Summary of Lost Connections Book by Johann Hari

Anxiety and depression rise and fall together. According to professor Robert Kohlenberg, the data are indicating that the two are not that distinct. In practice, the diagnosis of depression and anxiety overlap. Sometimes, one part is more pronounced than the other — you might have panic attacks this month and be crying a lot next month. But the idea that they are separate in the way that (say) having pneumonia and having a broken leg are separate isn’t borne out of evidence. In fact, the National Institutes of Health — the main body funding medical research in the United States — has stopped funding studies that present depression and anxiety as different diagnoses. Depression and anxiety are not identical but they are twinned. They are like cover versions of the same song by different bands.

We have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are. The conventional views are that they are due to a malfunctioning brain and the solution is to take antidepressant drugs that repair your brain chemistry. These pills are all around us today. Some 1 in 5 U.S. adults are taking at least 1 drug for a psychiatric problem. Nearly 1 in 4 middle-aged women in the U.S. is taking antidepressants at any given time. Around 1 in 10 boys at American high schools are being given a powerful stimulant to make them focus. Addiction to legal and illegal drugs is now so widespread that the life expectancy of white men is declining for the first time in the entire peacetime history of the United States.

These effects have radiated out across the Western world. The Western world is literally awash with antidepressant drugs. For example, as you read this, 1 in 3 French people is taking a legal psychotropic drug such as an antidepressant, while the UK has almost the highest use in all of Europe. When scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it 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’ve accepted that a huge number of the people around us are so distressed that they feel they need to take a powerful chemical every day to keep themselves together.

In Lost Connections, you will find references to scientific studies which challenge conventional views about depression and anxiety. You will find that the primary cause of the rising depression and anxiety is largely in our world and the way we are living in it. There are at least 9 proven causes of depression and anxiety, and many of them are rising all around us, causing us to feel radically worse.

There are two types of antidepressants — the real antidepressants and the chemical antidepressants. The latter offers a temporary escape that leads to more pain eventually. The former provides a true path out of pain. It is not something you buy, or swallow. It challenges our current explanations of the causes of depression and anxiety, opens our eyes to the real causes, and provides permanent solutions to these problems.