Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

Hari writes that he took his first antidepressant when he was 18. He decided to start medication after traveling around Europe to celebrate his last summer before starting college. During his vacation, he cried continuously and was overwhelmed with emotion because he “had been rejected by the first person [he] had ever really been in love with” (6). After a friend told him most people did not act this way, he “experienced one of the very few epiphanies of [his] life” (6). He realized he was depressed and decided to try antidepressants.

His doctor prescribed him a drug called Seroxat or Paxil. He told Hari that “some people […] naturally have depleted levels of a chemical named serotonin in their brains […] and this is what causes depression—that weird, persistent, misfiring unhappiness that won’t go away” (8). Later, while writing Lost Connections, Hari would be asked why his doctor didn’t ask him about any reasons why he might feel depressed.

At college, Hari encouraged friends to try antidepressants and felt he had become “unusually resilient and energetic” (9). However, he noticed several side effects, like putting on weight, and continued experiencing sudden outbursts of sadness. In response, his doctor kept giving him higher doses. From books and TV shows, Hari decided that he had inherited his tendency toward depression from his mother, which further proved depression is “something innate; in your flesh” (10).

Hari’s therapist kept pointing out that he still seemed depressed despite the antidepressants. Hari noticed that when he was a child, his friends’ families did not take medication for their mental health, unlike his own family. At the time of his writing, one out of five US adults took at least one mental health drug, one in four middle-aged women in the US took antidepressants, and one in ten US male high schoolers took a stimulant to help them focus. There is also an epidemic of addiction to legal and illegal drugs that has lowered the life expectancy of white men in the US (12).

Hari stopped taking the drugs after a personal crisis and realization that the drugs did nothing to help. Reluctantly and slowly, Hari began researching three mysteries: why antidepressants did not seem to work for him (11), why more people appeared anxious and depressed (13), and if something other than chemical brain imbalances could cause depression (13). Hari focused on his book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

Eventually, Hari started working on the book that would become Lost Connections, conducting interviews and traveling around the world. He learned that doctors no longer consider depression and anxiety to be completely distinct medical problems, and that “there is a continuum between unhappiness and depression,” although they are “very different” in severity (15). In his research, Hari found “real solutions” to depression that “don’t look like the chemical antidepressants that have worked so poorly for so many of us” (17).