In a sure-to-be-controversial book, Hari delivers a weighty, well-supported, persuasive argument against treating depression...
Mining the root causes of depression and anxiety.
Acclaimed British journalist Hari researched and wrote his bestselling debut, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2015), while pushing aside work on a subject that was much too personal to accept and scrutinize at the time. This book, the culmination of a 40,000-mile odyssey and hundreds of hours of interviews with social scientists and depression sufferers (including those who’ve recovered), presents a theory that directly challenges long-held beliefs about depression’s causes and cures. The subject matter is exquisitely personal for the author, since he’d battled chronic melancholy since his teenage years and was prescribed the “chemical armor” of antidepressants well into his young adulthood. Though his dosage increased as the symptoms periodically resurfaced, he continued promoting his condition as a brain-induced malady with its time-tested cure being a strict regimen of pharmaceutical chemicals. Taking a different approach from the one he’d been following for most of his life, Hari introduces a new direction in the debate over the origins of depression, which he developed after deciding to cease all medication and become “chemically naked” at age 31. The author challenges classically held theories about depression and its remedies in chapters brought to life with interviews, personal observations, and field-professional summations. Perhaps most convincing is the author’s thorough explanation of what he believes are the proven causes of depression and anxiety, which include disconnection from work, society, values, nature, and a secure future. These factors, humanized with anecdotes, personal history, and social science, directly contradict the chemical-imbalance hypothesis hard-wired into the contemporary medical community. Hari also chronicles his experiences with reconnective solutions, journeys that took him from a Berlin housing project to an Amish village to rediscover what he deems as the immense (natural) antidepressive benefits of meaningful work, social interaction, and selflessness.
In a sure-to-be-controversial book, Hari delivers a weighty, well-supported, persuasive argument against treating depression pharmaceutically.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-830-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.
Frey’s lacerating, intimate debut chronicles his recovery from multiple addictions with adrenal rage and sprawling prose.
After ten years of alcoholism and three years of crack addiction, the 23-year-old author awakens from a blackout aboard a Chicago-bound airplane, “covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.” While intoxicated, he learns, he had fallen from a fire escape and damaged his teeth and face. His family persuades him to enter a Minnesota clinic, described as “the oldest Residential Drug and Alcohol Facility in the World.” Frey’s enormous alcohol habit, combined with his use of “Cocaine . . . Pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP and glue,” make this a very rough ride, with the DTs quickly setting in: “The bugs crawl onto my skin and they start biting me and I try to kill them.” Frey captures with often discomforting acuity the daily grind and painful reacquaintance with human sensation that occur in long-term detox; for example, he must undergo reconstructive dental surgery without anesthetic, an ordeal rendered in excruciating detail. Very gradually, he confronts the “demons” that compelled him towards epic chemical abuse, although it takes him longer to recognize his own culpability in self-destructive acts. He effectively portrays the volatile yet loyal relationships of people in recovery as he forms bonds with a damaged young woman, an addicted mobster, and an alcoholic judge. Although he rejects the familiar 12-step program of AA, he finds strength in the principles of Taoism and (somewhat to his surprise) in the unflinching support of family, friends, and therapists, who help him avoid a relapse. Our acerbic narrator conveys urgency and youthful spirit with an angry, clinical tone and some initially off-putting prose tics—irregular paragraph breaks, unpunctuated dialogue, scattered capitalization, few commas—that ultimately create striking accruals of verisimilitude and plausible human portraits.
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.Pub Date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50775-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
4 Book Adaptations to Check Out In December
Dillard's headlong immersion into the mysteries of the natural world—from bedrocks to the heavens, and flora and fauna (from amoebas to us)—places this childhood memoir of life with a companionable family in Pittsburgh's elite enclave in the 50's and 60's. There is less tugging at the rare insight, the wild surmise, as in, say, Dillard's Teaching the Stone to Talk (1982), and this bright, imaginative whack through the "overgrown path" back to the past is more accessible to the general reader. Awareness is all to Dillard. To the tot, "mindless and eternal," playing on the kitchen floor, will come, in the roaring flood of time, "the breakthrough shift between seeing, and knowing you see." Aware as the dickens, Dillard found that everything in the world is "an outcrop of some vast vein of knowledge." The child Dillard will read books "to delirium," investigate rocks and insects, "pry open a landscape" with a microscope, draw faces, and just because it felt marvelous, pretend to fly, arms flapping, clown a Pittsburgh main street. In between accounts of such fabulous flights and efforts of concentration which "draw you down so very deep," there are delightful portraits of a set of attractive parents (shameless connoisseurs of jokes, both ancient and practical) and not unaffectionate views of Pittsburgh's Old Guard, at Country Club play to actually praying (to teen-ager Dillard's angry astonishment) in sables and tailcoats, in their gold-plated church). There are tales of mischief-making, dances and boys, school and the fine and splendid rages of adolescence ("I was a dog barking between my own ears"). Throughout, Dillard rumples up the placid life. An overview of one particular childhood told with shiver and bounce, and another Dillard voyage of discovery as she continues to "break up through the skin of awareness . . .as dolphins burst through the seas. . ."
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1987
ISBN: 0060915188
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
