LOST CONNECTIONS

UNCOVERING THE REAL CAUSES OF DEPRESSION – AND THE UNEXPECTED SOLUTIONS

Bloomsbury, 336pp, £16.99, Oldie price £11.41 inc p&p

Johann Hari was a star newspaper columnist when, in 2011, he lost his job and his reputation in a storm of accusations about plagiarism. Seven years later, he has written a book about depression, from which he has suffered since a child. Alastair Campbell, similarly afflicted, described in the Literary Review how he contacted Hari at the time of his disgrace, though he was unclear why. ‘Perhaps depressives have an instinct for each other,’ he pondered. Campbell was generous in his praise, saying that Hari ‘takes a big, controversial subject… covers it on a global canvas through diligent research and reaches a clear and broadly compelling conclusion’.

He explained Hari’s central thesis, that ‘depression is not caused by imperfections in the brain, to be cured by a pill, but by imperfections in our lives’, which can be put down to advertising, junk food and disconnection from the things that matter. ‘The morning after I finished the book,’ he wrote, ‘I still popped my 100 milligrams of sertraline… but if I do come off the pills, Hari’s excellent contribution will be part of my armoury.’

Fiona Sturges in the Guardian was also impressed by how Hari travelled the world in pursuit of his subject (‘ He meets ajunki e-turnedneuroscientist in Sydney, climbs a mountain with a primatologist outside Banff, and observes an Amish community in Indiana’) but was baffled by how little they get to say. Instead, Hari told ‘their stories on their behalf, throwing in a couple of quotes if they are lucky’. Isabel Hardman, in the Times, was partly swayed by Hari’s theories, while finding that ‘Some of his analysis is rather woolly’ and that ‘At points, his solutions seem rather suspect, too.’ She was cheered by Hari’s hope that ‘life doesn’t have to be one simply dictated by pills’ but in the end, she too was ‘not flushing the sertraline away just yet’.