Lost Connections
Why depression is our time's disease
"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti
I was once depressed.
There was no clear cause, at least not at first sight. I was at my "dream job”; at 25, I was finally paying all my bills and had some money left over for savings. I had my own apartment, and I was doing what I believed in. I was one of the lucky few of my biologist friends who were working in environmental conservation while making a decent living.
I was living in Brasília, where the federal government and all its branches are. Brasília is the brightest city I have ever lived in or been to. It's always sunny, with only around 60 days of rain yearly. It's almost impossible to walk around without sunglasses. No kidding.
But at that point, all the light and sunshine didn't seem to affect me. I saw the world in hues of black and gray. This is one of the photos I posted to Instagram. I kept it because that's exactly how I saw the world back then.
It was the hardest moment of my life, but thankfully I got out without a scratch. Now, 8 years later, and with many changes in my life since, I can better understand the reasons behind the continuous dread, the harmful thoughts, and the whole weekends spent in bed. I now understand why I felt out of control over my life. And I feel extremely thankful that I found a reliable therapist at the time who didn't simply send me to a psychiatrist to put me on drugs.
Back then, I couldn't see anything clearly, but I could already sense that my depression was not simply a malfunction in my brain or genetics. There was more to it.
And the more I learn about depression and mental health in general, the more I feel like depression is not simply the result of some backward genetic lottery. It is related to modernity, to our broken connections, to our bullshit jobs, to our lack of control over our lives, and to how separated we are from nature. Although it has a physical and genetic component, those are not enough to explain what is happening worldwide.
About this topic, Johann Hari writes:
“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.” - Johann Hari
I found this quote from a book that gave me food for thought on a lot of topics and gave me the research basis to better understand my situation as well as the situation of the world in general, where more and more people are diagnosed with depression.
The book is called Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions. I loved listening to the audio version so much that I bought the physical version to reread and highlight.
Johann Hari has struggled with depression his whole life. In his role as a journalist and writer, he had the opportunity to meet many specialists around the world who studied depression and anxiety for many years. As he interviewed and searched for scientific articles and proofs, he found that the primary explanation for depression offered in our culture fell apart. Depression is believed to be caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. However, this idea was built on a series of mistakes and based on very few experiments with poor design. He concludes that increasing serotonin levels with drugs will not solve the problem if low levels are not the primary cause to begin with.
On this premise, he explores nine causes of depression and anxiety, from work to genetics and our disconnect from nature. He talks to different specialists, from psychiatrists to evolutionary biologists. After presenting the causes, he explores possible antidepressants we can find that will counteract depression.
“...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.” - Johann Hari
We need our pain
Although I now live in a place that is the opposite of Brasília—dark and gray, with probably 60 days a year without rain and many months when the days are extremely short—I never felt as depressed as I did back then. I'm always afraid I'll fall back; it seems always to lurk, but so far, so well.
It probably has to do with what I wrote before; my life has changed dramatically since. Just like when we are physically sick, it's the pain or tiredness that makes us look at it and take the right measures. This is either through medicine, rest, or surgery. Depression also points to something that needs to be addressed.
In pointing out that depression can be caused by more than just brain chemistry, the author does not minimize the problem. The book is not simply saying, Go 'touch grass' and you will be fine. He is searching for a better understanding of what's going on.
He argues that if we believe there's simply something wrong with us and our brains, it takes away our agency to improve things. We get stuck. There's very little to do other than modulate our neurotransmitters. When in reality, there's a lot we can do and change to make our lives better. Even if it's extremely challenging to do so while depressed, just like it doesn't make sense to keep taking antihistamines while living in a mold-infested house, it doesn't make sense to simply take antidepressants and not make changes to your life. You need to fix the mold or get the hell out of the house. Depression can be a signal that something is wrong in our lives and demands change. What we need is help, as we are making those changes.
“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.” - Johann Hari
What I didn't like about the book
In Lost Connections, Johann Hari names nine causes of depression: disconnection from meaningful work, other people, meaningful values, the natural world, childhood trauma, status and respect, a hopeful and secure future, and finally, the roles of genes and brain changes. My only problem with the book is that it dances around the main cause of most of the disconnection we feel without really naming it. Although he addresses broad social issues at some points, it's obvious that neoliberalism is behind many of our woes.
Neoliberalism has given free rein to the market to the detriment of human well-being and connections. As Margaret Thatcher stated at the beginning of it, "There is no such thing as society". If there's no society, then naturally we feel disconnected.
If money and the economy are the only things that matter, of course, we don't do meaningful work, don't have meaningful values, don't have enough time for others, and don't feel like we have a hopeful and secure future. While you read it, you understand he also thinks this way but, nevertheless, leaves it unaddressed.
In this sense, The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han delves deeper and directly addresses how neoliberalism relies on a positive society, which makes us sick. Reading it after Lost Connections as an accompanying book is probably a good idea.
I also found that Lost Connections conversed well with The Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, which I reviewed two weeks ago. She even wrote a blurb on the back of Lost Connections.
Internet and disconnection
All three books try to make sense of our current times, our addiction to the internet, and what it does to our societies.
“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?”- Johann Hari
We turn to the internet for connections and friends; we turn to the internet to find meaningful work and validation; we turn to the internet for control over what we are doing; we want to do things our way and find our own solutions, which most jobs won't allow. Unfortunately, most of our cravings won't be truly satisfied here.
Most of all, we go to the internet to be distracted. To not feel the crushing reality of being a social animal alone in an apartment in a city by ourselves. Of not controlling our lives since we always worry about money and living conditions. Being distracted from our past pain and all we can't fix.
But distractions will not make us happy. It won't solve anything.
If you are depressed, it will probably keep you there. Depressed.
What matters
First, we need our pain. Western cultures are always extra keen on hiding, brushing off, or trying the easiest cure to solve our pain. We dislike bad feelings; we don't want to talk about pain, death, or grief. We want simple solutions. (A pill is perfect!)
Second, we have to fight the fixation we have on ourselves. Our hyperindividualistic strick. If not, not much is left for other parts of ourselves—for the true connections and the work that is truly meaningful to us. It doesn't leave us any time to fight our fights and ignite change in the world. The more we only think about ourselves and seek validation and connection through screens, the more miserable we feel.
“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.” - Johann Hari
Third, and most importantly, our connections are essential. Connection to others, to our past, and to the world around us.
“But what I was being taught is—if you want to stop being depressed, don’t be you. Don’t be yourself. 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.”
Lost Connections: Why are you Depressed and How to Find Hope by Johann Hari
Depression and anxiety are now at epidemic levels. Why? Across the world, scientists have uncovered evidence for nine different causes. Some are in our biology, but most are in the way we are living today. This book offers a different way of looking at that crisis.
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
A frustrated businessman is on a bridge, ready to commit suicide. An angel appears and shows him what life would have been like if he had never existed. When we are depressed, we tend to think people will be far better off without us, and the movie directly tackles this kind of thinking. Of course, he learns that his life is filled with love and people all around him who find him a good man.
Euphoria (HBO)
Rue (Zendaya) is a 17-year-old high schooler misusing drugs in a frantic way. That's because she is depressed, and the only time her depression quiets to what she calls a blissful "two seconds of nothingness" is when she's so high that her heart stops. It's a devastating, difficult-to-watch show, but it speaks directly and powerfully to a generation for whom sometimes merely existing is hard enough.
Thank you for this thoughtful take on a book I've heard about but had lagged about reading. I'll be getting it soon.
I cannot begin to unpack how much I love this piece. I've read the book too. And, as with seemingly all books on depression, the Capitalism/Neoliberalism card is never played. I almost leapt out of my chair when I got to that part of the essay on Thatcher. Nor sure if you've read Mark Fisher. You should. He talks almost endlessly on the subject of what he calls Capitalist Realism and depressive realism. The two, he argues, are inseparable. I've been saying this for decades since I first read Marx.