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Biography & Autobiography. Psychology. Self-Improvement. Nonfiction. HTML:The New York Times bestseller from the author of Chasing the Scream, offering a radical new way of thinking about depression and anxiety. What really causes depression and anxiety�??and how can we really solve them? Award-winning journalist Johann Hari suffered from depression since he was a child and started taking antidepressants when he was a teenager. He was told that his problems were caused by a chemical imbalance in his brain. As an adult, trained in the social sciences, he began to investigate whether this was true-and he learned that almost everything we have been told about depression and anxiety is wrong. Across the world, Hari found social scientists who were uncovering evidence that depression and anxiety are not caused by a chemical imbalance in our brains. In fact, they are largely caused by key problems with the way we live today. Hari's journey took him from a mind-blowing series of experiments in Baltimore, to an Amish community in Indiana, to an uprising in Berlin. Once he had uncovered nine real causes of depression and anxiety, they led him to scientists who are discovering seven very different solutions�??ones that work. It is an epic journey that will change how we think about one of the biggest crises in our culture today. His TED talk, "Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong," has been viewed more than eight million times and revolutionized the global debate. This book will do the… (more)
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On the other hand, status, whether at work or in the jungle, give you control so unless your are being challenged by a rival you will be less anxious and depressed than someone down the ladder.
Other tips- loving kindness meditation; a secular version of confession where another listens nin-judgementally to something you are ashamed of that gapoened to you or that you did; removing fear of the future with moncome or other programs (see Denmark); mental health requires societal as well as individual solutions.
Besides the captivating ideas, the prose itself is engaging, and does an excellent job of leading the reader through an ocean of research literature.
In 'Lost Connections' Johann Hari looks at depression from the inside. His own diagnosis of clinical depression led him to taking antidepressants for years, yet he never seemed to truly recover. As he wondered why, he began to question the assumptions that we have made in the past hundred years as to what the causes of depression are, and what depression actually is. This enlightening book is the result of his research, and as a lay reader on the topic I found it fascinating. His conclusions can be summed up rather simply: how is it possible to live happily in a world designed to make us miserable? When we re-frame depression that way, we see that the drugs won't work, they'll just make it worse: reconnection, as the title implies, is the route we must follow to escape our unhappiness.
There are those who have written negative reviews of this book, and I can certainly sympathise with the them - for three reasons. Firstly, Hari calls into question a lot of what we take for granted, and when you are convinced that the solution to your depression lies in finding the right drug cocktail, being told that the drugs are unlikely to work at all can feel like a slap in the face. Secondly, some readers have long been aware of the research that Hari references; nothing in the book will come as a surprise to them. To those of us who have never before read up on this issue, however, the book serves its purpose very well, summarising what we know and what we don't know about depression. And third, the writing style is not perfect; it's what I would call 'Gladwell-lite.' There are too many attempts to make of the story a real narrative, which means backtracking again and again to introduce characters the 'proper' way. Doing this once or twice would be forgivable, but the fact that it happens dozens of times every chapter means that reading the book is sometimes more of a struggle than it should be.
Despite any slightly negative words that I might offer about this text, I really have no hesitation in recommending it to everyone out there who either has depression, or is wondering how they might help somebody with depression. There's useful stuff in here - perhaps not the stuff that everybody wants or will use, but if you dig around and look for what resonates, you might find a new approach to living within these pages.
As Hari points out, when upper-class white women complained of “the problem with no name” in the 1950s/60s, they had everything that their culture told them they were supposed to want. The problem was that their culture had crappy values, and adhering to those values was depression-making. Similarly, economic insecurity, huge inequalities, and constant media exposure to the life we “should” be living is depression-generating for many people today. So is trauma; he tells the heartbreaking, and Freud-evoking, story of an obesity doctor who started to ask people what else had happened to them around the time they started to put on weight, and heard numerous rape/abuse stories; he was then chastised by a colleague for believing his subjects. But for them, obesity seemed like a solution to the problem of being the target of predatory men; telling them to learn how to eat right would be “grotesque.” More generally, Hari considers depression “a response to the sense of humiliation the modern world inflicts on many of us”—the powerlessness at work, the lack of feeling that you matter, the constant comparisons to richer and better-looking people in ads, the insecurity that means you could lose status at any moment. These are the things that we ultimately need to fix, along with generating authentic connections to other people through volunteering and other kinds of social engagement. Hari concludes that we shouldn’t tell ourselves that, until those fixes exist, pills are likely going to be enough.
So much for what other people were thinking. Generally I am a bit suspicious when a professional writer turns their hand to a subject (about which they know little) and by interviewing various experts in the field they produce their book to the deadlines given by the publishers. There are a few problems with this; how did they select their experts? they have no real experiential expertise themselves....hence, can we trust their judgement or their selective reporting?, and have they really explored the whole field thoroughly enough within the time frame. In Hari's case, he actually does have first hand experience of being depressed and of being treated with antidepressants over a long period. So I give him some marks for that.
What he says about anti depressants: basically that the chemical imbalance theory (generally purported to be a deficiency of serotonin) is either just wrong ...or there is virtually no supporting science to back it up....is not new to me. Nor is the evidence of the overwhelming evidence that if the drugs work it is only because of the massive placebo effect. And there is maybe a 2% real success rate. Hardly enough to offset the nasty side effects.
Hari travels over familiar ground (see the book "Cracked") that big pharma have corrupted the whole psychiatric profession so completely and have so much money at stake, that it is understandable that the chemical imbalance theory is perpetuated. He also covers some of the same ground as "Cracked" in highlighting how there are no objective tests for mental disease and the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual (DSM) used by the psychiatric profession to diagnose mental illness is really just a social construct..decided on by a majority vote. I find this pretty scary.
Hari comes up with nine causes of depression (all of which have social origins).
1. Disconnection from meaningful work
2. Disconnection from other people
3. Disconnection from meaningful values
4. Disconnection from childhood trauma
5. Disconnection from status and respect
6. Disconnection from the natural world (the outdoors)
7.Disconnection from a hopeful or secure future
8. A biological cause of endogenous depression (maybe less than 1% of people who become depressed)
9. A genetic contribution (maybe about 37% is inherited but maybe requires environmental triggering)
I guess it is hard to argue that all of these causes are significant. But, as a lot of reviewers have pointed out, Hari's contention that modern psychiatrists ignored all of these is probably overstating the case.
The second half of the book is devoted to solutions: to re-establishing those connections that we seem to have lost in modern society. And Hari comes up with seven techniques or ways of reconnecting. Here, he seems to argue very much anecdotally.....it works up to a point but there seems to be a shortage of good research in this field so that one can say with confidence that x technique works for these sort of people.
The techniques described are:
1. Reconnection to other people
2. Social prescribing...basically this is the idea that the Dr prescribes "taking a role in a community garden" as the cure...or something similar rather than prescribing an antidepressant drug. (Seems like No. 1 above).
3. Reconnection to meaningful work
4. Reconnection to meaningful values
5, Sympathetic joy: training yourself to be happy for others) and overcoming addiction to the self
6. Acknowledging and overcoming childhood trauma....the basic idea seems to be that you need to have the hurt/shame acknowledged by an authority figure ...such as a Doctor.....in a sympathetic way.
7.Restoring the future. This seems to be rather controversial...it is proposing a universal minimum income. It seems to have generally worked where it has been tried but seems to be very unpopular as "Socialism"....a dirty word for many Americans. A number of reviewers were obviously offended by this "politicisation" of the message. Personally, I just found it fascinating...and it is being talked about more and more. It might overcome the problems of young people who are on some sort of dole payment...which is not enough for them to live on properly , or to travel to a job interview, or to study to prepare themselves better for a role in society etc.
Generally, I really liked the book. it's well written. Easy to follow. Very anecdotal...but that is deliberate and clearly contributes to the readability of the book. I have few arguments with his basic theses and he seems to have made some really positive suggestions for a way forward. The fact that he has suffered the pain of depression himself makes the work much more meaningful. Four and a half stars from me.
First let me say that the author of this book is not a scientist, but rather a journalist who suffered from depression for most of his life, starting from early youth. There are, however, many, many scientific studies
Hari basically concludes that contrary to what the popular wisdom of the past several decades has told us, depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain: that it is not the lack of serotonin causing depression, and that all the new anti-depressants based on that theory are actually little better, if even that, than a placebo. Rather, he concludes that in most cases the causes of depression are circumstantial, grief being a form of depression (in fact the only form on which a chemical imbalance was not blamed) caused by circumstances. He calls the circumstances causing depression "disconnections," and lists the following causes: 1. Disconnection from meaningful work; 2. Disconnection from other people; 3. Disconnection from Meaningful values; 4. Disconnection from childhood trauma; 5. Disconnection from status and respect; 6. Disconnection from the natural world; and, 7. Disconnection from a hopeful future.
After describing these causes, he then discusses various ways to "reconnect." There are some interesting ideas here; read it and decide or yourself.
3 stars
This is a book of “big audacious claims;” however, I did not find it particularly innovative. Many others have pointed to people struggling with grief, poverty, and childhood traumas as being candidates to develop depression. Avoiding overreliance on social media, digital devices, and advertising are also fairly commonly espoused solutions, as is the value of mindfulness and talk therapy.
I enjoyed the success stories where people have connected with each other. These are uplifting and heartwarming stories of community activism, gardening groups, a small business collective, and several others. But these are anecdotes not proofs. Hari is a journalist, not a scientist. I would have appreciated more quotes containing evidence from the footnoted sources. Hari’s social solutions are oriented toward cultural changes that, as he admits, would be difficult to agree upon, fund, and implement.
In summary, this is not the scientific book that I thought it was when I picked it up. This is a topic of interest to me, and I have read many books with different approaches. In my opinion, the field is not as clear-cut as Hari paints it in this book. I recommend reading widely and consulting qualified professionals before making any health-related decisions or discontinuing any prescribed medications.
2.5
I feared it would fall into one of two camps: either the "big medicine is a scam and I have the cure" camp or the "here's a tiny preliminary bit of research that's going to change the world" camp. Instead the author pulled together several lines of thought, giving full citations to the research papers for each, and proposed some helpful steps toward making changes in one's own life and society.
The result are 9 reasons we are disconnected (which exacerbates anxiety + depression) and, more important, how to reconnect without relying on SSRI's and the western compulsion to label everything a disorder or disease.
An eye-opening read for anyone, but especially folks who have dealt with depression or anxiety.
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