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

The scientist Robert Sapolsky tried researching depression in baboons. At the top of the hierarchy among the baboons he studied was a male baboon called Solomon. In the bottom rank was a baboon Robert nicknamed Job. When Solomon was challenged by a younger baboon, Uriah, he started being harassed by the rest of the group and eventually left.

Sapolsky discovered that baboons have a similar response to losing status in the hierarchy as a depressed human: “He keeps his head down and his body low; he doesn’t want to move; he loses his appetite; he loses all his energy; when somebody comes near him, he backs away” (144).

Other scientific work suggests that depression in humans is, in part, a “submission response” signifying that “[y]ou don’t have to fight me. I’m no threat to you” (145). Hari suspects this may be how humans cope with a world that is already very difficult, where images of sexy bodies constantly appear in advertising or social media, and where employers have great power over their employees.

Social scientists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson found that “higher levels of mental distress” exist in societies with high income inequality like the United States than in more egalitarian nations like Norway: “The more unequal your society, the more prevalent all forms of mental illness are” (147).

Hari talks with Isabel Behncke, an evolutionary biologist, who would not speak with him unless he went on a mountain hike. Behncke studied bonobos in their natural habitat in Africa. In the wild, bonobos who are bullied by other members of their group react “with sadness and a loss of hope” (153). In zoos, bonobos developed even worse symptoms like depression. Other animals in captivity, like elephants, parrots, and horses, also show signs like hurting their own bodies and refusing to have sex.

Studies have shown that people who live in “green areas” exhibit less depression (154). A study that looked at an inner-city area with green spaces had inhabitants with less depression than similar areas without green spaces. Science suggests that exercise reduces depression, but that running in nature is more conducive to mental health than running on a treadmill in a gym. Another theory is that people across cultures have a preference “for landscapes that look like the savannas of Africa” (158). Behncke thinks that humans “have many modern forms of captivity” (160).

Hari notes that depressed people do not have a sense of a long-term future, and tells the story of an Indigenous American individual, Chief Plenty Coups. Living in Montana, Plenty Coups was a teenager when Europeans came to Montana, wiped out the population of wild buffalo, and placed surviving members of the Crow tribe in reservations. When their way of life was destroyed, “everyday activities seemed pointless” (163).

A Canadian psychology professor, Michael Chandler, looked at suicide rates among First Nations peoples. Some communities showed very high suicide rates, while others had low rates. Chandler’s research found that suicide rates were lower in Indigenous communities with some political independence as opposed to ones where the governments of Canada or the United States still effectively had control.

In an earlier study, Chandler had looked at groups of teenagers who experienced depression. A group of teenagers with anorexia were able to answer questions about what fictional characters would be like in the future. However, teenagers with clinical depression struggled to answer “questions about what they or anyone else would be in the future” (167). Chandler argues that his research into Indigenous communities and suicide rates suggests that loss of hope for a future is a cause, not a symptom, of depression.

Hari relates the story of his friend Angela, who earned a master’s degree but struggled to find a job. She took a job at a call center for charities, where she found out if she was still employed on a week-to-week basis. She got yelled at or fired if her rate of getting the people she called to donate dropped by 2%; she had to ask money from people who lived in extreme poverty, and even with her job she lived in poverty (169-70). Angela began feeling depressed and angry, and that she was doing worse than “even […] her grandmother […] in the 1930s” (171).  

She also found herself unable to plan ahead. She was part of what the philosopher Paolo Virno calls the “precariat […] a shifting mass of chronically insecure people who don’t know whether they will have any work next week and may never have a stable job” (172). Unstable work, Hari notes, has been taking over more and more traditionally middle-class jobs. Angela’s experience reminds Hari of a woman in Cleveland who he interviewed before the 2016 US presidential election. The woman talked about how “you could work in a factory and have a middle-class life—and she made a verbal slip. She meant to say ‘when I was young.’ What she actually said was ‘when I was alive’” (173).

While convinced that being “low in serotonin” did not cause depression, Hari still wonders what role genes and brain chemistry do play: “[E]ven the strongest advocates for the environmental and social causes of depression stressed to me that biological causes do exist, and are very real” (175).

Hari talks to Marc Lewis, a neuroscientist, who explains that the medical concept of neuroplasticity means the brain changes in response to human needs. Brains aren’t permanently geared for depression, but are constantly changing in response to a person’s environment: “The seven social and psychological factors I had been investigating, Marc believes, have the capacity to physically change the brains of millions of people” (178).

Scientific research has not yet identified “a specific gene or set of genes that can, on their own, cause depression and anxiety” (180). A research study in New Zealand found that, while there is a gene that is related to depression, it’s only activated “if you had experienced a terribly stressful event, or a great deal of childhood trauma” (181). Doctors do agree that endogenous depression, “the kind caused just by a malfunctioning brain body” (183), exists. However, it only seems to affect a small minority of people. Hari wonders why people like himself clung to the story of depression.

Hari concludes that it is uncomfortable to think about how culture itself is complicit in making people depressed: “You can have everything a person could possibly need by the standards of our culture—but those standards can badly misjudge what a human actually needs in order to have a good or even a tolerable life” (185). Studies indicate that calling depression a disease does not necessarily reduce its stigma.

The head of the Department of Social Psychiatry, Laurence Kirmayer, tells Hari that looking at the social and economic causes of depression challenges the “neoliberal” model of society, which is only concerned about people “functioning more efficiently” (189). Kirmayer argues that the drug model of treating depression means “big, big business” for drug companies (189).

According to another psychologist, Dr. Rufus May, the story that depression is caused only by brain chemistry has a number of negative effects on patients. It makes one feel “disempowered” and “tells you that your distress has no meaning” (190).