Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes Of Depression - And The Unexpected Solutions Quotes
"Only a fool, it seemed, would doubt the power of the tractor now."
"Everything he had learned in his medical training suggested that the claim that pain was a disembodied energy that could just be expelled into the air was nonsense."
"We are giving her a drug, which will usually have a chemical effect on her body in some way. And you are giving her a story—about how the treatment will affect her."
"As amazing as it seems, Haygarth realized, the story you tell is often just as important as the drug."
"Scientists like Irving Kirsch have shown remarkable effects from placebos."
"The patients reacted just as if they had been given morphine. They didn’t scream, or howl, and they didn’t go into full-blown shock."
"Irving was also one of the leading experts in the world in a field of science that began right back in Bath when John Haygarth first waved his false wand."
"The numbers showed that 25 percent of the effects of antidepressants were due to natural recovery, 50 percent were due to the story you had been told about them, and only 25 percent to the actual chemicals."
"Irving received an e-mail—one that suggested he may have, in fact, only scratched the surface of much more shocking scandal."
"It would be commercially unacceptable to include a statement that efficacy has not been demonstrated, as this would undermine the profile of Paroxetine."
"I realized I couldn’t continue to dismiss what Irving Kirsch was saying quite so easily."
"But when I read about his findings, in his scientific papers and in his book The Emperor’s New Drugs, I had two responses."
"There was never any basis for it, ever. It was just marketing copy."
"The term doesn’t really make any sense, she said: we don’t know what a "chemically balanced" brain would look like."
"We are told in our culture that depression is the ultimate form of irrationality."
"It works like this: "The companies are often running their own trials on their own products," he said."
"He says it is not surprising that the drug companies could simply override the evidence and get the drugs to market anyway, because in fact it happens all the time."
"In the days after the Second World War, a young woman in her early twenties—fresh from giving birth—walked through the ruins of Kensal Rise."
"This made many doctors and psychiatrists feel uncomfortable."
"George had been trained not as a doctor or psychiatrist but as an anthropologist."
"George and Tirril Harris’s research out across the world."
"The clinical trials he has analyzed—almost all the ones submitted to the regulator—typically last for four to eight weeks."
"All this sickness and distress must tell us something about our society, and what we’re doing wrong."
"It’s not possible for psychological distress to cause physical illnesses."
"Imagine a typical Tuesday morning in a large government department."
"Disempowerment is at the heart of poor health."
"The kind of connection we need is this connection."
"We embarked on an experiment—to see if humans can live alone."
"The worse stress for people isn’t having to bear a lot of responsibility. It is, he told me, having to endure 'work [that] is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; [where] they die a little when they come to work each day, because their work touches no part of them that is them.'"
"Being very fat stops most men from looking at you that way. It works."
"Obese people didn’t need to be told what to eat; they knew the nutritional advice better than he did. They needed someone to understand why they ate."
"You apply for a job weighing four hundred pounds, people assume you’re stupid, lazy."
"Obesity, he realized, isn’t the fire. It’s the smoke."
"People who are more familiar with these matters recognize that these statements by patients"—describing their sexual abuse—"are basically fabrications, to provide a cover for their failed lives."
"We’re extraordinarily sensitive to these things."
"Ask not what’s inside your head," he said. "Ask what your head’s inside of."
"Women need more than a house and a car and a husband and kids. They need equality, and meaningful work, and autonomy."
"You aren’t broken, we’d tell them. The culture is."
"It’s like being squeezed—like trying to fit down a very tight tube all the time."
"The way we have resisted this form of nastiness is to say that depression is a disease. You wouldn’t hector a person with cancer to pull themselves together, so it’s equally cruel to do it to somebody with the disease of depression or severe anxiety."
"For a long time, depressed and anxious people have been told their distress is not real—that it is just laziness, or weakness, or self-indulgence."
"Depression and anxiety have three kinds of causes: biological, psychological, and social."
"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society."
"The path away from stigma has been to explain patiently that this is a physical illness like diabetes or cancer."
"The evidence suggests... looking at depression as largely a reaction to the way we are living makes people less cruel, to themselves and to other people."
"It's thinking about you, you, you that's helped to make you feel so lousy. Don't be you. Be us. Be we. Be part of the group."
"The real path to happiness comes from dismantling our ego walls."
"We have become imprisoned inside our own egos, walled off where true connection cannot reach us."
"There's no point in using antidepressants if nothing has changed, so that when they come off the antidepressant they're still in the same place they were before."
"What we've had up to now isn't enough. The lives we're being pressured and propagandized to live don't meet our psychological needs."
"There’s something about saying ‘It’s okay,’... it’s normal."
"When you’re depressed, you’re in a very dark place, and if you can give somebody a taste of recovery, even if it’s a small taste, just that small hope, a bit of hope, [it’s] absolutely critical."
"Any excuse for a party." They’re always finding some reason to have a celebration, with all their patients invited.
"Social prescribing, if it is successful, wouldn’t make much money. In fact, it would blast a hole in that multibillion-dollar chemical market—there would be less profit."
"One study of depressed people in Norway found that a program like this moved people on average 4.5 points on the depression scale—more than double the effect of chemical antidepressants."
"When people come to them with a problem in living, they try to address the problem in living."
"An antidepressant, they have learned, isn’t just a pill. It’s anything that lifts your despair."
"This isn’t a molehill. It’s the mountain at the center of almost all our lives."
"The humiliation and control of so many workplaces can suppress that, or drive it out of people, but it’s always there, and it reemerges in the right environment."
"People want to work. Everybody wants to work. Everybody wants to feel useful, and have purpose."
"It’s not the work itself that makes you sick. It’s the feeling of being controlled—of being a meaningless cog in a system."
"The business closer to the democratic model grew, on average, four times more than the others."
"Work wouldn’t be an ordeal that’s done to you, something to endure. It’d be a democratic tribe that you are part of, and that you control as much as anyone else."
"Happiness is really feeling like you’ve impacted another human positively."
"We don’t allow space or create space [for] these really critical conversations to take place—so it just creates more and more isolation."
"My hunch is that, if we start to really talk about how this affects our emotional health, we will begin to see the need for more radical changes."
"I didn’t want to lose this sense of what I had taken in."
"It’s an opening of the mind that allows you to see ... things that are inside you already."
"All it’s doing is opening the gate to what we have known—at some level—we needed all along."
"It just removed the stress—or reduced the stress—that people dealt with in their everyday lives."
"You need to tell somebody what has happened to you, and you need to know they don’t regard you as being worth less than them."
"Right now, I think that is waiting to happen, in terms of the science of it."
"It’s about the size of the revolution in how gay people were treated. But that revolution happened."
"The response to a huge crisis isn’t to go home and weep. It’s to go big."
"Are you really going to do what you want to do?"
"Of course you’re going to do what you want to do. You’re a human being. You only live once."