“Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most. John calls this a “snowball” effect, as disconnection spirals into more disconnection. Lonely people are scanning for threats because they unconsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt. This snowball effect, he learned, can be reversed—but to help a depressed or severely anxious person out of it, they need more love, and more reassurance, than they would have needed in the first place. The tragedy, John realized, is that many depressed and anxious people receive less love, as they become harder to be around. Indeed, they receive judgment, and criticism, and this accelerates their retreat from the world. They snowball into an ever colder place.”
― Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions
― Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions
“All of the diagnoses that you deal with - depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar illness, post traumatic stress disorder, even psychosis, are significantly rooted in trauma. They are manifestations of trauma. Therefore the diagnoses don't explain anything. The problem in the medical world is that we diagnose somebody and we think that is the explanation. He's behaving that way because he is psychotic. She's behaving that way because she has ADHD. Nobody has ADHD, nobody has psychosis - these are processes within the individual. It's not a thing that you have. This is a process that expresses your life experience. It has meaning in every single case.”
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“You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met.”
― Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions
― Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions
“I wanted to turn heads not with lecherous leers of bemusement but with awe. I wanted to become untouchable, cruel, glittery, sleek and haughty as a cat.”
― Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
― Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
“So instead of seeing your depression and anxiety as a form of madness, I would tell my younger self—you need to see the sanity in this sadness. You need to see that it makes sense. Of course it is excruciating. I will always dread that pain returning, every day of my life. But that doesn’t mean the pain is insane, or irrational. If you touch your hand to a burning stove, that, too, will be agony, and you will snatch your hand away as quickly as possible. That’s a sane response. If you kept your hand on the stove, it would burn and burn until it was destroyed.”
― Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions
― Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions
Dannii’s 2025 Year in Books
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