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

by Johann Hari

The vast majority of research into whether drugs work or not is funded by big pharmaceutical companies, and they do this research for a specific reason: they want to be able to market those drugs so they can make a profit out of them. That’s why the drug companies conduct their scientific studies in secret, and afterward, they only publish the results that make their drugs look good, or that make their rivals’ drugs look worse.

Here is a treatment that has very few side effects, is not expensive, doesn’t require a trained or licensed professional to prescribe it, and has pretty good evidence of efficacy so far.” But the research is very hard to find funding for, he said, because “a lot of the shape of modern biomedical research has been defined by the pharmaceutical industry,” and they’re not interested because “it’s very hard to commercialize nature contact.” You can’t sell it, so they don’t want to know.

The cruelest thing about depression, she said, is that it drains you of the desire to be as fully alive as this—to swallow experience whole.

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.