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

by Johann Hari

If you can be happy for others, there’s always going to be a supply of happiness available to you. Vicarious joy is going to be available millions of ways every single day.

things she had been trained by the culture to envy were in fact the least valuable things we have: “Who’s envious of someone else’s good character? Who’s envious of somebody else’s wonderful treatment of their spouse? You’re not envious of that. You might admire that. You’re not envious of it. You’re envious of other shit: you’re envious of what people have materially, or status-wise.” As the meditation progressed across the years, Rachel began to see that even if she got those things, they wouldn’t make her happy. They’re not what matters.

It’s as though the loving-kindness meditation works a muscle that helps us resist and counteract the worst of our culture. It’s not so much what happens in those fifteen minutes—Rachel has come to feel that “you’re planting seeds during the meditation, [and] it flowers spontaneously during your day, and your life.”

three different kinds of causes of depression—biological, psychological, and social.

Why did meditation make people feel they were being changed in a way that was mystical—and what did that even mean?

The way people described feeling when they took psychedelics was strikingly similar to the way people said they felt if they had a deep, sustained program of meditation.

“I was very careful about what I said, and just overmonitored myself,”

“the more open I am, and the more revealing I am, the more I’m going to get from anything.” He felt his anxiety had—to a significant degree—been replaced with a sense of wonder.

“You know—we always have this part of ourselves which is always judging, which is always looking at ourselves or other people, over-monitoring,” he told me. “And I was [at that moment] in this place where my ego was just gone. I mean, they describe [it as] ego-death. But ‘I’ didn’t have any place in this. It was just totally shut off.” And for the first time in his life, Mark could feel “there’s no judgment. There’s compassion, an incredible sense of compassion for yourself and everyone

the experience made clear to him that people need a sense “of being accepted, to have some sense of importance, and to be loved.

I can give that to anyone at any time, and it’s that simple. It’s just paying attention. It’s just being with people. It’s loving.”

A large majority had more “positive attitudes about themselves and about life, better relationships with others, [and they became] more compassionate.” It’s precisely what has been shown to happen with meditators too.

the long-term meditators had plenty of words, because to them, the drug seemed to be bringing them, they said, to “the same place” that really deep meditation,

They both, he said, break our “addiction to ourselves.”

Mark built up walls, as an isolated ten-year-old, to defend himself against the grief for his father that he couldn’t voice to anyone. But as he grew older, those protective walls became a prison, preventing him from living fully.

you can see beyond your ego. You gain a radically different sense of perspective on yourself. As Fred put it to me, these experiences teach you that “you don’t have to be controlled by your concept of yourself.”

“Depression is a kind of constricted consciousness,” Bill Richards, who also led the experiments at Johns Hopkins, told me. “You could say people have forgotten who they are, what they’re capable of, have gotten stuck … Many depressed people can only see their pains, and their hurts, and their resentments, and their failures.

I had built up my ego—my sense of importance in the world—to protect me,

Our egos protect us. They guard us. They are necessary. But when they grow too big, they cut us off from the possibility of connection.

Taking them down, then, isn’t something to be done casually. To people who feel safe only behind walls, dismantling their walls won’t feel like a jail break; it will feel like an invasion.

the insights she had gained through the psychedelic experience couldn’t be maintained in the outside world as it currently exists.

What they do is give you—when the experience goes well—a remarkable sense of connection, for a very short period. “The value of the experience,” Andrew told me, is to “show you the possibility”—how connection can make you feel. Then, he says, “it’s up to you to find other ways to maintain the experience.”

Its value is not as a drug experience but as a learning experience. And you need to keep practicing the lesson, one way or another. If you have this intense experience, and then return to disconnection, it won’t last. But if you use it to build a deeper, longer sense of connection—beyond materialism and ego—it might. It shows you what we’ve lost, and what we still need.

Not everyone has to follow his path to get here, Mark told me. You can pull the plug on the things that are fragmenting us—the junk values and the egotism they create—in many ways. Some people will do it with psychedelics; more people will do it with loving-kindness meditation—and we need to look at exploring many other techniques too. But whatever way you choose, he says, “it’s not a trick of the mind. It’s an opening of the mind that allows you to see … [the] things that are inside you already.”

uncovered the startling evidence about the role childhood trauma plays in causing depression and anxiety later in life.

was told to look at the patient’s trauma questionnaire, and if the patient had suffered a childhood trauma, the doctors were given a simple instruction. They were told to say something like: “I see you had to survive X or Y in your childhood. I’m sorry that happened to you—it shouldn’t have. Would you like to talk about those experiences?” If the patient said she did, the doctor was told to express sympathy, and to ask: Do you feel it had negative long-term effects on you?1 Is it relevant to your health today?

the purpose was for them to see that an authority figure, who they trusted, would offer them real compassion for what they’d gone through.

the patients who had their trauma compassionately acknowledged by an authority figure seemed to show a significant reduction in their illnesses

There is a great deal of evidence—as I discussed before—that a sense of humiliation plays a big role in depression.

“I’m not saying this as a religious person—because I’m not [religious]—but confession has been in use for eighteen hundred years. Maybe it meets some basic human need if it’s lasted that long.” 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.

Most people are working all the time, and they are insecure about the future. They are exhausted, and they feel as if the pressure is being ratcheted up every year. It’s hard to join a big struggle when it feels like a struggle to make it to the end of the day. Asking people to take on more—when they’re already run down—seems almost like a taunt.

universal basic income.

It is a well-established fact that the poorer you are, the more likely you are to become depressed or anxious—and the more likely you are to become sick in almost every way.

“It just removed the stress—or reduced the stress—that people dealt with in their everyday lives,” Evelyn concludes. You knew you’d have a secure income next month, and next year, so you could create a picture of yourself in the future that was stable.

this tells us something fundamental about the nature of depression. “If it were just a brain disorder,” she told me, “if it was just a physical ailment, you wouldn’t expect to see such a strong correlation with poverty,” and you wouldn’t see such a significant reduction from granting a guaranteed basic income.

the need for a program like this—across all societies—has only grown.

“people are struggling to find that kind of stability in labor today … I don’t think those days are ever coming back. We live in a globalized world. The world has changed, fundamentally.”

a brilliant Dutch economic historian named Rutger Bregman. He is the leading European champion of the idea of a universal basic income.

Even middle-class people are living with a chronic “lack of certainty” about what their lives will be like in even a few months’ time,

People will be free to create businesses based on things they believe in, to run Kotti-style projects to improve their community,

restoring a secure future to people who are losing the ability to see one for themselves;

You’re a human being. You only live once. What would you want to do [instead]—something you don’t want to do?’ ”

The real story, I would explain, has been known to scientists for decades. Depression and anxiety have three kinds of causes—biological, psychological, and social. They are all real, and none of these three can be described by something as crude as the idea of a chemical imbalance. The social and psychological causes have been ignored for a long time, even though it seems the biological causes don’t even kick in without them.

“Mental health is produced socially:

“the dominant biomedical narrative of depression” is based on “biased and selective use of research outcomes” that “cause more harm than good, undermine the right to health, and must be abandoned.”

while there is some role for medications, we need to stop using them “to address issues which are closely related to social problems.” We need to move from “focusing on ‘chemical imbalances’ to focusing on ‘power imbalances.’

You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated.

Every human being has these needs, and in our culture, we’re relatively good at meeting physical needs—almost nobody actually starves,

But we’ve become quite bad at meeting these psychological needs. That’s a crucial reason why you—and so many of the people ar...

You will try to get rid of the depressed feelings in your head. But that won’t work unless you get rid of the causes of the depressed feelings in your life.