Career Lows

I WAS FIRST DIAGNOSED with depression when I was a teenager – and I was immediately told a story by my doctor. It was the 1990s and this take on our distress was conquering the world.

- Johann Hari

You are depressed for a straightforward reason, my doctor told me. There’s a chemical in people’s brains called serotonin that makes us feel good. You are naturally lacking this chemical. That is why you feel like pain is leaking out of you uncontrollably.

I lived by this story for years, drugging myself for more than a decade – and yet, to my puzzlement, I remained depressed. Three years ago, I began to research what was really happening. I ended up travelling the world, speaking to leading scientists on this issue, as well as people who’ve come back from depression. What startled me most was discovering that so much of what I thought I knew was wrong. They explained to me that there is no evidence that low serotonin causes depression. And there is no evidence that depressed people have a chemical imbalance in their brains.

But there is evidence that several key changes in the way we are living are causing depression and anxiety. Crucially, I learned that there is evidence for seven environmental causes – along with two real biological factors that make it worse.

I started to glimpse one of them in Philadelphia. Joe was waiting for the day to end. If you walked into the paint shop where he worked and asked for a gallon of paint in a particular shade, he would ask you to pick it from a chart, and he would prepare it for you. It was always the same. He would put a dash of pigment into the tin, then put the tin into a machine that looked a bit like a microwave, then the machine would shake it vigorously. This process evened out the paint. Then he would take your money and say, “Thank you, sir.” Then he’d wait for the next customer, and do the same thing. Then he would wait for the next customer, and do the same thing. All day. Every day.