The author presents several researchers of different fields all focusing on examining depression.

“It hasn’t been discredited, he said, because “it didn’t ever get ‘credited,’ in a sense.” What Causes Depression Then? It turned out that there is no scientific evidence behind that depression is caused by low serotonin levels. Serotonin didn’t affect their mood at all. Also increasing serotonin levels did not solve depression. It turned out that there were experiments where scientists drugged people to affect their serotonin levels and watched what would happen. He starts to do this by researching the scientific evidence behind the connection between serotonin and depression. Pointing at serotonin level as the cause of depression provides exactly that: your brain chemistry is out of balance, take these pills and it will fix you.īut Johann Hari takes away this easy-to-digest story and replaces it with a complex matrix, with life itself. Giving someone an easy-to-understand story about why they are suffering can be powerful. They are only focusing on the biological aspects.Īnd focusing on serotonin is a lie. Serotonin levels and a malfunctioning brain do not answer every question and pills can not solve depression alone based on these findings. Looking into the research of depression we can find that based on some mainstream schools, three fundamental aspects can be the root cause of mental disorders: It turned out serotonin levels alone can not answer the cause of depression.ĭepression is not caused by when the brain goes wrong. But pills did not work for him and do not work for a lot of people in the long term. This is the story the author got when he was diagnosed with depression. To fix this malfunction you need pills to restore your brain chemistry.

The most common way of looking at depression is that it’s a brain dysfunction caused by a low serotonin level. In this summary, I am sharing with you the main takeaways of the book about depression, life, and as it turned out about connections.

The author collected several interesting stories while the book is packed with research findings. Despite these, I felt like I was on a great journey when reading the book. Lost Connections is a non-fiction book about a serious subject. This personal touch makes him enthusiastic about finding the real causes of depression and researching potential remedies. The writer of Lost Connections: Why You're Depressed and How to Find Hope has been fighting depression for decades. Johann Hari is not writing about some distant topic in his book.

Johann hari book lost connections