Nonetheless, I found the book useful because it provides a more social and practical lens on the problem of depression, which we really don’t talk about much because it doesn’t fit into the standard “treatment of illness” narrative. The author seems to be taking a journalistic approach - find one or two experts and one or two random individuals whose stories support his narrative, describe a couple of studies - rather than a more rigorous “but why should we actually believe this over alternative models?”Īnother major issue is that it conflates “biopsychosocial model of depression” with a more generalized position of “antidepressants bad, all other treatments good,” which really doesn’t help the author’s case. Many of the claims made in the book seem to rely on anecdote and individual studies. The book provides a vague model pointing towards how we should think about depression differently, and even some specific causes to look at, but there’s clearly some big gaps in the supporting evidence, and there’s not much concrete advice that a depressed person won’t have considered before (“maybe you would be less depressed if you made friends, or had more money”). It’s not really fully fleshed out and supported, nor is it a good self-help guide. It also presents some interesting possible solutions for solving depression in one’s own life and solving depression as a social, collective-action problem. This book asserts that most of us are thinking about depression in a fundamentally wrong way, which would be very important if true. For instance, 34% of SSC readers said they were diagnosed or thought they had it in 2020 ( source). He learned there is scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety-and that this knowledge leads to a very different set of solutions: ones that offer real hope.Well, it's about depression, which is generally interesting to LW readers. So, as an adult, he went on a forty-thousand-mile journey across the world to interview the leading experts about what causes depression and anxiety, and what solves them. Some of the solutions his doctor offered had given him some relief-but he remained in deep pain. When he was a teenager, he had gone to his doctor and explained that he felt like pain was leaking out of him, and he couldn't control it or understand it. He had a very personal reason to ask this question. He was thirty-nine years old, and almost every year he had been alive, depression and anxiety had increased in Britain and across the Western world.

There was a mystery haunting award-winning investigative journalist Johann Hari. , offering a radical new way of thinking about depression and anxiety.

Johann hari lost connections