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Home » How To Recover From Depression: Dr Michael Yapko (Transcript)

How To Recover From Depression: Dr Michael Yapko (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Dr Michael Yapko’s talk titled “Keys to Unlock Depression: Why Skills Work Better Than Pills” on May 10, 2018.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

DR MICHAEL YAPKO: Well, that was a very nice introduction, thank you. I want to say I’m very grateful to Anthony for arranging this. This program, this idea of his of bringing psychology to the public to me is the most important thing that we as psychologists can do. The volume of information is so great and the quality of information has improved so markedly over time that there’s a lot to share and we have a relatively short time this evening, but I hope to give you a lot of good perspective about things that matter the most in learning to manage depression.

Early Career Experience

So let me say I will be speaking for roughly 45 minutes or so and then I will open it up to questions. Let me start with a story and get you thinking about this topic. When I was a young psychologist back in 1829 [note: this appears to be a transcription error], my first job was working in a psychiatric facility and I was the admissions person. It was my job to admit new patients to the unit.

Now this is a locked facility. People aren’t getting locked up because they’re doing well. They’re not really doing very well at all. And so my job was to interview them, find out why they were there, what was going on in their lives, what the expectation was for their hospitalization, what medications they were on, what the treatment plan was, all those kinds of things.

Pivotal Observations

Now I’m young, I’m inexperienced, and for me to have the opportunity to interview many hundreds of people in a relatively short period of time turned out to be pivotal in all the things I’m going to talk to you about tonight. I would interview people who had been through the worst experiences that you can imagine. People who had been raped, tortured, mutilated. People who had fled their homelands literally with the bullets whizzing past their head.

People who lost their entire family in one fell swoop in a plane crash or a car crash. People who had suffered the worst adversities you can possibly imagine. And when I would interview these people, it was easy to appreciate why they were broken, why they were so despairing, why they had given up on life. That was, of course, an interesting lesson to say the least.

Key Research Questions

The compassion, the empathy was very easy. But what fascinated me clinically, that has every bit of relevance to what we’re going to talk about tonight, is when I interviewed people who had been through these horrific experiences, people who probably should have been depressed, but they weren’t, and I wanted to know why not. What is it about the way that these people are coping that somehow serves to insulate them against depression? So it gave rise to the four research questions that have guided my career now for more than 40 years.

Think about your answers to these questions because we’re going to talk about them. The first question was, are there skills that people have that serve to insulate them? Very interesting. When you ask people directly, “Gee, anybody who had been through your circumstances would be depressed, you’re not, why not?”

And people would give me these very insightful answers like, “I don’t know.” Or they would say, “Well, I guess it’s just luck of the draw,” or “I guess it’s good genetics.” But they couldn’t really give me any insight into that. They’re just living it.

Patterns and Skills

They’re just being who they are, doing what they’re doing. So as a young researcher interviewing people and asking a million questions, slight exaggeration, and you find out that they like murder mysteries, and they like taking walks in the park, and they like playing with their kids and grandkids, and they like ice cream, and they like all kinds of things, and there I am trying to figure out, so what is it? Well, we’ve answered that question now. It’s the ice cream, if only it were that simple.

So starting to identify what patterns are present in the way this person thinks about things, in the way they define problems, in the way that they define their relationships, what are they doing in there? And what emerged from that with great clarity were certain patterns of self-organization. Keep that phrase in mind, patterns of self-organization.

Research Evolution

So then the question became, okay, if I think I have a handle on what’s going on with these folks, what we can learn from them, it leads to the second question. Can we say that these skills that these people have are, in fact, learnable? Are they teachable? Isn’t this what the purpose of therapy is, is to help people acquire these skills that are not intuitive for them that are intuitive for these other people?

Depression’s Impact

Then the third question became the salient research question. Can we prove scientifically, empirically, that when people are taught these particular skills that it makes a difference, that it reduces their level of depression, reduces the frequency of depression, reduces their vulnerability to relapses, reduces the impact on the people around them? This is one of the things about depression. It doesn’t just affect the individual sufferer. One of my recent books is called “Depression is Contagious,” and not in a viral sense, not in a bacterial sense, but in a social sense.

What is it about depression that is so easily transmitted to kids of depressed parents? If you’re the child of a depressed parent, your likelihood of suffering depression is three to six times greater than if you’re the child of a non-depressed parent. Just having a depressed parent is a massive risk factor, not a small one, a big one.

Research Progress and Prevention

Can we prove that by people acquiring and developing skills that it really makes a difference?