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by
Johann Hari
This is called “publication bias.”7 Of all the studies drug companies carry out, 40 percent are never released to the public, and lots more are only released selectively, with any negative findings left on the cutting room floor.
And what the trial found is that the drugs worked. Some 67 percent of patients did feel better, just like I did in those first months. But then they found something else. Within a year, half of the patients were fully depressed again. Only one in three of the people who stayed on the pills28 had a lasting, proper recovery from their depression. (And even that exaggerates the effect—since we know many of those people would have recovered naturally without the pills.)
“the grief exception.”3 They said that you are allowed to show the symptoms of depression and not be considered mentally ill in one circumstance and one circumstance only—if you have recently suffered the loss of somebody close to you. After you lose (say) a baby, or a sister, or a mother, you can show these symptoms for a year before you are classed as mentally ill. But if you continued to be profoundly distressed after this deadline, you will still be classified as having a mental disorder. As the years passed and different versions of the DSM were published, the time limit changed: it was
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Joanne had a patient whose daughter was abducted from the park during her first semester at college and burned alive. How can we tell that mother that she has a mental health problem, she asked me, because she is still in agony about it many years later? Yet that is what the DSM says.
example—if you didn’t have any friends, and you didn’t have a supportive partner, your chances of developing depression when a severe negative life event came along were 75 percent.12 It was much more likely than not. It turned out that every bad thing that happened to you, every source of stress, every lack of support—each one accelerated the risks of depression more and more.
These questions seemed too big, too revolutionary, to process. They are still ignored today—although later, I began to explore what they could mean.
Between 2011 and 2012,2 the polling company Gallup conducted the most detailed study ever carried out of how people across the world feel about their work. They studied millions of workers across 142 countries.
If you worked in the civil service and you had a higher degree of control10 over your work, you were a lot less likely to become depressed or develop severe emotional distress than people working at the same pay level, with the same status, in the same office, as people with a lower degree of control over their work.
Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.
When John and his colleagues added up the data,1 they were startled. Feeling lonely, it turned out, caused your cortisol levels to absolutely soar—as much as some of the most disturbing things that can ever happen to you. Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found,2 was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack.
I was standing in front of the first dedicated rehabilitation center for Internet and gaming addicts25 in the United States that Hilarie cofounded a decade ago, called reSTART Life.
Then they offered these four- or five-year-old kids a choice. They told them: You have to choose, now, to play with one of these two boys here. You can play with this little boy who has the toy from the commercials—but we have to warn you, he’s not a nice boy. He’s mean. Or you can play with a boy who doesn’t have the toy, but who is really nice.
In the program, there were some stars—people who shed remarkable amounts of weight, remarkably quickly. The medical team—and all their friends—expected these people who had been restored to health to react with joy. Except they didn’t react that way.
They called it the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study
vulnerable you were and are. You can become the powerful one. If it’s your fault, it’s under your control.
Both groups of kids were equally sick, and their distress levels were similar. Yet the anorexic kids could answer these questions normally, while the depressed kids couldn’t. “Almost unique to the suicidal group was a kind of across-the-board failure to be able to understand how a person could go on being the same individual,”
Your genes can certainly make you more vulnerable, but they don’t write your destiny.
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.”
