How a Cow Became an Antidepressant for a Cambodian Farmer
There was a farmer in Cambodia.
He worked in the rice fields.
One day, he stepped on a landmine left behind from the war.
The blast took his leg.
Later, he was fitted with an artificial limb.
After a while, he went back to the fields.
That was his work.
That was what he knew.
But the work had changed.
It hurt to stand in the water with an artificial leg.
And every day, he was returning to the same place where the explosion had happened.
Soon, he began to cry all day.
He would not get out of bed.
He developed what looked like classic depression.
Around that time, Derek Summerfield was in Cambodia, teaching local doctors about antidepressants.
The doctors told him they already had antidepressants.
He thought they meant herbs.
They did not.
They told him about the farmer.
They had sat with him.
Listened to him.
Looked closely at his life.
And they understood something important:
His pain made sense.
So the community bought him a cow.
With the cow, he could become a dairy farmer.
He would not have to return to the rice fields.
He would not have to keep walking back into the place that was breaking him.
Within weeks, the crying stopped.
Within a month, the depression was gone.
The Cambodian doctors said, in effect:
The cow was the antidepressant.
Not every pain is a malfunction.
Sometimes pain is a signal.
A signal that something in your life keeps hurting you.
A signal that a need has gone unmet for too long.
A signal that what you’ve been calling “strength” may actually be silent endurance.
This does not mean every depression has a simple external cause.
It does not mean medication has no place.
It means some suffering deserves to be listened to before it is judged.
The farmer did not need someone to convince him his pain was irrational.
He needed someone to see that it wasn’t.
He did not need a better way to endure the rice fields.
He needed a life that stopped sending him back there.
So before asking only:
“How do I get rid of this feeling?”
Ask something deeper:
“What is this feeling trying to tell me?”
And then:
“What is the cow in my life?”
What practical change would remove you from the place that keeps hurting you?
What shift would make your life more livable, not just more manageable?
Because sometimes the answer is not more endurance.
It is a different field.
Inspired by Johann Hari’s TED Talk, “This Could Be Why You’re Depressed or Anxious,” and his book Lost Connections.
