Hari - Lost connections: why youre depressed and how to find hope

More Praise for Lost Connections

Like a secular oracle, Johann Hari stands on the periphery observing what is coming. This book is a prescient and compassionate Rosetta Stone for those trying to understand mental illness. Beautiful.

Russell Brand

An exquisitely lucid treatise on why no person is, has been, or ever should be an island. This book is the most exciting thing Ive read this year. From slightly seedy to suicidalhowever you are feelingread this book and it will honestly help you to understand which roads we must walk if we want to see true, lasting change.

Emma Thompson, Oscar-winning actress and screenwriter

This is one of those extraordinary books that you want all your friends to read immediatelybecause the shift in worldview is so compelling and dramatic that you wonder how youll be able to have conversations with them otherwise. A highly personal book, written with humility, humor, and candor, it nonetheless heralds a crucial new discussion about our mental healthand health of the world weve created for ourselves. I havent been so gripped for ages I honestly couldnt put it down. What a stunning piece of work.

Brian Eno

A special writer, a great researcher, and a great wordsmith This look at depression will change everything you think about it.

Tour

Lost Connections is an important, convention-challenging, provocative, and supremely timely read. It is about time we looked at mental health through the prism of society rather than, simply, medicine. This brilliant book helps us to do that.

Matt Haig, author of Reasons to Stay Alive

This is an astonishing book that transforms our understanding of one of the crucial issues of our times. Johann Hari asks the big questions and provides the big answersanswers that have been neglected for far too long. You cannot fully understand this great curse of our age until you have read it.

George Monbiot, award-winning columnist for the Guardian

This is an extraordinary, elegant exploration of a timely problem. It is written with wit and lan and provides a devastating analysis of our society that is both shocking and profound This book deftly challenges the current orthodoxy around depression and is a breath of fresh air.

Max Pemberton of the Daily Mail

Beginning as a true believer in purely organic causes of depression, Hari journeys to a more expansive view that takes in a psychodynamic origin as well. Most importantly, he looks to the unnutritious values that our society espouses for an explanationas well as a possible solutionto this pervasive and painful malady.

Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy

A wonderful book I hope everyone will read it.

Sam Harris on Chasing the Scream

For Barbara Bateman, John Bateman, and Dennis Hardman

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

You can hear the audio for the interviews in this book at www.thelostconnections.com.

Contents

One evening in the spring of 2014, I was walking down a small side street in central Hanoi when, on a stall by the side of the road, I saw an apple. It was freakishly large and red and inviting. Im terrible at haggling, so I paid three dollars for this single piece of fruit, and carried it into my room in the Very Charming Hanoi Hotel. Like any good foreigner whos read his health warnings, I washed the apple diligently with bottled water, but as I bit into it, I felt a bitter, chemical taste fill my mouth. It was the flavor I imagined, back when I was a kid, that all food was going to have after a nuclear war. I knew I should stop, but I was too tired to go out for any other food, so I ate half, and then set it aside, repelled.

Two hours later, the stomach pains began. For two days, I sat in my room as it began to spin around me faster and faster, but I wasnt worried: I had been through food poisoning before. I knew the script. You just have to drink water and let it pass through you.

On the third day, I realized my time in Vietnam was slipping away in this sickness-blur. I was there to track down some survivors of the war for another book project Im working on, so I called my translator, Dang Hoang Linh, and told him we should drive deep into the countryside in the south as we had planned all along. As we traveled arounda trashed hamlet here, an Agent Orange victim thereI was starting to feel steadier on my feet. The next morning, he took me to the hut of a tiny eighty-seven-year-old woman. Her lips were dyed bright red from the herb she was chewing, and she pulled herself toward me across the floor on a wooden plank that somebody had managed to attach some wheels to. Throughout the war, she explained, she had spent nine years wandering from bomb to bomb, trying to keep her kids alive. They were the only survivors from her village.

As she was speaking, I started to experience something strange. Her voice seemed to be coming from very far away, and the room appeared to be moving around me uncontrollably. Thenquite unexpectedlyI started to explode, all over her hut, like a bomb of vomit and feces. Whensome time laterI became aware of my surroundings again, the old woman was looking at me with what seemed to be sad eyes. This boy needs to go to a hospital, she said. He is very sick.

No, no, I insisted. I had lived in East London on a staple diet of fried chicken for years, so this wasnt my first time at the E. coli rodeo. I told Dang to drive me back to Hanoi so I could recover in my hotel room in front of CNN and the contents of my own stomach for a few more days.

No, the old woman said firmly. The hospital.

Look, Johann, Dang said to me, this is the only person, with her kids, who survived nine years of American bombs in her village. I am going to listen to her health advice over yours. He dragged me into his car, and I heaved and convulsed all the way to a sparse building that I learned later had been built by the Soviets decades before. I was the first foreigner ever to be treated there. From inside, a group of nurseshalf-excited, half-baffledrushed to me and carried me to a table, where they immediately started shouting. Dang was yelling back at the nurses, and they were shrieking now, in a language that had no words I could recognize. I noticed then that they had put something tight around my arm.

I also noticed that in the corner, there was a little girl with her nose in plaster, alone. She looked at me. I looked back. We were the only patients in the room.

As soon as they got the results of my blood pressuredangerously low, the nurse said, as Dang translatedthey started jabbing needles into me. Later, Dang told me that he had falsely said that I was a Very Important Person from the West, and that if I died there, it would be a source of shame for the people of Vietnam. This went on for ten minutes, as my arm got heavy with tubes and track marks. Then they started to shout questions at me about my symptoms through Dang. It was a seemingly endless list about the nature of my pain.

As all this was unfolding, I felt strangely split. Part of me was consumed with nauseaeverything was spinning so fast, and I kept thinking: stop moving, stop moving, stop moving. But another part of mebelow or beneath or beyond thiswas conducting a quite rational little monologue. Oh. You are close to death. Felled by a poisoned apple. You are like Eve, or Snow White, or Alan Turing.