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

Hari tells the story of Nuriye Cengiz, an elderly woman who used a wheelchair and lived in Kotti, a poor neighborhood in Berlin. When Nuriye became depressed after being threatened with eviction, her neighbors reached out to help her. This happened even though the neighborhood was full of people from different backgrounds, including gay people, “left-wing squatters and rebels” (200), and working-class Turkish migrants like Nuriye.

A group of her neighbors started a protest, demanding that Nuriye be allowed to stay in her home. One protestor argued: “We have a right to the city, because we built this neighborhood” (202). The protest became not just about Nuriye, but about high rents in Berlin.

One of the protestors, Mehmed, was about to be expelled due to low grades, but during the protests he met a teacher who helped him get through school. A man without a home named Tuncai joined the protest and helped. When he was put in a psychiatric hospital, the protestors got him released and gave him an apartment. Eventually, Cengiz was evicted, but the community found her another nearby apartment and the protests continued.

The protestors succeeded in getting a rent freeze for their housing complex. Later, the Kotti activists worked with other communities and supported a referendum to keep rents low. The Berlin Assembly offered to enact a number of reforms, including a housing subsidy for poor families and including residents on the boards of housing companies, in exchange for withdrawing the referendum.

Hari saw Cengiz’s story and the protests her plight inspired as an example of community: “They taught me that when people rediscover each other, problems that previously seemed insoluble start to look soluble” (218). Social scientists like Brett Ford have conducted research suggesting that people in China, Japan, and Russia view happiness in collective terms, while people in the United States view happiness individually. Hari says: “[O]ur Western version of happiness doesn’t actually work—whereas the collectivist vision of happiness does” (220).

As a result of learning about Ford’s research, Hari addressed his own depression by trying to help a friend or even a stranger. He found it more effective than trying to address his depression alone. Hari spent some time with an Amish community at Elkhart-LaGrange in Indiana. While he could see the benefit to their lifestyle, he notes that Amish communities have been abusive toward women, children, and gay people: “Elkhart-LaGrange reminded me of my father’s village back in the Swiss mountains. It had a profound sense of community and home; yet that home had often vicious house rules” (229). Hari wonders if there is a way to achieve a compromise between community support and individual rights and freedoms.

Hari wonders how to “move from being isolated to being connected” (230). He begins with the story of Lisa Cunningham, a mental health nurse in London, who was bullied by other nurses when she complained to them about how they treated patients. She experienced depression and anxiety, even after taking Prozac.

Cunningham joined a program established by Sam Everington, a psychologist who noticed that “[h]is patients were often depressed […] because their lives had been stripped of the things that made life worth living” (233). Everington’s program, Bromley-by-Bow, put depressed and anxious patients in touch with a volunteer group. Cunningham became involved with a group assigned to turn a weed-covered urban space called Dog Shit Alley into a green space with vegetables and flowers (234). The program addressed two forms of disconnection, the disconnection from nature and the disconnection from other people.

Eventually, Cunningham moved to Wales to open a gardening center and kept in touch with some of the people from the program. Hari clarifies that Everington does prescribe antidepressants. However, he sees “that as one small part of the picture, and not a long-term solution” (240). The approach at places like Everington’s is that antidepressants should not just be seen as drugs. Instead, they should also be seen as tools that reconnect people.