Lost Connections

Journalist Johann Hari had depression from childhood and began taking antidepressants as a teenager, having been told his problems came from a chemical imbalance in his brain. Trained in the social sciences, he set out as an adult to test that explanation, and met social scientists around the world whose evidence suggests depression and anxiety are largely caused by problems in the way people live now. His reporting led him to experiments in Baltimore, an Amish community in Indiana and an uprising in Berlin. He identifies nine causes and then turns to scientists working on seven very different solutions. Bloomsbury published it in 2018, and it became a New York Times bestseller.

Steven Bartlett said the book changed his life; he wrote so after meeting Hari to discuss loneliness, anxiety and mental health in young people.