Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions

Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.”

Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart12 of poor health”—physical, mental, and emotional.

Scientists measure the depth of someone’s depression using something named the Hamilton scale, which was invented by a scientist named Max Hamilton in 1959. The Hamilton scale ranges from 0 (where you’re skipping along merrily) to 51 (where you’re jumping in front of trains). To give you a yardstick: you can get a six-point leap in your Hamilton sc

It wasn’t just a bad event that caused depression—it was also long-term sources of stress.

He feels, he told me, that the experience made clear to him that people need a sense “of being accepted, to have some sense of importance, and to be loved. And I can give that to anyone at any time, and it’s that simple. It’s just paying attention. It’s just being with people. It’s loving.”

The first are called intrinsic motives7—they are the things you do purely because you value them in and of themselves, not because of anything you get out of them.

They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.

This evidence suggests if we return to seeing our distress and our joy as something we share with a network of people all around us, we will feel different.

Depression and anxiety might, in one way, be the sanest reaction you have.6 It’s a signal, saying—you shouldn’t have to live this way, and if you aren’t helped to find a better path, you will be missing out on so much that is best about being human.

Our ego, our sense of self, always has both these qualities—protective, and imprisoning.