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Lost Connections

Metadata

  • Author: Johann Hari
  • ASIN: B07583XJRW
  • ISBN: 1408878720
  • Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07583XJRW
  • Kindle link

Highlights

Everything that causes an increase in depression also causes an increase in anxiety, and the other way around. They rise and fall together. — location: 286 ^ref-56919

The primary cause of all this rising depression and anxiety is not in our heads. It is, I discovered, largely in the world, and the way we are living in it. — location: 318 ^ref-60383

Almost everybody who is grieving, it turns out, matches the clinical criteria for depression. — location: 802 ^ref-59106

To say that if grief lasts beyond an artificial time limit, then it is a pathology, a disease to be treated with drugs, is—she believes—to deny the core of being human. — location: 814 ^ref-61157

Why is a death the only event that can happen in life where depression is a reasonable response? Why not if your husband has left you after thirty years of marriage? Why not if you are trapped for the next thirty years in a meaningless job you hate? — location: 829 ^ref-27944

We act like human distress can be assessed solely on a checklist that can be separated out from our lives, and labeled as brain diseases. — location: 838 ^ref-59591

The message my doctors gave me—that our pain is simply a result of a malfunctioning brain—makes us, she told me, “disconnected from ourselves, which leads to disconnection from others.” — location: 841 ^ref-563

“Why do we call it mental health?” she asked me. “Because we want to scientize it. We want to make it sound scientific. But it’s our emotions.” — location: 848 ^ref-22929

sometimes, when you listen to the pain and you see it in its context, it will point you to a way beyond it—as I learned later. — location: 854 ^ref-9504

What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need? — location: 876 ^ref-62394

When did you start to put on weight? If it was (say) when you were thirteen, or when you went to college—why then, and not a year before, or a year after? — location: 2048 ^ref-53594

Many of these women had been making themselves obese for an unconscious reason: to protect themselves from the attention of men, who they believed would hurt them. — location: 2060 ^ref-15524

“What we had perceived as the problem—major obesity—was in fact, very frequently, the solution to problems that the rest of us knew nothing about.” — location: 2063 ^ref-28204

Obesity, he realized, isn’t the fire. It’s the smoke. — location: 2082 ^ref-51505

Curiously, it turned out emotional abuse was more likely12 to cause depression than any other kind of trauma—even sexual molestation. — location: 2114 ^ref-28821

Being treated cruelly by your parents was the biggest driver of depression, out of all these categories. — location: 2116 ^ref-19144

depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences. — location: 2130 ^ref-40480

It is true that something is happening in your brain when you become depressed, he says, but that “is not a causal explanation”; it is “a necessary intermediary mechanism.” — location: 2132 ^ref-46037

If you believe that your depression is due solely to a broken brain, you don’t have to think about your life, or about what anyone might have done to you. The belief that it all comes down to biology protects you, in a way, for a while. If you absorb this different story, though, you have to think about those things. And that hurts. — location: 2148 ^ref-21878

You can admit to yourself that you are powerless—that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it’s your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power—at least in your own mind. If it’s your fault, then there’s something you can do that might make it different. — location: 2167 ^ref-62335

A person who thinks they deserved to be injured as a child isn’t going to think they deserve much as an adult, either. — location: 2174 ^ref-52830

when his blood samples were tested9—that when there is a war on for the position of alpha male, the most stressed baboons are the ones at the top. But the vast majority of the time, the lower you are in the hierarchy, the more stressed you are; and the baboons at the very bottom of the pile, like Job, are stressed constantly. — location: 2244 ^ref-23257

Stop attacking me. I’m beaten. I’m no threat to you. I give up. And here’s the striking thing. When a baboon is behaving this way—when nobody around him shows him any respect, and he’s been pushed to the bottom of the pile—he looks an awful lot like a depressed human being. He keeps his head down and his body low; he doesn’t want to move; he loses his appetite; he loses all his energy; when somebody comes near him, he backs away. — location: 2250 ^ref-55922

our closest cousins are most stressed in two situations—when their status is threatened (like Soloman, when Uriah struck), and when their status is low (like poor Job all the time). — location: 2265 ^ref-9304

having an insecure status was the one thing even more distressing than having a low status. — location: 2282 ^ref-17140

The more unequal your society, the more prevalent all forms of mental illness are. — location: 2298 ^ref-8579

When you have a society with huge gaps in income and status, Richard told me, it creates the sense that “some people seem supremely important, and others seem of no importance at all.” — location: 2302 ^ref-57731

bonobos will sometimes be bullied by their social group, and when this happens, they start behaving differently. They might scratch themselves a lot, compulsively. They’ll sit at the edge of the group and stare out. They’ll groom themselves a lot less, and they’ll refuse to be groomed by other bonobos. — location: 2382 ^ref-57995

They were being treated badly—and they were reacting with sadness and a loss of hope. — location: 2385 ^ref-46811

he told me that a doctor saying to a depressed person “ ‘now you’ve got a fucked-up brain, because it’s different from a normal brain,’ makes no sense in the current context—because we know that brains are changing their wiring all the time. — location: 2764 ^ref-10117