![]() ![]() Hari does not just complain about the way we have been taught to view depression and its treatments he also includes a lot of hard data from a variety of researchers that can help us. “Feeling lonely, it turned out, caused your cortisol level to absolutely soar-as much as some of the most disturbing things that can ever happen to you” (p. ![]() ![]() He was measuring how stressful loneliness was and how much cortisol was in each person’s saliva sample. On the second day, they did the same and also spit into a tube, sealed it, and kept it to hand in to the lab. ![]() They wore a cardiovascular monitor to measure their heart rates. One story he tells is of John Cacioppo’s early study in the mid 1970s in which people were asked to rate themselves on loneliness 9 times a day in response to a beeper. Rather than depression being caused by an imbalance of hormones in our brain, it is mainly the loss of social connections in our lives that causes neuro-chemical imbalances that lead to depression and anxiety, which have nevertheless created the multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry. It is, I discovered, largely in the world, and the way we are living in it” (p. In his introduction, he says: “We have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are…The primary cause of all this rising depression and anxiety is not in our heads. ![]()
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