The Reason for Almost All Mental Illnesses - Prof. Jordan Peterson

okay so let's go back to the complexity problem you see I I actually think it's the in some sense it's the fundamental problem when when you read about the teror management theorist types they think that death is the fundamental problem and that's a good argument because it is definitely a fundamental problem but I think it's a subset of the complexity problem and and the reason I think that is because sometimes people's lives become so complex that they'd rather be dead so and the reason they seek death when through suicide is to make the complexity go

away because complexity causes suffering if it's uncontrolled you know things just get beyond your control um and that can happen you know if you're hit by three or four catastrophes at the same time you know maybe you have oh the political system collapses there's hyperinflation you lose your job and you have someone that you love or two people die and maybe you get cancer something like that like that those things happen to people and they just think well there's no getting out of this like it's just too much and you know one of the things

that's very interesting about being a psychologist is that what you learn if you're going to be a psychologist is that people come to you with mental illnesses and that's almost never true people come to you because their lives are so damn complicated they cannot stay on top of them in any way that doesn't make it look like they're just going to get more complicated and so then that causes symptoms you know it's like it's this old idea sort of a metaphor for genetic susceptibility take a balloon and blow it up until it's beyond its tolerance

it's going to blow out at the weakest Point well that's sort of what a genetic susceptibility is if I just keep adding complexity on top of you at some point you'll blow out at your weakest point you know maybe you'll get physiologically ill maybe you'll start drinking maybe you'll develop an anxiety disorder maybe you'll get OCD maybe you'll get depressed whatever there'll be something about you that's the weakest point and if I just push that's where you blow out so that's a mental illness but those things almost never just happen sometimes but not very often

usually people have just been hammered like two or three different ways and then they collapse in the direction of their biological weakness and then maybe you put them back together but it's almost always a complexity related phenomena rather than a mental illness related phenomena not always but almost always