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4.22 AVERAGE
4.22 AVERAGE
If you want to understand depression and anxiety, please read this book. I am skeptical of mainstream writers commenting on mental health, yet Hari lays out the research comprehensively and positions themselves (& related biases) in their writing honestly & transparently. This book gets a 5 star because a collective response which encompasses social change is necessary for healing and addressing the pain of living in this world. The individual can only do so much, when the society in which they live is sick.
Another world is possible & we can build it together
Another world is possible & we can build it together
“...clinical depression is an understandable response to adversity...Your distress is not a malfunction...it’s a signal.”
“Everything that causes an increase in depression also causes an increase in anxiety, and the other way around. They rise and fall together.”
“in the biggest study of serotonin's effects on humans, it found no direct relationship with depression.”
“There’s no evidence there’s a chemical imbalance’ in depressed or anxious people’s brains.”
“The serotonin theory is a lie.”
“Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.”
"the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety; it is connection.”
“we live under a system that constantly distracts us from what’s really good about life...”
“Advertising plays a key role in why we are choosing a value system that makes us feel worse.”
“depression is, in part, a response to the sense of humiliation the modern world inflicts on many of us...”
Jiddu Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.”
“Don’t be you. Be connected with everyone around you. Be part of the whole. Don’t strive to be the guy addressing the crowd. Strive to be the crowd.”
Tim Kasser: “advertising is a form of mental pollution”
“Everything that causes an increase in depression also causes an increase in anxiety, and the other way around. They rise and fall together.”
“in the biggest study of serotonin's effects on humans, it found no direct relationship with depression.”
“There’s no evidence there’s a chemical imbalance’ in depressed or anxious people’s brains.”
“The serotonin theory is a lie.”
“Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.”
"the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety; it is connection.”
“we live under a system that constantly distracts us from what’s really good about life...”
“Advertising plays a key role in why we are choosing a value system that makes us feel worse.”
“depression is, in part, a response to the sense of humiliation the modern world inflicts on many of us...”
Jiddu Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.”
“Don’t be you. Be connected with everyone around you. Be part of the whole. Don’t strive to be the guy addressing the crowd. Strive to be the crowd.”
Tim Kasser: “advertising is a form of mental pollution”
An interesting read but very theatrical and journalistic.
An fascinating, well-researched recontextualisation of mental health that came to me at just the right time. I would highly recommend this book to anyone suffering from depression and/or anxiety and is unsure how to go on. You are not alone.
Finding a typically ingenious yet deep way to describe her harrowing experience with bouts of manic depression, the indomitable late Carrie Fisher once said, “One is Roy, rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood. And Pam, sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs … Sometimes the tide is in, sometimes it’s out.” According to the World Health Organisation (website accessed on 15th February 2019), depression is referred to as a ‘common illness worldwide’, that afflicted over 300 million people. After setting out these grave statistics, the WHO proceeds to expound further on this pernicious illness in a matter-of-fact way, “depression is different from usual mood fluctuations and short-lived emotional responses to challenges in everyday life. Especially when long-lasting and with moderate or severe intensity, depression may become a serious health condition. It can cause the affected person to suffer greatly and function poorly at work, at school and in the family. At its worst, depression can lead to suicide. Close to 800 000 people die due to suicide every year. Suicide is the second leading cause of death in 15-29-year-olds.”
Our stereotypical understanding – bolstered by the findings of research scientists, egged on by discourses on this topic by various medical practitioners constituting experts in this domain, and goaded on by the profit motives of Big Pharma – of depression has been that it is an insidious disease having its origin in an ‘imbalanced’ brain. Just a step removed from branding the unfortunate sufferer as one who is off kilter.
In a fundamentally path breaking and breathtaking book, the New York Times bestselling author Johann Hari upends the received wisdom regarding depression before proposing a radical set of principles that would combat this dangerous phenomenon with a bare minimum recourse to antidepressants. Hari must know being a sufferer himself. Recounting his painful experiences with candor and a dash of wit, Hari reminisces about the reasons proffered by his doctor for depression. Naturally depleted levels of a chemical termed serotonin in the brain is the direct, most proximate and ascertainable cause for depression. The solution – a new generation of drugs termed Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) or simply anti-depressants.
This spiel linking an innate deficiency in the brain with depression has ruled the roost thereby enhancing the coffers of the Big Pharma immensely. At the time of writing, the market for antidepressants is a whopping $100 billion plus. Hari debunks this obviously causal link by resorting to a degree of research that is frankly, astounding. Examining the social and psychological factors triggering depression, such as disconnection from the future, childhood trauma, disconnection from meaningful work and relationships, loneliness, lack of fulfilment, absence of status and disconnection from nature, Hari argues that these are some of the ‘lost connections’ that both accelerate and exacerbate the onset and course of depression.
Crisscrossing continents, clocking humongous air miles and poring over millions of academic papers in between, Hari has made research the cornerstone and crux of his book. The people whom he has interviewed for this work span a broad spectrum of professions and viewpoints. From a junkie-transformed-into-neuroscientist in Sydney to an avid mountaineer primatologist outside Banff in Canada, from interviewing isolated Amish community members to watching a spider weave its web outside a rehabilitation centre for gaming addicts, Hari leaves no stone unturned to strike at the core of the causes responsible for triggering depression.
Hari also interviews pioneers in path breaking methodologies such as Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University. Professor Griffiths amazingly secures the relevant approvals to bring back experimentation using psychedelic drugs to correlate the effects between the outcomes affected by an imbibing of psychedelic drugs and the results of deep meditation. The conclusion startlingly reveals identical patterns and experiences. Similarly, in the city of London he meets George Brown and Tirril Harris, authors of a groundbreaking study of the social causes of depression that had the duo venturing into the community and interviewing women about their lives. He makes clear the importance of their work and spends 10 pages telling their story, but quotes just a few sentences from each. However, most curiously – and this is a conundrum that manifests itself in almost every page – he devotes a surprisingly short amount of space for their narratives. While there has been no dearth of experts who have been interviewed both formally and informally for this book, the narrative does not find their voice. The results, opinions, methodologies and probabilities are all summarized by the author himself.
So how does one restore such lost connections? Hari’s solution is to “find practical ways to dismantle hierarchies and create a more equal place, where everybody feels they have a measure of respect and status”. This he argues may be done by simple actions such as bonding and banding together and finding meaningful work. Demonstrating fulfilling real life stories that include the now famous Kotti housing project protests in Berlin to a therapeutic horticulture group in east London; a bunch of bike mechanics in Baltimore responsible for setting up a workers’ cooperative to a short-lived albeit successful Canadian government tryst with universal basic income, Hari strings together a succession of ameliorating tales that warm the very cockles of the heart.
Depression has for far too long remained undisturbed as the elephant in the room. A combination of forced as well as ingrained factors such as shame, stigma, societal isolation and reluctance have taken an unfortunate toll on the minds and bodies of the hapless sufferers. It is time that all the relevant stakeholders unite, cutting across personal motives and materialistic drivers, to obliterate this scourge. To accomplish this, as Hari illustrates, huge steps, both mental and physical would need to be taken, boldly and brazenly. “One of the most important slogans of the past few years has been ‘Take back control’,” hari notes. “People are right to connect with this slogan – they have lost control, and they long to regain it – but that slogan has been used by political force . . . that will give them even less control.”
Indeed, the time has come for us to take control. A control that embraces an welcoming environment rather than an addictive cycle of antidepressants
Our stereotypical understanding – bolstered by the findings of research scientists, egged on by discourses on this topic by various medical practitioners constituting experts in this domain, and goaded on by the profit motives of Big Pharma – of depression has been that it is an insidious disease having its origin in an ‘imbalanced’ brain. Just a step removed from branding the unfortunate sufferer as one who is off kilter.
In a fundamentally path breaking and breathtaking book, the New York Times bestselling author Johann Hari upends the received wisdom regarding depression before proposing a radical set of principles that would combat this dangerous phenomenon with a bare minimum recourse to antidepressants. Hari must know being a sufferer himself. Recounting his painful experiences with candor and a dash of wit, Hari reminisces about the reasons proffered by his doctor for depression. Naturally depleted levels of a chemical termed serotonin in the brain is the direct, most proximate and ascertainable cause for depression. The solution – a new generation of drugs termed Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) or simply anti-depressants.
This spiel linking an innate deficiency in the brain with depression has ruled the roost thereby enhancing the coffers of the Big Pharma immensely. At the time of writing, the market for antidepressants is a whopping $100 billion plus. Hari debunks this obviously causal link by resorting to a degree of research that is frankly, astounding. Examining the social and psychological factors triggering depression, such as disconnection from the future, childhood trauma, disconnection from meaningful work and relationships, loneliness, lack of fulfilment, absence of status and disconnection from nature, Hari argues that these are some of the ‘lost connections’ that both accelerate and exacerbate the onset and course of depression.
Crisscrossing continents, clocking humongous air miles and poring over millions of academic papers in between, Hari has made research the cornerstone and crux of his book. The people whom he has interviewed for this work span a broad spectrum of professions and viewpoints. From a junkie-transformed-into-neuroscientist in Sydney to an avid mountaineer primatologist outside Banff in Canada, from interviewing isolated Amish community members to watching a spider weave its web outside a rehabilitation centre for gaming addicts, Hari leaves no stone unturned to strike at the core of the causes responsible for triggering depression.
Hari also interviews pioneers in path breaking methodologies such as Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University. Professor Griffiths amazingly secures the relevant approvals to bring back experimentation using psychedelic drugs to correlate the effects between the outcomes affected by an imbibing of psychedelic drugs and the results of deep meditation. The conclusion startlingly reveals identical patterns and experiences. Similarly, in the city of London he meets George Brown and Tirril Harris, authors of a groundbreaking study of the social causes of depression that had the duo venturing into the community and interviewing women about their lives. He makes clear the importance of their work and spends 10 pages telling their story, but quotes just a few sentences from each. However, most curiously – and this is a conundrum that manifests itself in almost every page – he devotes a surprisingly short amount of space for their narratives. While there has been no dearth of experts who have been interviewed both formally and informally for this book, the narrative does not find their voice. The results, opinions, methodologies and probabilities are all summarized by the author himself.
So how does one restore such lost connections? Hari’s solution is to “find practical ways to dismantle hierarchies and create a more equal place, where everybody feels they have a measure of respect and status”. This he argues may be done by simple actions such as bonding and banding together and finding meaningful work. Demonstrating fulfilling real life stories that include the now famous Kotti housing project protests in Berlin to a therapeutic horticulture group in east London; a bunch of bike mechanics in Baltimore responsible for setting up a workers’ cooperative to a short-lived albeit successful Canadian government tryst with universal basic income, Hari strings together a succession of ameliorating tales that warm the very cockles of the heart.
Depression has for far too long remained undisturbed as the elephant in the room. A combination of forced as well as ingrained factors such as shame, stigma, societal isolation and reluctance have taken an unfortunate toll on the minds and bodies of the hapless sufferers. It is time that all the relevant stakeholders unite, cutting across personal motives and materialistic drivers, to obliterate this scourge. To accomplish this, as Hari illustrates, huge steps, both mental and physical would need to be taken, boldly and brazenly. “One of the most important slogans of the past few years has been ‘Take back control’,” hari notes. “People are right to connect with this slogan – they have lost control, and they long to regain it – but that slogan has been used by political force . . . that will give them even less control.”
Indeed, the time has come for us to take control. A control that embraces an welcoming environment rather than an addictive cycle of antidepressants
This was easily the most amazing book I have ever read about depression (and I've read a few), and it has me rethinking everything I know about it - including how I manage my own depression. Hari does an AMAZING job of interviewing numerous doctors and researchers to get to the root of what is really ailing us when we experience depression. He also brings to light possible solutions and revolutionary doctors who are implementing them with success. I can't recommend this enough - for darn near anyone to read.
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
For anyone who suffers from depression, anxiety disorders, or both, this book is a gamechanger. Johann Hari dispels all of the most common myths we have been fed about the major underlying causes of depression and instead, reveals the true roots as well as what we can do to take steps to improve these diagnoses. Undeniably the most common myth about the root cause of depression is that it is a chemical imbalance--that it isn't our fault because the brains of people who suffer from depression are lacking serotonin. So, the prescribed cure for this has always been antidepressants (SSRIs, most commonly), which, the author demonstrates, through pointing to evidence, is actually a bunch of rubbish. He spends the rest of the book (patiently) explaining and proving why.
Through a series of chapters, the author, a journalist, deconstructs and de-bunks the narratives people with depression and anxiety disorders have been fed for years by everyone--doctors, the media, self-help "gurus," and so on. He dedicates chapters to often-ignored but evidence-based underlying causes, such as: loneliness; a disconnection from nature and from our tribes in favour of materialism and Facebook; a highly individualized Western culture that's all about "me me me," and much, much more.
Unlike other books on the subject, the author doesn't simply say "Here's our problem, and it's getting worse. Okay, bye!" He is also quick to point out "Look, just because this experiment I told you about worked for these people, I'm not telling you that the answer is to run out and do the exact same thing." He points to the fact that a multiplicity of approaches is needed and that this will look different for everyone.
If you're sick of the endless drove of how-to books about depression that endlessly harp on about looking in the mirror and saying "I love you" to your reflection, and want a book that deconstructs the real reasons why depression occurs--and how to set about repairing it in yourself--this book is essential reading.
Through a series of chapters, the author, a journalist, deconstructs and de-bunks the narratives people with depression and anxiety disorders have been fed for years by everyone--doctors, the media, self-help "gurus," and so on. He dedicates chapters to often-ignored but evidence-based underlying causes, such as: loneliness; a disconnection from nature and from our tribes in favour of materialism and Facebook; a highly individualized Western culture that's all about "me me me," and much, much more.
Unlike other books on the subject, the author doesn't simply say "Here's our problem, and it's getting worse. Okay, bye!" He is also quick to point out "Look, just because this experiment I told you about worked for these people, I'm not telling you that the answer is to run out and do the exact same thing." He points to the fact that a multiplicity of approaches is needed and that this will look different for everyone.
If you're sick of the endless drove of how-to books about depression that endlessly harp on about looking in the mirror and saying "I love you" to your reflection, and want a book that deconstructs the real reasons why depression occurs--and how to set about repairing it in yourself--this book is essential reading.
When I'm having a bad day and feel like I have to say something edgy about what's wrong with everything in society I tend to resort to: CAPITALISM IS A DEATH-CULT , which is in no way a false claim but maybe too intense for people. Johann Hari shows important pieces of evidence for the same claim in his book while avoids scaring off people with edginess. Good job. (Also his way of making this point without fancy ideology reminds me of Abigail Thorne's latest video where she says something along the lines of the leftism is already inside you ). So yeah, our current way of living is literally killing people and change is needed.
However, if you learned psychology like me the bio-psycho-social model of mental health is not new, and the book doesn't give new revelations but it's good to see this point being shown to a wider audience. The current purely medical view of mental health needs to be challenged cuz even my non-psychologist intellectual friends believe solely in that.
However, if you learned psychology like me the bio-psycho-social model of mental health is not new, and the book doesn't give new revelations but it's good to see this point being shown to a wider audience. The current purely medical view of mental health needs to be challenged cuz even my non-psychologist intellectual friends believe solely in that.
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
You’re not broken, our culture is.
Lost connections is a beautiful book, exploring the true reasons behind depression and anxiety and why so many of us feel this way. It opens up a conversation about the subject and shows that it’s normal to feel like we do. This was the most helpful I think. The solution that Johann Hari gave were also useful of course.
Sometimes the chapters ran unnecessarily long, but all in all a great book! Would recommend.
Lost connections is a beautiful book, exploring the true reasons behind depression and anxiety and why so many of us feel this way. It opens up a conversation about the subject and shows that it’s normal to feel like we do. This was the most helpful I think. The solution that Johann Hari gave were also useful of course.
Sometimes the chapters ran unnecessarily long, but all in all a great book! Would recommend.