Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

by Johann Hari

What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?

It wasn’t just a bad event that caused depression—it was also long-term sources of stress. And if you had some positive stabilizing things in your life, that massively reduced the chances of developing depression. For every good friend you had, or if your partner was more supportive and caring, it reduced depression by a remarkable amount.

We all lose some hope when we’re subjected to severe stress, or when something horrible happens to us, but if the stress or the bad events are sustained over a long period, what you get is “the generalization of hopelessness,” Tirril told me. It spreads over your whole life,15 like an oil slick, and you begin to want to give up.

To end loneliness, you need other people—plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you.

The feminist classics talk a lot about women like this. There were millions of women saying things just like it. And the women meant what they said. They were sincere. Yet now, if we could go back in a time machine and talk to these women, what we’d say is: You had everything a woman could possibly want by the standards of the culture. You had nothing to be unhappy about by the standards of the culture. But we now know that the standards of the culture were wrong. Women need more than a house and a car and a husband and kids. They need equality, and meaningful work, and autonomy.

need by the standards of our culture—but those standards can badly misjudge what a human actually needs in order to have a good or even a tolerable life. The culture can create a picture of what you “need” to be happy—through all the junk values I had been taught about—that doesn’t fit with what you actually need.19

The old story says our distress is fundamentally irrational, caused by faulty apparatus in our head. The new story says our distress is—however painful—in fact rational, and sane.

You’re not crazy to feel so distressed. You’re not broken. You’re not defective. He sometimes quotes the Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.”

I saw the error I had been making. Now, when I feel myself starting to slide down, I don’t do something for myself—I try to do something for someone else. I go to see a friend and try to focus very hard on how they are feeling and making them feel better. I try to do something for my network, or my group—or even try to help strangers who look distressed. I learned something I wouldn’t have thought was possible at the start. Even if you are in pain, you can almost always make someone else feel a little bit better. Or I would try to channel it into more overt political actions, to make the society better.

Joanne told me that grief is necessary. We grieve because we have loved. We grieve because the person we have lost mattered to us. To say that grief should disappear on a neat timetable is an insult to the love we have felt.