Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Loneliness: How Social Isolation Is Killing Us

The author of the following article in today's New York Times  − which I have excerpted here − is Dhruv Khullar, M.D., a resident physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital with interests in health policy, economics, and journalism. He is a contributor at the New York Times and writes regularly for both mainstream and academic publications, exploring evolving trends in medicine and health care. He graduated with honors from Yale University (B.A. in Biology), and earned his medical degree (M.D.) at the Yale School of Medicine. He also received a Masters in Public Policy (M.P.P.) from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership. His work has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Atlantic, Slate, Politico, and Scientific American. For the full article, go to

 

How Social Isolation Is Killing Us

 

Social isolation is a growing epidemic — one that’s increasingly recognized as having dire physical, mental and emotional consequences. Since the 1980s, the percentage of American adults who say they’re lonely has doubled from 20 percent to 40 percent.

About one-third of Americans older than 65 now live alone, and half of those over 85 do. People in poorer health — especially those with mood disorders like anxiety and depression — are more likely to feel lonely. Those without a college education are the least likely to have someone they can talk to about important personal matters.

A wave of new research suggests social separation is bad for us. Individuals with less social connection have disrupted sleep patterns, altered immune systems, more inflammation and higher levels of stress hormones. One recent study found that isolation increases the risk of heart disease by 29 percent and stroke by 32 percent.

Another analysis that pooled data from 70 studies and 3.4 million people found that socially isolated individuals had a 30 percent higher risk of dying in the next seven years, and that this effect was largest in middle age.

Loneliness can accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions. These effects start early: Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after controlling for other factors. All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as obesity and smoking.

The evidence on social isolation is clear. What to do about it is less so.

Loneliness is an especially tricky problem because accepting and declaring our loneliness carries profound stigma. Admitting we’re lonely can feel as if we’re admitting we’ve failed in life’s most fundamental domains: belonging, love, attachment. It attacks our basic instincts to save face, and makes it hard to ask for help.

I see this most acutely during the holidays when I care for hospitalized patients, some connected to I.V. poles in barren rooms devoid of family or friends — their aloneness amplified by cheerful Christmas movies playing on wall-mounted televisions. And hospitalized or not, many people report feeling lonelier, more depressed and less satisfied with life during the holiday season...

A great paradox of our hyper-connected digital age is that we seem to be drifting apart. Increasingly, however, research confirms our deepest intuition: Human connection lies at the heart of human well-being. It’s up to all of us — doctors, patients, neighborhoods and communities — to maintain bonds where they’re fading, and create ones where they haven’t existed.

 

Today is The Winter Solstice

The winter solstice

In the Northern Hemisphere, today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It's officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest-known holidays in human history.

Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. Many of the most ancient stone structures made by human beings were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

Some ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires. In ancient Egypt and Syria, people celebrated the winter solstice as the sun's birthday. In ancient Rome, the winter solstice was celebrated with the festival of Saturnalia, during which all business transactions and even wars were suspended, and slaves were waited upon by their masters.

(courtesy of Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac)

A poem: prelude to a marriage

With thanks to the author, Charles W. Pratt, and to his publisher, Hobblebush Books, as well as to Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.

 

The Merger

by Charles W. Pratt

        for my son

Trying to think of something useful
To say about marriage, I remember
A morning when I was twenty-plus,
Self-absorbed in my tinny pink
Renault Dauphine, my Little Toot,
And I tried to get by a tank-truck on
A bendy road too briefly straight.
Shuddering, pedal floored, my frivolous
Vessel leveled with the cab
Like a pilot fish by a shark’s grim grille.
Then there was a car ahead of us
And, as I tried to floor a pedal
Already on the floor, the blue
Of ice I hadn’t seen. Spinning
Toward the implacable hugeness of the cab, looking up
Into the eyes of the truckdriver, I felt
Only the sweet certainty of
Submission, call it love, as if
Already I had left myself and could look
Down with the driver’s godlike and loving
Eyes at a comical pink Dauphine
Sliding backwards down the road, then spinning
Again and into a snowbank, tilted
Against a tree. One flat tire
And a dent in the roof I pushed out myself.
I made it to work on time. Because
The truckdriver had seen the oncoming car
Before I had, had seen the patch of blue
And had slowed to let me by, I met
And married your mother, and you were born
And have grown up to meet and marry, and I
Have begun to understand the blind
Release of self to the will of another
And the answering wise, dispassionate
Restraint of the merger we call marriage.

"The Merger" by Charles W. Pratt from The Box Marked "Some are Missing." © Hobblebush Books, 2010.

John Glenn - memorable man

John Glenn, who passed away on December 8, 2016, was an original cosponsor of the 1997 Kerry-Wellstone "Clean Elections" bill. From a speech he gave on the Senate floor in 1998:

"What you should do on some of these votes, I think, is think of what you would like the ideal political system to be when your grandchildren have grown up and long after most of us will have left the Senate of the United States. What kind of law do you want to see in place that deals with them fairly? What kind of law do you want to see in place that makes them feel that their voice is heard in Government as much as those who can contribute millions or at least hundreds of thousands of dollars worth, to get their voices heard?"

November, 1967 − by Joyce Sutphen

Sometimes, with unsought grace, it is a lovely poem that enlivens heart and spirit.

 

 

Dr. Zhivago was playing at the Paramount

Theater in St. Cloud. That afternoon,

we went into Russia,

and when we came out, the snow

was falling—the same snow

that fell in Moscow.

The sky had turned black velvet.

We’d been through the Revolution

and the frozen winters.

In the Chevy, we waited for the heater

to melt ice on the windshield,

clapping our hands to keep warm.

On the highway, these two things:

a song from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

and that semi-truck careening by.

Now I travel through the dark without you

and sometimes I turn up the radio, hopeful

the way you were, no matter what.

 

 

 

 

"November, 1967" by Joyce Sutphen

from First Words.

© Red Dragonfly Press, 2010

Thanks to The Writer’s Almanac