest conditions listed throughout many traditional cultures alongside cancer, interestingly enough. And depression is something that is very intimately linked to the human experience. For example, people can develop clinical depression just contextually, just based on the circumstances of their life, right? Food shortage, jobs they hate, working multiple jobs, exhaustion, war, famine, all kinds of issues can contextually lead to depression that's clinical on its own. And so because life has historically been much, much harder than in modern times, depression has always been a facet of human experience, of the human experience. But the way we've treated it has not always been the same. Now I thought I would share a very interesting anecdote from someone who is visiting the Rwandan culture and the Senegalese because I thought this was very, very telling. But the author Andrew Solomon talks of his travels with the Rwandans and he said that we had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide and we had to ask some of them to leave. Their practice did not involve being outside in the sun, which is after all where you begin to feel better. There was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again when you're depressed and you're low and you need to have your blood flowing. There was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy. There was no acknowledgement that the depression is something invasive and external and that could actually be cast out of you again. Instead, they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to get them to leave the country. So this author was juxtaposing the modern healer, which was the physician, the psychiatrist, bringing these people with trauma and depression into a dingy little room and tell me about your feelings and your depression to prescribe a medication against the way traditional cultures view depression as an illness of the spirit. Now look, even clinically within modern biomedicine, there are myriad causes of depression. They tend to call it the biopsychosocial model. So biological factors like physiological reasons, most commonly we think of neurotransmitters related, right, SSRIs. Psychological reasons, they can be intrusive thoughts, they can be fears and phobias, it can be all kinds of things. And obviously social factors, right? Someone who has an awful purposeless job, who has worked in the bone, of course is likely to suffer from anxiety or depression, or the mother who doesn't have any healthy food to eat on a yearly basis because she's in a food desert and she's working three jobs and sleeping five hours a night. Of course she's going to meet a lot of criteria for clinical depression. So it is undeniable though that a piece is no doubt about it physiological. I mean the main way I clinically treat depression in Chinese medicine is with Chinese formulas, which is pharmacological in some ways no different from giving an antidepressant. So I'm not here in any way saying that it is a not a non-physiological condition or physiology is not one key piece, it is. But to just put depression on the back burner as it's just neurotransmitters and we leave it at that and you just take your meds and go about your life is a tragedy, honestly. That's the nicest way I can say it. It's a tragedy and it devalues this illness of the spirit that can be so much more for the patient, there can be so much more healing and so much more of an evolution that comes from it as opposed to swallowing a little white pill every day. But to me, ultimately, it's important to think of depression as a disease or an illness of the human spirit because that is the only point of view I have seen that leads to true and permanent healing. Healing of the human spirit can come in many different kinds. You know for me, maybe what's most telling is for example people with cancer who describe it as a wake up call in their life. But depression in many ways is similar where the person may need to change every aspect of their life if they want to heal from this condition. They may have to change their diet so that it's not as pro-inflammatory. They may need to get divorced for some people because they're literally in a prison that is killing their spirit and mentally they feel as if they're dying of cancer being in an unhealthy marriage or an abusive relationship. For others, it's quitting their job because it has no purpose and no meaning and they don't feel valued there or like there's any reason to be there besides getting money to exist. And for others, it's the entire way they view their lives or their mindset and philosophy around living. But all these changes can only come if you view depression as an illness of the spirit. Yes, the physiology, but primarily of the human spirit. And while there are many things that can affect the human spirit ranging from antidepressants all the way to shamanic rituals and religious ecstatic experiences, the way a person lives their life ultimately is a reflection of not only their spirit but the factors that affect the spirit. Is your job something that's enlivening, literally enlivening, leads to more life? Or is it something that depresses you? I mean, look at all the memes on the internet about nine to five jobs and what is happy hour? It's where all the miserable people congregate after their jobs. I mean, the way a human being lives his or her life is a reflection of the state of the spirit. And for so many people, if it begins and ends with it's just chemical imbalance, I just take this little pill and the healing ends there because there is no healing. There's just palliation. There's just, let me get through this day. You know, this medication helps me get through my day, gets me out of bed. I can show up to my job and that's great. But there's never progression and a healing response, a proper healing that comes from it. If it's just you does some pesky chemicals instead of this is a gift and this is an illness of the spirit that I need to tackle, yes, externally, but also internally as well. So my opinion, yes, depression has an absolutely undeniable physiological side. Zero doubt about it. It's the primary way I clinically treated, but not just that. It's not just that. It is also a gift and an illness or disease of the spirit. And if you view it that way, you're going to find you're able to unlock another part of your life that will lead to more permanent healing and more permanent freedom than just taking medication or smoking joints or whatever it is that helps you with that for the rest of your life. And ultimately, if it doesn't produce that kind of healing response, that kind of catharsis, then what's the point? Because there is no healing. So that's my two cents for today, my impassioned rant. Again before you guys go, check out the links below the video and the related video right over there.