What he found was that the scientific evidence for medication’s effectiveness is conflicting and controversial but the evidence for other causes, and treatments, is abundant.

Hari set out to understand why this was, speaking with psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, community organizers, researchers, and people struggling with depression and anxiety. He found them helpful at first, but years later in therapy came to realize that the medicine was no longer doing the trick for him - and hadn’t been for a long time. When Hari was first diagnosed with depression at age 18, his doctor prescribed him antidepressants. The author is an investigative journalist whose own story of depression, from his teens through adulthood, provides the framework for a journey through current research and what it tells us about what we get wrong, and right, about depression and anxiety. Lost Connections is a book about those other causes of depression and anxiety. In short, I had become disenchanted by the explanations medicine has to offer about anxiety and depression and the tendency in some quarters to look at antidepressants as first line treatment rather than one piece of a much bigger puzzle. I had a hunch that the mechanism by which antidepressants worked was more complicated than their action on neurotransmitters and that our apparent widespread deficits in serotonin were caused by something more complex. While it was clear to me that antidepressants could be effective for people with moderate to severe depression, I suspected that for many people they weren’t solving the problem per se, but instead giving a boost that might be helpful in putting into place other changes that provide more lasting relief.

I knew depression and anxiety weren’t solely caused by chemistry or biology, despite growing up in the age of Prozac. When I started reading Johann Hari’s Lost Connections, I was already a convert. Book Club: Lost Connections by Johann Hari

Book lost connections review