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

by Johann Hari

When I discussed some of the ideas I was putting forward in this book, one person I know said I’d just been taking the wrong pill—you should, he said, try Xanax instead. I was tempted. But then I realized—how can we say the solution to all the understandable pain and distress I’ve been describing is to take a tranquilizer, and for millions more people to take it, forever? Yet if I’m honest, that’s the kind of solution I craved. Something individual; something you can do alone, without any effort; something that takes twenty seconds to swallow every morning, so you can get on with life as it was before. If it couldn’t be chemical, I wanted some other trick, some switch I could flip to make it all fine. What this evidence was telling me was that this search for quick individual solutions is a trap. In fact, this search for individual solutions is part of what got us into this problem in the first place. We have become imprisoned inside our own egos, walled off where true connection cannot reach us. I started to think of one of the most banal, obvious clichés we have: Be you. Be yourself. We say it to one another all the time. We share memes about it. We say it to encourage people when they are lost, or down. Even our shampoo bottles tell us—because you’re worth it. But what I was being taught is—if you want to stop being depressed, don’t be you. Don’t be yourself.3 Don’t fixate on how you’re worth it. It’s thinking about you, you, you that’s helped to make you feel so lousy....