Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

by Johann Hari

Overview

The New York Times bestseller from the author of Chasing the Scream, offering a radical new way of thinking about depression and anxiety.

There was a mystery haunting award-winning investigative journalist Johann Hari. He was thirty-nine years old, and almost every year he had been alive, depression and anxiety had increased in Britain and across the Western world. Why?

He had a very personal reason to ask this question. When he was a teenager, he had gone to his doctor and explained that he felt like pain was leaking out of him, and he couldn’t control it or understand it. Some of the solutions his doctor offered had given him some relief—but he remained in deep pain.

So, as an adult, he went on a forty-thousand-mile journey across the world to interview the leading experts about what causes depression and anxiety, and what solves them. He learned there is scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety—and that this knowledge leads to a very different set of solutions: ones that offer real hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632868305
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	01/23/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	280,164
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Johann Hari is the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream, which is being adapted into a feature film. He was twice named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International UK. He has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others, and he is a regular panelist on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. His TED talk, “Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong,” has more than 20 million views.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Apple 1

Introduction: A Mystery 5

Part I The Crack in the Old Story

1 The Wand 17

2 Imbalance 27

3 The Grief Exception 38

4 The First Flag on the Moon 45

Part II Disconnection: Nine Causes of Depression and Anxiety

5 Picking Up the Flag (An Introduction to Part Two) 59

6 Cause One: Disconnection from Meaningful Work 61

7 Cause Two: Disconnection from Other People 72

8 Cause Three: Disconnection from Meaningful Values 91

9 Cause Four: Disconnection from Childhood Trauma 106

10 Cause Five: Disconnection from Status and Respect 116

11 Cause Six: Disconnection from the Natural World 123

12 Cause Seven: Disconnection from a Hopeful or Secure Future 132

13 Causes Eight and Nine: The Real Role of Genes and Brain Changes 143

Part III Reconnection. Or, a Different Kind of Antidepressant

14 The Cow 159

15 We Built This City 164

16 Reconnection One: To Other People 179

17 Reconnection Two: Social Prescribing 189

18 Reconnection Three: To Meaningful Work 201

19 Reconnection Four: To Meaningful Values 211

20 Reconnection Five: Sympathetic Joy, and Overcoming Addiction to the Self 218

21 Reconnection Six: Acknowledging and Overcoming Childhood Trauma 241

22 Reconnection Seven: Restoring the Future 245

Conclusion: Homecoming 255

Acknowledgments 265

Notes 269

Index 305

Editorial Reviews

"Lost Connections offers a wonderful and incisive analysis of the depression and alienation that are haunting American society." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"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

From the Publisher

2017-10-30
Mining the root causes of depression and anxiety.Acclaimed British journalist Hari researched and wrote his bestselling debut, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2015), while pushing aside work on a subject that was much too personal to accept and scrutinize at the time. This book, the culmination of a 40,000-mile odyssey and hundreds of hours of interviews with social scientists and depression sufferers (including those who've recovered), presents a theory that directly challenges long-held beliefs about depression's causes and cures. The subject matter is exquisitely personal for the author, since he'd battled chronic melancholy since his teenage years and was prescribed the "chemical armor" of antidepressants well into his young adulthood. Though his dosage increased as the symptoms periodically resurfaced, he continued promoting his condition as a brain-induced malady with its time-tested cure being a strict regimen of pharmaceutical chemicals. Taking a different approach from the one he'd been following for most of his life, Hari introduces a new direction in the debate over the origins of depression, which he developed after deciding to cease all medication and become "chemically naked" at age 31. The author challenges classically held theories about depression and its remedies in chapters brought to life with interviews, personal observations, and field-professional summations. Perhaps most convincing is the author's thorough explanation of what he believes are the proven causes of depression and anxiety, which include disconnection from work, society, values, nature, and a secure future. These factors, humanized with anecdotes, personal history, and social science, directly contradict the chemical-imbalance hypothesis hard-wired into the contemporary medical community. Hari also chronicles his experiences with reconnective solutions, journeys that took him from a Berlin housing project to an Amish village to rediscover what he deems as the immense (natural) antidepressive benefits of meaningful work, social interaction, and selflessness.In a sure-to-be-controversial book, Hari delivers a weighty, well-supported, persuasive argument against treating depression pharmaceutically.

Kirkus Reviews