Following my look at an extract published online, I was cursed enough to get my hands on a copy, and I have a lot of feelings about it. Hari’s review of studies of alternative treatments is helpful reading for any civil rights lawyer thinking about remedies for mental health disability rights violations.I forced myself to read Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression by Johann Hari so you don’t have to. society of the loss of community ties.I was particularly struck by the way that some of the prescriptions-for community integration and social prescribing-recall ADA rights. Some of the social prescriptions that Hari describes could have come from the pages of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, a book about the harms to U.S. To me, this resonates with the way stair-free design, for example in subways, helps wheelchair users, but also help parents with strollers and tourists with luggage. He is saying that some of the societal fixes to help people with those serious conditions will help everyone. Hari is not saying that clinical depression and anxiety are the same as ordinary unhappiness. “Depression and anxiety … are the sharpest edges of a spear that has been thrust into almost everyone in our culture.” (P.14). While clinical depression is different from unhappiness, he says, they are connected. It is, I discovered, largely in the world, and the way we are living in it.” Johann Hari, Lost Connections, p.13 “The primary cause of all this rising depression and anxiety is not in our heads. He lays out studies about factors other than brain chemistry that contribute to depression, and treatments that may be more effective than pills.
Hari’s book was therefore intriguing to me. I do not in any way question people who find psychiatric medication helpful-they know their lives and brains-but I have yet to speak with anyone who describes experiencing a simple “magic pill” effect. It is an experience I have heard many times. Hari’s story is that he ended up on a potent cocktail of drugs that left him worse off than he was at the outset. His doctors kept increasing the dose, leading to health-threatening side effects like significant weight loss, and then prescribing other medications to counteract the side effect. But Hari found that the drugs had only a modest and temporary effect. No Magic PillsĪccording to this story, the answer is a pill. Hari explains that, as an 18-year-old in London, he seized on the easy answer that the pharmaceutical industry has promoted and society has often embraced-depression is a brain chemistry imbalance, often described as a lack of serotonin. It’s a book that traces the journey of the author, a journalist who has been diagnosed with depression since he was a teenager, to uncover the causes of and solutions for depression that go beyond medication.
On the recommendation of a loved one with depression, I have been reading Johann Hari’s Lost Connections.
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