Spirituality and Depression with Johann Hari
The Marianne Williamson Podcast
Marianne Williamson
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2021
⏱️ 113 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With rates of depression and anxiety rising – perhaps skyrocketing during the pandemic – we’re all looking for a fix. But a quick fix doesn’t get to the root of the problem as author Johann Hari details in his book, “Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope.”
Suffering from depression for most of his life, Hari set out to study why so many are struggling and what he came up with, his 9 causes of depression, is spot-on.
This is a topic that’s close to my heart – something I’ve spoken and written about for years and I couldn’t be happier to have this discussion with Johann. We talk about our struggles with depression, habits you can build to lessen the severity when the sadness strikes and how society and government contributes to people’s despair.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | people's psyches have been poisoned. They've been fed a kind of KFC for the soul. They've been |
| 0:07.5 | taught that life is about things. They've been taught to seek happiness in places that can never |
| 0:13.4 | deliver them happiness. And they've been taught to neglect or even to despise the things that |
| 0:19.0 | would in fact bring them happiness, satisfaction and meaning. |
| 0:23.3 | But the good thing for us, and this might sound like an odd thing to say, and I don't want to sound |
| 0:28.1 | like I'm trivialising the pain, which I have felt and is a dreadful agonising pain, |
| 0:32.6 | the fact that the crisis is so bad that so many people are depressed, that so many people are addicted, is in one sense positive because it shows it's very important to talk about today, and that's the subject of spirituality and depression. |
| 1:13.5 | In 2016, I published a book called Tears to Triumph about the relationship of spirituality to depression, |
| 1:22.1 | the spiritual journey from suffering to enlightenment, and it's based on some experiences that I had over the last 37 years |
| 1:29.6 | of my career. You know, for decades, I've been very up close and personal working with people |
| 1:35.5 | in really some of the darkest times of their lives, whether it had to do with someone |
| 1:39.7 | who had been diagnosed with a life-challenging illness or whether it was someone who was |
| 1:43.6 | going through the loss of a loved, or whether it was someone who was going through the loss of a loved one, or whether it was someone in recovery, or whether it was someone |
| 1:50.0 | going through a divorce or bankruptcy. The issue of despair, the issue of human sadness, |
| 1:58.0 | the issue of going through very, very difficult times, what is we might call |
| 2:01.9 | the dark night of the soul, is something that I have had a lot of professional as well as personal |
| 2:07.2 | experience of. And I have a lot of thoughts about it, and I have seen the difference that being |
| 2:13.2 | a student of the Course of Miracles has made, the difference that meditation has made, the difference |
| 2:17.4 | that an entire context of a spiritual perspective has made not only on my life, but on the lives |
| 2:25.0 | of so many people that I have worked with. Several years ago, something began to happen that |
| 2:30.1 | kind of shocked me, and that had to do with what seemed to be an almost overnight prevalence of antidepressant use, |
| 2:40.1 | a pharmaceutical logical interpretation of what depression and anxiety means, |
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