Hari learned about the nine causes of depression from another great researcher and scientist Doctor Vincent Felitti. “I learned that there are in fact nine major causes of depression and anxiety that are unfolding all around us,” he added. “Two are biological, and seven are out in here in the world.”
Describing it as a breakthrough, Hari says Professor Felitti found out how the biggest culprit of depression was not so much biological factors but more because of our surroundings. The most shocking factor of this discovery happened by accident. He was researching obesity instead of depression.
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Dr Felitti was commissioned by Kaiser Permanente a Medical provider to find a way to reduce the company’s increasing obesity expenses. Felitti hit upon an idea to try and get the morbidly obese people back on track where some could not even fit through his door. He advised a novel idea of not eating so that their bodies will be forced to utilize the fat stored in their bodies. They were also given nutritional supplements and within a short while he was acquiring results. His patients lost weight.
There was some who lost more weight than others but surprisingly, the people who lost the most weight ended up becoming even more depressed than they were when they were obese. Unfortunately, many put the weight back on. Felitti could not understand why.
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One of Felitti’s patients a 28 year old female said that men never look at her when she was obese, but after losing weight drastically, men started to notice her but the main reason she started eating and increasing her weight was when she was 11 around the same time her grandfather was raping her.
Upon speaking to 183 members in the program, Felitti found almost 55% of them had been sexually abused. The woman in question said that being overweight is overlooked and that’s what she wanted to look like. Many of the women had intentionally made themselves unattractive to men by becoming overweight just to escape the male attention for fear of being hurt. This led Felitti to conclude that there was definitely a link between destructive behavior and childhood trauma
Wrote Hari “Childhood trauma caused the risk of adult depression to explode, If you had seven categories of a traumatic event as a child, you were 31,000 percent more likely to attempt suicide as an adult, and more than 4,000 percent more likely to be an injecting drug user.”
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