Lost Connections

My brother recommended this book to me. It was recommended to him by some intrusive software that had figured out he was going through a hard time.  The book is about the recent history of depression and anxiety and the current theories about their treatment.

The writer is someone who had suffered from depression since adolescence. He is from Britain but they have many of the same problems we do and they treat depression in the same way: they medicate it without asking any other questions about the person's life.

The author documents lots of really good reasons an average person in the US or Europe would be depressed or anxious ( they are treated as the same thing in the book -- their treatments by the medical community are the same):  lack of community and social and family ties, lack of autonomy from monotonous low paid and/or high stress work, empty values such as materialism that simply lead to emptiness.

I remember years ago when a friend called me to say she was considering taking medication for depression. I said, of course you are depressed. We live in a culture that hates women.  Who is happy here? Only people swimming upstream and that is exhausting.

In the years since I had to learn this lesson for myself.. so much easier said that done. To be content in our culture is an act of defiance against the rules of the society and the force and influence of our human condition. I've had to redefine the rules by which I live to avoid the fate of so many. It is a lot of swimming upstream but it's very worth it. Plus, as the author points out, the medication doesn't work for long.

Good book.