The cow was the solution
Dr. Derek Summerfield landed in Cambodia.
He was there to learn how land mines affected people’s mental health.
It turned out there was no obvious translation for the word “antidepressant” in the Khmer language. The idea of depression seemed to puzzle them.
Derek tried to explain it. The Cambodians thought about it carefully and said, yes, we do have some people like that: a farmer whose left leg was blown off by a land mine. He got fitted with a new limb but didn’t recover. He felt constantly anxious about the future and was filled with despair.
But they already had antidepressants for people like this. The doctors and his neighbors sat with him, and talked through his troubles. They realized that even with his new artificial limb, his old job—working in the rice paddies—was just too difficult.
So they had an idea.
Being a dairy farmer would involve less painful walking on his false
leg and fewer disturbing memories. They bought him a cow.
In the months that followed, his life changed. His depression went away.
“The cow was the antidepressant,” they told Derek.
It was a collective solution. He could never have gotten that cow on his own; he was too distressed, and anyway he didn’t have the cash.
This seems strange to most of us in the age of chemical antidepressants. The idea of a cow as an antidepressant seems almost like a joke. But here’s the thing. That Cambodian farmer did cease to be depressed when his social circumstances were changed.
Maybe we have been defining antidepressants the wrong way. What if changing the way we live—in specific, targeted, evidence-based ways—could be seen as an antidepressant, too?
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This is a gently modified excerpt from chapter 14 of a book called 'Lost Connections' by Johann Hari.