33.07 - MU Podcast - The Memetic Virus
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Welcome to Mysterious Universe, Season 33, Episode 7. Coming up on the show, we've got the Western memetic virus landing on the real-life Lost Island and the big pharma plot to infiltrate Japan.

I'm your host, Benjamin Grundy. Joining me is Aaron Wright. I understand you have a rather remarkable story coming up on this episode. You said it was quite complex. Like a lot of things content-related these days, I came across this tweet that sent me on a bit of a rabbit hole. It's usually how it starts these days. You find some interesting tweet. It was from this guy, Chris Lakin. And he tweeted out... Do I have the image? He tweeted out this...

Mental illnesses can be acquired via memetic viruses. What? And he's linking to this review of a book that's discussing anorexia rates in Hong Kong in the 1990s. And I'm like, that's a perfect topic for Mysterious Universe. Very much so. But memetic viruses, do you mean that it's some type of memory-based illness?

Is that what it is? Mimetic? Well, it's like a mimetic illness. So meme being something that spreads information or idea that spreads like a virus. So it replicates and it spreads among people. But the idea was that

this can occur with illnesses and this can occur with psychosomatic disorders. It spreads like a virus. Yes, there's been some speculation in the recent years that social media itself fuels these social diseases that spread about. But for it to actually somehow morph into a diagnosable illness, that's rather extraordinary. Yeah, so he linked to this long post on a review that

of this book from 2009 by Ethan Waters. It's called The Globalization of the American Psyche. That far back. Crazy like us. Yeah. And it argues that, you know, the DSM manual, for example, the manual that has all the- The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Yeah. The mental disorders. Once that went into certain regions around the world and became accepted, all of a sudden those

disorders that had never had a history in the region, they start to pop up and they start to appear and people start experiencing them. But is that just simply because like no one had a name for a particular subset of behaviors that people were displaying? And then once their manual came about, they then use that to... That's the argument they always make. It was just undiagnosed and people missed all these symptoms. But there's a

A researcher in Hong Kong I'm going to be talking about who was an expert in anorexia. And he researched this for years because he saw this firsthand. There were cases in China and Hong Kong of anorexia, but they were so incredibly rare, like one a year.

But they were completely different to the Western idea of anorexia, which says that it comes from feminine beauty ideals that are unobtainable. Yes. You know, Western values on... And the pressure. Yeah, the pressure to look a certain way that comes from Hollywood or comes from celebrities...

You know, that's what creates this fear of being fat. But what he was seeing was entirely different. In what sense? Well, it's completely different symptoms, like completely different way of thinking. They don't consider themselves to be scared of being fat. That doesn't even come on their radar in these cases in Hong Kong. Then why would you choose to be anorexic? Well, exactly. That's what he was trying to figure out. But then...

The memetic virus was injected into Hong Kong and he wasn't able to complete his research because all of a sudden the Western version started to appear once the memetic virus was implanted. Now, following on from that, we're going to be talking about another fascinating part of research from this book where we head to Japan and he starts this interview with a Canadian expert on cultural...

like cultural ideas of depression. It's really funny. Like he talks about how a Nigerian, when they're depressed, for example,

They'll say like, oh, I'm feeling spicy in my head. Which is actually kind of counter to what you'd expect if someone was describing the physical sensation of depression. You would say, I'm feeling like down in the dumps, you know, that kind of thing. I'm feeling down. If I'm anxious or depressed, it's in my gut. But yeah, apparently Nigerians are like, yeah, I feel spicy in my head. Or East Asians might say, oh, I'm feeling it in my shoulders, like my shoulders sore. That's just how it manifests. Yeah.

And he describes all these different ways that people might describe the depressing feeling. So it's changes depending on the culture. And the ideas, obviously, of depression are completely different across different cultures. Let me guess. Does this then tie into Big Pharma exploiting this for profit? Well, in Japan...

There was no market for SSRIs. Antidepressants. Absolutely zero market for it. And when the DSM manual was translated into Japanese and the Japanese experts read the description, the definition of clinical depression, they were like, no, no, that's ridiculous. That's absurd. That's way over the top. And we just don't believe that.

And so that Western idea of depression never existed in Japan. And so because that didn't exist, there wasn't really a market for the SSRI drugs, which at the time in the 90s were making pharmaceutical companies. Prozac was a big deal. It was the main driver of their profits. It was the wonder drug of the 90s, even though we know now they don't do anything really. They might actually harm you.

Allegedly. But there's this company, it's like Glaxo SmithKline, right? They saw this opportunity. They created this conference and this Canadian guy was invited and I'll explain this later in the segment, but he's invited and straight away he realizes there's something up with this conference. He's flown over there from like, this guy doesn't have much money. He's just your average academic in Montreal. Yeah.

He gets flown over like first class tickets. He arrives at the most expensive Japanese hotel in Tokyo. When he gets into his suite, there's like rose petals on the bed and like the bath is filled with honey and fruits and all sorts of ridiculous stuff. And he's like... Jeez, it's a bit more than a free pen at a conference somewhere, isn't it? Yeah, this guy's like, what is going on? Here he is here. I'll have his name later in the segment, but...

He's like, something's up. This is weird. There's something going on. And then he gets into the conference and it's some international conference on depression or like depression illnesses across cultures. So it's like something like that, which is his specialty.

And he gets into this conference and he soon realizes that, yeah, it's hosted by GlaxoSmithKline. Which is a warning in itself. They're paying for everything. And that happens from time to time. Of course it does, but it's not right. It's not a huge deal if it's doing real science. But he realizes that the company is not there to sell their products and promote their products to these medical professionals. Then what's it there for? It's there to learn from them. And this conference is all from these psychologists and...

Specialists. Anthropologists, especially, who have expertise in cultural reasons for depression, cultural links for depression. Oh my God. So they can adjust their marketing to fit the form of depression. He realizes what they're trying to do, what this big pharma company wants to do in Japan is create depression.

the market for their drug Paxil, which is an SSRI. They realized no one in Japan believes in depression. No one's being treated for it. It's not a thing. It doesn't exist. So this big pharma comes in like, let's inject a memetic virus and convince the Japanese they're depressed. Then we'll have a market for our drug. It's a wild story. So that's coming up. What have you been looking at this week? Oh,

I don't think that the plus extension, and I'm selling it short, is it's going to pale in comparison to what you're describing there. However, we are going to be discovering some stories of people that claim to have traveled to very remote and strange locations through some type of dimensional rift. And that's where we have the story of the man who claims to have landed on the real life Lost Island with all the weirdness attached to it. Polar bears?

There's no polar bears, but there is some very unusual things attached to it. We're also going to head back into Alaska where I'm going to describe some similar stories of the green mist. This is a phenomenon which seems to pop up in many of these stories. It's not just simply the mist, which is normally like a cliche associated with a lot of paranormal activity. People encounter a specific green mist that seems to propel them into other locations, dimensions, or God knows where. The fog. The fog, yeah, but it's

It's specifically green. And then it also ties into some very strange UFO experiences, which we'll get into in the plus extension. Is your segment going to end really ambiguously? Like they all just fade off into a dream? No, nothing like that. And then no one knows what the hell they spent five years watching the show for. Are we all dead? That was so frustrating. I'm still angry at that show.

So, yeah, I mean, again, the premise of this, the globalization of the American psyche, it's obviously America is the world's superpower. They project their power culturally across the world. But the argument is it's not just culturally. They actually project their insanity as well, their mental illness. This is the thing. To start this off, we occasionally get people going, you have no right to talk about the U.S. But the problem is a lot of people in the U.S. don't realize is that whatever happens in the U.S. culturally,

bleeds into the West everywhere else. Australia, the UK, even Europe. Culture, politics. Everything that you guys do in the US. Music. Significantly. Language. Oh, and Australia. I'm sorry. Don't get me wrong. I love the American culture for the most part, but Australia has lost so much of its own culture, its own larrikin, kind of easygoing, laid back. We're Americanized. We're completely and utterly Americanized. You can really tell in the younger generation now. Oh, yeah. Because...

they use so much American vernacular, especially black urban vernacular. Online vernacular is just...

But also things like victimhood culture, all this kind of stuff. It is completely and utterly... The funny thing is they can see the US is now turning around a bit. We're still 10 years behind. So we're still going down as this is all happening. So this will be an interesting look into how long this has been occurring. Yeah. And that's what Waters states. Again, this book came out in 2009. So there's a lot of modern stuff that... His book's a little bit before that, but...

He says it's how we're flattening the landscape of the human psyche itself. It's more than seeing McDonald's everywhere. He says we're engaged in the grand project of Americanizing the world's understanding of the human mind. There are telltale signs that have recently become unmistakable, he said, particularly telling other changing manifestations of mental illnesses around the world.

So he says the premise of the book is that the virus is us, as in Americans. The virus is Americans, right? So the story begins in Hong Kong.

And Waters goes to visit Dr. Sing Li. Here he is here. He's China's preeminent researcher on eating disorders. And on the way to this guy's office, he's in Hong Kong and he's looking at the advertisements, you know, big billboards. And he's looking at the magazine covers along the way. And it's just like beautiful thin women everywhere. And a lot of the advertisements are for things that make you slim.

There's like weight loss pills, there's slimming creams, masks and all that kind of beauty stuff. And, you know, photos of women before and after losing weight on cover of the magazines. It's like a big business in Hong Kong. He said the week's issue of that popular magazine Next had 150 ads in it.

And 110 of those ads were of beauty slimming products. So rather similar though to the US or to the West, surely. Aren't magazines like that, like fashion magazines and popular magazines kind of filled with advertising? Yeah, and that's what he's getting at. It's like you look at somewhere like Hong Kong in the 90s, very much westernized. You've got the British influence. Of course, yeah. You would look at that and go, okay, well, this environment makes sense that –

you have these Western beauty standards. You have people that want to be thin and you would expect bulimia and eating disorders to have spiked over the last 15 years. Will be consistent with global trends. And that's the idea of anorexia. Again, as I said at the start, it's like it comes from these beauty standards, impossible beauty standards. There's a fear that you're going to get fat. It's like becomes a body dysmorphia problem.

And so you would think that Hong Kong would follow suit because it has that influence. But this guy's research, Sing Lee's research, shows that it's more complex. What is right? It turns out that the West may indeed be culpable for the rise in eating disorders in Asia, but

But it's not from what you think. It's not from these Western beauty standards. It's from something else. How could it not be, though? If you've got these advertising standards, I suppose, infiltrating into the culture, wouldn't that be enough to trigger the same effect? Well, the reality was, even though they had all that advertisements and they had those beauty standards, anorexia wasn't a thing. See, this guy, he was trained in the UK, England.

And with, you know, in psychology and psychiatry and eating disorders was really fascinating to him. So when he came back to Hong Kong, he thought, okay, well, I'm going to look at the eating disorders in China and Hong Kong. He's like, there isn't any. It's hardly, it doesn't exist. It's not a thing. When he did find cases, the symptoms were totally different.

Most, for instance, didn't display the classic fear of fatness that you see in Western anorexics, nor did they misperceive the frail state of their body by believing they were overweight. And it was while he was trying to puzzle out these differences that he started to see something remarkable.

Over a short period of time, the presentation of anorexia in Hong Kong changed. So the symptoms that the sufferers were reporting started to morph. He said the symptom cluster that was unique to his Hong Kong patients started to disappear. What was once a rare disorder was replaced by an American version of the disease that started to become much more widespread.

So the American version of the disorder had been injected in this mimetic way. It came in as an idea. It didn't naturally emerge and it didn't come from

This advertising of hot, skinny women everywhere. Is it about attention seeking rather than the actual core issues of the illness? Well, we'll get into it because at the time, you know, when he got back in the 90s to Hong Kong, it was starting to spread around the world. Like anorexia was a Western thing. It was in America. It was in Western Europe. It was here. It started to appear. Yeah. In other Anglo countries, it started to appear in Russia a little bit and a little bit in Japan and Korea, tiny bit.

Um, but in China and Hong Kong, basically nothing. He did this exhaustive search. He managed to identify 10 possible cases in the five years from 1983 to 1988. Like think of that for a moment, five, like 10 cases in five years. It's insane. So he wanted to find out why, like they had that Western influence. Why weren't there more cases? So he started to treat the cases he could find and he discovered another puzzle.

The women who starved themselves in Hong Kong were different from the anorexics he had studied in England, from the anorexics he knew from cases in the West. He recounted one of the first patients he had was a 31 year old saleswoman. Her name was Zhao. He met her in a hospital exam room in 1998. She was shockingly emaciated, he said, sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, cold skin, virtually a skeleton.

She was five foot three. Her ideal body weight would have been 110 pounds, but then she weighed 48 pounds. She was in serious trouble. He noticed she had dry skin, subnormal body temperature. She had a really low heart rate. And it all started four years earlier when her boyfriend left her to migrate to England.

And she was devastated by the departure and just began to refuse skipping meals. She just didn't really explain it to anyone. She just stopped eating. Everyone encouraged her to eat, her friends, her family members. And when he asked her, what do you think is the main problem? She said, well, I've got this weird fullness, this thinness in my gut.

And he asked what else? She said, there's a bad mood that's hard to describe. It's no use talking about it anymore. And he asked her, well, what's the name for your condition? She's like, I don't know. I've got no idea.

She's got no idea about anorexia. She's never heard the Western description of it. Has never seen a story on a celebrity that has anorexia. It's not a thing in her mind. Is it some form of self-flagellation in the fact that her boyfriend has left? So it's like you deprive yourself of something to create a pain that distracts you from it. In the end, it's a mystery as to what really drives this version of it. But that's not really the point of the story.

The point of the story is that it's different to the West. And at the time, the DSM manual was like, here's the ubiquitous explanation of anorexia. This is what everyone that has this eating disorder around the world, this is how it happens. This is why it happens. He finds this case, it's totally different. She doesn't fit. Like one of the examples, he gets her to, he's like, sketch yourself, right? Anorexics in the West, you say, sketch yourself.

And it's totally disconnected from how they look. They're large, right? They draw themselves as fat or large, as chubby, when they're really skeletons. She draws herself, it's like Skeletor. It's a perfect... It's consistent with how she looks. It's a perfect representation of what she is. So that distorted perception doesn't exist. So she's clearly starving to the point of death. She's inflicting upon herself, but it doesn't tick any of the boxes from the DSM. It's totally different. So...

That disturbed self-image doesn't exist. She doesn't have a fear of being overweight. She doesn't even think about being overweight. When he gave her the standard eating disorder questionnaire of the time, it showed all these clear differences to the West. And when asked why she often went out for whole days without eating, she would just say that she just felt no hunger. She had this weird feeling in her abdomen and her stomach felt distended.

Another big thing was that she was from like a poor village, whereas in the West, it's always the rich, well-to-do girls. Not always, but that's consistent. That's the pattern. That's the trend, right? And so it was just this massive difference that nobody was researching. Now, unfortunately, there's a long story with this patient. She just kept on refusing treatment and she eventually died in hospital. She just starved herself to death. And because of this, this doctor, Dr. Lee-

He's like, that's it. I've got to understand this. It really drove him, gave him this passion to understand what was going on. So he's like, the only way for me to figure this out is to become anorexic.

So he's just like. Just starving himself. Starving himself. He's like, it's the only way I can get into the mental state and understand what's going on with my patients. And he says it was brutal. Of course it would be. Horrible mood. You know, he couldn't focus. He's hungry all the time. And he started to lose weight. But something weird happened at the three month mark.

He felt amazing. Like something happened. I was just thinking about this because you hear this with people that go on very low calorie diets for meditation practice and that kind of stuff. Once you get past this certain, it's not reported commonly, but you do hear it. Once you get past a certain hunger point, it's like it just disappears. He started to feel incredible, like hyper alert. He would do crazy things like he would be doing pull-ups and push-ups in the lift on the way to his office in the morning.

For much of the day, he was on this kind of runner's high that you get, you know, that feeling you get. His hunger, which for months had been this deafening alarm, was like a background whisperer and he could happily ignore it. It didn't really matter anymore. Is this some built-in mechanism, though, to allow, because obviously we're all cavemen at heart, is it somehow the body kicking into this final store of energy so that you can climb that mountain and kill that tiger? Yeah, maybe. There's some kind of evolutionary explanation in that way.

that vein but uh he's he just loved it and he the weirdest thing is he said he started to feel superior to people oh how weird as in all these other normies are all these feeders they're all addicted to food but i'm not held back by that attachment to eating i'm free i'm a free man

And he couldn't understand why people didn't have the willpower to do what he was doing. And he's starting to change, right? And he's like vaguely aware that he's becoming like a skinny prick. And another 10 pounds come off. Eventually, he's lost 12% of his body weight. And he starts to realize, holy crap, I'm addicted to not eating. Does the body release endorphins when you're hungry? It must do.

Well, there must be a certain point where something changes. You're right. Something changes. Or maybe the opioid receptors are somehow enhanced or something. I'm sure all the diet crazy listeners will not know the answer, like there's some ketogenic effect or something that kicks in. But one of his patients once told him that anorexia felt like getting on a train, only to discover too late that she was heading in the wrong direction on this train. And he now understood this feeling, like this momentum that you're going in this direction and you can't get off.

The only thing that got him off it was he had exams he had to do in London for some other degree. And he realized like, I need to be 100% mentally focused to pass. So I've got to eat properly again. And it got him off it. He lost that addiction and he just went back to his normal weight. So that's actually a good question. Is it that what just suddenly eating like for what, a few days? Can that cure the problem? I don't know.

He doesn't mention all the details, but at the same time, he said in Hong Kong, they were trying to run all these studies connecting eating disorders to the Western beauty image. Right. They couldn't find any links. So there was no evidence coming forward that the DSM description of anorexia was correct. This is where this Canadian guy comes into play. His name's Edward Shorter. He's written numerous papers on the history of anorexia.

And when Lee found his research, he was stunned because this Canadian guy, he focused on cases from 19th century Europe. Oh, really? And this Lee guy, he starts reading this research and

And the cases are identical. It's the precise thing that he's seeing in these one or two cases from Hong Kong. So then that would suggest that Western beauty standards or modern beauty standards are not the cause. Nothing to do with it. There's a story of a 16-year-old girl. She was treated in 1823 by a Frankfurt physician named Salomon Steibel. The trouble started when her parents insisted she break off a budding romantic relationship.

starts with a boy just like the girl in hong kong this has got this weird hoarders feeling like every episode of hoarders you can always pinpoint the person has had some type of emotional trauma in their life like oh yeah it's like it's there's an emotional trauma that triggers this this issue so is that what this is it's like it's a separation well that's what this version is the western version is totally different it's a completely different thing so

After the girl was given the bad news that she had to break off this relationship, she felt heavy pressure on the lower region of her esophagus, became pale and breathless, was unable to speak and had to sit down. The feeling of pressure on her esophagus returned daily, making it impossible, she said, to eat solid food.

It seems clear that her self-starvation was psychological in origin, beginning as it did with the termination of the romance. And the girl experienced her refusal to eat as a physical symptom, a literal blockage in her throat. That's what the girls in Hong Kong were saying. It's like something stopping my food from going down. Like there's this feeling in my stomach, like some physical feeling. Um,

They didn't report a desire to lose weight, the cases in the 1800s. They didn't view their body as fat. They weren't even thinking about fat. It had nothing to do with it. So this guy argued that in order to understand anorexia, you have to understand hysteria.

And hysteria, we've done shows on hysteria in the 1800s, just women going nuts, basically. But it affects men as well. I think there's this perception that it's just simply, oh, it's a hysterical woman. But this hysteria can readily affect men as well. Well, the early anorexics in Europe...

They had all the symptoms of hysteria. It was connected. Right. Right. So they had the tics, they had catalepsy, they had paralysis, muscle contractions, day blindness. Oh, so significant psychosomatic illnesses. Amnesia, the inability to stand or walk.

So hysteria was a memetic virus. This is this Canadian guy's understanding. So this historian, Janet Oppenheim, she's mentioned, she researched the Victorian culture in great detail. She found the disease not only in the mental health and medical literature of the time, but

Everywhere, like everywhere you looked, there's articles about hysteria, novels, you know, books, there's journals, there's like radio programs, everything in the 1800s that could be consumed of media had hysteria.

It would always have some kind of link to hysteria, short stories, personal letters, diaries, autobiographies. It had this huge hold on the minds of the people in the 19th century. So that was the social disease of the time, hysteria? Hysteria was the memetic virus. And so it morphs as a culture progresses? Yeah. So there's a quote from this French journalist in 1881 who said, the illness of our age is hysteria.

One encounters it everywhere. Everywhere one rubs elbows with it. Studying hysteria, Monsieur Le Sagu, the master of Monsieur Chacot, I don't know who those people are, have put their finger on the wound of the day. The singular neurosis with its astonishing effects travels the streets and the world. So he's

He's describing a meme. But it's almost like it never leaves. It might morph, but I would say hysteria is still strong today. You could isolate many social conditions to hysteria. Yeah, I mean, but the hysteria had a very specific set of symptoms. That cause physical symptoms. You're not entirely wrong, but let me get into it. So by 1860...

There was a director of one of the asylums in France, and he said that young women who have just reached puberty after a precocious physical development lose their appetite to an extreme degree. No matter how long they've abstained from food, they experience a distaste for it, which even the most insistent urging is unable to reverse. And he just said it was insane.

Very common to observe. Between 1860 and 1864, the young women in the Lisbon school alternated in groups between symptoms of hysteria, leg weakness, paralysis, day blindness, and periods of vomiting that went for months. At one point, 90 out of 114 girls participated in the epidemic of vomiting. So this is a memetic vomiting virus injected into the minds of these young women. But where would that come from back then?

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Like, is it just a social contagion? It's a social contagion. Yeah. It's in, like I said, it's in all conversations. It's in all correspondences. It's in all media of the time. And one of the symptoms coming out of this hysteria was not eating. Right. So in 1873, everything's hysteria, right? And some of those cases are not eating. But in 1873, there's the, you know, the pioneering psychologists of the time.

They give the non-eating part its own classification. They call it hysterical anorexia. And eventually the term hysterical is dropped off as hysteria kind of waned, but anorexia remained.

So the Canadian scholar that's studying all this, he argues that as doctors' own ideas about what constitutes real disease change from time to time due to the theory and practice, the symptoms that patients present will change as well. These medical changes give the story of psychosomatic illness its dynamic, the medical shaping of the symptoms. So in other words, these experts that go, okay, so you're experiencing this, let's classify it.

They're creating the disorder by classifying it, by giving it life, by naming it. They give it life. They inject it into the consciousness. It becomes a meme. It starts to spread. The disorder is created by them. Pardon me.

This is very much though from the perception of like high strangeness or a supernatural kind of form. It's all thought form as well. Yeah. Like I know it's like it's definitely going out on a limb with that, but it's like giving this enough attention. It's like it's forming a thought form. And so imagine you're like an expert in one of these medical fields and your whole life has been dedicated to treating this.

How would you feel about being told, oh, actually, sorry, you created it? They're not going to be very receptive to it. Well, they're making money out of it as well. They don't want to be receptive. What happened after hysteria anorexia was labeled and given its own category? It skyrocketed. Absolutely skyrocketed. This huge dramatic climb. In the 1850s, this self-starvation thing was very rare, like just a tiny subset of hysterics.

Except though in that case from Portugal or Lisbon, where you've got, like it was in a school. So you can see how that would spread through a school. But that's vomiting. That's like vomiting. But that's bulimia, which is consistent with an anorexic style. Oh, maybe in that case. But it doesn't mention not eating. But yeah, maybe that's connected. But it only took, I think it was like 30, 40 years to see this. The medical literature was just completely littered

with these cases of anorexia. It just exploded. One London doctor reported in 1888 that anorexic behavior was a very common occurrence now of which he had abundant opportunities of seeing and treating many cases.

In that same year, a young medical student confidently wrote in his doctoral dissertation, among hysterics, nothing is more common than anorexia. So it went from this tiny little thing. It's fashionable. They name it, they label it, the memetic virus is injected into the consciousness. Bang, everyone's suffering from it. So this is Shorter's theory that these psychosomatic illnesses...

This is this Canadian guy. His whole argument is that a psychosomatic illness is some kind of emotional distress that needs to be presented. It needs to be like displayed in some way. Can't people just use like the classic poltergeist outbreak? You know, that solves things. Well, if that's in the, he calls this thing the symptom pool.

So within the memescape, there's a pool of symptoms that you as someone distressed can draw upon, right? And you wouldn't draw upon something that's outside of the pool of symptoms because it has no cultural influence. Like there's no feedback effect from it. But without social media...

Like if we're talking about the 1800s here, is it just simply because it's people in close proximity and they're mimicking the symptoms of other people? It's like without social media, you just have social. So people are talking, sharing ideas. It's like social media just accelerates it, but it would be the same effect in the 19th century. So patients unknowingly adopt symptoms that will be acknowledged as legitimate distress and they pull it from this symptom pool.

So once anorexia is named, it enters the symptom pool.

And you're like a distressed, unhappy young woman, and you unconsciously go, bloop, you pull out anorexia from the symptom pool. But how is it that that occurs? Is it that somehow it's just so widespread amongst the culture that you are able to suddenly draw on it subconsciously? It's in the zeitgeist. They heard it from a friend. You know, they read about it in a magazine. They heard a report on the radio talking about anorexia and how it affects young girls. All of a sudden, it's in their mind field.

It's at the forefront. They pull it out. And naming diseases, officially labeling conditions like anorexia, influences how the distress manifests in society.

So that's his whole theory. And so the cycle in the 1800s was there'd be a few new exciting cases. The doctors would publicly describe and debate them. They'd write about them. Then magazines, newspapers, radio shows would pick up on it and talk about them. Women in the general population would unconsciously start to manifest these behaviors, seek help. They would get the feedback from the doctors that would reinforce it. And this would shape

the illness even more and it would spread even more. So it's got a feedback loop on it. Yeah, they're providing validation, scientific validation, creates this feedback loop. It establishes legitimacy of the symptom. In the end, it's just you're starving yourself.

It's not a disease. I think a lot of this is like, these aren't diseases. Well, they are. They are in the sense that it's a psychological disease. And for some people, it can be extremely difficult to treat. So we shouldn't be so dismissive of it. But perhaps the approach needs to be that these people need to be supported. Well, eventually hysteria fell out of fashion. Yeah, right. It got to the point where it became too popular.

Because if you think about it. Yeah, everyone's done that now. Yeah, it's like everyone's gone through the hysteria thing. So when you want to manifest distress and you want the feedback and you want to say, I'm sad, there's something wrong with me, I'm hurting inside. All you need is a good penis panic, you know, and then it's fine. Yeah, penis panic works because it's like new and novel. But you come out and you're like, oh, I'm not going to eat because I'm sad. Yeah, people are like.

Yeah, well, everyone else, welcome to the club. And then it doesn't. So is there an element of like, this is, I'm not saying the dark triad, you know, but is it like an element of narcissism that's in people? Because we're all, don't get me wrong, we're all narcissistic in some sense. We all have levels of it. But the expression of that varies greatly amongst a society. So is this what this is? Like younger, like, and maybe it's affecting girls because of a social issue. It's young women.

Right. So they need like for maybe that period of their lifetime, they need attention. And so it kind of from the pool, they pull out. Women are just crazy, dude. They're not. They're not. Well, I mean, the history demonstrates that they are. Well, no, you see what the issue is. It's the timing's about the same, right? Because for, for women, it used to be like with the medical profession that

everything that a woman experienced was, oh, that's hysteria. Like, oh, like she's gashed her leg as she's been, you know, out in the field plowing. That's not true. Well, no, there was. In fact, there was the book by, who was that noted author? Bill Bryson. Bill Bryson did At Home. And in there, it was like a description of medicine for women. And it was that

At one point, I don't recall exactly when it was, maybe the 1700s, but for a woman to see a physician, she'd actually have to speak to someone and then her description or her symptoms would be described through a closed door. Yeah, like when they were giving birth, the doctor had to have a sheet of paper.

Yes. So that he couldn't see anything because that was considered ghastly. Yeah. So around this time period, right, you've got around this time period, it's like all these issues going on, but maybe it's because that like had been ignored for so long that they had to draw on something. Maybe that's why it affected women more. I'm sure that's like a contributor, maybe like 1%. The other 99% is that young women are just fucking crazy. And that's just what happens. They're crazy. Like what's changed?

Okay, so I have noticed trends where it seems there's a whole heap of young men that jump on this kind of stuff. No, it's nothing. It's like nothing. It's nothing. It's 99% women with these disorders, right? So hysteria eventually fell out of fashion because everyone was doing it. It wasn't cool anymore. And it just, women stopped being hysterical. Like it just, they just stopped.

It's just the meme. Well, no, you know, you're right. Because what I mean is that it faded out and along with it, anorexia became non-existent as well. So you see this in the US, right? Yeah, because anorexia, I recall, was like a big thing in the 90s in Australia. Well, once hysteria faded and you start entering like the 1910s, 1920s, hysteria is gone, right? Women are normal again.

And then you get into the 1940s and there's these American researchers who looked at anorexia cases in hospitals in New York in the 1940s. It's exactly the same as Hong Kong. You can't find any cases. There's like one case at a New York hospital a year, maybe.

And they're all the same symptoms from Hong Kong, where it's like they feel something in their stomach. They just broke up with their boyfriend like this. It's the same thing. But don't you find it fascinating that they describe, you know, the sufferers of this describe a very physical symptom to something that is psychological. Isn't that extraordinary? Like it's so powerful that it can affect a physical sensation inside someone's body. Yeah, it's mind over matter. And then this happened in 1983.

So Karen Carpenter, one of the legendary carpenters. Oh, yes. Yep. She collapsed from a heart failure that was brought about because she had an eating disorder. So this is February 1983.

You can imagine she's a major celebrity. Huge press coverage, articles on anorexia start to appear everywhere. By the late 1980s, every Western teenage girl has now heard about anorexia. The symptoms are back in the symptom pool. And it starts luring a new generation of women. The memetic virus has been re-injected into the population. It's back.

What would make it- And the rates skyrocket. Anorexia is back. Why would it be so cyclic? I don't know. Why is anything cyclic? Yeah, I guess so. It's just, I mean, I guess that's a good point, but it's strange that it should kind of just go out of fashion for a number of decades and then all of a sudden be back. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, so this is around the same time, it's all coming back in the West. In Hong Kong, everything changed in November of 1994. Yeah.

Because at the time, like I said, there's just one or two cases. What happened then? There's a school girl, 14 years old. Her name's Charlene Xu Chi Ying. She's walking home from school. She'd collapsed a couple of times before at school. And the nurses at school said, you've got to go and eat. If this happens again, we're telling your parents. They didn't tell the parents. And so this girl, she agrees and she's walking home.

And she's skeletal thin. Like she's clearly not, she's not been eating. She's been starving herself. And she stands in front of the bus stop in Hong Kong, this busy bus stop, and she collapses and she dies. And across the road, multiple people see this and it becomes this huge story in Hong Kong. It whips up a media frenzy. Now, when the media covers this,

They don't speak to people like Li, that Chinese doctor I talked about earlier. They speak to Western experts. The media quotes directly from the Western DSM and they speak to Americans. Americans are interviewed on TV. American psychiatrists are interviewed on the radio. The papers start to run stories emphasizing that anorexia was a dangerous disease that is threatening young women in Hong Kong.

headlines like, call for vigilance to prevent anorexia deaths. Teen death sparks anorexia concern. Now, there's no evidence, and Dr. Lee knew this, that anorexia was anywhere on the radar in Hong Kong. Apart from this young girl, like you have these cases. He had cases, like 10 cases over five years. But not an outbreak. But it's not a thing that everyone needs to be worried. And-

headlines and leads of the story often were contradicted by quotes from local experts. Like the local experts, when they were quoted, they were like, well, you know, they're

You do have cases, but they're exceedingly rare. And, you know, they have these specific symptoms. Was there any information surrounding the circumstances of this girl? Had she gone through some type of emotional upset? It is detailed in the book, but I did gloss over it. It was very similar to the previous ones I'd mentioned. There was an emotional trigger. There was some emotional trauma and she just had stopped eating. She wasn't like fat phobic or anything from what we know. Why do families not intervene?

Well, we don't know. We don't know in that case. But then there were papers saying things like, teachers, social workers, parents, and schoolmates need to make a combined effort to detect anorexia among secondary schools before it's too late. Then the celebrities get involved. Within a few years of her death, there are several Hong Kong actresses and pop singers. They come out with their deep interviews, their harrowing stories about how they became anorexic.

Oh, it's all about me. So the media coverage in Hong Kong starts repeating these ideas that anorexia was a threat to young women. Reinforcing it. They face problems in school because they're worried about being too fat. That severe food restriction is a cry for help. That it's all connected with cultural ideas of thinness and beauty. Well, that third one, though, is probably right. Like, it is a cry for help.

Yeah, I mean, it is a cry for help. But not in the sense that they're describing it as. But not in the Western way. And yeah, the problem was that all these assumptions were wrong about the cases in Hong Kong. But it didn't matter because the memetic virus had been injected. So what do you think happened in Hong Kong? Anorexia rates skyrocketed from the mid-90s.

Absolutely skyrocketed. And there were all these youth programs to support young women with anorexia and there's a 24 hour hotline set up in multiple languages. It's interesting because it's almost like, I think for the most part, this is people genuinely trying to bring awareness to something and help people. But what it's actually doing is it's making it worse.

Well, there wasn't a problem in the first place. The fundamental thing is there was no problem. The meme virus gets injected. All of a sudden, it's this catastrophic issue. And Lee and other clinicians started to notice that the original symptoms they were seeing, like the five patients that have these specific issues from the East, they're gone. It's totally replaced by young women with the Western version of anorexia.

And this increased of three or four or five fold. And that in turn, like the increased cases increases the amount of articles and coverage and documentaries and TV shows that mention it. I can see how this would happen, but it's also dangerous that, you know, to approach this from the sense that, oh, it's, it was never there. I mean, maybe it was there. Maybe it had been there.

Even from a Western standpoint, but now that the label is being applied to it, more people feel like they can actually identify with what's happening with them. Yeah, again, that's always the argument. But Lee says there's no evidence for that because you can see the people that are hospitalized from starvation. You can see those statistics and it just wasn't a thing.

But those specific statistics exploded. And he said, the author Waters wrote that few considered the possibility that the idea of anorexia itself might have been part of the reason the disorder caught on so quickly in Hong Kong. Did it spread through China?

Because at that time, Hong Kong was under British rule. China was after. So it did spread through to China. Eventually, yeah. But Hong Kong had a strong Western influence for a long time. Well, that's what I mean. So 80% of the new eating disorders coming in, they gave their key reason for self-starvation, the fear of becoming fat. So it's not like it's not a real thing. It's not like...

They're imagining it. Just these young women are susceptible to ideas and they just follow the ideas and they suffer for it. So the importation of the Western diagnosis was changing the way patients and doctors talked about the disorder and it was changing the disease experience itself.

So, yeah, how does it exit? Like, how do you get it out of the symptom pool? You have to remove it from media. How can you do that? You have to remove it from the zeitgeist. Well, maybe, and this is obviously, I'm not saying this is what you should do. A book burning, a good old fashioned book burning. Give me every book on anorexia. Let's get a bonfire going. Problem solved. I was going to say, and this is not the right way at all, but one way that you could stop it is to ostracize sufferers.

Yeah, but you can't do that. Of course you can't do that. But I'm saying that's one way to stop it, which is probably a little bit better than just a book burning. Yeah, well. I'm not saying do that, but that's like, that would be one way to do it is to ostracize sufferers or not even ostracize, perhaps change it to tough love rather than being, oh, you know, it's like, oh, we have to treat you with kick gloves and be like, no, fucking eat something.

Well, that's what they, that's what he tried. I mean, that's what the hospital tried with that case of the woman, the young woman that died and she just refused. So did they get it out? That's the question. Did they, what did they do?

Nothing. They haven't done... Anorexia is still a thing in the West. And I looked at rates of anorexia over the past 30 years and they've remained pretty much stable. But now new memetic viruses have entered the zeitgeist. And so as you're listening to this segment and if you've read this book, it becomes glaringly obvious the modern malaise that are memetic viruses, one of them being gender dysphoria. Surely...

Surely there must be something, though, that's there that is about fear of being. Because as human beings, we do seek out people with lower weight, like lower fat levels, because that's like a built-in evolutionary thing because we want the best genetic offspring. That's actually built in. A really great example was you saw this, Lizzo was a great example, who was this...

larger woman. I will say overweight. She was overweight. And all these people, it's really funny. You saw the social media trend of all these people being like, oh my God, Lizzo's so sexy. She's so amazing. She's so hot. But then people would start, it became this meme of where people would say, oh, you look just like Lizzo. And these women would go ballistic.

Like, I'm not like Lizzo. I'm not like Lizzo. Do you think she's fine? Oh yeah, she's really sexy. Oh yeah, you look like Lizzo. And they'll be like, I don't look like Lizzo. And even now, Lizzo, there's rumors that she's taken a Zempik.

So there's still this thing, and I'm not criticizing her. I'm just saying that it's still this trend of people wanting to be thin. Well, I mean, you're talking about something fundamental in that we're attracted to fitness because it demonstrates the ability to sexually reproduce. They're healthy. They're ready to reproduce. That's why we like thin, beautiful people.

So that's never going to change. I mean, that's just inbuilt, right? But I mean, the thing with the anorexia... So it can't be just simply like a social mental illness. But remember the thing with anorexia, the Western version, the memetic virus version, is they think they're fat. It's dysphoria. They think they're fat, but they're just skeletons, right? So it's the same thing with gender dysphoria. They think they're another gender. And you can see that as a memetic virus coming in with the numbers.

So from 2017 to 2021, I know that's a short amount of time. Like you could bring the stats. Any person can see that the whole gender dysphoria thing has become front and center in that period of time. In the United States, it was a threefold increase in cases from 2017 to 2021.

England's insane on the gender dysphoria numbers. It was 50-fold, a 50-fold increase from 2011 to 2021, going from one in 60,000 sufferers in 2011 to one in 1,200 in 2021. That's a memetic virus. That is an idea that is spreading.

Do you know where something has to be drawn, a line that has to be drawn, is that, look, I think that there are people that are suffering from gender dysphoria, people that truly believe that they're born in the wrong body. If that's whatever, that's what people have. But perhaps it's been taken from a very... Right, just like anorexia. It's a very, very small percentage of people that are experiencing that. And for whatever reason, it's now become popular. So there are people that are experiencing it, but they're not experiencing

not experiencing it because they genuinely have it. It's this mimetic virus. You're totally right. There's the American researchers of anorexia started to see that in the 1970s. They called them copycat anorexia cases. Right. Yeah. Where, like I said, initially in the 1940s, it's one or two, like gender dysphoria is like one or two of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands. And then you see these copycat cases, the mimetic virus spreads, and then it's just, oh, I've got that too. Yeah.

That's me. Yep. So what about Lee? What about the Hong Kong researcher? Because it's asked at the end, like, you know, he'd spent two decades trying to convince psychiatry and, you know, Western assumptions, challenge Western assumptions about these disorders. Yeah, but that's an impossible task. And did he win the battle? Did he win the intellectual battle? He's asked this directly. He's like, no, I think the battle was lost. He said the DSM and Western categories for disease have been

gained such dominance in the process. Microcultures that shape the illness experience of individual patients are being discarded. This is taking place around the world and not just with anorexia, but other illness categories, depression, ADHD, other psychological trauma. Well, ADHD, actually, that's a good example. How many kids do you know when we were in school that had ADHD? Zero. Zero. And now...

I was talking to parents at the school the other day and they're just convinced their kids have ADHD. What are you talking about? It's a meme. It's a meme. At some point in the last 10 or 15 years, he said the current became too strong. He says it is, I think, a river of no return. That's dark. So as long as the West has cultural hegemony, which it does, as long as America still has cultural hegemony, which it does for now,

these psychoses are going to be like, there's no fighting it. If you're influenced by them, if your country is influenced by that culture, you get all the bad stuff. You get all the psychotic illnesses. You get all the...

the craziness. I hate to reinforce it, but it really is true. It's like Australia in the 80s and 90s is just so different. It's a completely different landscape to what it was then, like today. Like it's completely different. And it's like, in some ways, like Australia really did. Australia was like, like Australia, like Crocodile Dundee was popular, for example, you know, in America because we were different. Like there is really literally almost no difference between

between Australia and America now. Like our culture has just become completely entwined with it. That all the great stuff, like the values of freedom and independence and that kind of stuff, even though we don't have a first amendment. But a lot of those values are great. They're part of Australia, but everything else, all the other weird shit,

We're filled with it now. Yeah. And it's making people go crazy. Yeah. So that's anorexia. But I want to talk about... Climate change. No, that's next week. I want to talk about this...

Guy from Montreal who was sent to Japan. Yes, tell me about this. So his name's Dr. Lawrence Kermayer. He's at McGill University in Montreal. And he gets this invite to this conference in 2000. And like I said, he's like, well, something's not right. It's called the International Consensus Group on Depression and Anxiety. It's hosted and sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline, the big pharmaceutical company. And they're inviting top psychiatrists and researchers from multiple countries and they

It's going to be on the, it's going to be presented in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. So it's right up his alley. He's perfect for this. He gets invited. He's like, this is a no brainer. When he gets the plane ticket, that's the first red flag. It's like a $10,000 first class seat. The meetings are all closed door. No press, no uninvited guests. Even his graduate student who's in Japan studying this isn't allowed to go because

So he's like, that's a red flag. And when he gets to the hotel, it's like, I've never seen anything like this. It's like the Capitol or the Shangri-La or something. Yeah, the swankiest hotel, bath with petals, roses in it.

And he realizes that the GlaxoSmithKline reps in attendance at the conference, they're not interested in selling their products. And that's usually what these conferences are. Yes, of course. They hype their products and like, you know, give this to your patients. It's a great drug. That's not happening here. There's little mention of their new antidepressant drug, Paxil.

Instead, they seem to be more interested in hearing from the assembled group. They're there to learn. He said the focus was not on the medications. Is Paxil the one that caused all those murders? Is that the one? Well, save that. Save that for the end of the segment and then reveal it, please. They were not trying to sell their drugs to us, he said. They were interested in... Oh, my God. Yeah, okay, it is. Yeah, right. Paxil. Everyone's dead. They were interested in what we knew about how cultures shape the illness experience.

That's what GlaxoSmithKline wanted to know, how cultures shape the illness experience. So like I said, SSRIs had become the wonder drugs of the 90s, but Japan had zero on the market. And Japan likes Western drugs. Like,

They take Western drugs. Yeah, but Japan isn't painkillers in Japan. It's like, oh, here's some ibuprofen. They're like, that's almost illegal. Well, it's the same here, isn't it? Actually, that's a good point. We have become that way. Okay, what did you find on Paxil? I can tell you. Okay, Paxil. Jury finds drug 80% responsible for killings. A U.S. jury in Wyoming has found the British-based pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline responsible for a spate of family murders and suicides. When was that dated?

This one was 2001. Okay, so this is a little bit after. But committed by a patient taking the antidepressant paroxetine, which is marketed as Paxil in the United States. What the fuck? So this is like a year after this story I'm telling you now. But yeah, I mean, that pretty much sums up what the SSRIs do.

Um, so the Japanese, like I said, fundamentally different concept of depression than in the West. Um, the pre 1990s Japanese word for depression was utsubyo.

And it meant a lifetime tendency to extremely severe depression would probably land you in a mental hospital. So their name for depression, their translation of depression was full on psychosis. Like not, you know, you're sad for three months. You're in hospital, chronic, chronic mental illness. It was considered extremely rare, but, and also severe, almost like schizophrenia. Yes.

Only a few unlucky people had it, probably for genetic reasons, but most people wouldn't have to worry about it. That was the Japanese understanding of depression. The small amounts of psychiatrists in the country wouldn't deal with the average person with anything to do with depression. It was just like these chronic, hardcore, psychotic cases. So Big Pharma was like, there's no market there. How are we going to sell our drugs to these people? But GlaxoSmithKline had an idea. They were...

going to create a market for their SSRI pill Paxil. Their goal was to inject the West's memetic depression virus into the Japanese psyche. This is criminal. To create a market for their drug. These pharmaceutical cartels, that's the only way to describe them. The crazy thing about this is it worked. It actually worked. So to make Paxil a hit in Japan, it would not be enough.

to corner that small market of Utsubio.

Sufferers. It's not enough. The object was to influence at the most fundamental level the Japanese understanding of sadness and depression. In short, they were learning how to market a disease. To have the best chance of shifting the Japanese public's perception about the meaning of depression, GlaxoSmithKline needed a deep and sophisticated understanding of how those beliefs had taken shape. This was why Kamea came to realize the company had invited him and his colleagues and treated them like royalty.

GlaxoSmithKline needed help solving a cultural puzzle that would be worth billions of dollars. But there is no cultural puzzle. There is no cultural puzzle. It's just culturally they don't recognize it and they've created it. Yes, but from what we've just spoken about with these memetic viruses...

There is a solution to the puzzle. It's the memetic virus. You inject it, you change the thinking. So the question is, though, surely just because someone, a culture doesn't recognize a particular type of illness, is it possible that it was there? But because of the way that Japan is in this very reserved kind of nature and just a very productive culture, like you've just got to keep going, that it just simply didn't recognize clinical depression in the way that we understand it in the West.

Yes and no. Like, obviously, Japanese people get depressed, but they just think about it in a different way. Right. It's like they have, there's this particular word for... Because there's a lot of like, I mean, like the culture of like suicides, the horror suicide, that kind of stuff. That's an interesting point because that was their key. They tried to connect suicide to depression and then say everyone's depressed and be careful because you might catch a suicide. Right.

But a good example would be melancholy. Yes. Right? So in the West, we look at melancholy as something negative, right? It's something that brings you down. You know, you're down in the dumps. You're melancholic. You're like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. But in Japan, melancholy, and again, there's a word for it. I can't remember what it is, but it's considered a virtue. It's considered a positive attribute. Melancholy is like a state of...

The way he described it was it's almost like a spiritual trial. It's where someone is going through a particular state where they need to draw deep on their morals.

And they use their deep moral understanding to overcome this trial. And after they overcome this trial, they're an improved person. They're a better person because of it. So it's not seen as something negative. It's seen as like something to grow through, something that's like respected. It's like this deep cultural thing that's totally different to the West. Yeah.

So, yeah, it's a lot more complicated than just going, okay, well, obviously Japanese people experience depression. It's like, yeah, they do, but is it really the same thing if you think about it in a different way? Well, I mean, I was just thinking actually about, you know, like,

like looking at different cultures, interpreting, you know, states of mind in different ways. But then I started thinking about the US and itself and, you know, like depression, like that, they must have gone through some type of change in their thinking as well as a culture, right? Because obviously depression and the use of antidepressant medications has changed and

And only recently, though, the biggest thing has been, oh, it's clinical depression. It's due to an imbalance of neurochemicals in the brain. Yeah, that's the old argument. And yet some very recent studies are demonstrating, demonstrating that it's got nothing to do with that at all and that the SSRIs, they don't

Yeah, I mean, that's the latest. But I mean, at the end of this book, he goes through all the research that shows they don't work. So they haven't worked. That's from 10 years ago. We've known they haven't worked for a very long time. So then why are they still being prescribed?

who's got the power. You know what's funny? You see people in your circles that are suffering from emotional disturbances and these are friends and friends and friends and that kind of stuff and they go through, because people do, we all go through very distressing points in our lives and divorce and all that kind of stuff that happens. But you see that the answer is, and

antidepressants. They're just thrown on antidepressants and going back to that Japanese thing of like you having to actually get through it and overcome it and then it improves your character. It's like, that's totally removed in the West. It's not like a person can overcome it. It's like, oh, we'll fix this. We'll put you on antidepressants. It's because it's a disease. And it makes people worse in some sense. So that disease didn't exist in Japan. So here comes GlaxoSmithKline to try and create it. And the other thing, the other major difference is the race. Like

It's a different race. So do you think there are neurochemical differences? Yeah. Well, I mean, not to go into the semantic details, but different races are different. The race is real and Japanese people are a unique race. White people are a unique race. They think about things and behave very differently. And so, for example, all the Western cultures...

for the most part, are very extroverted. Yes. All the East Asian cultures, for the most part, are very introverted. So when you're suffering from depression, that plays into, but also Westerners are very individualistic. Like we look at this thing as, oh, this is my thing. This depression is my thing. I've got to take this mine. I'm depressed. It's me, me, me, me, me. It's narcissistic. Whereas in the East, it might be more like,

There's this thing, but how's it going to affect my family? How's it going to affect society? It's like they think about things in a completely different way because they are different. And so, yeah, that gets to the whole crux of the drive of the book is when you have this model of how everyone thinks and the way everything is, and this is just projected by the hegemonic empire across the world,

it doesn't work because people are different. The races are different. The cultures are different. And so... That's why we can never have a one world government or a united humanity because we are just so different. Yeah. And so...

You mentioned suicide. Suicide was there in, because rates in suicide in Japan were rising. But aren't, isn't suicide, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't suicide in Japan also associated with things like, it's like a ritual thing. It's about shame. It's about like pride, all that kind of like, very different to depression. Like obviously depression can be a part of it, but it's like a cultural thing. Well, remember there was no concept of that Western depression in Japan at the time. So there was no link between suicide and our idea of depression, but

But they started to slowly chip away. So GlaxoSmithKline, they started to, like in Japan, there's a rule where you can't advertise your drug directly to the public. Same as Australia. So what they did was they started to run like calls for trial participants, but it was just totally an ad. It's like, come and try our new, be a trial participant of our new drug. It works the same way. Your mental depression. They made sure the participants of these trials were female celebrities.

They funded the translation of Western books about depression into the Japanese language and started to get them out to Japanese publishers. They would do things very sneakily, like they disguised their PR promotions as, um,

help groups. They set up all these online help forums and online websites for Japanese people suffering from depression, suffering from... Well, that's why those ads tend to work in the US where you can advertise pharmaceutical products. Are you experiencing blah, blah, blah? And people sit there and they go, yeah, actually, I did experience that once, like a year ago. I'd better go and take this new drug. Have you ever felt sad? Yeah, yeah. You need our new drug. Have you ever felt mildly down? Yeah. Yeah.

So behind the scenes, all this online stuff, all these groups, these help groups, they're all funded by GlaxoSmithKline. They gave funding directly to prominent doctors and psychiatrists and got them to write about the drugs in journals, write about depression, write about- So it's regulatory capture as well and academic capture. And then they got their salary man. So you know the whole cliche of the Japanese salary man- High shine or something. Overworked like 20 hours a day. They're

in the office at the desk. Which, by the way, though, is complete and utter bullshit from a Western perspective. Like, we think that, oh, yeah, the salaryman, like, he's working really hard. No, like, I know people that work for Japanese companies, and what happens is they come in as early as they can before the boss, and then they leave once the boss leaves. So that could be 7 a.m. until 6 p.m., 7 p.m., but they don't do anything all day. It's just to be seen. Like, oh, I'm working so hard, so hard. Well, this guy was working hard,

This was in 1990. He was a 24-year-old Oshima Ichiro. He joined the Dentsu advertising agency, the largest advertising agency of its kind in the world. And when he first showed up, he was healthy, he was athletic, you know, 24 years old, ready to go. His employees described him as happy, committed. He lived with his mother and father and brother. He had a girlfriend, but he wasn't ready for marriage or kids yet. It's all career. Go, go, go, career.

And he was assigned the task of handling public relations and he had more than 40 corporate clients. A lot was on his shoulders. And as soon as he arrives, starts his new week at job, his new job for that week, the Nikkei collapses, the Japanese housing market collapses, you know, their decade or more of decline begins and stocks plummet. It's just...

It's over. But this downturn, he realizes he's like, holy crap, I got to work even harder to stay in the game because jobs are going. Like I've got to work really hard. So he's working past midnight every night.

He doesn't take a day off. He's in the office at 7, 6, 7 a.m. He's working past midnight. Eventually, his co-workers realize he'd been asleep at his desk. He hadn't even gone home. Wasn't it Japan only recently, actually, though, in contrast to what I just said, where someone was found dead at their desk and had been there for like five days or something? Oh, that's every day. Happens so often. There's just a chute that opens up underneath them and they slide down and a new guy just drops in. New salary, man.

In November of 1990, his mother and father really started to worry about his health because he was totally unfocused. He just had this glazed look on his face. He would fall asleep at the dinner table. He was promised 10 days of vacation every year, but he wouldn't take them. He said if he took the vacation, he would be so behind when he came back, it would be even more work.

Once his boss told him he wouldn't be allowed to take time off and then at like an after drinks event, his boss poured beer into his shoe and commanded that he drunk it. Oh, yeah. So very hierarchical and controlling. When he refused, his boss beat him up in front of all the other employees.

You know what will fix that? Paxil. Yeah. By the summer of that year, his workload had only gotten worse. He was now put in charge of a four-day conference for a client to be held in August. So I think that's what broke him, being in charge of this conference. And he got home at like 4 a.m. and then had to get up at 6 to pick up his boss, drive his boss to the conference. His boss testified later that when he was in the car, he was muttering that he was possessed by spirits.

That's not good. But the fact that you're saying his boss testified, did something disastrous happen to this guy? Well, he does this conference and he looks so sick that finally his boss is like, all right, you need to go to the hospital. He goes to hospital. He checks out. An hour after checking out, his family finds him dead. He'd hanged himself in the bathroom of their home. He'd had enough. Now, his parents sue this company, Dentsu. And

newspapers, editors, television producers. This is a huge story. It's a massive story. You can still find the articles today. In fact, I found this one where they're like, oh no, all the CEO had to resign and they're all bowing disgracefully. That's a deep bow too. Yeah. The lawyers for Ashima's parents argued that the stress of his job and his long hours brought on a depression that

That caused his death. This was a new argument because it's a new concept that's been introduced by the pharmaceutical company. This form of depression was different from the depression in the Japanese psychological literature, that full-on psychosis, because it hadn't resulted from a defect in Oshima's brain. It was brought on by his life. It was a type of depression that could happen to anyone.

That was the key. His parents won the case. The ruling suggested that anyone put under enough stress could succumb to depression. But all of that is true, though. I mean, that is true. If you subject someone to that kind of stress, of course they're going to be depressed. Of course they're going to get to a point where- Well, you're using the term depressed because you have the memetic virus. You think of it in that term. But what else could he be? 50 years ago in Japan, you'd be like, yeah, he's exhausted. He needs a rest. Depression doesn't come into it. It

It's a completely different thing. But essentially they overworked him to death. Yeah. But this was the opportunity for GlaxoSmithKline to leap on this. Because the difference is not to let them rest. It's to keep them going with the drug. Well, now it's a thing that anyone can catch. Now it's not some obscure mental illness that comes from your brain. You're working hard, which is like all of the salary men. You could catch this depression. Yeah.

And so after this was the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and all these Western like aid groups came in and they said, look, all these people affected by the earthquake, they don't just need food and shelter. They need psychological help for their emotional and mental health, which is true. But this was another vector where it's like, it's slowly starting to be injected by the West.

And Japanese psychiatrists were like, what's going on? All these people were coming forward with their emotional, psychological stress. And these psychologists were like, hang on, we treat people that are in straitjackets for like 10 years in the mental institution. What do all these people want? Unhappiness had never been connected to a mental health issue.

No, it's a normal state that people experience in response to normal life experience. But now the general public was starting to get this idea, the memetic virus was starting to be injected that, oh, if you're unhappy, you might have this thing called depression. Luckily, GlaxoSmithKline, they've got the cure. Paxil. And they were ready to go. The major problem they faced was the term Utsuboyo that I mentioned earlier, linked to that full-on psychosis.

So they came up with this ingenious marketing and they started to run these ads. I don't know how they got around the rules. I think online you can do whatever you want, but TV and radio you can't. They came up with a metaphor called Kokoro no Kaze.

which translates in English to a cold for the soul. Oh. That's what they called it. That's actually, that's very sinister. Because think about it. Everyone gets a cold. Of course. Anyone can get a cold. No social stigma if you get a cold. Yeah. And if you get a cold, medication, pretty simple, pretty easy. Take a pill, you get some syrup. It's simple. Suddenly depression was the same thing. A cold of the soul.

They started to show television advertisements showing a young woman standing in a field asking, how long has it been? How long has it been since you began to worry that it might be depression? Do not endure. Go see a doctor, says the voiceover.

Articles start to run, 26-page cover stories of businessmen who are now unhappy and suffering from this depression. The estimates of how many Japanese secretly suffered from depression, according to the Western experts, went from 3% to 17% of the population, and it was increasing every month. GlaxoSmithKline promoted the idea that there was an enormous economic cost for untreated depression, which could be counted in lost man hours and decreased productivity.

And then they finally got their windfall. It was rumored for years that Crown Princess Misako suffered from depression. Soon it was revealed that she was taking antidepressants as part of her treatment, and this got a huge boost for the profile of depression.

This pharmaceutical company had successfully injected the meme into Japanese society. Japan was now suffering from Western depression and Big Pharma had the cure ready to go. By 2004, Paxil had captured 50% of the Japanese antidepressant market, which was valued at over 65 billion yen that year.

By 2010, their total sales in Japan for the year, that year alone, were $3 billion. So in that small amount of time, that's a decade.

They took a culture that had no understanding of the Western idea of depression. In fact, they outright rejected it from the DSM. In 10 years, the pharmaceutical company comes in and successfully injects this meme virus. And within 10 years, they're making, what was that? $3 billion a year in sales of these SSRIs to the Japanese population. Well, the

Actually, this is kind of unique in the sense that you can monitor this, right? Did it have an overall positive effect on Japanese society? No, because the rest of the book is about the research that came out after the case that you mentioned in the United States. The SSRIs

They make people more depressed and more likely to commit suicide. Suicide rates kept on going up. It didn't fix anything. Well, that's one of the warnings you get here with any diagnosis of, not diagnosis, sorry, any prescription of antidepressant medications or SSRIs, that there's a warning. There's a little label that you can put on the side. Pharmacists have to put it on. I worked in a pharmacy years ago. You have to put a label on the side that initially can cause suicidal ideation.

Yeah. And they go, oh, that's because you're so depressed that when you start taking the SSRI, suddenly you start to feel better. And when you start to feel better, there's a period where you might feel like you're capable of killing yourself. What? Yeah. And the fundamental link, the fundamental understanding of how the drugs work was that they increase serotonin and serotonin is connected to-

Yeah, but isn't it amazing it's coming out now that actually you've got more serotonin receptors in your gut than you do in your brain. It's like how diet and microbiome actually cause considerable changes in your depressed state. And from what I was reading in the book towards the final chapters, he goes in, even back then in 2009, he was showing the data and the follow-up studies that showed increasing serotonin, again, leads to more depression, leads to...

you're more likely to commit suicide. Increasing serotonin does not help you. It's like it's just creating another imbalance. So the book is The Globalization of the American Psyche, Crazy Like Us by Ethan Waters. I'll link to it in the show notes. Pretty eye-opening. I didn't think I'd be doing a segment on anorexia in Hong Kong for this episode. There's always a first for everything then. But yeah, highly recommended. Definitely check that out.

And we're at the end of this free section of the show. Adios if you're on YouTube and listening to the free audio, the free podcast. Lots more coming up though.

What have you got again? Spooky fog? We are going to be talking about these strange green mists that seem to envelop people into these strange, high strangeness experiences, which I said strange twice, doesn't matter. We're also going to be going into some really obscure UFO reports and, of course, encounters with hidden dimensions that exist around us. That's right. The island from Lost. That's right. In real life. Yes.

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