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Join Julia Hotz, author of The Connection Cure, for a discussion on social cures for mental health and loneliness with Skip the Small Talk founder Ashley Kirsner on August 8th at Trident Booksellers & Cafe. If you love Skip the Small Talk, don't skip this talk!

About: The Connection Cure

Traditionally, when we get sick, health care professionals ask, “What’s the matter with you?” But around the world, teams of doctors, nurses, therapists, and social workers have started to flip the script, asking “What matters to you?” Instead of solely pharmaceutical prescriptions, they offer ‘social prescriptions’—referrals to community activities and resources, like photography classes, gardening groups, and volunteering gigs.

The results speak for themselves. Science shows that social prescribing is effective for treating symptoms of the modern world’s most common ailments—depression, ADHD, addiction, trauma, anxiety, chronic pain, dementia, diabetes, and loneliness. As health care’s de facto cycle of “diagnose-treat-repeat” reaches a breaking point, social prescribing has also proven to reduce patient wait times, lower hospitalization rates, save money, and reverse health worker burnout. And as a general sense of unwellness plagues more of us, social prescriptions can help us feel healthier than we’ve felt in years.

As Hotz tours the globe to investigate the spread of social prescribing to over thirty countries, she meets people personifying its revolutionary potential: an aspiring novelist whose art workshop helps her cope with trauma symptoms and rediscover her joy; a policy researcher whose swimming course helps her taper off antidepressants and feel excited to wake up in the morning; an army vet whose phone conversations help him form his only true friendship; and dozens more. The success stories she finds bring a long-known theory to life: if we can change our environment, we can change our health. By reconnecting to what matters to us, we can all start to feel better.

About the Author:

Julia Hotz is a journalist and author of The Connection Cure, America’s first book exploring the science, the stories, and the spread of social prescribing. Her stories have appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Scientific American, the Boston Globe, Time, and more. She helps other journalists report on the big new ideas changing the world at the Solutions Journalism Network.

About Ashley Kirsner:

Ashley Kirsner is the founder and director of Skip the Small Talk™, a social impact startup focused on combating the loneliness epidemic through nationwide, in-person events. Skip the Small Talk™ events are based on Kirsner’s social and clinical psychology research at Cornell University, the Harvard Decision Science Lab, the Harvard Business School, the University of Miami, the Psychotherapy and Emotion Research Lab at Boston University, and McLean Hospital. The success of Kirsner’s events have been featured in Forbes and The Boston Globe, and on the Today show and NPR.