University of Toronto professor, best-selling author, cultural phenomenon etc etc, Jordan Peterson, on Joe Rogan’s show, talking about his life-long depression.
Here’s the transcript: (starts 4:35 in, but the whole 30 minute interview is interesting — particularly because Peterson says the carnivore diet has made a radical difference in his life).
PETERSON: I’ve had depression since I was 13, probably, and very severe, and I’ve treated it a variety of ways, some of them quite successfully. But it’s been a constant battle, and my father had it, and his father had it, it’s just rife in my family……How do you define it?
Well, imagine that you wake up and that you remember that all your family was killed in a horrible accident yesterday. [I would feel that] all the time.
ROGAN: You would feel that even if nothing was wrong?
PETERSON: Yes. It’s actually worse than that. One of the things Michaela (his daughter) told me was she thought,’Well, what’s it like to be depressed’? Well, imagine you have a dog and you really love the dog and then the dog dies. And then about 2 or 3 years ago, our dog died — it was Michaela’s dog, and she really liked that dog — and she said ‘That was bad, but it’s nowhere near as bad as being depressed.”
And I asked her, too, at one point when she was about 16, ‘Look you’ve got a choice, kid. Here’s the choice. You can either have depression or [her autoimmune] arthritis. Which one?’ [She said], ‘I’ll take the arthritis.’ Well, that was after she’d lost two joints. So it was no joke.
It’s no joke, man. There isn’t any — I wouldn’t say that, I wouldn’t say there’s nothing worse, because “worse” is a very deep hole — but it’s bad.
Then he spends about 30 minutes talking about what’s been a remarkable help for the two months he’s been on it — a pure carnivore diet. I don’t doubt it’s helped Peterson, at all, but as Rogan asks, from whence come his vitamins? Peterson tries to answer that question, but he acknowledges it’s sort of an experiment. (And by the way, you can’t really take Vitamin C supplements on this diet because they’ve got corn starch and other things that violate it).
Later on, he talked about going off his diet briefly, and the return of his depression — or as he describes it — the “overwhelming sense of impending doom. Seriously, I mean overwhelming. Like, there’s no way I could have lived like that…. [lie] in bed frozen in something approximating terror. ”
I don’t think people without this condition have any idea of the sleepless sense of doom and terror. Here’s hoping the diet continues to help him.
There’s overwhelming evidence that diet plays a major role in depression (particularly, through its effect on gut bacteria).
