Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry and social justice.

Hello, this is James and welcome to the podcast. And this week I'm delighted to again get a chance to chat with Johann Harri.

Johann is an internationally best-selling author whose books have appeared in 38 languages.

He was twice named National Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International.

We last heard from Johann in 2018 about his then new book Lost Connections, uncovering the real causes of depression and

the unexpected solutions. Today we get to talk about Johann's latest book, Stolen Focus, Why

You Can't Pay Attention, released on the 6th of January 2022 in the UK and the 25th of January

in the US and Canada. For stolen focus, Johann went on a three-year

journey to uncover the reasons behind our inability to focus and to understand how this crisis

affects our well-being in our society. Crucially, he learned how we can reclaim our stolen focus

if we are prepared to fight for it.

In this interview, I was keen to understand Johan's motivations for examining our loss of focus

and also to examine what we might all be able to do to fully re-engage with our lives.

Johan, welcome.

Thank you so much for joining me today for the Mad at America podcast. I'm so glad to be back with you.

Hooray. Thank you. Thank you. We last spoke for this podcast in 2018 and then we discussed your new book at the time, lost connections, uncovering the real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions, which has quite rightly gone on to become an international

bestseller. So here we are in 2022, and your new book, Stolen Focus, looks at why we are

struggling to pay attention. So to kind of get us going, I was just wondering, did your work

writing Lost Connections lead directly to your desire to write stolen focus?

Or was there a precipitating event that kind of created the urge to find out more?

I think there's a sort of loose connection, which is all of my books are about a question that I want to answer,

that I don't know the answer to in advance.

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