Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
New York Times Bestseller
From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, a radical new way of thinking about depression and anxiety.
What really causes depression and anxiety - and how can we really solve them? Award-winning journalist Johann Hari suffered from depression since he was a child and started taking anti-depressants when he was a teenager. He was told that his problems were caused by a chemical imbalance in his brain. As an adult, trained in the social sciences, he began to investigate whether this was true - and he learned that almost everything we have been told about depression and anxiety is wrong.
Across the world, Hari found social scientists who were uncovering evidence that depression and anxiety are not caused by a chemical imbalance in our brains. In fact, they are largely caused by key problems with the way we live today. Hari s journey took him from a mind-blowing series of experiments in Baltimore, to an Amish community in Indiana, to an uprising in Berlin. Once he had uncovered nine real causes of depression and anxiety, they led him to scientists who are discovering seven very different solutions - ones that work.
It is an epic journey that will change how we think about one of the biggest crises in our culture today. His TED talk - 'Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong' - has been viewed more than 8 million times and revolutionized the global debate. This book will do the same.
Synopsis
The New York Times bestseller from the author of Chasing the Scream, offering a radical new way of thinking about depression and anxiety.
What really causes depression and anxiety--and how can we really solve them? Award-winning journalist Johann Hari suffered from depression since he was a child and started taking antidepressants when he was a teenager. He was told that his problems were caused by a chemical imbalance in his brain. As an adult, trained in the social sciences, he began to investigate whether this was true--and he learned that almost everything we have been told about depression and anxiety is wrong.
Across the world, Hari found social scientists who were uncovering evidence that depression and anxiety are not caused by a chemical imbalance in our brains. In fact, they are largely caused by key problems with the way we live today. Hari's journey took him from a mind-blowing series of experiments in Baltimore, to an Amish community in Indiana, to an uprising in Berlin. Once he had uncovered nine real causes of depression and anxiety, they led him to scientists who are discovering seven very different solutions--ones that work.
It is an epic journey that will change how we think about one of the biggest crises in our culture today. His TED talk, "Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong," has been viewed more than eight million times and revolutionized the global debate. This book will do the same.
Synopsis
The New York Times bestseller from the author of Chasing the Scream, offering a radical new way of thinking about depression and anxiety.
There was a mystery haunting award-winning investigative journalist Johann Hari. He was thirty-nine years old, and almost every year he had been alive, depression and anxiety had increased in Britain and across the Western world. Why?
He had a very personal reason to ask this question. When he was a teenager, he had gone to his doctor and explained that he felt like pain was leaking out of him, and he couldn't control it or understand it. Some of the solutions his doctor offered had given him some relief--but he remained in deep pain.
So, as an adult, he went on a forty-thousand-mile journey across the world to interview the leading experts about what causes depression and anxiety, and what solves them. He learned there is scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety--and that this knowledge leads to a very different set of solutions: ones that offer real hope.