Johann Hari Quotes

Fear was my main emotion until I started taking anti-depressant medication. And I was one of the people where, as I got older, the fear got worse and worse. So I can really relate to an animal getting, you know, scared and traumatized.

I think people can have a panic attack where your heart is racing, you get shakes and jitters. But you can also feel disconnected. You know what I mean? I can feel depressed.

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions.

My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.

More people worry themselves to death than bleed to death.

All the commercials on TV today are for antidepressants, for Prozac or Paxil. And they get you right away. "Are you sad? Do you get stressed, do you have anxiety?" "Yes, I have all those things! I'm alive!"

Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized?

Maybe depression is the most reasonable response to all the crap around us. Maybe it's the happy people who need medication.

There are peaks, there are valleys. But they're all kind of carved and smoothed out, and it feels like a low level of despair you live in. Where you're not getting any answers, but you're living OK. And you can smile at the office. You know? But it's a low level of despair. I was on Prozac for a long time. It may have helped me out of a jam for a little bit, but people stay on it forever. I had to get off at a certain point because I realized that, you know, everything's just OK.

Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.

I feel like a sickness and dystrophy is growing in people, like people are getting sicker, something about our society, something about our psychological structures. We’re not whole.

That’s the trouble with being scared all the time. Eventually, people just go numb.

Neurotics always feel as though they were going way up or way down, which is odd in people going sideways.

How many people do you know who are obsessed with their work, who are type A or have stress related diseases and who can’t slow down? They can’t slow down because they use their routine to distract themselves, to reduce life to only its practical considerations. And they do this to avoid recalling how uncertain they are about why they live.

People have become separated from their bodies. They are no longer whole. I see them move from their offices to their cars and on to their suburban homes. They stress out constantly, they lose sleep, they eat badly. And they behave badly. Their egos run wild; they become motivated by that which will eventually give them a massive stroke. They need the Iron Mind.

Depression is something that seems really obscure when you see it in a theater, but when you talk to people who come to see it and hear their reactions, you realize that it is such a prevalent part of life and our society today that it really needed to be told, and still needs to be told.

I always just looked really like someone who will someday be on prescription medication.

Anyone in the United States today who isn't paranoid must be crazy.

The real question is why are millions of people so unhappy, so bored, so unfulfilled, that they are willing to drink, snort, inject or inhale any substance that might blot out reality and give them a bit of temporary relief.

The need for certainty is the greatest disease the Mind faces

Anxiety is practising failure in advance. Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It's fear about fear, fear that means nothing.

Materialism has cast man into such depths that a mighty concentration of forces is necessary to raise him again. He is subject to illnesses of the nervous system which are veritable epidemics of the life of the soul.

Stress is a form of suffering, but it is accepted as normal. And it is normal in our world.

For many in our high-paced world, despair is not a moment; it is a way of life.