100 Quotes by Johann Hari

Later, one of the world’s leading medical journals, the Lancet, conducted a detailed study of the fourteen major antidepressants that are given to teenagers. The evidence – from the unfiltered, real results – showed that they simply didn’t work, with a single exception, where the effect was very small.

Depression isn’t a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences!

Rufus tells his patients when they come to him feeling deeply depressed or anxious: You’re not crazy to feel so distressed. You’re not broken. You’re not defective. He sometimes quotes the Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

This showed that loneliness isn’t just some inevitable human sadness, like death. It’s a product of the way we live now.

When alcohol was legalized again in 1933, the involvement of gangsters and murderers and killing in the alcohol trade virtually ended. Peace was restored to the streets of Chicago. The murder rate fell dramatically,25 and it didn’t rise so high again until drug prohibition was intensified in the 1970s and ’80s.

The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If we don’t begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives – and millions may die there.

Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart of poor health” – physical, mental, and emotional.

If I am an American who has developed an Oxycontin addiction, as soon as my doctor realizes I’m an addict, she has to cut me off. She is allowed to prescribe to treat only my physical pain – not my addiction. Indeed, if she prescribes just to meet my addiction, she will face being stripped of her license and up to twenty-five years in jail84 as a common drug dealer – just.

When they talk among themselves, advertising people have been admitting since the 1920s that their job is to make people feel inadequate – and then offer their product as the solution to the sense of inadequacy they have created.