Open help menu
Live Webinar
GXC 2025 Online Virtual Conference - Mental Health Without Borders

The Hope of Collective Understanding: A Global Conversation on Connection, Healing, and Care

Johann Hari 🇬🇧
|

Pricing

Information

Date & Time

Description

Johann Hari joins us as an honorary speaker, offering a powerful invitation to rethink how we understand and respond to mental health today. We keep coming back to Johann Hari’s work not because it gives us easy answers but because it opens something up. It gives us a chance to reflect and to question–not ourselves but the systems and stories we’ve inherited about mental health.


His writing gives us room to look again. What do we need to change in how we think about mental health? About depression, anxiety, addiction? What have we missed? What can we all do, wherever we are, with what we have?


In Lost Connections, he travels, listens, and watches–a housing community in Berlin where shared responsibility becomes its own kind of therapy, a GP surgery in East London prescribing meaning and community instead of pills, Finnish teams using Open Dialogue. Not treating in isolation but keeping people inside the conversation, inside care.


In Stolen Focus, he looks at the conditions that shape it all–our attention, our pace, and the way we’re pulled apart. For those of us in this field, it lands. We’ve felt it not just in clients but in the system itself.


He’s not offering answers; he’s asking the same questions many of us have been carrying for years. He gives language to what we’ve seen but haven’t always known how to say, and in that, there’s hope–hope we’re not alone in asking better questions, that connection is more than a soft word, and that what we do next, together, might be something lasting.

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

  • Critically analyze how prevailing societal narratives influence the understanding and treatment of depression, anxiety, and addiction.

  • Evaluate alternative models of care—including Open Dialogue, social prescribing, and shared-responsibility housing as tools for improving mental health outcomes.

  • Identify systemic, social, and cultural factors that shape both individual mental health and treatment responses.

  • Apply insights from case studies and research to develop more holistic, connection-oriented interventions in their own professional settings.

Educational Goal

This presentation will broaden participants’ perspectives on mental health by moving beyond an individual, symptom-focused framework to include systemic, cultural, and social dimensions of care. Clinicians will enhance their professional growth by critically reflecting on innovative, global practices that emphasize connection, meaning, and community, strengthening their ability to integrate these insights into future clinical work.

Presenters

Johann Hari 🇬🇧
Johann Hari is a New York Times best-selling author and the Executive Producer of an Oscar-nominated movie and an eight-part TV series starring Samuel L. Jackson. His books have been translated into 40 languages and have been praised by a broad range of influencers, from Oprah to Noam Chomsky, from Elton John to Naomi Klein. His latest book “Magic Pill" (Crown, May 7, 2024) is an investigation into the new trend of weight loss drugs and has been named a must-read by The Next Big Idea Club. The first of three other books, ”Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention” (Crown, January 2022) was number three on Amazon’s list of the best books of 2022, and it was named as a Book of the Year by The Financial Times, The New York Post, and The Spectator. It was also chosen as Book of the Month by Britain’s biggest bookseller, Waterstones, and Australia’s biggest bookseller Dymocks. It won several awards, including being named as Most Important Book of the Year at the Non-Obvious Book Awards and Business Book of the Year at the 2022 Porchlight Book Awards. It has been a best-seller on three continents. His second book, ”Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions” (Bloomsbury USA, January 2018) was described by the British Journal of General Practice as “one of the most important texts of recent years”, and shortlisted for an award by the British Medical Association. Johann’s first book, ”Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs” (Bloomsbury USA, January 2015) was adapted into the Oscar-nominated film ‘The United States vs. Billie Holiday’. It has also been adapted into the documentary series “The Fix” on The Roku Channel. Collectively, Johann’s TED Talks ”Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong” and “This Could Be Why You Are Depressed or Anxious” have been viewed more than 93 million times. He has written over the past decade for some of the world’s leading newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Spectator, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Politico. He has appeared on NPR’s All Thing Considered, HBO’s Realtime With Bill Maher, The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the BBC’s Question Time, and many other popular shows. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, when Johann was a year old his family moved to London, where he grew up and where he has lived for most of his life. His father – a Swiss immigrant – was a bus driver, and his mother was a nurse who later worked in shelters for survivors of domestic violence. Johann studied social and political science at King’s College, Cambridge, and graduated with a Double First. Johann was twice named National Newspaper Journalist of the Year by the Amnesty International UK Media Awards. He has also been named Cultural Commentator of the Year and Environmental Commentator of the Year at The Comment Awards.

Financially Sponsored By

  • GXC Events - The Global Exchange Conference