This Post Talks About Kids and Psychedelic Drugs

Well, we're just about wrapped up on discussing Johann Hari's book, Lost Connections. I still strongly encourage anyone that's been following this series to get the book. If you don't have enough money to buy it, hit up your local library. It's a very good book.

Chapters 13 and 20 will be discussed here. In chapter 13, Hari put two reasons for depression in one chapter. Genetics, and changes in the brain.

If you suffer from depression and anxiety, you've probably asked yourself, "Am I broken?" I've often asked myself that when wondering why I was depressed. I've had friends and family members talk to me about their depression and ask that. What we really mean is, "Am I just genetically predisposed to suffer from depression and anxiety?" And the answer is, well, kind of.

We're not actually broken. As I've written already and as Hari's book discusses in detail, we have perfectly good reasons for being depressed. Very legitimate reasons. Yet there is two factors that can make us more predispositioned for depression and anxiety.

The beginning of Chapter 13 discusses a concept called "neuroplasticity". Neuroplasticity is the brain changing over time as new experiences happen. Hari interviewed a neuroscientist named Marc Lewis about the concept. To quote:

If you look at a brain scan of a depressed or highly anxious person, Marc explained to me, it will look different from the brain scan of somebody without these problems. The areas that relate to feeling unhappy, or to being aware of risk, will be lit up like Christmas tree lights. They will be bigger, and more active.

Basically, if you do suffer from depression and anxiety, your brain is wired for it.

I can relate to this big time. I once told my therapist, "One of the perks of having General Anxiety Disorder is that you're always preparing for the worst case scenario." I said that completely unironically. My wife and I had signed up to National Debt Relief about six months prior because we were in debt up to our eyeballs, and they asked us if we wanted to pay an upcharge to keep a lawyer on retainer in case one of our creditors decided to sue us. Of course I did. I prepared for the worst case scenario. And then one of the creditors did. Good thing we paid for that lawyer, as he got that shit settled quick.

I'm always preparing for the worst case scenario, because having depression and anxiety has my brain hard wired to always be scoping out threats. When you suffer from those, your brain is in constant survival mode. Detect the threat. Prepare to defend against the threat.

It's kind of ironic that in those moments, anxiety feels less like a burden and more like a warm blanket.

The other part of chapter 13 talks about the genetic component of depression. When I saw that there was a genetic link to depression and anxiety, I was, to put it mildly, alarmed. My oldest daughter has shown symptoms of extreme anxiety, and not just in a "kids being kids" way. There's times when she expresses fear in a "this is not normal, even for a six year old" manner. And come to think of it, my parents have suffered from depression. My dad's medicine cabinet is full of pretty much every anti-depressant on the map. From what my parents have told me, my grandparents likely suffered from depression. But it's not that simple. A group of scientists did study the genetic component of depression and anxiety and, to quote:

Years into their work, they found something striking. They discovered that having a variant of a gene called 5-HTT does relate to becoming depressed.                                                                                                                                                                                   Yet there was a catch. We are all born with a genetic inheritance-but your genes are activated by your environment. They can be switched on, or off, by what happens to you. And Avshalom [the leader of the team of scientific researchers conducting the study] discovered-as Professor Robert Sapolsky explains-"that if you have a particular flavor of 5-HTT, you have a greatly increased risk of depression, but only in a certain environment." If you carried this gene, the study showed, you were more likely to become depressed-but only if you have experienced a terribly stressful event, or a great deal of childhood trauma.

So there is a mental component to depression, but it's only activated as a result of the perfectly good reasons why you're depressed or anxious.

So how do we deal with this? Well, according to the book, by doing lots and lots of drugs!

I'm kidding, but not really.

Ronald Griffith is a man that rose through the ranks of psychology and has become a veritable god in the field. After trying to find studies on meditation (more on that later), he found that there were studies done in the 50s and 60s on the effect of hallucinogens that caused people to not only be less depressed, but also quit smoking and drinking. The studies ceased after that, because, well, President Nixon. But in the 1990s, Dr. Griffith had enough political clout to try it again. He decided to do experiments with patients under the influence of psilocybin, the chemical in magic mushrooms. The patients were placed in a room under the supervision of a medical professional, and given the drug. The effects were magical.

Like I keep saying, get the fucking book and read it (Lost Connections by Johann Hari, at your local library if you can't afford to buy it, otherwise it's literally anywhere books are sold), because the results were spectacular, and the experiences detailed in the book are far too long for me to quote. Yet the patients had their anxiety replaced by a feeling of deep connection to people and their emotions.

When I read about this, I did look into where I could have this same treatment. Do drugs, end your depression. I found one retreat out in California that cost thousands of dollars to attend, not including travel costs. So that's out.

So what can we do? That's where meditation comes in.

Or I should say, real meditation. Meditation exercises are pretty much everywhere these days, and a lot of it is just bullshit made to collect your money. Back when I worked at the oil refinery, I would listen to a meditation app on my phone that did nothing but have me doing some breathing exercises. For $5.99 a month, some asshole told me to "breathe in, breathe out" for ten minutes a day and it didn't do a thing. I was still depressed and hated my job.

Hari's book mentions two types of meditation. The first is "loving-kindness meditation". If you're the type of person that hates people out of envy, this is a good exercise for you. Just close your eyes, think of someone that you're envious of, and instead of thinking hateful thoughts, focus on thinking positive thoughts about the person. Do it for five minutes at a time, every day. After a while, you'll notice that not only are you happier, but you're also liking people a lot more.

The other is deep meditation, which does mimic the effects of being on magic mushrooms. One of the patients that had taken shrooms in the experiment given by Dr. Griffith ended up becoming a meditation coach because he knew that the psychological effects of taking the drug were temporary, and he wanted to continue having the mental state that he had after doing the experiment.

I've been trying to find a deep meditation coach ever since reading Hari's book, and it's not an easy task. I live in Southeast Michigan, where 2/3rds of the population lives, and finding pretty much any other thing is easy to find here. Yet finding an actual deep meditation coach, as opposed to a bunch of con artists, is hard. I'll still keep looking, though.

Well, this wraps up my series on Lost Connections. I might do a conclusion post in the days ahead to sum up everything in his book and my last few posts. There's also a lot of stuff I really want to write about if I can get the time. Either way, thanks for reading!

One Thing We Can Do For Ourselves

This post is going to be discussing chapter 11 of Lost Connections. Cause Six: Disconnection from the Natural World.

A little over a year ago, I got sacked from my job working security at an oil refinery in Southwest Detroit. I didn't know it at the time, but it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Getting fired sucks, and I didn't take it well even though I hated the job. The main reason why I hated the job was the area itself. For miles around, all you saw was urban decay. The heavy industrialization of the area took its toll on the environment. You saw nothing but concrete, and the nearby River Rouge was so polluted that it didn't even look appealing. You certainly couldn't swim in it. Not unless you wanted to die a horrible death from cancer.

That environment took a toll on the employees of the refinery. Everyone was miserable there (I imagine they still are). That made management hard to deal with. Much of middle management would take their hatred of the area out on the workers. So the combination of a shit environment with shit bosses made the whole job a shit job.

Thinking back on how awful that job was, I'm tempted to ramble on about it. But this is about Johann Hari's book, and not my old shit job.

In this chapter, Hari interviews Isabel Behncke, an evolutionary biologist. In order to get the interview, Isabel made Hari climb a mountain with her. Hari did not want to climb a mountain-he's a city boy through and through-but he wanted the interview, so off he went. The chapter ends when they've finished climbing the mountain:

The cruelest thing about depression, she said, is that it drains of you the desire to be fully alive as this-to swallow experience whole. "We want to feel alive," she said. We want it, and need it, so badly. Later, she said: "Obviously, we were facing death, but you felt alive, right? You might have been horrified-but you were not depressed."                           No. I was not depressed.

Isabel studied bonobos for many years. She first studied them in zoos, and realized she'd have to go to a war-torn part of the Congo to study them outside of captivity. She found that when the bonobos were not in captivity, they sometimes would get depression. Like many primate societies, there's always a few members of the tribe that face ostracization, and those would show signs of depression. Yet, they only showed depression to a certain point.

In the wild, for bonobos, there's a limit to how far this depression goes. It's there-especially for the low-status ones-but there is a floor below which the animals won't sink. Yet in zoos, it seemed the bonobos would slip further and further down, in a way they never would in the wild. They would scratch until they bled. They would howl. They would develop tics, or start rocking obsessively. In their natural habitat, she [Isabel] never saw the bonobos develop this "full-blown, chronic depression," she says, but in zoos, it was quite common.

This chapter of Hari's book cites several studies that show the link between being away from nature and depression. One that really captured my attention was one that wasn't discussed very much, but gave a shout out to Michigan. Namely, the Jackson State Prison. Those of us that live in Michigan know that if you done fucked up bad, that's the prison you're going to. It's underdone different names and rebuilding over the years, yet it houses Michigan's most violent offenders. One thing that was noticed in a study done on mental health in that prison was that on one side of the prison, inmates can look outside of their cells and see farmland. On the other side of the prison, inmates see a concrete wall. When all other factors were accounted for, those that were on the side that saw the farmland had a 25% rate of decrease in mental and physical health problems.

One of the things I noticed about Hari's book is that there is no chapter on reconnection associated with this. Probably because the solution to this is simple: Get your ass outside. It would be hard to write a whole chapter just telling people to get their ass outside. While most of the problems with depression outlined in Lost Connections talks about a need for a collective solution, this is one that we can handle on an individual level. Go outside. Get in touch with nature.

One of the perks of my new job is that it has an impressive amount of vacation pay, and unlike every other job I've had that promised vacation pay, you don't have to wait a year to get it. A certain amount of hours are accumulated in every paycheck. So next month, I'll be going camping with my family in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. My wife and I love going up there. We've taken three vacations up there, including our honeymoon. Because of how security companies have done me in past employment, this will be our first vacation in six years. And like I said in my post Wanting Stuff Makes us Depressed, we really miss tent camping, so instead of taking the camper, we're taking a tent. I was discussing the UP with one of my coworkers who had never been up there and asked, "You know what's in the UP that makes it so great?" He answered no and I responded, "NOTHING! THERE'S NOTHING UP THERE, AND THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT SO GREAT! It's nothing but trees! You go up there, you unplug, and you enjoy yourself!" My wife and I are geeking out about our vacation next month where we'll see a whole bunch of nothing. Nothing but nature. We're going to see the Painted Rocks, make our third trip to Tahquamenon Falls, and visit a bear sanctuary. A whole bunch of nothing but nature, and we're thrilled about it.

One of the few things we can do for ourselves to fight depression is to get back in touch with nature. Get your ass outside. Go hiking. Go camping. Go ice fishing if it's cold. Or ice skating if that's your thing. Just get your ass outside.