Johann Hari Depression Quotes

What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?

Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said—it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else. If you have lots of people around you—perhaps even a husband or wife, or a family, or a busy workplace—but you don’t share anything that matters with them, then you’ll still be lonely.

You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met.

Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.

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.

We grieve because we have loved. We grieve because the person we have lost mattered to us. To say that grief should disappear on a neat timetable is an insult to the love we felt.

When work is enriching, life is fuller, and that spills over into the things you do outside work,” he said to me. But “when it’s deadening,” you feel “shattered at the end of the day, just shattered.

The Internet was born into a world where many people had already lost their sense of connection to each other. The collapse had already been taking place for decades by then. The web arrived offering them a kind of parody of what they were losing—Facebook friends in place of neighbors, video games in place of meaningful work, status updates in place of status in the world. The comedian Marc Maron once wrote that “every status update is a just a variation on a single request: ‘Would someone please acknowledge me?

You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated.

When they talk among themselves, advertising people have been admitting since the 1920s that their job is to make people feel inadequate—and then offer their product as the solution to the sense of inadequacy they have created.

The difference between being online and being physically among people, I saw in that moment, is a bit like the difference between pornography and sex: it addresses a basic itch, but it’s never satisfying.

To end loneliness, you need other people—plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you. You have to be in it together—and “it” can be anything that you both think has meaning and value.

We are all born with a genetic inheritance—but your genes are activated by the environment. They can be switched on, or off, by what happens to you.

This showed that loneliness isn’t just some inevitable human sadness, like death. It’s a product of the way we live now.

So instead of seeing your depression and anxiety as a form of madness, I would tell my younger self—you need to see the sanity in this sadness. You need to see that it makes sense. Of course it is excruciating. I will always dread that pain returning, every day of my life. But that doesn’t mean the pain is insane, or irrational. If you touch your hand to a burning stove, that, too, will be agony, and you will snatch your hand away as quickly as possible. That’s a sane response. If you kept your hand on the stove, it would burn and burn until it was destroyed.

Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most. John calls this a “snowball” effect, as disconnection spirals into more disconnection. Lonely people are scanning for threats because they unconsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt. This snowball effect, he learned, can be reversed—but to help a depressed or severely anxious person out of it, they need more love, and more reassurance, than they would have needed in the first place. The tragedy, John realized, is that many depressed and anxious people receive less love, as they become harder to be around. Indeed, they receive judgment, and criticism, and this accelerates their retreat from the world. They snowball into an ever colder place.

...Every one of the social and psychological causes of depression and anxiety they have discovered has something in common. They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.

extremely depressed people have become disconnected from a sense of the future, in a way that other really distressed people have not.

You need your nausea. You need your pain. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. All these depressed and anxious people, all over the world—they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has gone wrong with the way we live. We need to stop trying to muffle or silence or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor it. It is only when we listen to our pain that we can follow it back to its source—and only there, when we can see its true causes, can we begin to overcome it.

When they added up the figures, John and other scientists found that being disconnected from the people around you had the same effect on your health as being obese—which was, until then, considered the biggest health crisis the developed world faced.

I kept noticing a self-help cliché that people say to each other all the time, and share on Facebook incessantly. We say to each other: “Nobody can help you except you.” It made me realize: we haven’t just started doing things alone more, in every decade since the 1930s. We have started to believe that doing things alone is the natural state of human beings, and the only way to advance. We have begun to think: I will look after myself, and everybody else should look after themselves, as individuals. Nobody can help you but you. Nobody can help me but me. These ideas now run so deep in our culture that we even offer them as feel-good bromides to people who feel down—as if it will lift them up. But John has proven that this is a denial of human history, and a denial of human nature. It leads us to misunderstand our most basic instincts. And this approach to life makes us feel terrible.

You can’t escape it: when scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it is laced with antidepressants, because so many of us are taking them and excreting them that they simply can’t be filtered out of the water we drink every day. We are literally awash in these drugs.

Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.

The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let’s get to the deeper problem.

One friend told me that she always knew her depression was lifting when she felt her sense of time expanding again

We have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are.

The Italian philosopher Paolo Virno says we have moved from having a “proletariat”—a solid block of manual workers with jobs—to a “precariat,” a shifting mass of chronically insecure people who don’t know whether they will have any work next week and may never have a stable job.

Materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.

Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart of poor health”—physical, mental, and emotional.

Materialism is KFC for the soul.

It turned out that for every category of traumatic experience you went through as a kid, you were radically more likely to become depressed as an adult. If you had six categories of traumatic events in your childhood, you were five times more likely to become depressed as an adult than somebody who didn’t have any. If you had seven categories of traumatic event as a child, you were 3,100 percent more likely to attempt to commit suicide as an adult.

She had felt homesick. But she was at home.

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

Depression isn't a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences!

I’ve pursued happiness for myself my whole life, and I’m exhausted, and I don’t feel any closer to it—because where does it end? The bar just keeps getting moved.

Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.

The primary explanation for depression offered in our culture starts to fall apart. The idea you feel terrible because of a “chemical imbalance” was built on a series of mistakes and errors. It has come as close to being proved wrong, he told me, as you ever get in science. It’s lying broken on the floor, like a neurochemical Humpty Dumpty with a very sad smile.

But what I was being taught is—if you want to stop being depressed, don’t be you. Don’t be yourself.3 Don’t fixate on how you’re worth it. It’s thinking about you, you, you that’s helped to make you feel so lousy. Don’t be you. Be us. Be we. Be part of the group. Make the group worth it. The real path to happiness, they were telling me, comes from dismantling our ego walls—from letting yourself flow into other people’s stories and letting their stories flow into yours; from pooling your identity, from realizing that you were never you—alone, heroic, sad—all along.

You’ve got to pull yourself out of the materialistic environments—the environments that are reinforcing the materialistic values,” he says, because they cripple your internal satisfactions. And then, he says, to make that sustainable, you have to “replace them with actions that are going to provide those intrinsic satisfactions, [and] encourage those intrinsic goals.

If you picture of a perfect After-life, it's being with the people you love all the time. He asked me: Why wouldn't you choose today: when you're still alive, to be truely present with the people you love? Why would you rather be lost in a haze of distractions!?

When he put lonely people into brain-scanning machines, he noticed something. They would spot potential threats within 150 milliseconds, while it took socially connected people twice as long, 300 milliseconds, to notice the same threat. What was happening? Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most. John calls this a “snowball” effect, as disconnection spirals into more disconnection.

Antidepressant drugs that increase serotonin in the brain have the same modest effect, in clinical trials, as drugs that reduce serotonin in the brain.

Nearly twice as many people hate their jobs as love their jobs.

Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack.

The vitally important corollary is that evolution shaped us not only to feel bad in isolation, but to feel insecure.” It’s a beautiful theory.

Every single person reading this is the beneficiary of big civilizing social changes that seemed impossible when somebody first proposed them.

The scientific evidence is clear that exercise significantly reduces depression and anxiety.

They found that 13 percent of people say they are “engaged“ in their jobs—which means they are “enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and contribute to their organization in a positive manner.

When the results came back and were all calculated out, Tim was struck by the results: materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.

Robert Kohlenberg, a professor of psychology, once thought that depression and anxiety were different things. But as he studied it, he discovered that "the data are indicating they're not that distinct." Depression and anxiety overlap. I started to see depression and anxiety as cover versions of the same song by different bands. Depression is a cover version by a downbeat emo band, and anxiety is a cover version by a screaming heavy metal group, but the underlying sheet music is the same. They're not identical, but they are twinned.

Anywhere in the world where people describe being lonely, they will also—throughout their sleep—experience more of something called “micro-awakenings.” These are small moments you won’t recall when you wake up, but in which you rise a little from your slumber. All other social animals do the same thing when they’re isolated too. The best theory is that you don’t feel safe going to sleep when you’re lonely, because early humans literally weren’t safe if they were sleeping apart from the tribe. You know nobody’s got your back—so your brain won’t let you go into full sleep mode.

Later, one of the world’s leading medical journals, the Lancet, conducted a detailed study of the fourteen major antidepressants that are given to teenagers. The evidence—from the unfiltered, real results—showed that they simply didn’t work, with a single exception, where the effect was very small.

Rufus tells his patients when they come to him feeling deeply depressed or anxious: You’re not crazy to feel so distressed. You’re not broken. You’re not defective. He sometimes quotes the Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

It was only a long time into talking with these social scientists that I realized every one of the social and psychological causes of depression and anxiety they have discovered has something in common. They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.

This is what I would want to tell my teenage self. You have to turn now to all the other wounded people around you, and find a way to connect with them, and build a home with these people, together - a place where you are bonded to one another and find meaning in your lives together. We have been tribeless and disconnected for so long now. It's time for us all to come home.

We are living, she has come to believe, in a culture where people are not “getting the connections that they need in order to be healthy human beings,” and that is why we can’t put down our smartphones, or bear to log off. We tell ourselves that we live so much of our lives in cyberspace because when we are there, we are connected—we are plugged into a swirling party with billions of people.

Johann Hari’s 2018 book Lost Connections argues that our culture has come to medicate depression first and ask questions later, without recognizing that some discomforts are not medical emergencies. He tells the story of how when he begged for antinausea medication in a jungle hospital in Vietnam, the doctors said, “You need your nausea. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. It will tell us what is wrong with you.

That summer, in a small house near the beach, he began to write a book. He knew it would be the last thing he ever did, so he decided to write something advocating a crazy, preposterous idea—one so outlandish that nobody had ever written a book about it before. He was going to propose that gay people should be allowed to get married, just like straight people. He thought this would be the only way to free gay people from the self-hatred and shame that had trapped Andrew himself. It’s too late for me, he thought, but maybe it will help the people who come after me. When the book—Virtually Normal—came out a year later, Patrick died when it had only been in the bookstores for a few days, and Andrew was widely ridiculed for suggesting something so absurd as gay marriage. Andrew was attacked not just by right-wingers, but by many gay left-wingers, who said he was a sellout, a wannabe heterosexual, a freak, for believing in marriage. A group called the Lesbian Avengers turned up to protest at his events with his face in the crosshairs of a gun. Andrew looked out at the crowd and despaired. This mad idea—his last gesture before dying—was clearly going to come to nothing. When I hear people saying that the changes we need to make in order to deal with depression and anxiety can’t happen, I imagine going back in time, to the summer of 1993, to that beach house in Provincetown, and telling Andrew something: Okay, Andrew, you’re not going to believe me, but this is what’s going to happen next. Twenty-five years from now, you’ll be alive. I know; it’s amazing; but wait—that’s not the best part. This book you’ve written—it’s going to spark a movement. And this book—it’s going to be quoted in a key Supreme Court ruling declaring marriage equality for gay people. And I’m going to be with you and your future husband the day after you receive a letter from the president of the United States telling you that this fight for gay marriage that you started has succeeded in part because of you. He’s going to light up the White House like the rainbow flag that day. He’s going to invite you to have dinner there, to thank you for what you’ve done. Oh, and by the way—that president? He’s going to be black.

cruel optimism.' This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture - like obesity, or depression, or addiction - and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon - but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.

But once I knew about Brett’s research, I saw the error I had been making. Now, when I feel myself starting to slide down, I don’t do something for myself—I try to do something for someone else. I go to see a friend and try to focus very hard on how they are feeling and making them feel better. I try to do something for my network, or my group—or even try to help strangers who look distressed. I learned something I wouldn’t have thought was possible at the start. Even if you are in pain, you can almost always make someone else feel a little bit better. Or I would try to channel it into more overt political actions, to make the society better.

In that moment, I finally understood for the first time why -- throughout this journey -- I kept thinking about that day when I got terribly sick in rural Vietnam. When I yelled for drugs to stop my worst symptoms -- the extreme room-spinning nausea -- the doctor told me: "You need your nausea. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. It will tell us what is wrong with you." If i had ignored or silenced that symptom, my kidneys would have failed, and I would have died. You need your nausea. You need your pain. It is a message, and you must listen to the message. All these depressed and anxious people, all over the world -- they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has gone wrong with the way we live. We need to stop trying to muffle or silence or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor it. It is only when we listen to our pain that we can follow it back to its source -- and only there, where we can see its true causes, can we begin to overcome it.

It would be grotesque to compare what has happened to workers in the West to what has happened to the Native peoples of the Americas, who have survived a genocide and more than a century of persecution. But while I researched this book, I spent some time in the Rust Belt. A few weeks before the U.S. presidential election in 2016, I went to Cleveland to try to get the vote out to stop Donald Trump from being elected. One afternoon I walked down a street in the southwest of the city where a third of the houses had been demolished by the authorities, a third were abandoned, and third still had people living in them, cowering, with steel guards on their windows. I knocked on a door, and a woman answered who, from looking at her, I would have guessed was fifty-five. She began to rage—how terrified she was of her neighbors, how the kids in the area “have got to go,” how she was desperate for anyone who would make things better, how there wasn’t even a grocery store anywhere nearby any more and she had to take three buses just to get food. She mentioned in passing that she was thirty-seven years old, which took me aback. And then she said something that stayed with me long after the election. She described what the area was like when her grandparents lived there, and you could work in a factory and have a middle-class life—and she made a verbal slip. She meant to say “when I was young.” What she actually said was “when I was alive.

If your picture of a perfect afterlife is being with the people you love all the time, he asked me, why wouldn’t you choose today—while you’re still alive—to be truly present with the people you love? Why would you rather be lost in a haze of distractions?

a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?

Why do so many people who experience violence in childhood feel the same way? Why does it lead many of them to self-destructive behavior, like obesity, or hardcore addiction, or suicide? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can’t move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless—that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it’s your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power—at least in your own mind. If it’s your fault, then there’s something you can do that might make it different. You aren’t a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You’re the person controlling the machine. You have your hands on the dangerous levers. In this way, just like obesity protected those women from the men they feared would rape them, blaming yourself for your childhood traumas protects you from seeing how vulnerable you were and are. You can become the powerful one. If it’s your fault, it’s under your control. But that comes at a cost. If you were responsible for being hurt, then at some level, you have to think you deserved it. A person who thinks they deserved to be injured as a child isn’t going to think they deserve much as an adult, either.

The greater the trauma, the greater your risk of depression, anxiety, or suicide. The technical term for this is “dose-response effect.” The more cigarettes you smoke, the more your risk of lung cancer goes up—that’s one reason we know smoking causes cancer. In the same way, the more you were traumatized as a child, the more your risk of depression rises. Curiously, it turned out emotional abuse was more likely12 to cause depression than any other kind of trauma—even sexual molestation. Being treated cruelly by your parents was the biggest driver of depression, out of all these categories.

Does trying consciously to make yourself happier actually work?1 If you decided—today, now—to dedicate more of your life to deliberately seeking out happiness, would you actually be happier a week from now, or a year from now? The team studied this question in four countries: the United States, Russia (at two different locations), Japan, and Taiwan. They tracked thousands of people, some of whom had decided to deliberately pursue happiness and some of whom hadn’t. When they compared the results, they found something they had not expected. If you deliberately try to become happy, you will not become happier—if you live in the United States. But if you live in Russia, Japan, or Taiwan, you will become happier. Why, they next wanted to know, would that be?

When they turn sixteen, all Amish have to go on a journey—one that makes them curiously well equipped to comment on our culture. They have to go and live in the “English” world for a few years. It’s called going on Rumspringa, and out there, they don’t follow the strict Amish rules for an average of two years. They get drunk, they go to strip clubs (at least, Freeman Lee did), they use phones and the Internet. (Lee told me he always thought somebody should launch a brand of rum named Rumspringa.) And then—at the end of their youth spurt—they have to make a choice. Do you want to leave all that behind and come home to join the Amish Church—or do you want to stay out in the world? If you stay out in the world, you can still come back and visit, but you’ll never be an Amish. Around 80 percent choose to join the Church.5 This experience of freedom is one of the reasons why the Amish are never regarded as a cult. It is a genuine choice.

two things make depression much more likely—having a severe negative event, and having long-term sources of stress and insecurity in your life. But the most startling result was what happened when these factors were added together. Your chances of becoming depressed didn’t just combine: they exploded. For example—if you didn’t have any friends, and you didn’t have a supportive partner, your chances of developing depression when a severe negative life event came along were 75 percent.11 It was much more likely than not. It turned out that every bad thing that happened to you, every source of stress, every lack of support—each one accelerated the risks of depression more and more.

If you believe that your depression is due solely to a broken brain, you don’t have to think about your life, or about what anyone might have done to you. The belief that it all comes down to biology protects you, in a way, for a while. If you absorb this different story, though, you have to think about those things. And that hurts.

We have been animals that move for a lot longer than we have been animals that talk and convey concepts,

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.” And if the world keeps causing you deep pain, of course you’ll stay trapped there for a long time, with the snowball growing.

One study of depressed people in Norway found that a program like this moved people on average 4.5 points on the depression scale—more than double the effect of chemical antidepressants.

We say to each other: “Nobody can help you except you.” [...] We have started to believe that doing things alone is the natural state of human beings, and the only way to advance. We have begun to think: I will look after myself, and everybody else should look after themselves, as individuals. Nobody can help you but you. Nobody can help me but me. These ideas now run so deep in our culture that we even offer them as feel-good bromides to people who feel down—as if it will lift them up. But [...] this is a denial of human history, and a denial of human nature. It leads us to misunderstand our most basic instincts. And this approach to life makes us feel terrible.

Bulantıya ihtiyacımız var. Çektiğimiz acıya ihtiyacımız var. Bir mesaj bu, bu mesajı dinlememiz gerekiyor. Dünyanın dört bir yanında depresyon ve kaygı yaşayan onca insan bize bir mesaj gönderiyor. Bize yaşam tarzımızda bir terslik olduğunu söylüyorlar. O acıyı boğmaya, susturmaya ya da patolojikleştirmeye çalışmayı bırakmamız gerekiyor. Onu dinlememiz ve ona saygı göstermemiz gerekiyor. Kaynağını görmemizin tek yolu o acıyı dinlemekten geçiyor- ancak o zaman, gerçek nedenlerini görebildiğimizde o acının üstesinden gelebileceğiz.

Many scientists and psychologists had been presenting depression as an irrational malfunction in your brain or in your genes, but he learned that Allen Barbour, an internist at Stanford University,15 had said that depression isn’t a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences. “I think that’s a very important idea,” Vincent told me. “It takes you beyond the comforting, limited idea that the reason I’m depressed is I have a serotonin imbalance, or a dopamine imbalance, or what have you.” It is true that something is happening in your brain when you become depressed, he says, but that “is not a causal explanation”; it is “a necessary intermediary mechanism.

Un día descubrió que nunca podía desembarazarse de «esa sensación de no tener un futuro». Ni siquiera se veía capaz de planificar con unos días de antelación. Los comentarios de sus amigos sobre hipotecas y pensiones se le antojaban casi utópicos, mensajes llegados de un país que solo podía visitar. «Te arranca de cuajo cualquier sentido de identidad que puedas albergar y lo reemplaza con vergüenza, preocupación y miedo… ¿Qué eres? No soy nada. ¿Qué eres?»

When I spoke with the journalist Johann Hari about his book Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions, he explained that we don’t have a problem with depression and anxiety as much as we have a crisis of meaning. Hari’s book highlights the nine main causes of depression, two of which involve human biology, but the major factors that have rapidly increased depression in the Western world throughout the last century involve disconnection from a meaningful life.

It is, he told me, having to endure “work [that] is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; [where] they die a little when they come to work each day, because their work touches no part of them that is them.

Just as we have shifted en masse from eating food to eating junk food, [...] we have shifted from having meaningful values to having junk values. All this mass-produced fried chicken looks like food, and it appeals to the part of us that evolved to need food; yet it doesn’t give us what we need from food—nutrition. Instead, it fills us with toxins. In the same way, all these materialistic values, telling us to spend our way to happiness, look like real values; they appeal to the part of us that has evolved to need some basic principles to guide us through life; yet they don’t give us what we need from values—a path to a satisfying life. Instead, they fill us with psychological toxins. Junk food is distorting our bodies. Junk values are distorting our minds. Materialism is KFC for the soul.

in the United States, 40 percent of the regulators’ wages are paid by the drug companies (while in Britain, it’s 100 percent). When a society is trying to figure out which drug is safe to put on the market, there are meant to be two teams: the drug company making the case for it, and a referee working for us, the public, figuring out if it properly works. But Professor Ioannidis was telling me that in this match, the referee is paid by the drug company team, and that team almost always wins.

An American anesthetist named4 Henry Beecher—posted on the front lines—was worried he would kill his soldiers by inducing heart failure if he tried to operate on them without anything to numb them. So, because he didn’t know what else to do, he tried an experiment. He told the soldiers he was giving them morphine, when in fact he was giving them nothing but a saltwater drip with no painkiller in it at all. The patients reacted just as if they had been given morphine. They didn’t scream, or howl, and they didn’t go into full-blown shock. It worked.

The grief exception revealed something that the authors of the DSM—the distillation of mainstream psychiatric thinking—were deeply uncomfortable with. They had been forced to admit, in their own official manual, that it’s reasonable—and perhaps even necessary—to show the symptoms of depression, in one set of circumstances. But once you’ve conceded that,4 it invites an obvious follow-up question. Why is a death the only event that can happen in life where depression is a reasonable response? Why not if your husband has left you after thirty years of marriage? Why not if you are trapped for the next thirty years in a meaningless job you hate? Why not if you have ended up homeless and you are living under a bridge? If it’s reasonable in one set of circumstances, could there also be other circumstances where it is also reasonable?

like putting a Band-Aid on an amputated limb. [When] you have a person with extreme human distress, [we need to] stop treating the symptoms. The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let’s get to the deeper problem.

[I am] now highly skeptical about the way we talk about depression and anxiety as if they are mainly caused by defects in our brain or genes. It’s a kind of holdover from a highly Westernized, medicalized vision of health and wellbeing, [...] and it lacks any serious appreciation of the cultural context in which these things are happening. If you act this way, you ignore the legitimacy of being depressed for many people who have been stripped of hope. Instead of thinking about these causes of depression, though, we have been simply putting people on drugs, and that’s become an industry.

The term doesn’t really make any sense, she said: we don’t know what a “chemically balanced” brain would look like. People are told that drugs like antidepressants restore a natural balance to your brain, she said, but it’s not true—they create an artificial state. The whole idea of mental distress being caused simply by a chemical imbalance is “a myth,” she has come to believe, sold to us by the drug companies.

He introduced me to an idea I hadn’t heard before—a concept named “cruel optimism.” This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture—like obesity, or depression, or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon—but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.

Any and all errors in this book are entirely my responsibility. It’s very important to me to make sure all the facts in this book are correct. If our extensive fact-checking process has missed any errors, please e-mail me at chasingthescream@gmail.com and we’ll get them corrected in later editions—go to this book’s website for a full list of any I have been made aware of.

In a world that thinks there’s no such thing as society, the idea that our depression and anxiety have social causes will seem incomprehensible. It’s like talking in ancient Aramaic to a twenty-first-century kid.

The goal was to offer the patient two things at the same time. The first was an opportunity to describe the traumatic experience—to craft a story about it, so the patient could make sense of it. As this experiment began, one of the things they discovered almost immediately is that many of the patients had literally never before acknowledged what happened to them to another human being.

You need your nausea. You need your pain. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. All these depressed and anxious people, all over the world—they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has gone wrong with the way we live. We need to stop trying to muffle or silence or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor it. It is only when we listen to our pain that we can follow it back to its source—and only there, when we can see its true causes, can we begin to overcome it. To

For decades, long before these new antidepressants were developed, we have been disconnecting—from each other, and from what matters. We have lost faith in the idea of anything bigger or more meaningful than the individual, and the accumulation of more and more stuff. When I was a child, Margaret Thatcher said, “There’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families”—and, all over the world, her viewpoint won. We believed it—even those of us who thought we rejected it. I know this now, because I can see that when I became depressed, it didn’t even occur to me, for thirteen years, to relate my distress to the world around me. I thought it was all about me, and my head. I had entirely privatized my pain—and so had everyone I knew.

Ronald Purser, who is professor of management at San Francisco State University. He introduced me to an idea I hadn’t heard before—a concept named “cruel optimism.” This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture—like obesity, or depression, or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon—but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.

He had explained to me: It’s not the work itself that makes you sick. It’s three other things. It’s the feeling of being controlled—of being a meaningless cog in a system. It’s the feeling that no matter how hard you work, you’ll be treated just the same and nobody will notice—an imbalance, as he puts it, between efforts and rewards. And it’s the feeling of being low on the hierarchy—of being a low-status person who doesn’t matter compared to the Big Man in the corner office.

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.

Mental health is produced socially: the presence or absence of mental health is above all a social indicator and therefore requires social, as well as individual, solutions.

It’s not so much what happens in those fifteen minutes—Rachel has come to feel that “you’re planting seeds during the meditation, [and] it flowers spontaneously during your day, and your life.

Depression and anxiety might, in one way, be the sanest reaction you have.6 It’s a signal, saying—you shouldn’t have to live this way, and if you aren’t helped to find a better path, you will be missing out on so much that is best about being human.

But I was going to learn that neither of these stories is true. The primary cause of all this rising depression and anxiety is not in our heads. It is, I discovered, largely in the world, and the way we are living in it. I learned there are at least nine proven causes of depression and anxiety (although nobody had brought them together like this before), and many of them are rising all around us—causing us to feel radically worse.