He was going to propose that gay people should be allowed to get married, just like straight people. He knew it would be the last thing he ever did, so he decided to write something advocating a crazy, preposterous idea-one so outlandish that nobody had ever written a book about it before. “That summer, in a small house near the beach, he began to write a book. Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions And this approach to life makes us feel terrible.” It leads us to misunderstand our most basic instincts. But John has proven that this is a denial of human history, and a denial of human nature. These ideas now run so deep in our culture that we even offer them as feel-good bromides to people who feel down-as if it will lift them up. We have begun to think: I will look after myself, and everybody else should look after themselves, as individuals. We have started to believe that doing things alone is the natural state of human beings, and the only way to advance. We say to each other: “Nobody can help you except you.” It made me realize: we haven’t just started doing things alone more, in every decade since the 1930s. “I kept noticing a self-help cliché that people say to each other all the time, and share on Facebook incessantly.
Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions They snowball into an ever colder place.” Indeed, they receive judgment, and criticism, and this accelerates their retreat from the world. The tragedy, John realized, is that many depressed and anxious people receive less love, as they become harder to be around. 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. 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. John calls this a “snowball” effect, as disconnection spirals into more disconnection. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. “Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found.
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