JOHANN HARI

EVERYTHING YOU THINK

YOU KNOW ABOUT
DEPRESSION IS WRONG
JEFF HAYS FILMS 2022
MEET JOHANN HARI
Johann Hari is the author of
three New York Times best-
selling books and the
Executive Producer of an
Oscar-nominated movie and
an eight-part TV series
starring Samuel L. Jackson.
His books have been
translated into 38 languages
and been praised by a broad
range of people, from Oprah
to Noam Chomsky, from Elton
John to Naomi Klein.

His latest book, ‘Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention’, was
published in January 2022, and received rave reviews everywhere
from the Washington Post to the Irish Times to the Sydney Morning
Herald. It has been a best-seller on three continents.

Johann’s first book, ‘Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the
War on Drugs’, was adapted into the Oscar-nominated film ‘The
United States Vs Billie Holiday’. It has also been adapted into a
documentary series which is available to view now.

His second book, ‘Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes of

Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions’ was described by the
British Journal of General Practice as “one of the most important texts
of recent years”, and shortlisted for an award by the British Medical
Association.
Johann’s TED talks have been viewed more than 80 million times. The
first is named ‘Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is
Wrong’. The second is entitled ‘This Could Be Why You Are Depressed
or Anxious’.

He has written over the past decade for some of the world’s leading
newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Los
Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Spectator, Le Monde Diplomatique,
the Sydney Morning Herald, and Politico. He has appeared on NPR’s
All Thing Considered, HBO’s Realtime With Bill Maher, The Joe Rogan
Podcast, the BBC’s Question Time, and many other popular shows.

Johann was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and when he was a year old,
his family moved to London, where he grew up and where he has
lived for most of his life. His father – a Swiss immigrant – was a bus
driver, and his mother was a nurse and later worked in shelters for
survivors of domestic violence.

He studied Social and Political Science at King’s College, Cambridge,

and graduated with a Double First.

Johann was twice named ‘National Newspaper Journalist of the Year’

by Amnesty International. He has also been named ‘Cultural
Commentator of the Year’ and ‘Environmental Commentator of the
Year’ at the Comment Awards.

He lives half the year in London and spends the other half of the year
traveling to research his books.

You can email Johann at chasingthescream (at) gmail dot com.

To read about what Johann is working on now, and what you can do
to support him, please click here.

Visit Johann online at https://johannhari.com/

INTRODUCTION
“Why is it that with each year that passes more and more of us seem
to be finding it harder to get through the day?”

Johann Hari poses this question at the beginning of his riveting

interview with Jeff Hays. It’s a question he’s pondered deeply, having
suffered under the oppressive weight of depression most of his life.

This suffering, and the curiosity that sprung from it, led him to ask the
hard questions and not rest until he found answers. And what he
found will surprise and enlighten you.

He tackles head-on the oversimplified explanation of depression that

too many of us have been given: it is a chemical imbalance, and the
answer is a pill. Because sadly, while that has spurred on a giant
money-making industry, it’s not working long-term for most people.

Johann’s questions and subsequent research have uncovered gems of

truth that may not seem linked at first, but which add up to a ground-
breaking formula to address and banish depression once and for all.

If you're ready to have previous beliefs challenged and are curious

about genuine solutions, it’s time to hear what Johann has to say.

Johann’s revelatory interview with Jeff Hays is available in its entirety

to you when you view Jeff Hays Film’s ground-breaking series…
THE INTERVIEW
Johann Hari: I was nearly 40, and every single year that I've been alive,
depression and anxiety had gone up here in the United States, in
Britain, and across the Western world. And I wanted to understand
why, why is this happening to us? Why is it that with each year that
passes more and more of us seem to be finding it harder to get
through the day?

And that was connected to a more personal mystery, which is, I

remember when I was a teenager, I went to my doctor and I
remember saying that I had this feeling like pain was leaking out of
me and I didn't understand it. I couldn't control it. I felt quite ashamed
of it. And my doctor told me a story that I now realize was well-
intentioned but very oversimplified.

My doctor said, "Well, we know why some people get like this. Some
people just have a chemical imbalance in their brains. You're clearly
one of them. All we need to do is give you some drugs. You're going to
be fine." So I started taking a chemical antidepressant called Paxil and
it gave me real relief for a while. I felt much better, but within a few
months, that feeling of pain came back.
So I went back, my doctor said, "Oh clearly we didn't give you a high
enough dose." I took a higher dose. Again, I felt better. Again, the
feeling of pain came back and I was really in this cycle of taking higher
and higher doses until for 13 years I was taking the maximum possible
dose you were allowed to take. And at the end of it, I was still really
depressed.

I was trying to think the personal mystery was, well, I've done
everything that I've been told to do according to the story our culture
is telling about depression, anxiety. Why do I still feel like this?

I used my training in the

social sciences at
Cambridge University to
just go on a big journey, to
try to understand this. I
traveled all over the world.
I interviewed over 200 of
the leading experts on
depression and anxiety.
And what I learned is
there's scientific evidence
for nine different factors
that cause depression and
anxiety. There are real
biological contributions.
This is why my doctor
wasn't totally wrong, but
the picture is much more
complex than just a
biological malfunction.

And I learned that once you understand these different factors, it

opens up a whole different set of solutions that should be offered to
people alongside the option of chemical antidepressants.
Jeff Hays: So I love that you got into the complexity of it because we
like simple solutions to complex problems and it's never that easy. So
let's talk about these nine, the factors that aren't physical. What did
you find?

Johann Hari: Well, it's interesting. There's three kinds of causes of

depression or of any kind of emotional mental health problem. And
they're all real, and they all play out to some degree in any individual
who becomes depressed or anxious. So there are biological causes.
For example, your genes can make you more sensitive to these
problems though, they never write your destiny. There are
psychological causes. For example, childhood trauma would be an
obvious one that I suspect we'll explore more. And then there's social
causes in the environment. Loneliness would be an obvious example.

There's very broad agreement among scientists. It's in all the

textbooks that we have of what's called a biopsychosocial model.
Biological causes, psychological causes, social causes, and they
interact with each other, right? The social causes can make the
psychological causes worse, which can make the biological causes
worse. They interact.
But as one expert put it to me, at the moment, in theory, we have a
biopsychosocial model, in practice we have a bio-bio-bio model. If you
go to your doctor and you say, you're depressed, how often does your
doctor ask about any of these other things? My doctor never
mentioned any other possibility. All they tell people is a biological
story.

And I want to stress the biological story has some truth in it. It's not a
lie. It's not untrue. Chemical antidepressants do give some relief to
some people along with causing some problems for others. So it's not
that we want to throw out the biological story, but we want to
massively nuance and complexify it because the scientific evidence is
very clear that is one part of a much bigger problem.

And precisely because this problem goes deeper than our biology, the
solutions need to go deeper than our biology too. And it's interesting, I
kept learning the evidence for this, but there was one moment it really
fell into place for me. I went to interview a South African psychiatrist
called Dr. Derek Summerfield.
And Dr. Summerfield happened to be in Cambodia in Southeast Asia
when they first introduced chemical antidepressants for people in
that country and the local doctors, the Cambodians had never heard
of these drugs. So they asked him, well, what's an antidepressant? And
he explained, and they said to him, "Oh, we don't need them. We've
already got antidepressants." And he said, "What do you mean?"

He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy
like, I don't know, ginkgo biloba, St. John's wort, something like that.
Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community
who worked in the rice fields. And one day he stood on a landmine
left over from the war and his leg got blown off.

So they sent him off for physical rehab. And a few months later, they
gave him an artificial limb. And a few months later, he goes back to
work in the rice field. But I'm guessing it's pretty traumatic to go back
and work in the field where you got blown up. And apparently, it's
very physically painful to work underwater when you've got an
artificial limb, the guy started to cry a lot. After a while, he just refused
to get out of bed. He developed what we would call classic
depression.

This is when the Cambodian doctors said, "Well, that's when we gave
him an antidepressant." And Dr. Summerfield said, "What was it?" They
explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They
realized that his pain made sense. In fact, you only had to speak to the
guy for five minutes to realize why he was so distressed.
One of the Cambodian doctors figured if we bought this guy a cow, he
could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was
screwing him up so much. So they bought him a cow. Within a couple
of weeks, his crying stopped, within a month his depression was gone,
it never came back. They said to Dr. Summerfield, "So you see doctor,
that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right?"

Now, if you've been raised to

think about depression the way
we have that it's primarily or
entirely a malfunction inside
your brain. That sounds like a
bad joke, right? I went to my
doctor for an antidepressant, she
gave me a cow. But what those
Cambodian doctors knew
intuitively from this individual
unscientific anecdote was
precisely what the World Health Organization, the leading medical
body in the world, has been trying to tell us for years.

If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy,
you're not in the main a machine with broken parts. You're a human
being with unmet needs and what you need is love and practical
support to get those needs met. And it's important to notice what
those Cambodian doctors didn't say.

They didn't say, well, this is on you buddy. You're going to have to sort
out your own problem here. You're just weak. They didn't say that.
They came together and collectively helped him. So a big part of what
I started to ask and explore in my book, Lost Connections, is what's the
cow for the things that are screwing us up? A lot of our problems are
more complicated than working in a rice field with an artificial limb,
what's the cow for us? What's the cow that solves our problems?
Jeff Hays: So what is our cow?

Johann Hari: When you understand the deeper causes of depression

and anxiety, you can begin to build different solutions. So I'll give you
an example of a problem and a solution that has been put into
practice. We are the loneliest society in human history, even before
COVID and everything that happened since, 41% of Americans agreed
with this statement, no one knows me well.

There's a study that's been done for a while, which asked Americans,
how many close friends do you have, who you could turn to in a crisis.
And when they started doing it years ago, the most common answer
was five. Not the average, but the most common answer. Today, the
most common answer is none. There are more people who have
nobody to turn to when things go wrong than any other option. What
is life like when you have nobody to turn to in good times and bad
times?
To understand this, I spent a lot of time interviewing Professor John
Cacioppo, who was the leading expert on loneliness in the world. He
spent more than 30 years making a series of crucial breakthroughs in
the study of loneliness.

We are the first humans ever to disband our tribes. And if you think
about the circumstances where we evolved, if you were cut off from
the tribe, you were depressed and anxious for a really good reason.
You were going to die…

Loneliness evolved as a necessary aversive mechanism inside all

human beings saying, get back to the tribe, get back to them. So this
is not some malfunction in us, the feeling of loneliness, loneliness is a
necessary signal telling us to get back to where we need to be, to be
among other people.

And so obviously a big part of what I was trying to think about in Lost
Connections is we've got these problems. In some ways, to me, it
seems relatively easy to diagnose problems, I'm much more interested
in solutions. Once you know that, what do we do? And one of the
heroes of my book is a doctor who built a solution based precisely on
this understanding that is spreading all over Europe and should
spread to the United States.

So Sam Everington is a doctor in a poor part of east London, actually,

where I lived for a long time, though sadly Sam was never my doctor.
And Sam like me is not opposed to chemical antidepressants, he
thinks they give some people some relief and that has value. But Sam
was really uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming to
him with just terrible depression and anxiety and he could see
chemical antidepressants took the edge off for some, that's worth
doing for some of them, but he could see that a lot of them were
depressed and anxious for really understandable reasons, like they
were really lonely.
So one day he began to pioneer a different approach. A woman came
to see him who I got to know later called Lisa Cunningham. And Lisa
had been shut away in her home with crippling depression and
anxiety for seven years, just horrendous. And Sam said to Lisa, "Don't
worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs, but I'm also going to
prescribe something else."

He said, "What I'd like

you to do is come and
meet twice a week here
in the doctor's offices
with a group of other
depressed and anxious
people not to talk about
how shit you feel. You
can do that if you want,
but that's not the point
of it. The point of it is so
you can all find something meaningful that you can do together."

The first time the group met, Lisa literally started vomiting with
anxiety. It was just so overwhelming, but the group starts talking. They
were like, what could we do together? What could we do that would
be meaningful?...

They started to do something even more important. They started to

form a tribe, they started to form a group. They started to care about
each other. If one of them didn't show up, the others would go looking
for them and say, "Hey, what's wrong." They started to solve each
other's problems. The way Lisa put it to me as the garden began to
bloom, we began to bloom.

This approach is called social prescribing. It's spreading all over

Europe. There was a small study in Norway, for example, that found it
was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants in
reducing people's depression and anxiety.
The most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety
are the ones that deal with the deep, underlying reasons why we're
depressed and anxious in the first place. And social prescribing deals
with one of the key underlying reasons why people are depressed,
that they're so lonely.

This totally fits with another piece of evidence that really struck me as
I was doing the research. So there's a woman called Dr. Brett Ford,
who was interviewed in Berkeley, she's in Toronto now. And she was
part of this really fascinating piece of research that was done. So she
was part of a big team of scientists across the world that did this
research.

So they wanted to investigate a very simple question, which seems

like quite an obvious question in a way. If you decided you were going
to spend say an hour or two hours a day, deliberately trying to make
yourself happier, would it work? Would you actually become happier?

And what they discovered is

in the United States, when we
try to make ourselves happier,
generally, you do something
for yourself, as an individual.
You treat yourself by buying
something. You work harder
to get a promotion. You show
off on social media. You do
you. In the other countries in
the main, when you try to
make yourself happier, you
did something for someone
else, your friends, your family,
your community.
Of course, there's exceptions on both sides, but we have an
instinctively individualistic idea of what it means to be happy. You
think the way you make yourself happy is you do something for
yourself.

They have an instinctively collective idea of what it means to be

happy. They think the way you make yourself happier is by making
your group happier. And it turns out there are many great things
about our society, but our story of happiness just doesn't work. A
species of isolated individualists, who just tried to help themselves
would never have survived on the savannas of Africa. We would've
died out. We wouldn't have formed tribes. We wouldn't have formed
groups. We evolved to work as groups. We feel good when we are part
of a group...

So I'd say we're a society sick with a kind of extreme individualism. It's
not that we don't want some individual self-expression, of course, we
do. I'm not suggesting we all become like the Amish. I wouldn't want
that either. But we've become so extreme in our individualism...

And this fits with another wider element of what I learned about
depression. Out of all the causes of depression that I wrote about in
Lost Connections, I actually think it was probably the most
challenging for me personally, one of the two most challenging.
But weirdly, nobody had ever
scientifically investigated this
until an incredible man I got to
know named professor Tim
Kasser who's at Knox College at
Illinois, just retired from there.
And Professor Kasser spent 30
years doing really deep
research on how your values
affect your life, depression,
anxiety, all sorts of things. And
he discovered loads of things.
But for the purposes of this
conversation, I think there's,
there's two big headlines.

Firstly, he discovered the

philosophers were right. The
more you think life is about
money and status and showing
off, the kind of values that are inculcated in us by advertising and
Instagram and everything like them, the more likely you are to
become depressed and anxious.

And secondly, as a society, as a culture, we have become much more

driven by these values all throughout my lifetime. And in a way, this is
where the analogy I think with junk food comes in. I think we've been
fed a kind of KFC for the soul.

We've been trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places.
We're taught this script from when we're very young, of course,
unconsciously, if you don't feel good, there's a solution for that, work
hard at a job you don't like to buy some shit you don't need, display it
on social media to make people go OMG, so jealous. Right?
We're trained to think that. And at some level we know this isn't right.
I doubt anyone watching believes they're going to lie on their
deathbed thinking of all the likes they got on Instagram and all the
shoes they bought. They know that's not going to be the case. They're
going to think about moments of love and meaning and connection
in their lives.

As Professor Kasser put it to me, we live in a machine that is designed

to get us to neglect what is important about life. We know Professor
Kasser showed there's a lot of evidence about exposure to advertising
causes a huge rise in junk values. Exposure to social media causes a
rise in junk values.

But again, what fascinated me about this was the solution. Now
there's several levels to this solution. One is, I would argue, we need to
much more tightly restrict advertising. Most advertising at the
moment is a kind of frenemy. It goes, "Oh Jeff, I love you. I think you're
great, if only you didn't stink so much. I love you. I think you're great, if
only you changed your face. I think you're great." It's puncturing and
undermining us.

In London, there was a campaign, an advertising campaign maybe five

years ago now all over the London subway system. And it was a
picture of an impossibly ripped guy and a really slim woman. I think it
was an ad for protein powder.
I know so little about fitness, I can't even remember what it was. And
the ad, it was a picture of these people and it said, “are you beach
body ready?"

The clear implication being, if you don't look like these people, you're
not ready to go to the beach. And there was a campaign to vandalize
this that just said, people just wrote over it, “advertising shits in your
head” which I thought was a great slogan. And the Mayor of London
banned those ads because it's a completely disastrous message
particularly for young girls and young boys, in fact.

We live in a culture that's constantly pushing us towards worrying

about ego, worrying about junk values... And there's all sorts of reasons
why junk values are deeply harmful and correlate with higher
depression.

One is we know people with junk values are significantly more likely
to have poor quality relationships. If you value people because of how
they look and they value you because of how they look or because of
money, then we can all see that's going to be a poor relationship.
There's all sorts of reasons why people with high junk values have
higher depression and anxiety. So just anything that can overcome
these things.
And of course, we all have this capacity in us. No one is a hundred
percent ego and no one is a hundred percent altruistic. We're all in
eternal conflict with these things and that's healthy, right? You want
to have some sense of ego, but we're in a culture that is constantly
pushing us towards egotism, narcissism. And so having these
anchoring things that are built into your life to help recalibrate you
towards more meaningful values really helps.

The difference in psychological state, between when I focus on the

meaning versus when I focus on the ego stuff, even in this
conversation, I can feel it. I can feel when I was talking about the
meaning, I felt calmer. Now I'm thinking, oh, what's the Amazon
ranking (of my book)? And I can feel myself getting more and more
amped up and anxious.

So yeah, these things play out for all of us to some degree… and maybe
there's some absolute saints out there, but the rest of us live in the
middle and we're constantly navigating our way through that. And
there's some things we can do to anchor ourselves more deeply in
meaning.

Jeff Hays: So let's talk about Stolen Focus for a second. It seems to me
there's an overlap between some of these things that are causing
depression and the things that are causing us to lose our ability to
focus. Am I getting that right?

Johann Hari: So Chasing the Scream is about addiction… and Stolen

Focus, which is about why we can't pay attention. And I think with all
of these, these are things we think of as individual problems and to
some degree of course are individual problems, but are profoundly
driven by the environment and by the way we live.

I felt like I could see that happen to pretty much everyone I know. I
was particularly worried about the young people in my life who often
seemed to be worrying at the speed of Snapchat where nothing still
or serious could touch them. And I wanted to understand, okay, well,
is this a real crisis? Does every generation think this, or is this a real
crisis? If it is, what's causing it and what can we do about it?

And even very early on,

when I started doing the
research, I was quite
taken aback. For every
one child who was
diagnosed with attention
problems when I was
seven years old... there's
now a hundred children
who are identified with
those problems. The
typical American office
worker now focuses on
only one task for only
three minutes. So I
wanted to figure out, why
is this happening?

And I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts on focus and

attention. And it was fascinating because I learned that there's a
broad array of factors, 12 factors in fact, that can make your attention
better or can make it worse. And loads of the factors that can make
our attentions worse have been hugely supercharged in recent years.

And crucially, your attention didn't collapse, your attention has been
stolen from you by these very big forces. And once you understand
that, a bit like with depression, when you understand what actually
causes the problem, a whole different set of solutions become
available to you.
Jeff Hays: So as you're talking and I'm loving this overview, I'm
designing an environment for my mind that is going to be easier to be
happy in. It's like some really practical things. Help me on the
environment that I should create for being able to focus. What are the
things I need to get rid of?

Johann Hari: At the moment, it's like someone is pouring itching

powder all over us, all day and then leaning forward and going, "Hey
buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't
scratch so much," to which the response is okay, I'll learn to meditate,
but screw you, we need to stop you pouring itching powder on me. So
that's why there's got to be an offense level of this where we take on
the forces that are doing this to us.

Let's think about sleep. We sleep 20% less than we did a century ago
according to the national sleep foundation. Children sleep 85 minutes
less than they did a century ago. And I interviewed the leading sleep
experts in the world, many of them, and the evidence on this is
overwhelming. It might sound like a bit of a no shit Sherlock finding,
but the evidence is overwhelming.
If you sleep less than eight hours a night, your attention will deeply
suffer. In fact, if you stay awake for 19 hours your attention is as
impaired as if you got legally drunk.

There was one piece of research that really knocked me back. I went
to interview a man named Dr. Charles Czeisler... And he did this
research that basically scanned the brains of people who were tired,
not super tired, and discovered that when you are tired, you can
appear to be awake as much as I'm awake talking to you now. You'll
be looking around, you can be talking, but whole parts of your brain
have gone to sleep.

When we say, I'm half asleep, it

turns out that's not a metaphor. Lots
of us are going around half asleep a
lot of the time. In fact, this is why
drowsy driving and distracted
driving are the two biggest rising
causes of death in the United States.
So you can see just that obvious
one. And it's interesting, Dr. Czeisler
said to me, even if nothing else had
changed, except that we sleep so
much less, that alone would be
causing a really serious crisis in
people's ability to focus and pay
attention. And that obviously is not
the only change that's happened.

Professor Roxanne Prichard, who's

another great sleep expert, she's at
the University of Minneapolis where
I interviewed her… When you're
sleeping, your brain is healing, it's
repairing itself.
So throughout the day when you're awake, your brain is building up
metabolic waste, what Professor Prichard calls brain cell poop is
building up in your brain. When you go to sleep, your brain cleans
itself. A watery fluid rinses through your brain, your cerebral spinal
fluid channels open up, and that brain cell poop that builds up during
the day is carried down to your liver and out of your body. If you don't
sleep properly, that process doesn't happen or doesn't happen as well,
as effectively.

This is why people who don't

sleep, people who sleep even
slightly less are significantly
more likely to later develop
dementia because your brain
is literally clogged. You know
that kind of hungover feeling
you have when you haven't
slept properly? Again, not a
metaphor, your brain is
literally clogged up with
metabolic waste. So you can
see why prioritizing sleep is so
hugely important.

There was one thing Dr. Czeisler discovered that really helped me as
well, an insight that really helped me. So he explained to me, humans
are as sensitive to light as algae... So human beings evolved so that
when it starts to get dark, our bodies give us a surge of extra energy.

Now we control the light. So 90% of us look at a glowing device within

two hours of going to sleep. So imagine you're lying in your bed, as
most of us do, as I used to do, and you're looking at your phone and
then you switch your phone off. So it suddenly gets dark and you shut
your eyes and try to go to sleep. What happens is, as far as your body's
concerned, it just got dark, he's got to get back to the cave, give him
an extra surge of energy.
So we're doing something immediately before we go to sleep that
triggers a surge of energy that undermines our ability to sleep and
undermines our ability to get good sleep. You can see this is called the
second surge, this surge of energy. One of the things we have to do,
which is a real challenge, is not look at glowing light, at least two
hours before you go to sleep. We're doing the equivalent of drinking a
cup of coffee before we go to sleep. It's absolutely wearing us out.

…there's this fascinating new movement called nutritional psychiatry…

which is all about looking at how the ways we eat affect the ways our
brains work. And I interviewed loads of these nutritional psychiatrists
and there were essentially three key ways I learned from them in
which the way we eat is profoundly affecting our ability to focus and
pay attention.

First way is pretty simple. Imagine you have the standard British or
American breakfast, which I'm pretty sure you and me grew up eating.
Sugary cereal or white bread toasted with butter. What that does is
that releases a huge amount of energy really quickly into your brain,
and it's a great feeling. Glucose hits your brain, it's like you've woken
up, the day has begun.
But what that does is that because it releases so much energy so
quickly, you'll be sitting at your desk a couple of hours later, or your
kid will be sitting at their school desk and your energy will crash. And
you begin to experience usually what's called brain fog where you just
can't think very clearly until you have another sugary carby snack.

The way we eat at the

moment puts us on a roller
coaster of energy spikes and
energy crashes throughout
the day, which gives us these
big patches of brain fog. The
way Dale Pinnock, one of
Britain's leading nutritionists
put it to me, is it's like we're
putting rocket fuel into a mini.
It'll go really fast, and then it'll
just stop. Whereas if you eat
food that releases energy
more steadily throughout the
day, you won't experience so
many patches of brain fog.

The second way in which the way we eat is profoundly harming our
ability to focus is for your brain to function optimally, you need all
sorts of nutrients in your diet. And it turns out the way we eat at the
moment is chronically lacking lots of these nutrients. Most famously
omega-3s which are found in fresh fish and sardines. And
unfortunately, the evidence suggests supplements don't really cut it.
Your body metabolizes supplements differently to how it metabolizes
hot nutrients contained in food.

The third way is, to me, the most shocking and disturbing… it's not just
that our food lacks nutrients that we need, our food also contains
chemicals that act on our brains like drugs.
These factors are profoundly affecting our attention and focus. And
again, there's two levels at which we've got to tackle that. There are
things we can do as individuals, but we've also got to take on the food
industry. We've got to take on a food industry, which is so profoundly
damaging us.

You can see how in three generations, the entire food supply system
completely changed. We went from mostly eating fresh and nutritious
food to mostly eating... Well, the majority of what Americans eat is
now processed or ultra-processed food, which Michael Pollan, the
great food writer has a great definition of that is that you can tell
something is processed food, if when you look on the back of the
packet, you can't figure out what the ingredients were in nature. Look
at the back of a Twinkie packet and try and figure out where that
came from you. You can't. Whereas a cabbage, we know where that
came from. So most of what we eat is processed food.

Jeff Hays: So you mentioned just briefly what we're doing to our
children. And can you go into a little bit of that?

Johann Hari: it turns out that the childhood we've lost contains an
enormous number of factors that are essential for developing a
healthy sense of focus and attention to give you a real, no shit
Sherlock other insight, one of them is exercise. Children need to run
around. Professor Joel Nigg, the leading expert on children's attention
problems has shown children who don't get to run around have fewer
brain connections, they struggle to focus more. One of the best things
you can do for a kid who can't focus is let them go out and run
around.

The Amish have no ADHD among their children. I asked them why
virtually none. I asked them why, they said, "Well if the kid doesn't
want to sit still, we don't make him sit still. We let him go run around.
We let him go fishing. They're really good at that."
Jeff Hays: What an odd thing to do.

Johann Hari: Exactly. We are the only human society ever that has
tried to get children to sit still for eight hours a day. No humans before
have ever done that, for a very good reason, it's an unbelievably foolish
thing to do. But it's not just exercise. It turns out when children play
freely, they develop all sorts of skills that are essential for deploying
their attention. Wonderful scientists, a Chilean scientist called Dr.
Isabel Behncke has done great work on this. When children play
freely, they learn what interests them.

That's really important for attention. They learn how to persuade other
kids to pay attention to them and how to be persuaded to pay
attention to other kids. They learn how to take their turn. They learn
how to make things happen. They learn how to invent things, and
supervised play with an adult standing over them, telling them what
to do, just doesn't give them those skills. It's like the difference
between whole foods and processed food, it just doesn't cut it.

And so I would argue, I talk about many things we need to do with our
kids, we need to deal with our tech. We need to deal with the aspects
of our technology that are designed at the moment to invade people's
attention, particularly children's. We need to deal with the aspects of
our food. We need to deal with the school system. If you wanted to
design a school system that would ruin children's attention, you
would design them on what we have now.
But most of all, we need to restore childhood. At the moment, our kids
are not having a childhood that our ancestors would have recognized
as a human childhood.

And I think one of the blessings of the nightmare we've all been
through in the last two years is all COVID did was accelerate a trend
when it comes to children that had already been in place. Actually the
truth is before COVID, we didn't let our children out either. At least
they got to go to school, which was better, but we didn't let them out
of the house to play freely even before COVID.

And I think we've all seen during COVID whatever your view of the
COVID restrictions and there's a legitimate debate about it, everyone
on both sides agrees, this has been a nightmare for our children. And
so I would say what we can learn from two years of locking our
children away is that locking children away is a terrible thing. And
actually we need to profoundly reopen childhood and a big part of
that needs to be children playing outdoors again.

Jeff Hays: Absolutely brilliant.

Jeff Hays: So I wanted to talk to you about trauma as it relates to
depression. And we talked about the other pieces of that. What did
you find out as it relates to trauma?

Johann Hari: I learned a huge amount about how trauma affects all
three of these topics, depression, anxiety, and attention problems.
And I think one of the people who most helped me understand this
was an amazing man named Dr. Vincent Felitti. So Dr. Felitti was a
doctor in San Diego in the early 1980s. For a minute, you're going to
think, what the hell has this got to do with any of these subjects? Bear
with me because it led to a huge breakthrough in understanding this.

So Dr. Felitti… starts to work with 200 severely obese people, people
who weighed more than 400 pounds, so really severe obesity... He
asked himself what would happen if really obese people literally
stopped eating and we gave them vitamin shots and everything, so
they didn't get scurvy. Would they just burn through the fat supplies
in their bodies and lose weight?

There's a woman, I'm going to call her Susan, that's not her real name,
who went down from being more than 400 pounds to 138 pounds.
Incredible, not atypical in the program. So you can imagine Susan's
family, they're phoning Dr. Felitti, saying, "You've saved her life. She's
really grateful." And then one day something happened that no one
expected, Susan cracked... She didn't go quite back to where she'd
been, but she starts really heavily eating.

She'd been in a bar and a man hit on her, not in a horrible way, a nice
way. And she felt really freaked out and she went to start eating. That's
when Dr. Felitti asked her something... He said to her, "Susan, when
did you start to put on your weight?" In her case, it was, I think it was
when she was 11. And he said, "Well, did anything happen to you that
year that didn't happen when you were nine, didn't happen when you
were 14. Anything happen that year?" And Susan looked down and she
said, "Yeah, that's where my grandfather started to rape me."
So Dr. Felitti went and spoke to all the people in the program and
interviewed them in detail. And he discovered a big majority of them
had put on their extreme weight in the aftermath of being sexually
abused or assaulted. And at first he's like, "This is really weird. What
would explain that?" So he starts asking the patients.

Susan put it really well. She said to him, "Overweight is overlooked

and that's what I need to be." Obviously gaining a lot of weight,
protected her from sexual attention, which was something she had a
very strong need to do. And Dr. Felitti realized this thing that seems
irrational and obviously is bad for your health, in fact, was performing
a perfectly logical function for these people, unconsciously. It was
protecting them from sexual attention, which they had very good
reason to need.

And Dr. Felitti realized it's like there was a fire inside them and that he
had been focusing on the smoke, which I thought was a really good
metaphor...

Catch Johann Hari's captivating interview with Jeff Hays in full when
you watch the Anxiety & Depression Docuseries.
FROM JOHANN'S WEBSITE...

"As you read Lost Connections, you can listen along to my

interviews, and hear the people the book discusses talking
directly to me, and to you.

I conducted hundreds of interviews in over a dozen countries.

These are the audio clips of some of the most interesting
people: the ones who made the final cut.

Some of these audio clips won’t make a huge amount of

sense if you’re not reading the book – they aren’t designed as
stand-alone radio – but I hope they give you a sense of some
of the extraordinary people I got to know working on this
book.

Some Firefox users may experience issues seeing the audio in

the browser. This is a Firefox specific issue, and in this
instance the recommended browsers are Safari, Chrome or
Opera..."

Check out Johann's website to hear audio interviews on the

topic of Depression with Professor Irving Kirsch, Professor
Robert Kohlenberg, Dr. Guy Sapirstein, Professor David
Healey, and others!

Enjoy other bonus content as well, like a self-quiz on your

knowledge and understanding of depression.
Concerned about the epidemic of anxiety
and depression? So is Johann Hari...

"Why is it that with each year that passes more and more of us seem
to be finding it harder to get through the day?"

"I had this feeling like pain was leaking out of me and I didn't
understand it. I couldn't control it."

"So there's three kinds of causes of depression or of any kind of

emotional mental health problem. And they're all real, and they all
play out to some degree in any individual who becomes depressed or
anxious."

"And precisely because this problem goes deeper than our biology,
the solutions need to go deeper than our biology too."

"If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy,
you're not in the main a machine with broken parts. You're a human
being with unmet needs and what you need is love and practical
support to get those needs met."

Everything you've ever learned about anxiety and depression

is wrong... and if you're worried about this epidemic of
suffering, you need to see Jeff Hay's eye-opening interview
with Johann Hari in its entirety!