Motivation for Reading
I suffer from intense, seasonal bouts of depression (shockingly, in the summer) that started in 2020 and have been gaping black holes that sap my energy, motivation and desire for life. (If you experience depression, then you know.) I become unrecognizable to myself and to those around me. And yes, when the world is warming up and people begin flocking to parks and outdoor parties, I want nothing more than to hide away and suffer, alone, in the confines of my own home.
I’ve been trying, for years, to understand what the hell is going on and why this was happening to me. Had I experienced mental health issues or depression before in the past?! (This line of thinking resulted in obsessively scanning the pages of my journals, journals that I have written extensively about my personal desires, dreams, and qualms of life, looking for any sign of a persistent mood disorder.) While yes, I experienced moments of sadness and low, nothing paled to the intense months of low mood I’d been experiencing every summer for the past four years.
So. What the fuck do I do with this category 5 hurricane that barrels towards my life in the summer, leaving me hanging on for dear life, waiting for it to pass in the fall? I do what I have done with nearly any curiosity that comes up in my life; I turned to books.
And believe me, I’ve read a lot of books about depression, anxiety, the brain and mental health. But this book, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression -- And the Unexpected Solutions, by Johann Hari, has been one of my favorites. Hari both writes about the experience of depression in a way that really captures that feeling of what it means to suffer from depression, but also shares an analysis of why people today in society are depressed and what they/we can do about it. So… the gist of the book.
Half Baked Review: 8.5/10
Key Learnings: The book lays out key disconnections that contribute to depression
Disconnection from other people: We evolved to live in community with other people and society has become far more individualized, that weighs on our mental health and wellbeing.
“Lonely people are also anxious, have low-self esteem, are pessimistic, and are afraid other people will dislike them.”
“So every human instinct is honed not for life on your own, but for life like this, in a tribe.”
Disconnection from meaningful work: People need work that challenges them, that makes them feel empowered, where they can change and grow and make an impact on their workplace
Disconnection from meaningful values: Our values guide our spirit, and our values have been deeply tainted by a society (filled with advertising) that wants us to hate ourselves and consume more.
“For thousands of years, philosophers had been suggesting that if you overvalue money and possessions, or if you think about life mainly in terms of how you look to other people, you will be unhappy…” “The more you think life is about having stuff and superiority and showing it off, the more unhappy, and the more depressed and anxious, you will be.”
“Yes most of us, most of the time, spend our time chasing extrinsic goals -- the very thing that will give us nothing.”
“We have shifted from having meaningful values to having junk values.”
Disconnection from a hopeful or secure future: I felt particularly interested in this cause of depression, because my bouts of depression intensified during the pandemic, and as my commitment and work to organizing to stop the climate crisis deepened. A huge piece of my depression that intensifies during the summer is a nihilism about the future; a fear about what is to come from a changing climate. How am I to plan, to want children, when I don’t feel hopeful or optimistic about the future?
There was a powerful anecdote that struck me in this chapter, about a group of teens in a psychiatric unit in Vancouver, who when asked questions about their future, were incapable of answering questions about who they would be in the future. They were not able to describe their lives five or ten years down the line. For them, the future had disappeared. I resonated with this so deeply; when the fog of depression arrives, I have an inability to see the future of my life; I can only feel the excruciating pain and weight of the present.
Disconnection from childhood trauma: There’s a story shared in the book around people getting treated for obesity; when a therapist took the time to talk to these people, and get underneath their patterns and behaviors, so much of their relationship to eating and food connected back to childhood trauma.
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE): A questionnaire that highlights the correlation between childhood adverse experiences (e.g., divorce, abuse) and depression. If you had six or more traumatic childhood events in your childhood, you were 5x more likely to become depressed as an adult than someone who didn’t.
Disconnection from status and respect: When people are depressed, they often feel this sense of being pushed down. Why does this happen? Hari shares a story about baboons and the strict hierarchy they have. And how there’s often an alpha, who asserts his dominance over the other baboon, and one baboon who often ends up at the bottom of the chain of command. Here, the baboon with the lowest status would often have to show that they knew they were defeated. These gestures looked an awful lot like a depressed person.
“...it was discovered that depressed humans are flooded with the very same stress hormone that you find in low-ranking male baboons.”
“...I began to wonder… if depression is, in part a response to the sense of humiliation the modern world inflicts on many of us.”
Disconnection from the natural world: Nature has been a natural landscape & backdrop for humans for thousands of years. We currently live in a society that has cut us off from that landscape and that has dramatic effects on our wellbeing.
“We know now from over a century of observing animals in captivity that when they are deprived of their natural habitat, they will often develop systems that look like extreme forms of despair.”
“What if humans become more depressed when we are deprived of access to the kind of landscape we are involved in, too?”
“You become trapped in your own story and your own thoughts, and they rattle around in your head with a dull, bitter insistence. Becoming depressed or anxious is a process of becoming a prisoner to your ego, where no air from the outside can get in. But a range of scientists have shown that a common reaction to being out in the natural world is the precise opposite of this sensation -- a feeling of awe.”
The real role of genes and brain changes: The book talks of the chemical imbalance theory: The idea that depression is caused by chemical imbalance (serotonin theory) in the brain is a myth pushed by the pharmaceutical industry to make money; it is not true. And while yes, antidepressants can work for some people, researchers still really don’t know why.
“For as long as you live, this neuroplasticity never stops, and the brain is always changing.”
“The pain caused by life going wrong can trigger a response that is “so powerful that [the brain] tends to stay there [in a pained response] for a while, until something pushes it out of that corner, into a more flexible place.”
Takeaway: “The genetic factors that contribute to depression and anxiety are very real, but they also need a trigger in your environment or your psychology. Your genes can supercharge those factors, but they can’t create them alone.”
So given this, what is one to do?
Connection to other people: We live in an incredibly individualistic and isolated society. Be a part of a community and part of a group. (I can say organizing and being a part of Sunrise, and having strong friendships to lean on, has immensely helped)
Social prescribing: “His patients were often depressed, he realized, because their lives had been stripped of the things that make life worth living.”
“He believed that something was going wrong for his depressed patients not primarily in their brains or their bodies, but in their lives, and if he wanted to help them make them better, he had to help his patients change their lives.”
Find meaningful work: “87% of us feel either disengaged or enraged by our jobs.” People should have agency in their work.
Develop meaningful values:
“The role of advertising, “Advertising, he says, is a form of mental pollution”
“Advertising is only the PR team for an economic system that operates by making us feel inadequate and telling us the solution is to constantly spend.”
Reflect on the question, “What do you spend your money on? What do you really value?”
Sympathetic joy, and overcoming addiction to self
Sympathetic joy: “The opposite of jealousy or envy… it’s simply feeling happy for other people.”
Meditation & psychedelics, breaks our addiction to ourselves
Post psychedelics, “often leave people with a profound sense of connection -- to other people, to nature, and to a deeper sense of meaning. They were the opposite of the junk values soaked in.”
Experience of being in nature, psychedelics, shrinking of the ego
Goal is to return is to a healthy relationship with our ego
Acknowledging and overcoming childhood trauma: There is power in allowing people the space to share their childhood trauma. It’s important to both allow people to describe the traumatic experience, to craft a story about it. Second, it’s to show they people won’t be judged when they share their experience
Share that childhood trauma isn’t what causes depression and anxiety, but the hiding away of trauma
Sense of humiliation plays a big role in depression. Talking to people about their childhood trauma allows them to reduce their humiliation and poor self-concept
Restoring the future: Give people a renewed sense of hope about their future and their own security. There is a story of universal basic income, and what that does to give a person a sense of security while having their basic needs covered.
Key Quotes
“Two things make depression much more likely -- having a severe negative event, and having long-term sources of stress and insecurity in life.”
“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 driver. It’s not the place to look for the main explanation, or the main solution.”
“Your distress is not a malfunction. It is a signal -- a necessary signal.”
“Deep grief and depression, she explained to me, have identical symptoms for a reason. Depression, I realized, is itself a form of grief -- for all the connections we need, but don’t have.”
Final thoughts.
This book brought me into a deeper understanding of why people experience depression. It also helped me interrogate some of the stories I tell myself about the depression that I experience.
Now, I believe deeply in neuroplasticity and my brain’s ability to change. (I haven’t always experienced depression and I don’t always have to.) I don’t believe my depression is just a chemical imbalance, but a result of societal stressors that impact my body in various ways. (#biopsychosocial) I know I need to spend more time in nature, it’s good for me and my brain and my mental health; there are evolutionary reasons why. That my fears around climate change and the future are valid, but that humans have survived and endured through difficult times, and still found joy, and so will I. That depression is not a moral failing, a sign of weakness… it’s a reaction to the world that we’re living in and the way we’re living.
I’ll close with this quote from the book that hit.
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.” - Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti