Johann Hari

Johann Hari was born in 1979 and grew up in London. He read Social and Political Sciences at King's College, Cambridge, and began contributing to The Independent while still a student, eventually becoming one of its youngest columnists. His own experience with antidepressants from early adolescence drove a sustained attempt to understand why depression and anxiety were so common — a question that eventually pulled him away from daily journalism into years of research and travel across several countries.

Lost Connections, published in 2018, presented those findings to a wide readership. Travelling to Baltimore, an Amish community in Indiana, and Berlin, Hari gathered evidence from social scientists who argued that depression and anxiety are not primarily explained by a chemical imbalance in the brain but by a cluster of disconnections — from meaningful work, from other people, from the natural world. He named nine causes and seven potential solutions, prompting significant debate about how mental distress is understood, diagnosed, and treated.

He followed it with Stolen Focus (2022), an investigation into the forces fragmenting human attention in the digital age. Lost Connections has been translated into multiple languages and continues to circulate among clinicians and general readers around the world. His work sits at the intersection of investigative journalism and personal testimony, consistently asking what conditions in contemporary life produce so much suffering — and whether those conditions, rather than the individuals experiencing them, are what most needs to change.