Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

At the end of the 18th century, an English doctor, Dr. John Haygarth, made a discovery: In the city of Bath, patients with debilitating pain claimed to be experiencing tremendous relief by using a metal rod called a “tractor.” The tractor supposedly drew the pain and sickness from the patient’s body. After doing a couple of experiments, Dr. Haygarth found the tractors kept working, even though there was no logical or medical reason for them to do so. However, sometimes they would stop working after a while.

This was an early documented case of the placebo effect, where a person recovers from an illness while taking a medicine that has no actual physical impact.

Hari introduces Dr. Irving Kirsch, who wrote the book The Emperor’s New Drugs. Through Kirsch’s work and others, Hari found “that nobody seems to know quite what [antidepressants] do to us, or why—including the scientists who most strongly support them” (23). Hari’s initial response was anger, since Kirsch “seemed to be kicking away the pillars on which I had built a story about my own depression” (23). Like Dr. Haygarth centuries before, Kirsch suspected that antidepressants were having something like a placebo effect on patients, although, unlike a true placebo, “they had a real chemical effect” (25).