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You'd probably find a lot to like in the book Lost Connections by Johann Hari. The main thrust is the impact society has had on mental health, in contradiction

You'd probably find a lot to like in the book Lost Connections by Johann Hari. The main thrust is the impact society has had on mental health, in contradiction to the notion that depression is merely a "chemical imbalance".

kirrent 5y ago
I'd steer clear of Hari. Having listened to an interview with him I found interesting I did a fair amount of digging into the sources of his claims. Some of his claims were known and fairly uncontroversial in the medical establishment but the manner he presented them, against some straw-man of medical practice, was a bit misleading (examples - https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2018/jan/08/is-everything-johann-hari-knows-about-depression-wrong-lost-connections https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2018/jan/...). Still, that didn't worry me because I'm sure plenty of people do receive the standard of care he was arguing against. As that article above suggests, best practice care is expensive and time-consuming. Where he really lost me was that every fascinating and surprising claim presented by him with absolute certainty that I looked into was either an exaggeration or wrong. As an example, he had a striking statistic that the modal number of friends people used to be able to rely on in an emergency was something like 4 or 5. Ten years later in the present day that number has dropped to 0. Putting aside the fact that a mode can be pretty misleading, I still thought it was an interesting difference in only ten years so I was disappointed to find that the most credible explanation in the literature seems to be that it's an artefact of survey design. Even the original paper he got the statistic from was pretty equivocal on the validity of the finding, so even if he was a bit lazy in not reading through later papers, he still should have been less confident. I haven't read his book though. The above is just to say, caveat lector.
- rainonmoon 5y ago
  I always appreciate a good fact checking, thanks! I'll have to look into it more for myself, great counter-perspective. I'll add an anecdote about the book's effect re: the claims about brain chemistry: talking to the friend who recommended the book about Hari's claims to the ineffectiveness of medication, she said "Even if my medication only makes a few percent difference, for me it's the difference between killing myself and not." I liked that reading of Hari's book not as anti-medicine, but as an explanation for why people who've been ratcheting up their dosage over the years, as a lot of my friends have, still feel totally insane: medication can't fix the whole problem itself.

kirrent 5y ago

I'd steer clear of Hari. Having listened to an interview with him I found interesting I did a fair amount of digging into the sources of his claims. Some of his claims were known and fairly uncontroversial in the medical establishment but the manner he presented them, against some straw-man of medical practice, was a bit misleading (examples - https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2018/jan/08/is-everything-johann-hari-knows-about-depression-wrong-lost-connections https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2018/jan/...). Still, that didn't worry me because I'm sure plenty of people do receive the standard of care he was arguing against. As that article above suggests, best practice care is expensive and time-consuming. Where he really lost me was that every fascinating and surprising claim presented by him with absolute certainty that I looked into was either an exaggeration or wrong. As an example, he had a striking statistic that the modal number of friends people used to be able to rely on in an emergency was something like 4 or 5. Ten years later in the present day that number has dropped to 0. Putting aside the fact that a mode can be pretty misleading, I still thought it was an interesting difference in only ten years so I was disappointed to find that the most credible explanation in the literature seems to be that it's an artefact of survey design. Even the original paper he got the statistic from was pretty equivocal on the validity of the finding, so even if he was a bit lazy in not reading through later papers, he still should have been less confident. I haven't read his book though. The above is just to say, caveat lector.

rainonmoon 5y ago
I always appreciate a good fact checking, thanks! I'll have to look into it more for myself, great counter-perspective. I'll add an anecdote about the book's effect re: the claims about brain chemistry: talking to the friend who recommended the book about Hari's claims to the ineffectiveness of medication, she said "Even if my medication only makes a few percent difference, for me it's the difference between killing myself and not." I liked that reading of Hari's book not as anti-medicine, but as an explanation for why people who've been ratcheting up their dosage over the years, as a lot of my friends have, still feel totally insane: medication can't fix the whole problem itself.