Llewellyn King: The Deadly Hurt of Loneliness — It Kills

Not the cheeriest of articles but an important subject.

http://whchronicle.com/the-deadly-hurt-of-loneliness-it-kills/

 

I've wondering how susceptible that study on loneliness is to the correlation/causation issue - that is, illness that impacts mortality causes loneliness rather that that loneliness impacts mortality. I haven't read the paper it's based on, though.

 

I wonder how much we learn to deal with lack of human contact.

Currently I am coming out of the worst relapse of my twenty five years of ME. At the lowest, bedbound, I would regularly go ten days or more without any face to face contact with another person. Although the circumstances are very different at this time my cousin (in law) was in solitary confinement in an Iranian jail. Though I can not fully imagine what it is like to be subject to such a malign environment, it did strike me that people with ME may have significantly less human contact than those imprisoned in solitary confinement.

If an institution or organisation imposed on people, what many people with ME experience on a daily basis over years and even decades, they would be considered guilty of human rights abuses and torture.

Access to the Internet and TV provides some sense of social interaction. Within severe ME lack of face to face contact has its pluses as well as its minuses. Even a short conversation may result in a crash, days of severe pain, exhaustion, etc. The three or four days each week I now spend with out any direct human contact are partly welcomed because they allow me to control and ration my activity levels, allowing the social contact I do have.

 

In relation to the study refered to in the Blog post, it is interesting to ask what loneliness is. Loneliness is not simplely lack of human contact or lack of love. Different people in the same circumstances will experience very different levels of loneliness.

One thing I did when I had such extremely limited direct contact was to ask people to send me photographs, so though I might not speak to someone for ten days, in that time I still maintained a sense of being part of a community, part of a social group that spanned the whole world, from Britain, to mainland Europe, to India to New Zealand. Also I was fortunately able to manage the diary page on our village Blog, so hearing voices in the street at ten to seven on a Tuesday evening I knew who was going to play bowls or what film people were watching in the village hall.

Is this study looking the effects of isolation or of emotional distress?