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by
Johann Hari
Read between
May 28 - June 4, 2023
that when there is a war on for the position of alpha male, the most stressed baboons are the ones at the top. But the vast majority of the time, the lower you are in the hierarchy, the more stressed you are; and the baboons at the very bottom of the pile, like Job, are stressed constantly.
The more unequal your society, the more prevalent all forms of mental illness are. Other social scientists then broke this down to look at depression specifically16—and found the higher the inequality, the higher the depression.
Cause Six: Disconnection from the Natural World
We know now from over a century of observing animals in captivity that when they are deprived of their natural habitat, they will often develop symptoms that look like extreme forms of despair. Parrots will rip their own feathers out. Horses will start unstoppably swaying. Elephants will start to grind their tusks—their source of strength and pride in the wild—against the walls of their cells until they are gnarled stumps. Some elephants in captivity are so traumatized2 they sleep upright for years, moving their bodies neurotically the whole time. None of these species ever behave this way in
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What they found was clear: the people who moved to green areas saw a big reduction in depression,6 and the people who moved away from green areas saw a big increase in depression.
So another British study decided to screen out that effect. They compared deprived inner-city areas that had some green space to very similar deprived inner-city areas without green space. Everything else—like levels of social connections—was the same. But it turned out there was less stress and despair in the greener neighborhood.
The biologist E. O. Wilson—one of the most important people in his field in the twentieth century—argued that 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.
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.
Cause Seven: Disconnection from a Hopeful or Secure Future
At some profound level, Michael had discovered, extremely depressed people have become disconnected from a sense of the future, in a way that other really distressed people have not. From this early research, though, it was hard to tell if these kids’ symptoms were a cause or an effect.
Around 20 percent of people in the United States and Germany have no job contract, but instead have to work from shift to shift. The Italian philosopher Paolo Virno says11 we have moved from having a “proletariat”—a solid block of manual workers with jobs—to a “precariat,” a shifting mass of chronically insecure people who don’t know whether they will have any work next week and may never have a stable job.
First, this sense of precariousness started with people in the lowest-paying jobs. But ever since, it has been rising further and further up the chain. By now, many middle-class people are working from task to task, without any contract or security. We give it a fancy name: we call it being “self-employed,” or the “gig economy”—as if we’re all Kanye playing Madison Square Garden. For most of us, a stable sense of the future is dissolving, and we are told to see it as a form of liberation.
Causes Eight and Nine: The Real Role of Genes and Brain Changes
The brain changes as you become depressed and anxious, and it changes again when you stop being depressed and anxious. It’s always changing in response to signals from the world.
What the leading scientists found—according to the National Institutes of Health overview of the best twin research—is that for depression, 37 percent of it is inherited, while for severe anxiety, it is between 30 and 40 percent. To give you a comparison, how tall you are is 90 percent inherited;12 whether you can speak English is zero percent inherited.
Everyone reading this will know somebody who became depressed, or anxious, yet seemingly had nothing to be unhappy about. It can be totally baffling: someone who looks to you like they have every reason to be happy is suddenly in total despair.
You can have everything a person could possibly need by the standards of our culture—but those standards can badly misjudge what a human actually needs in order to have a good or even a tolerable life. The culture can create a picture of what you “need” to be happy—through all the junk values I had been taught about—that doesn’t fit with what you actually need.
For a long time, depressed and anxious people have been told their distress is not real—that it is just laziness, or weakness, or self-indulgence.
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. This way is better, Marc said, because if it’s an innate biological disease, the most you can hope for from other people is sympathy—a sense that you, with your difference, deserve their big-hearted kindness. But if it’s a response
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“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.”
What if changing the way we live—in specific, targeted, evidence-based ways—could be seen as an antidepressant, too?
Reconnection One: To Other People
They wanted to know: Does trying consciously to make yourself happier actually work?1 If you decided—today, now—to dedicate more of your life to deliberately seeking out happiness, would you actually be happier a week from now, or a year from now?
If you deliberately try to become happy, you will not become happier—if you live in the United States. But if you live in Russia, Japan, or Taiwan, you will become happier.
In other words: in the West, we mostly have an individualistic way of looking at life. In Asia, they mostly have a collective way of looking at life.
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. Don’t be you. Be us. Be we. Be part of the group. Make the group worth it. The real path to happiness, they were telling me, comes from dismantling our ego walls—from letting yourself flow into other people’s stories and letting their stories flow into yours; from pooling your identity, from realizing that you were never you—alone, heroic, sad—all along.
Now, when I feel myself starting to slide down, I don’t do something for myself—I try to do something for someone else. I go to see a friend and try to focus very hard on how they are feeling and making them feel better. I try to do something for my network, or my group—or even try to help strangers who look distressed.
An Amish family isn’t like an English family, he explained. It’s not just your mom and dad and siblings. It’s a big interconnected tribe of about 150 people—all the Amish, in fact, who live within walking or buggy distance of your home.
If you can be everywhere—in vehicles, or online—you end up, he believes, being nowhere.
Reconnection Two: Social Prescribing
One day, a young Eastender came in who was feeling really down. Sam took out his pad, to give this man pills or refer him to a social worker. The man looked at him and said: “I don’t need a fucking social worker. I need a social worker’s wage.”
Creating a garden takes time and investment of energy and a commitment … You might not feel you’ve made much impact in one gardening session, but if you do that every week, over a period of time, you’ll see a change.” She was going to learn “it’s about commitment to something that might take a long time, and having the patience to do that.”
“It isn’t something that just happens. I think if you’re depressed, you can’t just go out and find a bit of garden and get stuck in it and you’ll feel better. It has to be managed and supported.” If people merely say “Oh, just go sit in a park, you’ll feel better; go for a walk in the woods, you’ll feel better,” she says: “Yeah, of course that’s true, but someone has to help you do it.”
There has, however, been a series of scientific studies of “therapeutic horticulture”4—getting people to try gardening to improve their mental health. None of the studies have been carried out on especially big groups or for a long time, and the studies aren’t perfectly designed, so we should handle them with some skepticism—but the results suggest there’s something here we should be looking at more. One study of depressed people in Norway found that a program like this moved people on average 4.5 points on the depression scale—more than double the effect of chemical antidepressants.
Reconnection Three: To Meaningful Work
If you can move to a job where you are controlled less, and have more autonomy, or are doing something you believe matters—do it. Your anxiety and depression levels will likely dip. But in a landscape where only 13 percent of people have jobs they find meaningful, that advice seems almost cruel.
It’s not the work itself that makes you sick. It’s three other things. It’s the feeling of being controlled—of being a meaningless cog in a system. It’s the feeling that no matter how hard you work, you’ll be treated just the same and nobody will notice—an imbalance, as he puts it, between efforts and rewards. And it’s the feeling of being low on the hierarchy—of being a low-status person who doesn’t matter compared to the Big Man in the corner office.
From this experience, she has learned that “people want to work. Everybody wants to work. Everybody wants to feel useful, and have purpose.”
Reconnection Four: To Meaningful Values
As they explored this in the conversation, it became clear quite quickly—without any prompting from Nathan—that spending often isn’t about the object itself. It is about getting to a psychological state that makes you feel better.
Just asking these two questions—“What do you spend your money on?” and “What do you really value?”—made most people see a gap between the answers that they began to discuss.
Tim had shown before that materialism correlates strongly with increased depression and anxiety. This experiment showed, for the first time, that it was possible to intervene in people’s lives in a way that would significantly reduce their levels of materialism.
Reconnection Five: Sympathetic Joy, and Overcoming Addiction to the Self
Sympathetic joy is a method for cultivating “the opposite of jealousy or envy … It’s simply feeling happy for other people.” Rachel guided me through how it works. You close your eyes and picture yourself. You imagine something good happening to you—falling in love, or writing something you’re proud of. You feel the joy that would come from that. You let it flow through you. Then you picture somebody you love, and you imagine something wonderful happening for them. You feel the joy from that, and you let that, too, flow through you.
“There’s always going to be shit coming into your life to be unhappy about. 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. If you want to look at other people and be happy for them, you can be happy every single day, regardless of what’s happening to you.”
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.
Some 80 percent of people who were given the highest dose of psilocybin said, two months later, that it was one of the five most important things that had ever happened to them.
The first is that while some people find it liberating to be released from their ego, some people find it absolutely terrifying. Around 25 percent of people in the Johns Hopkins studies had at least some moments of real terror.
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.
Reconnection Six: Acknowledging and Overcoming Childhood Trauma
