Johann Hari is an award-winning British journalist and playwright. He was a columnist for The Independent and the Huffington Post, and has won awards for his war reporting. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, El Mundo, the Melbourne Age, El Pais, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Irish Times, The Guardian, Ha'aretz, the Times Literary Supplement, Attitude (Britain's main gay magazine), the New Statesman and a wide range of other international newspapers and magazines.
Hari describes himself as a "European social democrat", who believes that markets are "an essential tool to generate wealth" but must be matched by strong democratic governments and strong trade unions or they become "disastrous". He appears regularly as an arts critic on the BBC Two programme Newsnight Review, and he is a book critic for Slate. He has been named by the Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people on the left in Britain, and by the Dutch magazine Winq as one of the twenty most influential gay people in the world.
After two scandals in 2011 involving plagiarism and malicious editing of Wikipedia pages, Hari was forced to return the prestigious Orwell prize he had won in 2008, and lost his position at The Independent.
I have always been interested in how depression affects people in general as I have suffered from this in the past. I knew anti-depressants did work for many people but also from my own experience that lifestyle and focussing on living could make a difference too. When I had depression many years ago I was told by my Doctor that it was because of a chemical imbalance in the brain and how the antidepressants altered that. This book clearly sets out how the theory about depression has changed and it is very valuable to understand this.
Why are we becoming more and more estranged from each other when the notion that we should be together is innate in our natural behavior? As a result, our mental organs ache. Will we continue to deceive ourselves with things that no one needs or value (for example, materialism, the social environment) to heal? NO! We need to be together and unite our LOST CONNECTION.