doing and sent me off with a script for Zoloft. One in four middle-
aged American women takes or has taken an antidepressant. One in
fourteen children takes a drug for emotional or behavioral problems,
reflecting about a fivefold increase since 1994. For me, as for a
sizable percentage of others with mild depression, the meds didn’t
seem to work, and I hated the common side effects, which include
everything from headaches to insomnia to low libido.
Moving on, I tried to grasp the destress crowd’s favorite darling,
meditation. The science is very convincing that it changes your brain
in ways that make you smarter and kinder and generally less ruffled
by life. The problem is, as with antidepressants, meditation doesn’t
work for many of us. Only 30 percent of aspirants are “fully adherent”
after a standard eight-week course, according to Joshua Smyth, a
biobehavioral psychologist at Pennsylvania State University. It has a
high threshold to enlightenment.
But pretty much any slouching screen fiend can spend time in a
pocket of trees somewhere. If there was one man who can
demonstrate how forest therapy works, it’s Yoshifumi Miyazaki. A
physical anthropologist and vice director of the Center for
Environment, Health and Field Sciences at Chiba University on the
outskirts of Tokyo, he believes that because humans evolved in
nature, it’s where we feel most comfortable, even if we don’t always
know it.
In this, he is a proponent of a theory popularized by the widely
revered Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson: the biophilia hypothesis.
It’s been more or less appropriated by environmental psychologists
into what’s sometimes called the Stress-Reduction Theory or Psycho-
Evolutionary Restoration Theory. Wilson didn’t actually coin the
word “biophilia”; that honor goes to social psychologist Erich
Fromm, who described it in 1973 as “the passionate love of life and of
all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a
plant, an idea or a social group.”