A new study shows that Americans are more depressed than ever. We talk a lot about mental health in our culture, but the problem only gets worse. So what s really going on here? Also, Harry and Meghan try out their own Jussie Smollett hoax, a new drug that turns people into zombies with rotting flesh is spreading through our cities, and a special needs student tells her story of being harassed and punished for not respecting her teacher s pronouns. And Caitlyn Jenner has tried to position himself as the voice of reason on the gender issue. But is his view actually reasonable?
00:02:05.080We talk to each other and to our friends and to our therapists.
00:02:07.360In fact, there have never been more people talking about this subject and talking to therapists about their own mental health.
00:02:14.340According to a poll released a few weeks ago, the number of Americans who are seeking mental health treatment and counseling has doubled over the past 20 years.
00:02:22.480In 2004, it was only about 13% of Americans that said that they had visited a therapist or counselor or psychiatrist over the past year.
00:02:29.800And now that number is close to a quarter of all American adults, and it's rising fast.
00:03:12.580This was reported just yesterday by CNN.
00:03:15.260Quote, depression is more widespread than ever in the United States, according to a new report from Gallup.
00:03:19.520About 18% of adults, more than one in six, say that they are depressed or received treatment for depression, a jump of more than 7 percentage points since 2015, when Gallup first started polling on the topic.
00:03:30.340Nearly 3 in 10 adults have been clinically diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime, according to the survey, which is also a record high.
00:03:37.720According to the Gallup poll, young adults reported higher rates of depression than any other age group, and the greatest increase in recent years.
00:03:44.160Nearly a quarter of adults under 30 say that they're currently depressed.
00:03:47.420Lifetime rates of clinical depression are significantly higher among women, with rates rising twice as fast as in men.
00:03:54.080More than a third of women say that they've been diagnosed with depression at some point in their life, compared with about a fifth of men, according to the survey.
00:04:00.500Also, for the first time, lifetime rates of clinical depression among black and Hispanic adults matched or surpassed the rate among white adults.
00:04:09.060Well, there's the racial equity we're looking for, at least.
00:04:13.300In fact, this isn't really news at all.
00:04:15.240Well, every few months, it seems, there's another study or survey showing that Americans are increasingly depressed and anxious and lonely.
00:04:22.980I think we all kind of get the point by now.
00:05:00.040Case in point, here's Good Morning America, yesterday morning, talking about this Gallup poll and bringing in their own expert, their chief medical correspondent, Dr. Jen Ashton.
00:05:27.120We should be doing, as I like to say, a checkup from the neck up, just as we do with our physical health.
00:05:32.600And then we have to change our approach to mental health and wellness and not only jump in when there's an issue or when we're struggling, but prevention.
00:05:41.040And that, I think we're starting to get on the right path with that.
00:06:09.220And this is about as deep as the analysis goes.
00:06:11.460And that hasn't changed either over the past year.
00:06:13.480Even after the most popular theory of depression, the theory propagated by those TV doctors and especially by the pharmaceutical industry, was blown completely out of the water last year.
00:06:24.760I mean, for decades, we were told that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.
00:06:29.260Antidepressant drugs were prescribed with the promise of healing or correcting this imbalance.
00:06:34.900Those 65 million people that have taken these drugs, it's been on the, and not all of them are antidepressants, but many of them, it's been on the promise that if you take the drug, it's going to correct the imbalance and then everything will be fine.
00:06:47.520But a major study, if you recall last year, which reviewed previous studies on the subject, found that there isn't now and never was any good evidence that this chemical imbalance exists.
00:06:59.080It was all a myth, a scam that big pharma used to peddle its drugs.
00:07:04.160And yet somehow this revelation has not prompted any introspection on the part of the medical field or so-called mental health experts.
00:07:10.380Much of what they've said about depression over the past many decades was grounded in falsehood.
00:07:15.440And yet they've made no serious attempt to grapple with that fact.
00:07:19.580Their approach and their talking points haven't changed.
00:07:23.240That's because most of these people are married to a strictly materialist view that we are nothing but a collection of chemicals.
00:07:31.080We are an assemblage of cells and everything must be explained and every problem must be addressed on that level.
00:07:37.760And when those explanations and solutions fail, they have nothing else to offer.
00:07:42.260Because if it's not a mere chemical problem to be fixed with more chemicals, then they won't be able to fix it at all.
00:07:50.180The medical industry has medicalized the entire human condition and now can only address these issues on that level.
00:07:56.780The result is that they so often miss the point entirely.
00:07:59.960So when it comes to the skyrocketing rates of depression, I think that there are, much can be said about it, but there are three major points that are often missed.
00:08:10.240Three potential causes that don't often factor into these discussions.
00:08:15.260The first one that I think is one of the most obvious ones, but worth mentioning, is that our lives have been taken over by screens.
00:08:24.000Yesterday I saw a chart that somebody posted on Twitter when I was staring at my own screen showing how the U.S. birth rate has declined by 20% since 2007.
00:08:34.640And that is a, to say that's a steep decline is quite an understatement.
00:08:41.180Really, if you look at the chart, it's the birth rate was rising and then you hit 2007 and it just hits, it's like diving off a cliff.
00:08:49.980Well, guess what else happened in 2007?
00:08:57.660The proliferation of screens and along with it, pornography, social media, everything else, has impacted every facet of our lives to a degree that we will likely never completely understand.
00:09:08.940And this has also impacted our quote unquote mental health and certainly not in a good way.
00:09:13.480People are reporting feeling isolated and lonely and all these things because increasingly we are, because our lives revolve around these screens.
00:09:22.140Second, at a deeper level, we are a culture that has lost its sense of purpose and meaning.
00:09:27.180Church attendance is declining along with the birth rate, two things that are not unrelated.
00:09:32.080Religious affiliation is on the decline as agnosticism and atheism ascend.
00:09:36.160And it makes sense that depression would rise along with all of this because the godless life is a despairing life.
00:09:44.540It is a life of pointless suffering and misery.
00:09:47.800In a world without God, what is there to feel but despair?
00:09:50.840We are dust and our existence amounts to nothing and leads to nothing.
00:09:55.280There's no real beauty or joy or redemption, certainly.
00:09:59.440We are careening helplessly back into the abyss from which we came.
00:10:02.580When we die, we will dissolve into the ether and all we are and all we've done, everything we've done, everyone we've loved will be nothing.
00:10:25.800It's just to say that despair and meaninglessness go hand in hand.
00:10:30.360And as our culture loses the faith that used to serve as its foundation, it also loses meaning.
00:10:36.800The third factor is that, that certainly is not, is almost never discussed, but I think plays into this, is that we think about our own feelings obsessively.
00:10:51.180You know, the doctor on Good Morning America recommended this as a solution when really it's part of the problem.
00:10:56.640She recommended we spend more time doing internal assessments of our own mental health and well-being.
00:11:03.260You know, we need to sit around, we need to spend more time sitting around and thinking about our feelings.
00:11:08.580But one of our problems is that we already spend way too much time assessing those things.
00:11:13.660We are constantly asking ourselves how we feel and how we feel about how we feel and how we feel about our feelings about our feelings.
00:11:22.180It becomes this kind of infinite regression.
00:11:32.480And this is a very modern and unique way of living.
00:11:35.560I mean, it's hard for us to understand that because it's all we've ever known.
00:11:39.460But it is a very modern phenomenon to have people walking around constantly thinking about their own feelings and assessing their own feelings.
00:11:47.740When we visited the Maasai tribe in Kenya for what is a woman, I remember, I think I've mentioned this before, asking one of the tribe's women if she was happy with her life.
00:11:57.080And I asked her if she ever experienced depression, even in spite of having a husband and children.
00:12:27.500And she said, no, we don't have that here.
00:12:30.300And everyone else seemed to agree that they don't have depression in their tribe.
00:12:34.580That's a Western thing, they seem to think.
00:12:37.860Now, of course, that doesn't mean that they live lives of perfect bliss.
00:12:41.840In fact, their lives are quite a bit harder and more brutal by most measures and not a life that I would want to live.
00:12:46.840But when she claimed that they don't have depression, I think what she was trying to say is that they don't spend time thinking about their own feelings.
00:12:55.060They don't think about those things as much.
00:12:58.140They're absorbed in their duties and their responsibilities.
00:13:01.360And if they're doing what they're meant to do and they're filling their role in their families and in their society, then they're happy.
00:13:09.060Those two things are inextricably linked in their minds.
00:13:13.880And this is how most people across the world lived historically until modern times.
00:13:18.440If you go ask your great-grandfather, if you go back in time to your great-grandfather, your great-great-grandfather,
00:13:24.900and ask him if he's happy, he would probably respond in a very similar way to how the Maasai tribe responded,
00:13:32.500by saying something about the things that he does.
00:13:34.440Like, well, yeah, I have a family and I provide for my family.
00:16:06.420The incident has been reported by Reuters and Sky News and allegedly happened after Harry and wife Markle attended an awards ceremony in New York on Tuesday,
00:16:14.080during which Markle received a Woman of Vision Award.
00:16:26.380Where is there evidence that Meghan Markle has a vision that extends beyond her reflection in the bathroom mirror?
00:16:32.540That's the only vision I think she's thinking about.
00:16:34.200In a statement from The Prince's representative, it says,
00:16:36.540Last night, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Miss Ragland were involved in a near-catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi.
00:16:44.440This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians, and two NYPD officers.
00:16:54.320While being a public figure comes with a level of interest from the public, it should never come at the cost of anyone's safety.
00:16:59.260The incident, which comes just over a week after Harry attended his father, King Charles' coronation in London,
00:17:05.640has horrible shades of the way in which Harry's mother, Princess Diana, died in the late 1990s in Paris.
00:17:10.280Some media blame the erratic behavior of the paparazzi as the cause of the fatal crash.
00:17:16.180And so it's almost as if it happened again, we're told, with this high-speed car chase in New York City.
00:17:23.520Now, when I just, first reaction, reading up on this story, a number of problems immediately arise.
00:17:36.600The first one is, what do you mean near-catastrophic?
00:17:40.240Okay, what you're saying is nothing happened.
00:17:56.080It's like you've got nothing, and then you have catastrophe, and you've skipped over all the things in between and gone right to, it was almost a catastrophe.
00:18:05.840So that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
00:18:07.200And then also, how would that work exactly?
00:18:12.600You know, I've spent more time in New York City than I have ever wanted to spend.
00:18:18.960And one of the many things about New York City that's just god-awful is the traffic and the fact that, you know, if you have to go somewhere and it's a mile and a half away,
00:18:30.740and usually you would think, oh, it's a mile and a half away, I'll get in the car, you know, five minutes ahead of time, I'll be there on a time.
00:18:38.920No, a mile and a half is going to take you about six and a half hours.
00:18:42.740So with traffic that jammed up, how could there be a high-speed chase, and especially one that lasts for two hours?
00:18:53.700This would have to be, I mean, we're talking about Fast and Furious type of thing.
00:19:03.060There's a way to engage in a high-speed chase, but you have to be like a professional stunt driver in order to find, to weave your way in and out of New York traffic.
00:19:11.900So it sounds like a little bit of an odd story.
00:19:15.320In fact, it sounds completely unbelievable.
00:19:17.020And then all the updates start coming in with other people who were around this and saw this, and pretty much all of them are saying, no, it was totally fine.
00:19:26.700They were in a cab for part of this high-speed chase, and the cab drivers come out and said, no, it was basically normal.
00:19:35.500Daily Wire has an update from the New York Police Department.
00:19:37.920So the New York Police Department responded on Wednesday to reports that Prince Harry's wife, Meghan Markle, and her mother, Doria Ragland, were involved in a near-catastrophic car chase.
00:19:45.380NYPD Deputy Commissioner Public Information Officer Julian Phillips issued a statement to the Daily Wire confirming that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were escorted by officers while in the city, but said that there were no collisions or injuries involved in their transport.
00:19:59.140Quote, on Tuesday evening, May 16th, the NYPD assisted the private security team protecting the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
00:20:04.560There were numerous photographers that made their transport challenging.
00:20:07.840The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrived at their destination, and there were no reported collisions, summonses, injuries, or arrests in that regard.
00:20:14.640And other witnesses have said, including the mayor of New York has come out and said that it's hard to believe that that would have happened.
00:20:27.780Again, anyone who's familiar with New York City knows that there are no two-hour high-speed car chases happening in the middle of New York City.
00:20:36.380So this is a story that they invented, not the first time that they've invented a story, but it is really extraordinary that they feel the need to stoop to this level.
00:20:53.700I mean, this is full-on Jussie Smollett.
00:20:58.200This is basically a Jussie Smollett moment.
00:21:01.680And what makes it Jussie Smollett is it's not so much the thing that they're claiming.
00:21:09.620And as far as I know, they're not claiming that the paparazzi had MAGA hats and were chasing them down and saying this is MAGA country.
00:21:16.260So they're not saying that, but it's similar to Jussie Smollett in just how unbelievable it is.
00:21:21.160Like, if you're familiar at all with the area, anyone who knew anything about Chicago, even if you didn't spend a lot of time there, if you've spent any time in Chicago, you immediately knew, as soon as you heard the Jussie Smollett story,
00:21:32.020okay, 2 a.m. in the winter in Chicago and you're walking for a sandwich, that doesn't make any sense.
00:21:40.380Trump supporters in MAGA hats hanging out outside in Chicago at night also doesn't make any sense.
00:21:46.120And same thing here with this story in New York.
00:21:48.460If you have any common sense at all, especially if you're familiar with these areas, the story doesn't even begin to hold water.
00:21:56.100And yet they make up the story anyway because they are so desperate to be victims.
00:22:04.960And this psychological pull towards victimhood for Harry and Meghan is overwhelming.
00:22:17.040When, in reality, it's like they have really nice, comfortable lives, the kind of lives that most people, most people would kill to have a life like this.
00:22:30.400Like, you're rich, you don't have to do anything.
00:22:33.420You can just, like, your whole job is just to be famous and rich.
00:22:38.020Live in a beautiful house, all these things.
00:22:40.320And you would think, well, why can't you just accept that?
00:22:47.100Why can't you accept the fact that you have a nice, easy, comfortable life?