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.
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