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

Very good book.. Just finished reading Kindle edition.. A perspective changing book, A must for those with anxiety and depression; for those who are care givers for people with depression and anxiety; those who want to understand depression and anxiety and for health care professionals in related fields.5 star rating for content, research, presentation, courage to go against the prevailing thinking in society and bigwigs, courage to accept incorrect stands taken by author (on this topic) in the past.But I recently read criticisms about book and author on Google. I am not in position to evaluate that in depth. So just mentioned this to have a balanced views. But personally I found great insights in this book.

I never expected that I am going to get such an excellent well researched book on anxiety and depression. This book is must because every second person in the world is going throe some sort of mental trauma. We all run for short cut and take pills. This must be stopped.

A must read for EVERYONE! Whether you’re a therapist, a life-coach, a teacher or just another human being who wants to understand himself and another human being better, this book is a must-read. Talks about depression from a non-clinical lens. Scientifically backed with research and throws light on where all our lifestyle plays a huge role in causing depression.

This book is really like a medicine for me. This book is for everyone because mostly we all conduct lonely life which can very easily gives us enormous pain. I like this book. I heard from many people they often old times are far better than now because in olden day, people are very closely lived together.

The book in general is insightful just that was not the “kept me hooked up” kind of book. A decent read in general.

Best book, should be readed by everyone.Author went into details and did real experiments on humans about their life na then prsented the results.Everything is so perfect.

Nice,absorbing book.Has a very simple ,analytical approach towards explaining things which really helps you in understanding things easily.Haven't completed the book as yet...but so far..so good......would recommend it to those people too who don't suffer from depression....helps you in empathasing with others suffering from it....makes the world a better place

Nice

Lost Connections is a good book about the causes and fixes for anxiety an depression written by a Brit who realized that a small chunk of what he’s swallowed over the years is a lie, and is trying to find the truth… without realizing that he’s still swimming in a broad pool of propaganda that’s not true.As such, it has some very valuable insights and solidly done research in the first half, presented in an aggrieved narrative about how he was lied to by his doctor and the pharmaceutical companies and therefore presuming that any and all use of antidepressants is a lie. (I note that the studies he cites often showed only a small percentage of people were helped by antidepressants compared to the control and the placebo, but small is not non-zero. In his rage at not being personally helped long-term, he presents this fact and then overlooks it repeatedly.)
The causes of anxiety and depression are often disconnection and trauma. The author breaks it down into 8 categories: 1.) Feeling that your work is completely disconnected from any meaningful results, 2.) Disconnection from a social. Group, 3.) Disconnection from Meaningful Values 4.) Reaction to traumatic events, 5.) Very low social status / respect 6.) Disconnection from the natural world, 7.) Lack of Hope for the future / present insecurity and instability with no relief in sight, 8.) Certain physical disorders (low thyroid) and genetic dice-loading triggered by other events

.The first half is a pretty good read, and has solid studies and science. That said, the further in you go, the more bias leaks through.
The author is hampered in understanding the people he talks to by three main things: one, he’s a middle-class Brit from the suburbs of London, who continually assumes that the entire Western world, including all of America, must have the exact same shallow, materialistic culture he does. He has no shared context or values with most of the people he’s interviewing… and often fails to understand that there’s even a gap. Two, he’s so profoundly disconnected from nature that when told “climb the mountain with me or you don’t get an interview”, he could only view the vistas through the mental framework of “seeing a screensaver.” Three, he’s so profoundly leftist that he cannot see where he’s traded the ability to understand for a pot of propaganda.For example, not once in the entire book does he ever consider the role of religion and faith in people’s lives. When he talks about the value of being out in nature, and being surrounded by things that make you feel small, and merely a part of something much greater, of feeling awe and connection to something far beyond himself… he never once realizes this is how a large part of the world, including in the West which he despises, feel as part of their relationship with G-d.When he talks about the value of being a connected community that helps each other out, and shares triumphs and sorrows together, he looks past every single church, temple, tabernacle, and mosque out there, and scrapes the bottom of the barrel until he comes up with an example of a community pulling together to protest rent raises as his example for the west. Even when he interviews an Amish community, he manages to spend a lot of pages talking about their connectedness… without ever once mentioning their faith. His interpretation is that they’re essentially "a support group for rejecting modernity"… and he failed to understand their reaction when he told them that.For another, he acknowledges that people need a connection to nature… but then proceeds to talk about it only in the context of urban dwellers experiencing green spaces. The idea of small town culture escapes him entirely, and rural living is something he presents as needing fly to Cambodia and Vietnam to experience and interview.When he talks about bonobos at the bottom of the hierarchy acting as if they are depressed, he starts flying his marxist flag and states that the USA is the most unequal country in the world because we have the richest rich, so the rest of the population must feel desperately poor and oppressed by comparison.When he talks about the awareness of imminent possibility of death as a part of life giving perspective, and refocusing the brain… It never occurs to him to talk to any combat veterans, or other military members.As such, take this book with a heavy dose of salt, understanding that the author’s limitations are severe. Try not to throw your e-reading device across the room when he meticulously footnotes medical studies, but then claims that the land mines in Cambodia were all left there by the US.And so on it goes, including, but not limited to, a predictable bout of watching him proclaim that Asia is far more socially connected, and therefore far more mentally healthy than the west’s shallow material culture. The differences in a shame culture versus a guilt culture never enter his mind, nor the suicide rate and social issues in Japan and China from those cultures.The second half the book is a masterful exercise in understanding where he lost the plot, and watching him scrabble to present all the wrong solutions or interpretations of other people’s solutions, while desperately clinging to his worldview.If the cause is disconnection, then the solution, long-term, is reconnection. It’s stepping outside yourself and focusing on things larger than yourself. It’s finding ways to make your world better, your social connections flourish and strengthen, to make work meaningful and assume authority to go with the responsibility, It’s spending time working with your hands and seeing the results, it’s being out in nature, it’s spending time in prayer and meditation, it’s gaining perspective on the things that truly matter, on living life by your morals, it’s paying attention to your own body and reconnecting with it.The author instead recommends classic socialist responses they’ve been using and failing at for over a century: forming unions, starting worker’s co-ops, and mandating the government ban something. In this case, advertising.He also recommends starting a “kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for junk values, a space where we can all meet to challenge the depression-generating ideas we’ve been taught to learn to listen instead to our intrinsic values.”

But he’s an atheist and proudly tells us again and again that he’s wedded to the mentality that he’s smarter than the backwards religious people, so the obvious solutions people have used for as long as they’ve been human have escaped him entirely.
Religion, Marx said, is the opiate of the masses. He was wrong about that, like he was about so much else.But as the Amish tried to gently point out to the author, faith and community can be the antidepressant of the masses.

The US suicide rate has risen nearly 30 percent since 1999. The rate in 2017 was the highest it has been in at least 50 years. Why are more Americans suffering from depression?Johan Hari interviewed prominent researchers in the field to find the answer. An award-winning journalist and best selling author, Hari suffered from depression, which ran in his family. He took antidepressants in progressively stronger doses, but inevitably the sadness returned.Hari noticed a tremendous increase in the American use of antidepressants over several decades. Today about one in four middle-aged women in the United States is taking antidepressants. His book explains why are so many more people apparently feeling depressed and severely anxious. Something changed. Hari came to understood that depression is not caused by a defective brain. Instead, anxiety and depression are reactions to how we are living.What are environmental factors causing anxiety? In a word, the cause is disconnection -- from meaningful work, from other people, from meaningful values, from nature, from a secure future.Gallup finds that 87 percent of workers are either not engaged or are actively disengaged from their jobs. Nearly twice as many people hate their jobs as love their jobs. Depression among British civil servants correlates with their rank, with higher ranked bureaucrats suffering less depression than those lower on the totem pole. The degree of control a worker has over his job is the key factor, even among workers with the same ranking."More people say they feel lonely than ever before," and research shows that loneliness leads to depression. In most cases in one five-year study, loneliness preceded depressive symptoms.Humans evolved in tribes, and being part of a tribe was necessary for survival. "Loneliness isn’t just some inevitable human sadness, like death. It’s a product of the way we live now." Highly social groups such as the Amish and the Hutterites have very low rates of loneliness.In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam of Harvard meticulously documented the sharp decline in community involvement in the US since the 1960s. Putnam also found we do fewer activities with our families, such as eating meals or watching tv together.Americans have been polled for decades about how many close friends they have; at one time the answer was three, but today the most common answer is none. In short, there has been an unprecedented social crash, which prevents us from fulfilling our desire for belonging.Cyberspace connection doesn't fill the void. The inordinate amount of time young people spend on smartphones further reduces the time they spend in face-to-face interaction."Online connection is a pale imitation of face-to-face connection that we social animals crave. The difference between being online and being physically among people is a bit like the difference between pornography and sex: it addresses a basic itch, but it’s never satisfying. Social media can’t compensate us psychologically for what we have lost—social life."Another cause of depression is the loss of status and respect. Among baboons, the lowest ranking members of the troop have the highest levels of stress hormones, although having an insecure status was the one thing even more distressing than having a low status. In other words, stress is highest when status is low or is threatened. Depressed humans have the same stress hormone found in low-ranking male baboons. Human depression and anxiety are responses to the constant status anxiety many of us live with today.Research by Wilkinson and Picket finds that the more unequal the society, the more prevalent all forms of mental illness are. The higher the inequality, the higher the depression, which strongly suggests that something about inequality seems to be driving up depression and anxiety. This doesn’t affect only people at the bottom; in a highly unequal society, everyone has to think about their status a lot, and whether they are in danger of falling into lower status.What role do genes play in depression? The best research on identical twins reveals that 37 percent of depression is inherited, while for severe anxiety, it is between 30 and 40 percent. "So genes increase your sensitivity, sometimes significantly, but they aren’t—in themselves—the cause. Experts agree that depression caused solely by internal brain malfunction is rare or nonexistent, with the exception of bipolar or manic depressive disorders where genes play a bigger role.If Hari is right that depression is not a brain disease, then pills are not the appropriate treatment for most people. So what is? Hari says treatment would change if doctors called depression disconnection. "If disconnection is the main driver of our depression and anxiety, we need to find ways to reconnect." The Amish have low rates of depression because they have a dense community network that provides a profound sense of belonging and meaning.Alienated workers need to become reconnected to meaningful work. They need to overcome the feelings of being controlled and having no say and little status. An alternative to the corporation is the democratic cooperative, which better engages partner/workers than the hierarchical corporate structure. Partners are happier, less anxious, and less depressed than they had been working in the kind of top-down organizations that dominate our society. People are less anxious where they feel they have some control and input, as opposed to just being given orders.Finally, he would address anxiety related to low income by having government provide a guaranteed basic income. Studies of this policy show recipients have less stress, a reduced sense of financial insecurity, fewer doctor visits for anxiety and depression, and more time with their kids.Lost Connections reads like a series of stories rather than an academic journal. Hari's interviews with researchers and formerly depressed people make the book more interesting and readable. Some of his contentions are debatable, but he certainly persuades readers to rethink what we know about depression. ###

Like many who will consider reading this book I have suffered from bouts of extreme clinical depression for a long time, despite a life that has been, by any standard measure, filled with success, recognition, and good fortune. And I know, like most who suffer from depression do, that 1. the pain is very real, and 2. career recognition, material success, and a comfortable life have little to do with the ultimate quality of life.Three decades ago I was finally forced to seek help. And I mean forced. I was that guy in the corner office of a large organization, I owned an impressive amount of stuff, traveled the world, and split my holidays between Aspen and the Caribbean. And I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. There was no reason to. And if I hadn’t addressed it, I’d probably still be there.I, too, was treated with SSRIs and they worked remarkably well. And I could not have cared less if that was a function of the placebo effect or the drugs were addressing some chemical imbalance in my brain. I still don’t, to be honest.I do, however, care about continuous improvement in my overall health and well-being. View the beautiful valley before you from atop the mountain and you’ll seek a more magnificent mountain. I have little fear of falling back to where I was because I ultimately went through extensive psychotherapy with a brilliant and insightful doctor and he taught me how to fish, or climb, as it were.Johann Hari has provided a delightful refresher course, although that understates the contribution of this book. He has also reframed the discussion in a way that only a fellow traveler and gifted writer could. He has made both the problems and the solutions very accessible and in so doing has broadened both the audience and the quality of the dialogue.Which is why, I think, this is a book not for the depressed and anxious, but for all of humanity. Depression is often defined as a very specific manifestation of issues each and every one of us faces at some time in our lives. That doesn’t mean that different manifestations are any less painful or debilitating. Addiction is just one example. Are you drinking too much because you’re addicted or depressed? It doesn’t matter.That’s not to suggest that the source of all pain is universal. That, I think, would be naïve. We are quite literally defined by our experiences and once you’ve been around for a couple of decades or more you are experientially unique.Mark Twain once quipped, “History does not repeat itself but it often rhymes.” And so it is with mental and physical well-being. We’re more alike with each other and with the baboons of the savanna than we are different.I won’t give away the details of the book because you need to experience the context within which the author unveils the problems and their solutions. Let’s just say that the title is appropriate. It’s all about connections.I have given a great deal of thought, and now have the time to do so, as to how to re-establish the connections that have been lost in our current world. As Johann so clearly established, it is the loss at the heart of our growing collective angst and disillusionment. I have been particularly interested, in light of my executive career, with re-establishing purpose and connection in the workplace. When I began my career we never talked about work/life balance, not because we didn’t work hard or our lives outside of work weren’t important, but because our careers were an integral part of our life. We achieved connection, purpose, identity, and status there, no matter what job title you held.But that is all gone today and I have met few, even in the C-suites of corporate America, who honestly claim to get any real fulfillment from their work. And that is a function of lost connection. That loss, however, has resulted in an even bigger loss - the loss of trust that connection enables. There is no trust in the world most of us live and work in today. And by trust I don’t mean the trust to set a pile of money on the table and leave the room. I mean the trust to know that the people you work with have compassion, humility, and optimism; are competent in what they do; and have some sense of how they and we, as human beings and as a work unit, fit into the world.I read a lot of books. And this is one of the best I’ve read in a long time. Johann never says so, but he is a fellow Pyrrhonist, I suspect. That, by the way, is the ultimate compliment – it’s where trust comes from. You can’t trust a person who hasn’t challenged himself or herself. And he clearly has.This is a book you should read. Perhaps more importantly, this is a book your adolescent children should read. (I feel the same way about psychotherapy, actually. It should be mandatory when you turn sixteen.)Thank you, Johann Hari.

love it.

I found this audiobook disappointing, I really would have preferred not to as I thought the introduction, contents and structuring of the audiobook were very interesting, so much so that I bought a paperback too in order to revisit some of the ideas or highlight for reference.The audiobook itself is narrated by the author, I had some issues with the pace of narrative, tone and inflection is definitely not neutral either and not in a sense that they are trying to provide emphasis or convey feeling. I just felt that (like the content and paperback) the author has certain "enthusiasms", which may not be readily shared by the reader, and its really reflected in the recording. Some content that really should not seemed really dull because of how it was conveyed in a kind of monotonous drone almost, other parts where delivered with an almost keen joy, though these were not so much what I felt would be the "main content".The first part of the book is a pretty serious criticism of SSRI prescriptions, the evidence base for the same, some of the regrets that some of their original supporters and promoters have about shaping the culture which sells them (either literally or in the sense of promotion to patients as first line treatment). There is a lot about the author's own experience here, early embrace of pharmaceutical remedy is regretted as they relate their view that it was probably all placebo effect, the benefits were not real but the adverse side effects where. Now a lot of this content was properly qualified and I do think the author intended to do more than generalize from their own experiences. I was still a little uncomfortable with this.The rest of the book, I expected at least, would be about "social prescribing", the bio-psycho-social formulation model of mental health assessment and treatment, in practice for years now in most mental health services, maybe some discussion of therapies. It is that but its also a more in depth discussion of a number of protest groups and other lifestyle choices that I think had particular appeal to the author themselves. Even some of these that made sense to me, like a universal basic income, where very quickly linked with other things that I felt where the authors real interest and what they really would have preferred to be talking about instead, such as gay rights.Social prescribing, biopscyhosocial formulations and connectedness are really important ideas but I did not really think the kind of discussion I'd hoped for was present at all. As important as these things are, as important as the pharmaceutical skepticism can be too, there are also legitimate concerns that these can become convenient covers for inadequacy in resourcing. Not simply in terms of prescribing decisions (often money expensive, and costly in other ways, prescription medications) but also in terms of the availability of formal services, therapies and practitioners.The thinking goes that if the individual experiencing illness as a consequence of a "lack of society", ie intangible, informal personal resources, which are not in the gift of services or practitioners to provide, that practitioners can not consider themselves "substitutes" or "alternatives" (not even as "palliatives" or "compensations" for losses, as DW Winnecott wrote about in terms of delinquency and loss of family life).I think the dilemma is a very real one, I have read authors make persuasive cases about "social character" or "shaping social pressures" (often below the level of awareness) for years. I am wary of their findings becoming a rationale for "more of the same", no response or a poor response. In any case I did not think there was a great deal of depth of any discussion on these points in this audiobook.As to the realness of the dilemma, people with connections to satisfying work, to friends, family, positive professional, personal and peer support groups cope better with the precipitation of mental illness, even when they have a predisposition towards it. These things are often not readily available, at least not as readily available as some alternatives.The discussion also relates mainly to some of the more "social malaise" types of mental illness, many of the insights are as close as possible to universal insights. However, there is a real difference between the debilitating effects of a serious mental illness, such as varieties of schizophrenia, personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder/emotional upset personality disorder, and recurrent depressive illness of which situational stress is the greater part. There is little or no real discussion on those points. So, in that respect, I do not think the book does much to inform the listener, whether they are professionals or public.I found this all pretty disappointing as a listener/reader as I had high hopes. When partially through the paperback I actually let someone else borrow my copy and recommended it to others. When having finished the book and listened to the audiobook over twice I could only reach the conclusions I've outlined here. It could be a matter of taste and I could be approaching the whole thing with lost of reading I've done before. It is good to see social prescribing given a platform at all though, its the often a popularly neglected and prosaic but vital dimension of life.