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

by Johann Hari

giving a person a story about why they are in pain is one of the most powerful things you can ever do.

We are told in our culture that depression is the ultimate form of irrationality: that’s how it feels from the inside, and that’s how it looks to the outside. But on the contrary, George and Tirril were reaching the conclusion that, as they wrote then, “clinical depression is an understandable response to adversity.”

It was only a long time into talking with these social scientists that I realized every one of the social and psychological causes of depression and anxiety they have discovered has something in common. They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.

The concept of “work hours” is vanishing for most people—so this thing that 87 percent of us don’t enjoy is spreading over more and more of our lives.

The worst stress for people isn’t having to bear a lot of responsibility. It is, he told me, having to endure “work [that] is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; [where] they die a little when they come to work each day, because their work touches no part of them that is them.”

Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most. John calls this a “snowball” effect, as disconnection spirals into more disconnection.

In other words, the advertisements led them to choose an inferior human connection over a superior human connection—because they’d been primed to think that a lump of plastic is what really matters.

You had everything a woman could possibly want by the standards of the culture. You had nothing to be unhappy about by the standards of the culture. But we now know that the standards of the culture were wrong. Women need more than a house and a car and a husband and kids. They need equality, and meaningful work, and autonomy.

If your picture of a perfect afterlife is being with the people you love all the time, he asked me, why wouldn’t you choose today—while you’re still alive—to be truly present with the people you love? Why would you rather be lost in a haze of distractions?

Advertising is only the PR team for an economic system that operates by making us feel inadequate and telling us the solution is to constantly spend.

Every doctor providing help to a Kaiser Permanente patient—for anything from hemorrhoids to eczema to schizophrenia—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 response to a huge crisis isn’t to go home and weep. It’s to go big. It’s to demand something that seems impossible—and not rest until you’ve achieved it.

Much more than you’ve been told up to now, it’s not serotonin; it’s society. It’s not your brain; it’s your pain.