Pen Hanley's Blog

‘Lost Connections’ and ‘A Heart That Works’

How to find hope in a world gone mad

During a week at the coast recently with four others, one of the books I’d brought was Johann Hari’s Lost Connections: Why you’re depressed and how to find hope (Bloomsbury, 2018). Three of those friends at different times picked up the book and couldn’t stop reading it. Not because they were depressed but because Johann Hari’s books are like that: exceptionally easy to read and about intrinsically fascinating topics. He has the beautiful style of a bright person who reveals his mistakes and the anxieties and puzzlements of his heart in an appealing and often humorous way. He’s an independent thinker who presents rigorous evidence and complex information lucidly.

I’d read many books on depression when I was fighting a serious bout back in the 1980s. Fighting is not an apt verb because one of the worst things about depression is that it takes away one’s energy. Hard to fight anything when it’s difficult to get out of bed in the morning. The book that helped me most then was Maggie Scarf’s Unfinished Business. That was at a particular time in my battle and it could be different for different people and would be different for me at a different stage.

I beat my youthful depression after an epiphany that came after more than a year of weekly counselling with a gifted psychologist. Much of that time I was unemployed and libraries are free so I read everything my counsellor recommended, even some novels, like The Colour Purple. They all helped and I found anything written by Dorothy Rowe powerfully illuminating. Rowe was an Australian psychologist who later went against the new pharmaceutical trend and insisted that the SSRI drugs were not effective, that depression was a symptom of a deeper problem, which was best solved by the old-fashioned ‘talking cure.’ You can still buy her books in second hand shops and online and they’re really worth reading: accessible and with a clear-eyed, common sense analysis of our society and people’s behaviour.

Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An atlas of depression

Years later, Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An atlas of depression (Simon & Schuster, 2001) came out and even though it was, thank God, not relevant to me any more, I read it and it’s a towering piece of work, the best and certainly most comprehensive about depression I’d read up to then.

But Hari’s Lost Connections eclipses even that. Not that we should compare them – all of these books and especially Solomon’s are brilliant and I’m sure have helped countless people.

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