Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - Der Welt nicht mehr verbunden: Die wahren Ursachen von Depressionen - und unerwartete Lösungen

Reviews tagging 'Mental illness'

Der Welt nicht mehr verbunden: Die wahren Ursachen von Depressionen - und unerwartete Lösungen by Johann Hari

6 reviews

mondovertigo's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective fast-paced

5.0

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fkshg8465's review against another edition

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informative slow-paced

This book angered me. I found it myopic.

Problems: feels like he’s seeking confirmation bias everywhere he looks, doesn’t really account for all kinds of depression but because all types as a single form of depression (e.g., maybe not every depression is a chemical imbalance, but some clearly are - like schizophrenia, so to dispute that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance is like saying schizophrenia can only be idiopathic), feels like when Tom Cruise called Brooke Shields irresponsible for taking antidepressants during post partem depression. While he poopoos psychotropic drugs, he lauds psychedelic drugs. This seems hypocritical. Regardless of the type of pill, it’s still a pill.

Also, nothing he presented is all that surprising, or rather, surprising enough for me to accept his supposition: events of loss contribute to depression; people who are disengaged at work are depressed; lonely people are depressed; people with less stress are less depressed; etc. Lastly, it seems all the examples, anecdotes, and studies he looked at were decades old (or older).

For purposes like this book, old data is only valuable to me if I can compare it to new data. There was no current data referenced.

Bottom line: he’s trying too hard to convince readers of his personal conclusions, and none of the evidence is scientific enough to prove his arguments. Mostly, it feels like he thinks he got a bad deal from the start when he was 18 and is now on a crusade to prevent others from going through the same helplessness he experienced. Drugs may not have been the right answer for him, but he also doesn’t say whether he relied only on the pills or if he got any therapy along with it. So it’s hard to tell how how much he relied on the perceptions in the first - that would be like if I only relied on medication but ate anything I wanted, as much as I wanted, and sat and watched TV all day and then wondered why my diabetes wasn’t improving or being properly managed, and then to say the Rx didn’t work effectively.

It’s clear he did a lot of research, but it looks like he only looked for data that supported his premise rather than also confirming it by invalidating opposing data; I didn’t see any opposing data refuted. Maybe he did research other perspectives, but because none of it is presented here, it makes it hard to follow him to the same conclusions. This is not a binary issue - depression isn’t a matter of only a chemical imbalance, which he admits, but in the same vein, we cannot totally discount that psychotropics don’t help.

This book, I find, to be dangerous in that it invalidates all those people who do have chemical imbalances, those depression may not have been caused by one of the nine sources he’s identified in his journey. That’s very disrespectful, and I imagine, distressing to those in this category, be it partially or in full. He discounts any possibility that depression might be completely chemical. I’m unwilling to conclude that based in this book. I would need a lot more convincing with a lot more balanced data. I’m not saying he’s totally wrong. I think he has a lot of valid points, but I’m undermining to say he’s completely right.

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