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

Hari says that advertising is a form of “mental pollution” and lists a number of places that have banned or restricted outdoor advertising. The city of São Paolo in Brazil enacted the Clean City Law, which banned all outdoor advertising. Greece and Sweden have banned advertising directed to children. The city of London took down an ad that sparked protests (257).

Hari interviews Nathan Duggin, an investment advisor who ran a study with teenagers and their parents about money. Duggin found that people purchased things they did not need to feel better or so they would fit in with their peers. The study’s results indicated that “spending often isn’t about the object itself. It’s about getting to a psychological state that makes you feel better” (260).

Duggin also challenged members of the survey to “draw up a list of their intrinsic values” (262), which most people being interviewed had never really thought about. It was found that the “people who had gone through this experiment had significantly lower materialism and significantly higher self-esteem” (263). Duggin believes that we could form similar discussion groups that emphasize intrinsic values over materialism.

Hari discusses Rachel Shubert, his friend and former classmate: “Rachel had come to realize that she was angry and envious a lot of the time” (266). She felt her accomplishments were diminished by other people’s accomplishments, and made herself feel better by looking at the flaws of people she envied. She decided to practice a technique called “sympathetic joy” (268). It involves meditating and imagining something good happening to a stranger and then sharing in their happiness. In the next stage, you imagine something good happening to someone you envy or dislike. After doing this for several weeks, she “felt the toxic feelings slowly abate” (268), and began to “see the happiness of others not as a rebuke, but as a source of joy” (269).

Next, Hari talked to Roland Griffith, a psychologist who researched the similar effects meditation and psychedelic drugs have on the human mind. One of Griffith’s patients was Mark, who, over the course of three sessions, took psilocybin, a psychedelic that gave him a vision that helped him resolve issues with his late father and assisted him with social anxiety. Hari stresses that the doctors he spoke with said that psychedelics needed to be taken in a clinical setting.

For the health insurance company Kaiser Permanente, the doctor Vincent Felitti set up an experiment. Some of the patients who discussed their trauma for a survey were then asked by a doctor: “I’m sorry that happened to you—it shouldn’t have. Would you like to talk about those experiences?” (294). If the patient answered yes, then the doctor would talk about it sympathetically and ask how they thought the trauma impacted them.

According to the study, patients were glad, rather than offended, to be asked. Patients given an option to talk about their trauma with a psychotherapist were 50% less likely to return saying they felt physically ill or needed medication (295). Hari says that this suggests that it is not just the trauma that is damaging, but the shame surrounding it. Such shame fuels depression and anxiety.