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

by Johann Hari

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. You have to be in it together—and “it” can be anything that you both think has meaning and value.

And when you are a patient in a hospital bed, you’re not alone—but the help flows only one way. The nurse is there to help you, but you aren’t there to help the nurse—and if you try, you’ll be told to stop. A one-way relationship can’t cure loneliness. Only two-way (or more) relationships can do that.

Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said—it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else.

If you have lots of people around you—perhaps even a husband or wife, or a family, or a busy workplace—but you don’t share anything that matters with them, then you’ll still be lonely. To end loneliness, you need to have a sense of “mutual aid and protection,” Jo...

a self-help cliché that people say to each other all the time, and share on Facebook incessantly. We say to each other: “Nobody can help you except you.”

We have begun to think: I will look after myself, and everybody else should look after themselves, as individuals. Nobody can help you but you. Nobody can help me but me. These ideas now run so deep in our culture that we even offer them as feel-good bromides to people who feel down—as if it will lift them up.

He pioneered a school of thinking differently about the brain, and it’s come to be known as “social neuroscience.”

“This notion that the brain is static and fixed is not accurate. It changes.” Being lonely will change your brain; and coming out of loneliness will change your brain—so if you’re not looking at both the brain and the social factors that change it, you can’t understand what’s really going on.

Two commercials—just two—did that. Today, every person sees way more advertising messages than that in an average morning. More eighteen-month-olds can recognize the McDonald’s M19 than know their own surname. By the time an average child is thirty-six months old,20 she already knows a hundred brand logos.

tracked the percentage of total U.S. national wealth that’s spent on advertising, from 1976 to 2003—and he discovered that the more money is spent on ads, the more materialistic teenagers become.

“Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you’re a loser. Kids are very sensitive to that … You open up emotional vulnerabilities, and it’s very easy to do with kids because they’re the most emotionally vulnerable.”

If you believe that your depression is due solely to a broken brain, you don’t have to think about your life, or about what anyone might have done to you. The belief that it all comes down to biology protects you, in a way, for a while. If you absorb this different story, though, you have to think about those things. And that hurts.

It’s hard to describe what depression and acute anxiety feel like. They are such disorientating states that they seem to escape language,

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s research into these questions—distilled in their book The Spirit Level—has made them two of the most influential social scientists in the world.

Just asking these questions—as you have to when inequality grows—loads more and more stress into our lives.

This is not something that separates you from the world. It’s something, actually, you share with countless others.” We need to see “this is not just my personal problem,” he said, but “a shared problem—and attributable to the kind of society we live in.

“We have been animals that move for a lot longer than we have been animals that talk and convey concepts,” she said to me. “But we still think that depression can be cured by this conceptual layer. I think [the first answer is more] simple. Let’s fix the physiology first. Get out. Move.”

The scientific evidence is clear that exercise significantly reduces depression and anxiety.11 She thinks this is because it returns us to our more natural state—one where we are embodied, we are animal, we are moving, our endorphins are rushing. “I do not think that kids or adults who are not moving, and are not in nature for a certain amount of time, can be considered fully healthy animals,” she says.

scientists have compared people who run on treadmills in the gym12 with people who run in nature, they found that both see a reduction in depression—but it’s higher for the people who run in nature.

all humans have a natural sense of something called “biophilia.”13 It’s an innate love for the landscapes in which humans have lived for most of our existence, and for the natural web of life that surrounds us and makes our existence possible.

When you are depressed—as Isabel knows from her own experience—you feel that “now everything is about you.” You become trapped in your own story and your own thoughts, and they rattle around in your head with a dull, bitter insistence. Becoming depressed or anxious is a process of becoming a prisoner of your ego, where no air from the outside can get in. But a range of scientists have shown that a common reaction15 to being out in the natural world is the precise opposite of this sensation—a feeling of awe.

Faced with a natural landscape, you have a sense that you and your concerns are very small, and the world is very big—and that sensation can shrink the ego down to a manageable size. “It’s something larger than yourself,”

I had noticed something else about my depression and anxiety over the years. It often made me feel, in some peculiar way, radically shortsighted. When it came, I would only be able to think about the next few hours: how long they would seem, and how painful they would be. It was as if the future vanished.

she always knew her depression was lifting when she felt her sense of time expanding again—she would find herself able to think about where she would be a month from then or a year from then.

196 First Nations groups, the Canadian term for the Native American groups who were able to survive this European invasion—albeit on reservations,

preventing them from having any say over how they lived. This continued until a few decades ago. The result was that the people who had gone through all this—and their children—had the highest levels of suicide in the country.

lack of community control was a massive and major factor.

Michael had been curious about one of the oldest and most fundamental questions humans have—How do you develop your sense of identity?

What is the connecting thread that runs from your baby self, vomiting out teething biscuits, to the person who is reading this book now? Will you be the same person twenty years from now? If you met her, would you recognize her? What is the relationship between you in the past and you in the future? Are you the same person all along?

Just as they couldn’t see who Jean Valjean would be in the future, it turned out they couldn’t see who they, as individuals, would be in the future, either. For them, the future had disappeared. Asked to describe themselves five or ten or twenty years from now,8 they were at a loss. It was like a muscle they couldn’t work.9

extremely depressed people have become disconnected from a sense of the future,

A sense of a positive future protects you. If life is bad today, you can think—this hurts, but it won’t hurt forever. But when it is taken away, it can feel like your pain will never go away.

Angela thought she would get better at it and the work would become tolerable until finally she got a proper job.

When I asked her to describe how she felt doing this work, she paused. “It’s like being squeezed—like trying to fit down a very tight tube all the time.

you’ve been relegated to the shitty world where people can tell you you’re not good enough and fire you like that”—and she snapped her fingers.

Angela felt she had regressed back beyond even what her grandmother had in the 1930s. She was auditioning for her job every hour, every call, she said. It made her feel “frightened of going in to work,” she says, “because of how horrible the day would be, and the fear that this would be the day I really fucked up and got fired, and then we would be in trouble.”

she could never shake off “that sense of having no future.” She couldn’t plan even a few days ahead.

talking about mortgages and pensions, it sounded to her almost utopian—dispatches from a co...

“It completely takes away any sense of identity that you might have, and replaces it with shame and worry and fear … What are you? I’m nothing. What are you?” She couldn’t conjure any sense of herself in the future that looked any different from the way it did today: “I’m terrified of being...

For the past thirty years, across almost all of the Western world, this kind of insecurity has been characterizing work for more and more people.

When Angela had a sense of a positive future, back when we were students, she had been a whirl of positivity.

There was a window when people on middle-class and working-class incomes had some sense of security and could plan for the future. That window has been closing, as a direct result of political decisions to free businesses from regulation and to make it very hard for workers to organize to protect their rights, and what we are losing is a predictable sense of the future.

Working this way meant she couldn’t create a picture of herself in a few months, never mind in a few years, or a few decades.

She mentioned in passing that she was thirty-seven years old, which took me aback. And then she said something that stayed with me long after the election. She described what the area was like when her grandparents lived there, and you could work in a factory and have a middle-class life—and she made a verbal slip. She meant to say “when I was young.” What she actually said was “when I was alive.”

“I am trying to live a life I do not understand.”

Angela—and my other friends who have been swallowed into the precariat—can’t make sense of their lives, either: the future is constantly fragmenting. All the expectations they were raised with for what comes next seem to have vanished.

When you have a stable picture of yourself in the future, she explained, what it gives you is “perspective—doesn’t it? You are able to say—‘Okay, I’m having a shitty day. But I’m not having a shitty life.’

But instead, she got trapped in the precariat. And after that, nothing happened.

How does your brain change when you are deeply distressed?2 Do those changes make it harder to recover?

my brain was physically broken, and it would have to be fixed with drugs. Was that story right all along? When I said that, he looked sad and said no, it doesn’t mean that at all.