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

by Johann Hari

When we talk about home today, we mean just our four walls and (if we’re lucky) our nuclear family. But that’s never been what home has meant to any humans before us. To them, it meant a community—a dense web of people all around us, a tribe. But that is largely gone. Our sense of home has shriveled so far and so fast it no longer meets our need for a sense of belonging. So we are homesick even when we are at home.

When he put lonely people into brain-scanning machines, he noticed something. They would spot potential threats within 150 milliseconds, while it took socially connected people twice as long, 300 milliseconds, to notice the same threat. What was happening? Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most. John calls this a “snowball” effect, as disconnection spirals into more disconnection. Lonely people are scanning for threats because they unconsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt. This snowball effect, he learned, can be reversed—but to help a depressed or severely anxious person out of it, they need more love, and more reassurance, than they would have needed in the first place.

“When people have these kind of problems, it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them,” he said, “and time to start asking what happened to them.”

The more unequal your society, the more prevalent all forms of mental illness are.

For a long time, we have been told there are only two ways of thinking about depression. Either it’s a moral failing—a sign of weakness—or it’s a brain disease. Neither has worked well in ending depression, or in ending its stigma. But everything I had learned suggests that there’s a third option—to regard depression as largely a reaction to the way we are living.

Human life, he says, is like a big warm coal fire that is glowing. But if you take out one coal and isolate it, it’ll burn out quickly. We keep each other warm, he stays, by staying together.

You need to tell somebody what has happened to you, and you need to know they don’t regard you as being worth less than them.

There is evidence—from other scientific studies—that shame makes people sick. For example, closeted gay men, during the AIDS crisis, died on average two to three years earlier5 than openly gay men, even when they got health care at the same point in their illness. Sealing off a part of yourself and thinking it’s disgusting poisons your life. Could the same dynamic be at work here?

You have to turn now to all the other wounded people around you, and find a way to connect with them,7 and build a home with these people—a place where you are bonded to one another and find meaning in your lives together. We have been tribeless and disconnected for so long now. It’s time for us all to come home.