How to find hope in a world gone mad
During a week at the coast recently with four others, one of the books I’d brought was Johann Hari’s Lost Connections: Why you’re depressed and how to find hope (Bloomsbury, 2018). Three of those friends at different times picked up the book and couldn’t stop reading it. Not because they were depressed but because Johann Hari’s books are like that: exceptionally easy to read and about intrinsically fascinating topics. He has the beautiful style of a bright person who reveals his mistakes and the anxieties and puzzlements of his heart in an appealing and often humorous way. He’s an independent thinker who presents rigorous evidence and complex information lucidly.
I’d read many books on depression when I was fighting a serious bout back in the 1980s. Fighting is not an apt verb because one of the worst things about depression is that it takes away one’s energy. Hard to fight anything when it’s difficult to get out of bed in the morning. The book that helped me most then was Maggie Scarf’s Unfinished Business. That was at a particular time in my battle and it could be different for different people and would be different for me at a different stage.
I beat my youthful depression after an epiphany that came after more than a year of weekly counselling with a gifted psychologist. Much of that time I was unemployed and libraries are free so I read everything my counsellor recommended, even some novels, like The Colour Purple. They all helped and I found anything written by Dorothy Rowe powerfully illuminating. Rowe was an Australian psychologist who later went against the new pharmaceutical trend and insisted that the SSRI drugs were not effective, that depression was a symptom of a deeper problem, which was best solved by the old-fashioned ‘talking cure.’ You can still buy her books in second hand shops and online and they’re really worth reading: accessible and with a clear-eyed, common sense analysis of our society and people’s behaviour.
Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An atlas of depression
Years later, Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An atlas of depression (Simon & Schuster, 2001) came out and even though it was, thank God, not relevant to me any more, I read it and it’s a towering piece of work, the best and certainly most comprehensive about depression I’d read up to then.
But Hari’s Lost Connections eclipses even that. Not that we should compare them – all of these books and especially Solomon’s are brilliant and I’m sure have helped countless people.
Recent research has proved Dorothy Rowe to be right: there is no evidence that there is a chemical imbalance in depressed or anxious people’s brains. In the 1990s the newly developed SSRI drugs began to be increasingly prescribed even though no one was sure how they worked (or in some cases even if they worked!) But a multibillion dollar industry was not going to let medical research doubts get in the way of megaprofits like these.
Some pretty serious side effects …
Okay, but the placebo effect counts for a lot and if that’s what’s going on with some people whose depression is diminished why stop taking this mysterious medication?
The side effects can be serious – massive weight gain; 75% of patients experience sexual dysfunction; and some studies indicate an increased risk of violent criminal behaviour. They increase the risk of miscarriage and of children born with autism and in older people of stroke.
And their efficacy is not great. Good for you if you’re in the minority for whom they work but several studies have followed patients for many years after taking SSRIs and the proportion of people still depressed is found to be 65%-80%.
‘It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.’
Hari’s book explores his idea that it’s not a chemical imbalance in our brains that causes depression – it’s the loss of connection in our society that’s at fault. He presents compelling evidence that most depression is caused by imbalances in our extremely unequal and unfair society. As Krishnamurti said, ‘It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.’ The solution lies not in drugs but in solving the problems inherent in our alienated disconnection from:
meaningful work
other people
meaningful values
childhood trauma
status and respect
nature
and a hopeful future.
Since depression and anxiety are at epidemic levels this is an important book that deserves all the accolades from famous people all over its cover.
Grief
Depression is different from grief, which I’ve had too, as most people have or sadly will have since this is the human condition. After both tragedies I read a ton of bereavement books and watched as many bereavement films as I could too. Some people wouldn’t want to go there but I found it helpful to see how others dealt with similar ghastly circumstances or indeed worse than mine. The book that helped me most was Genevieve Jurgensen’s The Disappearance, published in 1999. It’s not easy, reading these books, but I’d read just a few pages at a time then go for a walk or something. It was hard but I was getting a lot out of these harrowing books and I knew that somehow I needed to keep reading. The film that seemed to me most authentic was The Son’s Room directed by Nanni Moretti.
Did you see the more recent wonderfully funny TV series Catastrophe? Created by and starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_(2015_TV_series)
During that highly successful four-part series Rob Delaney, an American living in London with his wife Leah, was enduring a parent’s worst nightmare: a fatally ill small child. He has written a memoir of that time, A Heart That Works (Coronet, 2022). No other bereavement book has gripped me so viscerally. I took it back to the library before I’d taken notes but trust me, this slim paperback, from the moment I read the unique dedication (I’m not going to spoil it) to the last word of the Acknowledgments, had me captivated.
You might cry, but this book also has the maximum belly laughs per chapter that I can recall. Because life goes on and things happen beside the tragedy, we respond to them and they often hark back to memories of that person we loved so much. We’re lucky to have those memories; grief is the price we pay for love. And we’re lucky to read a writer who feels so intensely and observes the absurd incongruities of life, for instance, the callously inadequate profit-obsessed United States health system when compared with England’s National Health Service, which was set up to provide what people need when they’re at their most vulnerable.
It sounds quaint after thirty or forty-odd years of NeoLiberalism but the notion of a ‘public good’ used to be considered an important component of a civilised society and the UK was particularly good at it. Its National Health Service is a beleaguered remnant of that ideal that all liberal democracies once had before social media was used to manipulate enough voters to put billionaire populists in power all across the globe.
The relief of horror movies
Rob Delaney and Leah, during and after their son died, found some relief in watching horror films and TV shows, for example, Devs: ‘…for us, watching a fictional character to crazy from grief feels like getting into a warm bath.’ 10 Cloverfield Lane was another hit with them as was Midsommar and Ari Aster’s Hereditary. The last one made them laugh so much in the cinema that people sitting near them ‘were both nervous and disgusted, but since they were English they didn’t say anything.’
He writes, ‘Ah, the visceral healing power of prescription-strength art.’
Grieving people have different needs and that wouldn’t be for everyone but I too found relief from watching or reading comically gruesome things. Anyone unfortunate enough to be depressed or grieving would benefit from the (serious) books mentioned above but if you only have time for two, borrow or buy or steal Johann Hari’s Lost Connections (for depression, and it also has important things to say about grief as well) and Rob Delaney’s A Heart That Works (for grief). They’re important and beautiful books.
[contact-form][contact-field label=”Name” type=”name” required=”true” /][contact-field label=”Email” type=”email” required=”true” /][contact-field label=”Website” type=”url” /][contact-field label=”Message” type=”textarea” /][/contact-form]
Leave a Reply