The Root Cause of Depression and How to Heal It
Stopping the Dark Slide of Depression  We all know it, that dull ache of pointlessness, overwhelming sadness and a deep lack of interest in life. The fog of listless pain that blows in and then settles, trapping us inside it. Most of us have suffered at some point in our lives from depression. Be it a mild version following a major life event, or a more prolonged episode that can get so severe it entraps us in an ever compressing world of hopelessness to such an extent we consider ending our own lives. Depression is one of the biggest issues in our world today. With record numbers of people suffering from the dark cloud, and soaring suicide rates, depression is a crippling disease reaching epidemic proportions. Well-known author and journalist, Johann Hari, suffered from depression as a teen, taking anti-depressants from a tender age. Told, like so many others, his depression was the cause of a chemical imbalance in his brain, he later studied social sciences and embarked on a quest to discover the truth about the cause of his depression. He swallowed antidepressants like millions of others, and after 13 years of pills, without much change, and a broad investigation into the true causes of depression, he is calling for a different approach. The Chemical Imbalance Myth His amazing journey involved hundreds of interviews in over a dozen countries and led him to discover that almost everything we know about depression and anxiety is wrong. I started to research my book, Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions, because I was puzzled by two mysteries. Why was I still depressed when I was doing everything I had been told to do? I had identified the low serotonin in my brain, and I was boosting my serotonin levels–yet I still felt awful. But there was a deeper mystery still. Why were so many other people across the Western world feeling like me? Around one in five US adults are taking at least one drug for a psychiatric problem. In Britain, antidepressant prescriptions have doubled in a decade, to the point where now one in 11 of us drug ourselves to deal with these feelings. What has been causing depression and its twin, anxiety, to spiral in this way? I began to ask myself: Could it really be that in our separate heads, all of us had brain chemistries that were spontaneously malfunctioning at the same time? He says that between 65% and 80% of people on antidepressants are depressed again within a year. We’ve been telling ourselves this chemical story for 35 years and every year depression and anxiety gets worse. The Power of Connection Searching for answers to his own depression, he began a quest to solve the depression puzzle. To find the answers, I ended up going on a 40,000-mile journey across the world and back. I talked to the leading social scientists investigating these questions, and to people who have [...]