Most People Are Treating the Wrong Problem
We medicate depression. We talk about anxiety. We scroll through articles about mental health at midnight while doing absolutely nothing to address what is actually wrong.
Psychologist Dr. Dan Franz, who joined Dave Rodriguez and Dimitri Snowden on The Vitality Journey Podcast after 30 years of clinical practice, offered a reframe that cuts through all of it. The opposite of depression is not happiness. It is connection.
That one sentence restructures the entire conversation. Because if depression is fundamentally a disconnection problem, then the solutions most people reach for first are either treating symptoms or making the root problem worse.
The Numbers Are Not in Question
One billion people worldwide are living with a mental health condition. One in five adults carries an anxiety disorder diagnosis. Twenty-one percent of adults reported depression symptoms in just the past two weeks. And only 14% of adults sought any form of professional mental health support in the last year.
As researcher Brene Brown puts it plainly: we are not okay.
Dr. Franz named what he sees underneath these statistics: an existential malaise. Not just clinical depression, not just diagnosable anxiety, but a low-grade fog that most people carry without ever labeling it. He goes further than the reported numbers. He believes all seven billion of us feel it at some point, on some level, daily.
Why We Got Here
Dr. Franz draws from the work of his mentor Viktor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy, who argued that a meaningful life requires responsibility. And as Frankl observed of the United States specifically: the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast needs a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast to balance it.
The argument is this: over the past century, free time and leisure have expanded dramatically. But our ability to use that freedom well has not kept pace. We fill it with screens. We fill it with the algorithmic choices that platforms make for us. And we have become, collectively, more inward.
That inward turn, Dr. Franz argues, is not how human beings are wired. We are built for contribution. We are built for community. When we have too much time to analyze ourselves and not enough invested in others, we drift. That drift is what the statistics are measuring.
Three Insights That Reframe the Conversation
1. Depression has a relational root, not just a biochemical one.
Johan Hari’s research in Lost Connections makes this case extensively. Dr. Franz confirms it from the clinical side. Many of the people who sit across from him in the worst seasons of their lives are not primarily lacking medication or a diagnosis. They are lacking genuine human connection. A community. A friend who knows the whole story. A relationship where they can be honest without performing.
2. Social media fills a gap it did not create.
The devices are not the source of the problem. They are an efficient way of numbing it. When people don’t know what to do with free time and don’t have deep community, platforms step in. They offer micro-belonging: small groups, sub-communities, the illusion of connection. But as Dr. Franz notes, they are optimized for engagement and revenue, not for the kind of meaning that actually sustains a person.
3. The path out runs through other people, not through better self-analysis.
When a 20-something sits in front of Dr. Franz, digitally immersed and self-diagnosed, his first prescription is not a framework. It is a direction: find someone or something to be of service to. This is Viktor Frankl’s concept of self-transcendence made practical. Give yourself over to something beyond yourself. Stop being the main character in your own suffering. When you are genuinely invested in someone else’s wellbeing, the inward spiral loses its grip.
What to Actually Do
Dr. Franz does not prescribe complicated systems to people who are struggling. He starts with habits. Here is what that looks like applied to the insights from this conversation:
- Audit your connections. Not your follower count. Your actual relationships. Who knows what is really going on with you? Who would you call at 10 p.m.? If the list is short or empty, that is the most important thing to work on.
- Find something to be of service to. It does not have to be grand. Coach a youth sports team. Volunteer once a month. Be the friend who shows up consistently. The specifics matter less than the direction: outward, not inward.
- Get intentional about what fills your time. If you do not decide, the devices will. Dr. Franz is not anti-technology. He is pro-meaningful decision. What do you choose to do with your free time, deliberately, on purpose? That question is more powerful than any app restriction.
- Change one habit. Dr. Franz’s clinical framework is simple: change habits, and you change mindset. Change mindset, and behavior follows. You do not have to fix everything. You have to change one thing and let the compound effect do the rest.
The Myth Worth Confronting
The myth: If I just understand myself better, I will feel better.
Dr. Franz sees this play out every week with younger clients who can speak about themselves in clinical terms with more fluency than most trained professionals. The self-analysis is deep. The healing is not happening. Because understanding the problem is not the same as moving through it.
The path out is not more introspection. It is engagement. With other people. With meaningful work. With habits that point you toward contribution rather than consumption.
The Bottom Line
If you feel a low-grade sense of something being off, and you’ve been trying to solve it by understanding it better or finding the right content or waiting until conditions improve, this conversation is worth your time.
The opposite of depression is connection. Start there.
Watch the full conversation with Dr. Franz on The Vitality Journey Podcast: HERE
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Full Transcript
Dave: That idea of connection. Johan Hari’s book, Lost Connections, says what I just heard you say: the opposite of depression is not happiness, it’s connection.
Dr. Franz: The opposite of depression is connection.
Dave: And that goes with the Harvard longitudinal study: the number one indicator of happiness is the quality and content of your relationships. When people come to you in a bad place, I’m guessing most of them don’t have the kind of relationships that sustain them.
Dr. Franz: Unfortunately, surprisingly, many people don’t have those kinds of connections. That is a lot of the problem that I see. These are not the things I was taught to treat in graduate school. You meet these criteria, you form a treatment plan, you have 10 to 12 sessions, and you’re terminated. I hate that word. Any more today, it is much more of a relational journey, and helping people find connection outside of my office.
Dave: Let me cover the real-world statistics about emotional and mental health. One billion people worldwide are living with a mental health condition such as anxiety or depression. One out of five adults is diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. 21% of adults report symptoms of depression in the past two weeks. And only about 14% of adults received some kind of counseling from a mental health professional in the last year. Brene Brown says we’re not okay. And only a small percentage are seeking help. How would you characterize the state of our emotional health as a society?
Dr. Franz: As Brene Brown says, we’re not okay. We are not in good shape. I would say it’s an existential malaise that we’re all feeling. It is just this constant state of meh, this existential malaise that we all feel more than just one billion. I would say it’s all seven billion of us who feel that at some point, sometime daily.
Dimitri: Looking at it from a corollary perspective, is it the water? Is it the food? Why can’t we see the correlation between an institution, a framework, a chemical, and identify the issue and remove it?
Dr. Franz: I think it’s the food supply. When we go to Europe and see how they eat and then we come home, we are not doing something right here. But that’s just one of the villains I focus on. My mentor Victor Frankl says that to have meaning, we need to be responsible. In the past hundred years, we have gained ever-increasing free time, leisure, and opportunity, and we don’t know what to do with it. We have lost our sense of responsibility. Frankl said this of the US: you have this beautiful Statue of Liberty on the East Coast, and it needs to be balanced with a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast. Too much freedom, too much leisure, and not enough responsibility.
Dimitri: Would you add too many choices?
Dr. Franz: Absolutely. I read something that said depression is actually quite selfish. Because you’re never depressed about someone else’s issues. You’re the main character. The correlation they were making was that back in the day, there was no time for depression. We had cows, we had hay, we had to build the village. There was no time to sit and be so inward about what’s not happening. This convenience factor, the affordance of time, has now made us turn inward. And we’re not built that way. I see that so much in our younger generation. Twenty-somethings are really struggling with that. They have a depth of self-analysis that goes too deep, too far.
Dimitri: Is that the Googling they’re doing?
Dr. Franz: The Googling, the WebMDing, the ChatGPTing, all of it. But I think it’s also these sub-micro groups. Everyone wants to belong. If I can just find one other person that’s like me, we’re going to create our own little group. Part of this is that social construct trying to fill in the cognitive and emotional gaps that exist.
Dave: How important is social media and technology in this picture?
Dr. Franz: A lot. Again, with so much free time and leisure opportunity, if we don’t know how to fill it, those devices will fill it for us. As Hari says in Stolen Focus, when we allow that to dictate our choices, we’re not making meaningful decisions. Something else is deciding for us. And it’s not always the most meaningful. It’s the most capitalistic, quite frankly.
Dave: So let’s just play this out. You have a 20-something client sitting in front of you. They’ve diagnosed themselves. They’re digitally immersed. What’s your encouragement to them?
Dr. Franz: Find something or someone else to be of service to. That’s right out of logotherapy and Victor Frankl’s work: to be of service, to transcend the self, to be self-transcendent, to give yourself over to something or someone. It is unselfish and one of the most meaningful things you can do.
Dave: So to your point about depression being selfish, the idea of emerging from deep emotional ill-health begins with: who are you investing in? Where are you serving somebody else?
Dr. Franz: Exactly. And it takes time. Therapy now, at least my therapy, is much more relational. Sometimes we do eight to twelve sessions, things are better, call me if you need me. And six months, a year, three years later, I got a text this morning from a gentleman I haven’t seen in at least 18 months. He said, are you still taking clients? I said, for you, absolutely. Let’s find a time.
Dave: You have a 20-year-old who’s struggling, not at the level of crisis. Where do you start? Is the recalibration biochemical? Is it programmatic?
Dr. Franz: Sometimes it’s pretty overwhelming. But we have to start somewhere. I’ve adopted this framework: if we’ve got a lot of issues going on, we can make a few small changes in a couple of areas. What habits do you want to form? How can we change this? By changing habits, we change mindset, change behavior, change attitude, and change the whole picture.