Johann Hari

Depuis des décennies les scientifiques connaissent la véritable histoire de la dépression et de l'anxiété. Les causes de ces maladies sont de trois types : biologiques, psychologiques et sociales. Toutes ont un effet réel et aucune ne se résume à un simple déséquilibre chimique. Les causes sociales et psychologiques ont été passées sous silence pendant une longue période, alors que, sans elles, les causes biologiques n'auraient sans doute aucune influence..

J'ai moi-même été souvent découragé. Mais à mesure que je me forçais à continuer mes recherches, je me suis rendu compte qu'au bout du chemin se trouvaient les vraies solutions.

Lonely people are scanning for threats because they unconsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt. This snowball effect, he learned, can be reversed—but to help a depressed or severely anxious person out of it, they need more love, and more reassurance, than they would have needed in the first place. The tragedy, John realized, is that many depressed and anxious people receive less love, as they become harder to be around. Indeed, they receive judgment, and criticism, and this accelerates their retreat from the world. They snowball into an ever colder place.

You will try to get rid of the depressed feelings in your head. But that won’t work unless you get rid of the causes of the depressed feelings in your life. No, I would say to my younger self—your distress is not a malfunction. It is a signal—a necessary signal. [...] you are at a fork in the road now. You can try to muffle the signal. That will lead you to many wasted years when the pain will persist. Or you can listen to the signal and let it guide you—away from the things that are hurting and draining you, and toward the things that will meet your true needs.

The response to a huge crisis isn’t to go home and weep. It’s to go big. It’s to demand something that seems impossible—and not rest until you’ve achieved it.

how weird it is—the idea that we should all sit apart from one another, pursuing our own little story, watching our own little TV, and ignoring everyone around us. “It’s normal,” he said, “that you care.”

Your brain is constantly changing to meet your needs. It does this mainly in two ways: by pruning the synapses you don’t use, and by growing the synapses you do use. So, for example, if you raise a baby in total darkness, 5 the baby will shed the synapses that relate to eyesight—the brain has figured out he won’t need them and that it’s better to deploy that brainpower somewhere else. For as long as you live, this neuroplasticity never stops, and the brain “is always changing,”[...] Because you are feeling intense pain for a long period, your brain will assume this is the state in which you are going to have to survive from now on—so it might start to shed the synapses that relate to the things that give you joy and pleasure, and strengthen the synapses that relate to fear and despair. That’s one reason why you can often start to feel you have become somehow fixed in a state of depression or anxiety even if the original causes of the pain seem to have passed.

Baboons are locked in their hierarchy. They need somebody at the bottom to beat up and humiliate. [...] But humans do have a choice. We can find practical ways to dismantle hierarchies and create a more equal place, where everybody feels they have a measure of respect and status. Or we can build up hierarchies and ramp up the humiliation—as we are doing today. When we do that, many of us will feel we are being pushed down, almost physically, and many of us will show signs of submission. We’ll lower our heads and our bodies and silently say: Leave me alone. You beat me. I can’t take this any more.

To end loneliness, you need other people—plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you. You have to be in it together—and “it” can be anything that you both think has meaning and value.

Une relation à sens unique ne peut être un remède à la solitude. Seule une relation réciproque le peut.
John a montré que la solitude n'est pas liée au fait d'être physiquement séparé des autres, mais au sentiment de ne rien partager d'important avec eux.

J'avais dix-huit ans quand j'ai avalé mon premier antidépresseur.
La scène se déroulait sous un pâle soleil anglais, devant la pharmacie d'un centre commercial de Londres. Le cachet était petit et blanc, et quand je l'ai avalé, il m'a fait l'effet d'un baiser chimique.
Ce matin-là, j'étais allé chez mon médecin. Je lui avais expliqué que je ne me souvenais plus d'avoir passé une journée sans crise de larmes. Depuis ma plus tendre enfance, à l'école, au collège, à la maison, avec des amis, je devais souvent m'isoler et m'enfermer pour pleurer. Il ne s'agissait pas seulement de quelques larmes. C'étaient de vrais sanglots. Et même quand les larmes ne venaient pas, un monologue presque ininterrompu bourdonnait dans mon esprit. Ensuite, je me faisais des réprimandes : C'est dans ta tête tout ça. Reprends-toi, arrête d'être aussi faible.
J'avais honte d'en parler à l'époque ; j'ai honte de l'écrire aujourd'hui.

Every single person reading this is the beneficiary of big civilizing social changes that seemed impossible when somebody first proposed them. Are you a woman? My grandmothers weren’t even allowed to have their own bank accounts until they were in their forties, by law. Are you a worker? The weekend was mocked as a utopian idea when labor unions first began to fight for it. Are you black, or Asian, or disabled? You don’t need me to fill in this list.

If your picture of a perfect afterlife is being with the people you love all the time, he asked me, why wouldn’t you choose today—while you’re still alive—to be truly present with the people you love? Why would you rather be lost in a haze of distractions?

The lives we’re being pressured and propagandized to live don’t meet our psychological needs—for connection, security, or togetherness. We demand better, and we’re going to fight for better, together.

The real path to happiness, they were telling me, comes from dismantling our ego walls—from letting yourself flow into other people’s stories and letting their stories flow into yours; from pooling your identity, from realizing that you were never you—alone, heroic, sad—all along.

If those changes seem big, that tells you only that the problem is big. But a big problem is not necessarily an insoluble problem.

“When people have these kind of problems, it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them,” he said, “and time to start asking what happened to them.”

You can become the powerful one. If it’s your fault, it’s under your control. But that comes at a cost. If you were responsible for being hurt, then at some level, you have to think you deserved it. A person who thinks they deserved to be injured as a child isn’t going to think they deserve much as an adult, either. This is no way to live. But it’s a misfiring of the thing that made it possible for you to survive at an earlier point in your life.

When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can’t move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless—that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it’s your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power—at least in your own mind. If it’s your fault, then there’s something you can do that might make it different. You aren’t a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You’re the person controlling the machine. [...] In this way, just like obesity protected those women from the men they feared would rape them, blaming yourself for your childhood traumas protects you from seeing how vulnerable you were and are. You can become the powerful one. If it’s your fault, it’s under your control.

If you believe that your depression is due solely to a broken brain, you don’t have to think about your life, or about what anyone might have done to you. The belief that it all comes down to biology protects you, in a way, for a while. If you absorb this different story, though, you have to think about those things. And that hurts.