On Depression And Anxiety: Specifying The Nature Of The Problem

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s “Depression & Anxiety.” In this segment, he defines depression, addresses the difference between being depressed and having a terrible life, acknowledges the proper treatment for depression, and outlines how meaningful life pursuits can stave off negative emotion and create a good life. Dr. Peterson’s extensive catalog is available on DailyWire+.

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Generally, when people come to see a psychotherapist, they do it for one of three reasons. They’re either depressed or they’re anxious or some combination of the two, or they don’t do a particularly good job of standing up for themselves, in which case they need what’s often called assertiveness training. We’ll walk through all of those, but we’ll start with depression.

So what is depression exactly? Well, it’s a preponderance of negative emotion, which seems self-evident. Depressed people are sad and frustrated and disappointed and grief-stricken. They have low self-esteem. They tend to feel all negative emotions simultaneously in a manner that’s paralyzing. If you have the proclivity to feel one negative emotion more intensely, you have the proclivity to feel them all because they covary, which means they tend to occur together.

That’s because all negative emotions are the manifestation of the abstraction of a behavioral system that stops you from moving forward or moves you backwards or, in another variant, prepares you to fight. (Anger is a mix of positive and negative emotion, so it’s a bit more complicated.) If you feel a preponderance of negative emotions, you tend to be paralyzed and to withdraw, to be frozen in place and to withdraw.

WATCH: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety on DailyWire+

Now, if you’re depressed, you also experience an absence of positive emotion. Positive emotion is linked to movement forward, and it manifests itself in curiosity and the desire to play, and more particularly, in hope. It makes itself known as a marker that you’re moving toward valuable goals. Depression takes you out in a sense such that you don’t feel any positive emotion in relationship to goals; nothing seems worthwhile, which is the absence of goals, and it also floods you with negative emotion.

Treatment for depression — pharmacologically or behaviorally, psychologically — can address either the deficit of positive emotion, the excessive negative emotion, or both. Antidepressants, known as serotonin reuptake inhibitors, tend to modulate the degree to which negative emotion propagates neurologically. Antidepressants, like Bupropion or Wellbutrin, tend to increase the probability that positive emotion will make itself manifest. Sometimes people who are treated biochemically for depression are treated with SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and with drugs like Wellbutrin. (There are mixed antidepressants.)

Because antidepressants work upon occasion, people also tend to think or make the claim that depression is fundamentally a biochemical disorder. That begs the question, what do you mean by fundamentally and what do you mean by biochemical? The situation is much more complex than the mere reduction of the condition to a biochemical abnormality might indicate.

When I was doing differential diagnosis for depression — differential diagnosis means specifying the nature of the problem, distinguishing it from other similar problems, and then formulating something approximating a treatment plan — one of the things I tried to determine as a good behaviorist was whether the person who was suffering a dearth of positive emotion and an excess of negative emotion was suffering because they were ill in this strictly physiological sense, which might also mean that something had gone wrong biochemically with, for example, the serotonin production system, or whether they were suffering from the cumulative micro and macro catastrophes of life.

One question might be, are you depressed or do you just have a terrible life? Although this hasn’t been well delineated in the research literature because the diagnoses aren’t done carefully enough, my belief and strong intuition, which makes sense theoretically and biochemically as well, is that antidepressants often work quite well for people who don’t have terrible lives but are depressed.

Whereas for people who have terrible lives, anti-depressants might help them stave off the worst manifestation of suicidal self-destruction but can’t put in place the behavioral and psychological structures that are necessarily put in place in order for them to thrive, in order for them to be buttressed against negative emotion, which is generally manifest in response to genuine crisis and to help them gather this sense of positive movement toward a goal that might be necessary to live in the absence of depression.

So you could say to have a good life and therefore not to be depressed, you need a goal, and maybe you need an overarching goal, and maybe you need an overarching goal that unites all the impulsive goals that might otherwise preoccupy you. You need to have enough stability in your immediate environment and your near conception so that you’re not flooded with anxiety and negative emotion.

How might you understand that in a more differentiated manner if you were trying to address your own proclivity for depression? You need to be engaged in some meaningful life pursuits. You need to know what to do with your life. You need to have some day-to-day routines. You need to be engaged in something that is productive and can sustain you and that simultaneously makes you grow.

Then you might ask more concretely, what might you engage in if you wanted to set your life up so that you were not depressed and nihilistic? One answer to that is, you could look for meaning and significance where other people have found it.

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WATCH: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety on DailyWire+

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of “Maps of Meaning,” “12 Rules For Life,” and “Beyond Order.” You can now listen to or watch his popular lectures on DailyWire+.

Be sure to PRE-ORDER Dr. Peterson’s newest book: “We Who Wrestle with God” (Portfolio/Penguin. November 19, 2024.)

The views expressed in the series “Depression and Anxiety” are presented for educational and informational purposes and are not intended a medical or psychological advice.