This became a quite personal question for her when she was writing up some of her research at an Oxford college. Shut inside all day, trying to work, she found herself depressed for the first time in her life. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t bring her mind to focus on how to get out of her terrible sense of pain. She took antidepressants, but like most people who take them, she was still depressed. She started to ask herself: Could her own depression be linked to the depression she’d seen in the caged bonobos? What if, she wondered, humans become more depressed when we are deprived of access to
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