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, on Lost Connections by Johann Hari

In journalist Johann Hari‘s Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions, he tells readers his own long-term depression has been blamed on a chemical imbalance in the brain. However, at some point in his therapeutic process “…he began to investigate whether this was true – and he learned that almost everything we have been told about depression and anxiety is wrong.”

Hari’s research led him to this basic conclusion (HuffPost): “I learned that there are in fact nine major causes of depression and anxiety that are unfolding all around us. Two are biological, and seven are out in here in the world, rather than sealed away inside our skulls in the way my doctor told me…I was even more startled to discover this isn’t some fringe position – the World Health Organization has been warning for years that we need to start dealing with the deeper causes of depression in this way.”

According to Fiona Sturges, The Guardian, the factors cited by Hari that contribute to reactive depression “include hardship, trauma, loneliness, lack of fulfilment, absence of status and disconnection from nature.”

Particularly salient is what Hari gleaned about one of these from physician and researcher Vincent Felitti‘s work (HuffPost): “Childhood trauma caused the risk of adult depression to explode. 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, and more than 4,000 percent more likely to be an injecting drug user.”

Hari, furthermore, makes this helpful point:

One day, one of Dr. Vincent Felitti’s colleagues, Dr. Robert Anda, told me something I have been thinking about ever since.
When people are behaving in apparently self-destructive ways, ‘it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them,’ he said, ‘and time to start asking what happened to them.’

In the case of more endogenous depression, or the biologically based type, Hari now believes Big Pharma and prescribers take advantage of the popularized but not necessarily accurate notion of the brain having a chemical imbalance. There is a significant body of research that disputes both this theory and the efficacy of the prevailing remedy, antidepressant medications.

If meds aren’t always effective, what other kinds of solutions to depression/anxiety did Hari find and thus present in Lost Connections? Kirkus Reviews reports the author’s view that there are “immense (natural) antidepressive benefits of meaningful work, social interaction, and selflessness.”

For further details we have to read the book.