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

by Johann Hari

“You’ve got to pull yourself out of the materialistic environments—the environments that are reinforcing the materialistic values,” he says, because they cripple your internal satisfactions. And then, he says, to make that sustainable, you have to “replace them with actions that are going to provide those intrinsic satisfactions, [and] encourage those intrinsic goals.”

As I described before, for decades, psychiatrists have—in their training—been taught something called the bio-psycho-social model.22 They are shown that depression and anxiety have three kinds of causes:23 biological, psychological, and social. And yet almost nobody I know who has become depressed or severely anxious was told this story by their doctor—and most were not offered help for anything except their brain chemistry.