The Gray Area with Sean Illing
Society & Culture:Philosophy
“What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief — for our own lives not being as they should?” asks Johann Hari. “What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost yet still need?”
In his new book, Lost Connections, Hari advances an argument both radical and obvious: Depression and anxiety are more than just chemical imbalances in the brain. They are the result of our social environments, our relationships, our political contexts — our lives, in short.
Hari, who has struggled with depression since his youth, went on a journey to try to understand the social causes of mental illness, the ones we prefer not to talk about because changing them is harder than handing out a pill. What he returned with is a book that claims to be about depression but is actually about the ways we’ve screwed up modern society and created a world that leaves far too many of us alienated, anxious, despairing, and lost.
The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti famously said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.” So that, then, is the question Hari and I consider in this conversation: How sick, really, is our society?
Books:
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free