Title: Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions
Author: Johann Hari
Genre: Self-Help
Trigger Warnings: Starvation, fatphobia, sexual abuse mentions, suicide mentions, gendered slurs, psychedelic use
Back Cover:
Award-winning journalist Johann Hari suffered from depression since he was a child and started taking antidepressants when he was a teenager. He was told—like his entire generation—that his problem was caused by a chemical imbalance in his brain. As an adult, trained in the social sciences, he began to investigate this question—and he learned that almost everything we have been told about depression and anxiety is wrong.
Across the world, Hari discovered social scientists who were uncovering the real causes—and they are mostly not in our brains, but in the way we live today. Hari’s journey took him from the people living in the tunnels beneath Las Vegas, to an Amish community in Indiana, to an uprising in Berlin—all showing in vivid and dramatic detail these new insights. They lead to solutions radically different from the ones we have been offered up until now.
Just as Chasing the Scream transformed the global debate about addiction, with over twenty million views for his TED talk and the animation based on it, Lost Connections will lead us to a very different debate about depression and anxiety—one that shows how, together, we can end this epidemic.
Review:
I heard of this book because of a video on Facebook my fiance sent me where the author outlined the basic concepts of Lost Connections. He wanted me to laugh at the author with him, but what he was saying honestly didn’t seem that outlandish to me. So I put this book on my reading list to evaluate the claims in full.
That, and I have more than my fair share of mental health issues and I would love to improve them.
The basic premise of the book is that depression and anxiety, rather than being individual biological problems, are more influenced by society, especially how modern Western society has become disconnected – from meaningful work, from other people, from meaningful values, from childhood trauma, from status and respect, from the natural world, and from a secure future.
Johann gives quite a bit of anecdotal evidence – stories and interviews with people who felt depression and anxiety which improved when they reconnected with one (or more) of the things that he claims we’re disconnected from. But there is also a surprising about of hard evidence (experiments and published research) that environmental factors do strongly affect anxiety and depression. (There’s also quite a bit of research showing that antidepressants have little to no effect.)
I’m disconnected from pretty much everything listed, and some of the stories Johann writes about – with people feeling better by connecting to those things – actually made me tear up with how much I wanted a connection like that.
Lost Connections makes a compelling point, much of it backed up by actual research, and I’m sold. I have no idea how to change society to reflect that, but I’m definitely working towards changing my own environment to connect more.
Bluejay Reads 