['Therapy In A Nutshell' original article](https://therapyinanutshell.com/the-9-causes-of-depression-according-to-johann-hari-lost-connections-part-2/) ..here’s what Johann identifies as the nine true causes of depression. And I would call them the nine social causes of depression because there’s a lot of real causes of depression. ### 1. Disconnection From Meaningful Work So number one: disconnection from meaningful work. This is feeling helpless, feeling controlled by other people, feeling meaningless.  So a lot of us have menial jobs, jobs with little to no say about how the company runs and no ownership of the process, and this can lead to feelings of discouragement, despair, and feeling like everything is pointless.  ### 2. Disconnection From Other People Number two: disconnection from other people. Johann shared studies where participants were rejected or shunned by people planted into their experiment. They tested the level of these people’s stress hormones and found that becoming acutely lonely was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack.  And our society is the loneliest it has ever been in the [[History]] of the world. People live in their own homes, they don’t interact nearly as much, they’re far less likely to have many close friends or a local community to support them. And this unnatural state leads to depression. ### 3. Disconnection From Meaningful Values Number three is disconnection from meaningful values. So essentially this point he makes is about materialism and how advertising makes us feel inadequate until we buy something. He shared a lot of stories about how marketing and advertising affects children’s brains and basically leaves us feeling emptier and emptier.  ### 4. Disconnection Due to Childhood Trauma Number four: disconnection due to childhood trauma.  He talks about the [[ACEs]] study that showed that childhood [[Trauma]] makes it much more likely that you develop depression. The ACEs questionnaire asked about 10 types of childhood trauma, things like abuse, neglect, and loss of a parent, and found that if you experienced 6 of them as a child you were 5 times more likely to develop depression, and if you experienced 7 of them you were 31 times more likely to attempt suicide as an adult.  So basically, this impact of childhood trauma and childhood abuse is so overwhelming that it has to be counted as one of the real causes of depression. ### 5. Disconnection From Status and Respect Number five is disconnection from status and respect.  Johann shares the example of a group of wild chimpanzees that researchers observed for a long time. And the alpha champ, the boss champion was the strong, happy guy who enjoyed the first access to food and the lovely lady chimps, more opportunities to make babies because of his status.  He was healthier than the other monkeys, but he got older and along came a younger, stronger chimp who started doing it with all the ladies. And eventually the two of them fought. The younger chimp won.  The older chimp sank in status, and at that point he seemed depressed. He stopped eating as well. He stayed on the sidelines of the community and eventually wandered off alone into the wild where he presumably died.  Now, we see this happen in human society as well. A loss of status and respect contributes to depression for many in our society. And there’s so many people who are marginalized: the young, the old, the poor, and people marginalized by race or gender or education or other situations.  Now, for us to be mentally healthy we need a group of people who respect us, who we belong to, who we have influence with. And I don’t mean that the only people who can be mentally healthy are the powerful or the rich, but the opposite of that is certainly an obstacle to [[Mental Health]] in our society.  ### 6. Disconnection From the Natural World Number six: disconnection from the natural world. Now, here Johann cites a prison study: inmates who could see out the windows were 24% less likely to get physically or mentally ill. So essentially our separation from nature makes us sick, and being in nature can make us healthier.  Johann says, “Here is a treatment that has very few side effects, it’s not expensive, it doesn’t require a trained or licensed professional to prescribe it, and it has pretty good evidence of efficacy so far. But the research is very hard to find funding for because a lot of the shape of modern biomedical research has been defined by the pharmaceutical industry, and they’re not interested because it’s very hard to commercialize nature contact. You can’t sell it, so they don’t want to know.”  We haven’t seen advertisements on TV saying, “Are you feeling depressed? It might be a nature imbalance. Go spend 15 extra minutes a day in nature, and your brain chemistry might change.”  ### 7. Disconnection From a Hopeful or Secure Future Number seven: disconnection from a hopeful or secure future. There were some really interesting studies in the book that Johann shared showing that people with depression were not able to visualize the future compared to non-depressed people. So as we get disconnected from our future, it’s easy to become more depressed.  ### 8/9. The Real Role of Genes and Brain Changes Causes eight and nine: he calls this the real role of genes and brain changes. So the chemicals in your brain, the structure of your brain, changes depending on how you use it. Depression isn’t just a simple chemical imbalance; it’s an interaction of biology and environment and how you think and act.  So Johann discusses neuroplasticity, which is one of my favorite topics. Johann describes how when you’re depressed your brain physically changes, and how when you recover your brain physically changes. So let me just read you this part.  “Imagine that your marriage just broke up and you lost your job and, you know what, your mother just had a stroke. It’s pretty overwhelming.  “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 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.”