Interview: Johann Hari on Mental Health During the Pandemic

“There has been a huge transfer of wealth to the rich and gradual collapse of the middle class. That’s made a lot of people anxious.“

On May 31, 2020, Merion West‘s Kevin Turner was joined by journalist and author Johann Hari, who is most famous for his work on topics including depression, addiction, and loneliness.

Mr. Hari’s most recent book, Lost Connections, is available on Audible.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

I remember that when Lost Connections came out, people were thinking about how the book goes about depression, but you touched on lots of issues related to isolation in the book as well. Now that we are living in the current world of COVID-19, how do you see the message of your work resonating in our daily lives?

Yeah, it’s been a really interesting experience because so many people have been talking about it on social media and recommending it to their friends. It’s come back up the bestseller list two years after it came out. And I think this whole terrible experience of the pandemic is–in one way—an opportunity for us to understand depression and anxiety more deeply. Depression or anxiety have dramatically spiked under this pandemic, and a big part of what I’m exploring in the book—what I learned in my three years of research for the book—is that depression and anxiety have actually been increasing all throughout my lifetime. I’m 41 years old, and this is happening in the United States, in Britain, and across the Western world.

One of the reasons I wrote the book is because I wanted to understand why. Why are depression and anxiety increasing so much? Why is it with each year that passes, more and more of us are finding it harder to get through the day? I actually learned that there’s really good scientific evidence for why depression and anxiety are increasing. And I think that lots of those factors have acutely spiked in the last two months. One of the reasons why I wanted to learn about why depression and anxiety have increased so much was a kind of personal reason, which is that when I was a teenager, I remember going to my doctor and explaining that I had this feeling like pain was leaking out of me.