One of my sons recently told me about two books, both of which I've now gotten from Powell's Books and am reading. Lost Connections: Why You're Depressed and How to Find Hope is one. The below are quotes from its author. There are so many excellent books out there. Lost Connections and Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari are certainly among them. — Molly
We have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are.
My job now was to give meaning to my pain. And, perhaps, to our pain.
Depression and anxiety have three kinds of causes—biological, psychological, and social.
The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let’s get to the deeper problem.
When I started work on this book, I wanted quick solutions to my depression and anxiety—ones that I could pursue on my own, fast.
If you believe that your depression is due solely to a broken brain, you don’t have to think about your life, or about what anyone might have done to you. The belief that it all comes down to biology protects you, in a way, for a while. If you absorb this different story, though, you have to think about those things. And that hurts.
The
message my doctors gave me—that our pain is simply a result of a
malfunctioning brain—makes us, she told me, “disconnected from
ourselves, which leads to disconnection from others.”
* * * * *
And so the model is preserved. Depression is something you can find on a checklist. If you tick the boxes, you’re mentally ill. Don’t look for context. Look for symptoms. Don’t ask what is happening in the person’s life.
It
seemed like my story, played out line by line. I felt better at first;
the effect wore off; I tried increasing the dose, and then that wore
off, too. When I realized that antidepressants weren’t working for me
any more, that no matter how much I jacked up the dose, the sadness
would still seep back through, I assumed there was something wrong with
me.
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.
They wanted easy answers to complex fears.
Then one day, after interviewing several depressed people, I asked myself: What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should?
Joanne told me that grief is necessary. We grieve because we have loved. We grieve because the person we have lost mattered to us. To say that grief should disappear on a neat timetable is an insult to the love we have felt.
To say that if grief lasts beyond an artificial time limit, then it is a pathology, a disease to be treated with drugs, is—she believes—to deny the core of being human.
* * * * *
It
is foolish to deny there is a real biological component to depression
and anxiety (and there may be other biological contributions we haven’t
identified yet)—but it is equally foolish to say they are the only
causes.
Antidepressant drugs that increase serotonin in the brain have the same modest effect, in clinical trials, as drugs that reduce serotonin in the brain.
After twenty years researching this at the highest level, Irving has come to believe that the notion depression is caused by a chemical imbalance is just “an accident of history,” produced by scientists initially misreading what they were seeing, and then drug companies selling that misperception to the world to cash in.
You can’t escape it: when scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it is laced with antidepressants, because so many of us are taking them and excreting them that they simply can’t be filtered out of the water we drink every day. We are literally awash in these drugs.
The serotonin theory “is a lie. I don’t think we should dress it up and say, ‘Oh, well, maybe there’s evidence to support that.’ There isn’t.”
The primary explanation for depression offered in our culture starts to fall apart. The idea you feel terrible because of a “chemical imbalance” was built on a series of mistakes and errors. It has come as close to being proved wrong, he told me, as you ever get in science. It’s lying broken on the floor, like a neurochemical Humpty Dumpty with a very sad smile.
* * * * *
Depression isn’t a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences.
It
is true that something is happening in your brain when you become
depressed, he says, but that “is not a causal explanation”; it is “a
necessary intermediary mechanism.”
Anxiety and depression seem to him, he says, “rational reactions to the situation, as opposed to some kind of biological break."
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.
He told me: “This notion that the brain is static and fixed is not accurate. It changes.” Being lonely will change your brain; and coming out of loneliness will change your brain—so if you’re not looking at both the brain and the social factors that change it, you can’t understand what’s really going on.
* * * * *
Something has gone badly wrong with our culture. We've created a culture where really large numbers of the people around us can't bear to be present in their daily lives. They need to medicate themselves to get through their day.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make. The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad – it’s just that drug prohibition is even worse.
It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behavior – it’s the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him. As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you – it’s the cage you live in.
The opposite of addiction is human connection. And I think that has massive implications for the war on drugs. The treatment of drug addicts almost everywhere in the world is much closer to Tent City than it is to anything in Portugal. Our laws are built around the belief that drug addicts need to be punished to stop them. But if pain and trauma and isolation cause addiction, then inflicting more pain and trauma and isolation is not going to solve that addiction. It's actually going to deepen it.
More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal – the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites.
But
then I contrast this evidence with the evidence from Portugal. More
people used drugs, yet addiction fell substantially. Why? Because
punishment – shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable –
traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on
helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible
for many of them to.
The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection. It’s all I can offer. It’s all that will help him in the end. If you are alone, you cannot escape addiction. If you are loved, you have a chance. For a hundred years we have been singing war songs about addicts. All along, we should have been singing love songs to them.
* * * * *
The Internet was born into a world where many people had already lost their sense of connection to each other. The collapse had already been taking place for decades by then. The web arrived offering them a kind of parody of what they were losing – Facebook friends in place of neighbors, video games in place of meaningful work, status updates in place of status in the world. The comedian Marc Maron once wrote that “every status update is a just a variation on a single request: ‘Would someone please acknowledge me?
Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said—it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else. If you have lots of people around you—perhaps even a husband or wife, or a family, or a busy workplace—but you don’t share anything that matters with them, then you’ll still be lonely.
This showed that loneliness isn’t just some inevitable human sadness, like death. It’s a product of the way we live now.
It’s worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.
Lonely people are scanning for threats because they unconsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt.
The
tragedy, John realized, is that many depressed and anxious people
receive less love, as they become harder to be around. Indeed, they
receive judgment, and criticism, and this accelerates their retreat from
the world. They snowball into an ever colder place.
I
quickly discovered that this question has been studied even less than
the causes of depression and anxiety. You could fill aircraft hangars
with studies of what happens in the brain of a depressed person. You
could fill an aircraft with the research that’s been conducted into the
social causes of depression and anxiety. And you could fill a toy
airplane with the research into reconnection.
Sometimes, all you can do for a person is hold them. Sometimes, that is the most we can do. It’s a lot.
Dr. Anda—one of the pioneers of this research—told me it had forced him to turn his thinking about depression and other problems inside out. "Where people have these kinds of problems, it's time to stop asking what's wrong with them and time to start asking what happened to them."
* * * * *
The more unequal your society, the more prevalent all forms of mental illness are.
Today, we are living with status gaps that are bigger than any in human history. If you work for a company, in living memory it used to be that your boss would likely earn twenty times more than the average employee. It's now three hundred times more. The six heirs to the Walmart fortune own more than the bottom 100 million Americans. Eight billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of the human race.
The greatest trick the rich - and their cheerleaders on the right - ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn't exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.
Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart of poor health” – physical, mental, and emotional.”
* * * * *
It
is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy
the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. It is a logic
that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the
witch hunts to the present day.
The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.
The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If we don't begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives - and millions may die there.
* * * * *
There
is an emerging scientific consensus that global warming is making
hurricanes more intense and more destructive. It turns out that Katrina
fits into a pattern that scientists and greens have been trying to warn
us about for a long time.
The
climate-change deniers are rapidly ending up with as much intellectual
credibility as creationists and Flat Earthers. They are nudging close to
having the moral credibility of Holocaust deniers.
* * * * *
We are being propagandized to live in a way that doesn’t meet our basic psychological needs—so we are left with a permanent, puzzling sense of dissatisfaction.
Tim’s
first tentative piece of research was to give this survey to 316
students. When the results came back and were all calculated out, Tim
was struck by the results: materialistic people, who think happiness
comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher
levels of depression and anxiety.
It’s not that materialistic people don’t care about their kids—but “as the materialistic values get bigger, other values are necessarily going to be crowded out,” he says, even if you tell yourself they won’t.
Twenty-two different studies have, in the years since, found that the more materialistic and extrinsically motivated you become, the more depressed you will be.
Materialism is KFC for the soul.
When the culture you are embedded in isn’t healthy, you’re going to end up with an unhealthy individual.
The web arrived offering them a kind of parody of what they were losing—Facebook friends in place of neighbors, video games in place of meaningful work, status updates in place of status in the world.
John
had discovered that we—without ever quite intending to—have become the
first humans to ever dismantle our tribes. As a result, we have been
left alone on a savanna we do not understand, puzzled by our own
sadness.
* * * * *
Mental health is produced socially: the presence or absence of mental health is above all a social indicator and therefore requires social, as well as individual, solutions.
You
aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are
not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful
values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life,
telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need
to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel
you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all
these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having
been mistreated.
They had proved that depression is—in fact—to a significant degree a problem not with your brain, but with your life.
Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti explained: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.”
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 old story says our distress is fundamentally irrational, caused by faulty apparatus in our head. The new story says our distress is—however painful—in fact rational, and sane.
Lots of people thought then—and think now—that depression and anxiety are like that: that it’s just a random piece of chemical bad luck, happening inside your skull rather than in your life.
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.
For every good friend you had, or if your partner was more supportive and caring, it reduced depression by a remarkable amount.
The scientific evidence is clear that exercise also significantly reduces depression and anxiety.
* * * * *
This is why I believe we should not—must not—talk about solving depression and anxiety only through individual changes.
Because you have been given the wrong explanation for why your depression and anxiety are happening, you are seeking the wrong solution.
We have to change the culture so that more people are freed up to change their lives.
As I changed my life in this way, my depression and anxiety have massively reduced. It isn’t a straight line. I still have bad days—because of personal challenges, and because I still live in a culture where all the forces we’ve been talking about are running rampant. But I no longer feel pain leaking out of me uncontrollably. That’s gone.
You
will get something wrong today, and tomorrow, and every day of your
life. So will I, and everybody you know. You don’t have a choice about
being wrong sometimes: mistakes will be your life-long companion. But
you do have a choice about whether to approach your error in terror so
you suppress, ignore and repeat it — or to make it your honest, open
ally in trying to get to the truth.
How do we start to rebuild a society where we don’t feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?
* * * * *
Rufus tells his patients when they come to him feeling deeply depressed or anxious: You’re not crazy to feel so distressed. You’re not broken. You’re not defective. He sometimes quotes the Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who explained: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society."
"If you have ever been down, or felt lost, this amazing book will change your life. Do yourself a favour--read it now." - Elton John
"Wise, probing, and deeply generous Hari has produced a book packed with explosive revelations about our epidemic of despair . . . I am utterly convinced that the more people read this book, the better off the world will be." - Naomi Klein
"This is a bold and inspiring book that will help far more than just those who suffer from depression. As Hari shows, we all have within us the potential to live in ways that are healthier and wiser." - Arianna Huffington
"Through a breath-taking journey across the world, Johann Hari exposes us to extraordinary people and concepts that will change the way we see depression forever. It is a brave, moving, brilliant, simple and earth-shattering book that must be read by everyone and anyone who is longing for a life of meaning and connection." - Eve Ensler, author of THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES
"This is one of those extraordinary books that you want all your friends to read immediately--because the shift in world-view is so compelling and dramatic that you wonder how you’ll be able to have conversations with them otherwise." - Brian Eno
"One of the world's most important and most enlightening thinkers and social critics." - Glenn Greenwald, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"Johann Hari is again getting people to think differently about our mood, our minds and our drug use, and that is something we need a lot more of." - Bill Maher
"Depression and anxiety are the maladies of our time, but not for the reasons you think . . . An important diagnosis from one of the ablest journalists writing in the English language today." - Thomas Frank, author of WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS
"Eye-opening, highly detailed . . . The book is part personal odyssey, in which Hari gets to grips with the flaws in his own treatment, and part scholarly reflection, where he sifts through the varying perspectives of scientists, psychologists and people with depression . . . Hari is clear about the difficulties of the task ahead and, in offering new ways of thinking, presents not surefire solutions but, he says, 'an alternative direction of travel' . . . A compassionate, common-sense approach to depression and anxiety . . . His book brings with it an urgency and rigour that will, with luck, encourage the authorities to sit up and take note." - Guardian, "Book of the Day, 17 January 2018"
"A bold call for a complete re-evaluation of what is causing the western epidemic of mental illness." - Sunday Times
"Brilliant." - Mail on Sunday
"This book has a great deal to offer. Lost Connections isn't as much about science and mental health as it is about society, and the stories we tell around mental illness . . . This book's value lies in its attempt to change the stories we tell about the depressed and anxious, and perhaps help some of those suffering change how they think about themselves." - Independent
"You might think Lost Connections is a self-help title but in reality it's a book that aims to change society, not individuals . . . Lost Connections is an important and controversial book because it asks questions about the biggest problems we have in the world." - Attitude Magazine
"Thought-provoking . . . His comprehensible and penetrating study features extensive research and interviews with everyone from leading scientists and medics to members of the Amish community. This heartening book reveals the mutual social benefits of reconnecting with others and helping them to help yourself." *****- Western Mail
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