In Johann Hari's bestselling book, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, the British author explored misconceptions of addiction. It is not the drugs themselves that lead to dependence, he argued. Rather, it is one's environment and the attempt to self-medicate and alleviate pain that are the true causes of addiction.

Three years later, Hari's follow up, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions, digs beneath addiction, into mental health. It comes as there’s new urgency for a more thoughtful understanding of why increasing numbers of Americans are turning to powerful opioids like OxyContin, heroin, and fentanyl.

"While I researched this book, I spent some time in the Rust Belt," Hari writes in Lost Connections. "A few weeks before the U.S. presidential election in 2016, I went to Cleveland to try to get the vote out to stop Donald Trump from being elected. One afternoon I walked down a street in the southwest of the city where a third of the houses had been demolished by the authorities, a third were abandoned, and a third still had people living in them, cowering, with steel guards on their windows."

[For more on this story by Travis Lupick, go to https://www.thefix.com/johann-...-connections-america]