This is another excerpt from Lost Connections by Johann Hari, this time from the last chapter called "Conclusion: Homecoming." Such a powerful and important book, and what I believe to potentially be a needed and treasured gift for so many of us. ― Molly
After my research had ended and I had written most of this book, I went out and walked aimlessly for hours one afternoon in London, when I realized I was only a short walk away from the shopping center where I had collected and swallowed my first antidepressant as a teenager nearly twenty years before. I wandered over and I stood in that doorway, and I remembered the story I had believed on that day, and for so long after. I had been told it by my doctor, and by Big Pharma, and by the bestselling books of the day: the problem is in your head. It's chemical imbalance. Your broken machinery needs to be fixed, and this is the answer.
People were walking in and out of the pharmacy past me, and given how common antidepressants are, I knew it was likely that some of them were going in to collect their own pills. Maybe one of them was about to swallow a pill for the first time, and this whole tale would begin all over again.
I started to wonder what I would say now ― after all I had learned ― to that teenage version of myself, if I could go back in time and talk with him before he swallowed that first pill on this spot.
I would try, I hope, to tell that teenager a story about his distress that was more honest. What they've been telling you up to now is false, I'd say. That doesn't mean all chemical antidepressant are bad: some credible scientists argue they give some temporary relief to a minority of users, and that shouldn't be dismissed. The false story is the claim that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and that the primary solution for most people is a chemical antidepressant. That story has made Big Pharma over $100 billion, which is one of the crucial reasons why it persists.
The real story, I would explain, has been known to scientists for decades. Depression and anxiety have three kinds of causes ― biological, psychological, and social. They are all real, and none of these three can be described by something as crude as the idea of a chemical imbalance. The social and psychological causes have been ignored for a long time, even though it seems the biological causes don't even kick in without them....
So I would want to tell that teenage boy that the implications of these findings for his pain are massive.
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.
Every human being has these needs, and in our culture, we're relatively good at meeting physical needs ― almost nobody actually starves, for example, which is an extraordinary achievement. But we've become quite bad at meeting these psychological needs. That's a crucial reason why you ― and so many of the people around you ― are depressed and anxious.
You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live. 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. Your biology can make your distress worse, for sure. But it's not the cause. It's not the drive. It's not the place to look for the main explanation, or the main solution.
Because you have been given the wrong explanation for why your depression and anxiety are happening, you are seeking the wrong solution. Because you are being told depression and anxiety are misfirings of brain chemicals, you will stop looking for answers in your life and your psyche and your environment and how you might change them. You become sealed off in a serotonin story. You will try to get rid of depressed feelings in your head. But that won't work unless you get rid of the causes of the depressed feelings in your life.
No, I would say to my younger self ― your distress is not a malfunction. It is a signal ― a necessary signal.
I know that this is going to be hard to hear, I'd tell him, because I know how deep your suffering cuts. But this pain isn't your enemy, however much it hurts (and Jesus, I know how much it hurts). It's your ally ― leading you away from a wasted life and pointing the way toward a more fulfilling one.
Then I would tell him ― you are at a fork in the road now. You can try to muffle the signal. That will lead you to many wasted years when the pain will persist. Or you can listen to the signal and let it guide you away from the things that are hurting and draining you, and toward the things that will meet your true needs...
... The longing for connection never goes away.
So instead of seeing your depression and anxiety as a form of madness, I would tell my younger self ― you need to see the sanity in this sadness. You need to see that it makes sense. Of course it is excruciating. I will always dread that pain returning, every day of my life. But that doesn't mean the pain is insane, or irrational...
Depression and anxiety might, in one way, be the sanest reaction you have. It's a signal, saying ― you shouldn't have to live this way, and if you aren't helped to find a better path, you will be missing out on so much that is best about being human...
Up to now, we have put the onus for solving depression and anxiety solely on depressed and anxious individuals. We lecture or cajole them by saying they have to do better (or swallow the pills). But if the problem doesn't originate with them alone, it can't be solved by them alone. As a group, together, we have to change our culture ― to strip out the causes of depression and anxiety that are causing such deep unhappiness.
This, then, is the main thing I would want to tell my younger self. You're not going to be able to deal with this problem alone. It's not a flaw in you. The hunger for this change is out there all around you, waiting just beneath the surface. Look at the people opposite you on the subway as you read this. May of them are depressed and anxious. Many more are unnecessarily unhappy, feeling lost in the world we have made. If you stay broken up and isolated, you will likely stay depressed and anxious. But if you band together, you can change your environment....
This is what I would want to tell my teenage self. You have to turn now to all the other wounded people around you, and find a way to connect with them, and build a home with these people ― a place where you are bonded to one another and find meaning in your lives together.
We have been tribeless and disconnected for so long now.
It's time for us all to come home.
..... All these depressed and anxious people, all over the world ― they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has gone wrong with the way we live. We need to stop trying to muffle or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor it. It is only when we listen to our pain that we can follow it back to its source and only there, when we can see its true causes, can we begin to overcome it.
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