“We’re All Connected (but I got mine!)”

“We’re All Connected (but I got mine!)”        July 28, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray

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schadenfreude: pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. This word is taken from German and literally means "harm-joy". It is the feeling of joy or pleasure when one sees another fail or suffer misfortune.

I was quite surprised by a question very casually posed to me by an old friend one day. He took a long draw on his cigarette and asked, “Why do you still do this church stuff when you don’t really believe in anything?” The question reminded me of what I really like about preaching . . . people sit quietly while I am talking and I can indulge myself in the fantasy that I am being understood. But I can’t be too hard on my friend. Most people were taught that they should be religious so 

that they could go to heaven and avoid the fires of hell. I was only ten or eleven years old when I pointed out to my parents that going to church in order to get a golden ticket on the train to glory was selfish and it just couldn’t be right . . . and they predictably told me that faith was a matter of believing and not of thinking. And, generally, it is. Even people who think their way through the ridiculous church manipulation of the heavenly carrot and the hellish stick, still go on believing that the only reason to be religious is some kind of divine fire insurance. Which is why most modern people rarely or never go to church and why most movies, plays, and novels that have a minister in the cast, portray that person as a con man, a fraud, or an idiot.

The sixteenth century founder of the Jesuit movement, St. Ignatius of Loyola, wrote the Spiritual Exercises which shaped not only a lot of modern spiritual practice but he also gave me the outline impetus for my doctoral dissertation, so this dead monk and I spent a lot of years together. But behind all of the genius of Ignatius was this familiar assumption, he writes: Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

This transactional approach to having a relationship with God is obviously morally and intellectually corrupt and yet most people still believe that it is the reason to be religious and I think it should be obvious that it is the worst and most reprehensible, and, frankly, the most embarrassing reason to be religious. Though that might be at least a part of why there are 8000 people down the road at 6 Flags over Jesus this morning and only 40 or 50 here . . . but I digress. 

And here is the over-arching point that I have to make today: the fundamental difference between a spiritual world view and what I may call a “selfish” world view is that spiritually we acknowledge that we are all connected . . . and to be clear, many humanists, atheists, and agnostics acknowledge this connection as well, but most of the world, the religious and the not religious, primarily approach the world as an individual in competition for resources against the rest of the world. 

You can see this dichotomy played out in both religious and secular circles. A fundamental teaching of Buddhism is that all perceptions that we are separated from one another and from the earth itself is nothing but an illusion. 

Looked at for its virtue rather than negatively, the whole spiritual transformation sought in Christian monasticism is a denial of self, possessions, and appetites, so that we can set aside ego boundaries to be existentially united with God and everyone else. 

I wrote a whole book about this 20 years ago that I am still waiting for Oprah to discover and endorse. But it is not just religious people who affirm this. Few things make me happier than listening to the autotuned voices of physicists affirming that we are all connected, just as Christian mystics and Buddhist monks have for centuries.

(Rob, can we legally import the first two minutes of this video?)

What does this mean to us, to assert that we are all connected? I think that Martin Luther King, Jr. said it very clearly:

“All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

This issue comes up in political debates in the most disgraceful way. Whether you favor a “Medicare for all” plan, or single payer, anyone who does not favor some path towards universal coverage is saying that a system that leaves millions of people uninsured is somehow acceptable to them. They have medical coverage that they like and they don’t want to change a system that works for them, even if that means that hundreds of thousands of people die prematurely and unnecessarily. 

What kind of monster could be so callous and heartless as to suggest that people with high salaries and good jobs should get the best health care

And people who have less affluence should just die sooner and suffer more?

Who could be so devoted to a caste system in which the upper class gets great care and the lower class gets little or none, or faces the whole sewer of medical bankruptcy, payday loans, and constant fear about getting their next vial of insulin?

When the talking heads on the morning shows discuss Democratic debates, their hair catches on fire at the notion that candidates suggest that illegal immigrants within our borders would also receive health care. Well, what else? Let them die by the side of the road? 

And when you are vacationing in France, or Spain, or England, or Germany, what do you do when you get sick, when you break a tooth on your caviar spoon? You will go and receive virtually free health care because that’s what happens in civilized countries! There is a mentality in this nation that simply reels in fear that someone might get something of value at the expense of the public. 

Does Joe Scarborough believe that he earns $14 million dollars a year for interrupting intelligent people on the set of Morning Joe five mornings a week? Look, if wealth were tied to hard work, if pay was based on labor, the richest people in the world would be the women who live in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Any guess how long Joe would last if he had to carry water on his head for miles, search for fire wood, and then prepare a meal for his family? Anyone who is born white, male, and heterosexual in North America, with every possible advantage given to those who have plundered the world’s wealth for most of two centuries who then can manage to muster rage about providing healthcare to someone who happens to be within our borders when they have an accident or fall ill is so blind to reality as to be nearly unteachable. 

When I go to speak in Great Britain, I go with no worries about needing medical care there because I know that I would be given whatever I needed. My friends in England, however, have to take out a temporary health insurance policy when they come here because our country has yet to wake up to the reality that illness is not a profit-making opportunity, it is a problem to be solved by rational, reasonable people. 

We are all connected. If you recognize that you are a part of a civilization, then you don’t want to live in a giant house in a gated community while hundreds of people are homeless. 

Sure, hard work and ingenuity will always be rewarded with a better or more comfortable life, but demanding that others suffer to add to your comfort and security is obscene. 

Sadly, many people only become woke to ethical issues when it affects them personally. I have a German friend whom I get to see now and then. His sense of humor, possibly typical of Germans, often comes in the form of a very personal punch below the belt. We were having breakfast recently, just catching up on our various travels, publications, and work. I shared with him a bit about my work with young men who have been sentenced to long prison sentences after being found to possess child pornography. He shook his head and laughed, and said, “How do you always get tied up with such messes. We have a saying in Germany, ‘shit draws flies.’” However, when he learned that one of the young men is the son of a German friend of his, his view of the whole problem transformed in a second. Suddenly, he wanted to know what he could do to help the family. And I asked, “Aren’t you afraid of drawing flies?”

The real test of sincere compassion is to care about those with whom you do not have social ties. If I am generous with my daughter, that is hardly a claim of nobility. If I am generous with the child of someone I do not know, because they are in need, then I may be affirming what I have claimed about my faith in a connected spirituality. 

I want to see people of faith being concerned about the 2 million people who are incarcerated before one of your own children, neighbors, or friends is in jail. I want for all of us to be concerned about the opiod addiction crisis before someone you know dies. 

We liberals have done a lot of hand wringing over the past two years about how people continue to support Donald Trump even after all he has said and done about immigration, race, and poverty issues. But nowhere has the heartless nature of his administration been more on display than in the child separation policy at the 

border. How can anyone witness this nightmare of traumatizing 15,000 children and still support Trump?

Well, and here is why I chose the definition of schadenfreudeas my wisdom lesson today. 

There are those who have speculated that the suffering at the border, the suffering of those whose applications for asylum, for immigration, are being denied is, as they say, “the feature and not the bug” in the system. The suffering is what Trump is giving to his base who enjoy knowing that even if their salaries are going down, their jobs are being exported off-shore, their roads have pot-holes, and their kids can’t afford to go to college or even to get their teeth fixed, at least these poor brown people at the border are suffering even more. 

I’m not suggesting that this is true of everyone who continues to support Trump after all of these horrible atrocities but, you cannot deny that a certain degree of schadenfreude is a part of the formula for his success and as bad as that makes him, it sure doesn’t make me any less ashamed of the much of the voting public in America. 

I asked Rob to be our liturgist this morning because of his long work with the movement to abolish capital punishment. This week our Attorney General, Bill Barr, announced that the Federal government would end its own moratorium on capital punishment and make steps to execute some of the more than 60 federal prisoners on death row. 

Demonstrating to me, once again, that the Trump administration not only cannot do absolutely anything right, but they rather seem to be determined to dismember modern civilization, brick by brick. 

Now, I am opposed to the death penalty, even in the face of the most egregious crimes because if the criminal has been arrested and is in prison, killing them is just social revenge. If they are captured, they do not represent a danger to society so killing them isn’t justice, it is murder. But even if you cannot join me in feeling connected, even to the most guilty among us, let me remind you that our justice system is so flawed that I wouldn’t let our court system balance my checkbook, let alone rely upon them to accurately decide who is guilty and who is not.

Our justice system is so corrupt that a 18 year old kid on the autism spectrum can be sent to prison for 15 years for child porn on their laptop computer and Jeffery

Epstein can get away with trafficking young girls as sex slaves at his homes in New York, Florida, and on his private island for years while law enforcement at every level has turned and looked away and even when finally brought to trial, he received a sentence so light that it would have embarrassed the most corrupt government in the most remote of third world countries. 

Our judicial system routinely releases rich criminals and jails poor people for minor offenses and we should trust them with life and death decisions? Since DNA testing has become more available in criminal defense, dozens of death row inmates have been released . . . and there would be many more if DNA evidence existed. Fair estimates are that one in every 25 prisoners who are executed were innocent. So, how many people can the state wrongfully murder before we are all complicit in state sponsored murder? There is no reason to execute even the guilty who are already captured and are of no danger to society but to execute the innocent because we continue to accept this justice for sale court system . . . folks, this is morally intolerable.

Any sense you may have that you are not connected to the millions of people who languish in prisons, even the ones on death row, is an illusion. We are connected to the immigrant, the refugee, the convicted criminals, and the mothers who are carrying their children on their backs through civil war and gang violence to bring their babies to safety.

I want to close with a favorite preacher story, and like a lot of preacher stories, it might be entirely fictitious but since that never stopped anyone who wrote the Bible, I’m not going to let it stop me. . . if you have heard it before, don’t stop me:  

It has been said that during the dark days of the depression, the famous New York Mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, would sometimes don magistrates’ robes and sit in municipal court. 

Into a courtroom typically filled with pimps, prostitutes, and pushers, the bailiff brought in a haggard looking old woman who had been caught stealing bread from a local grocer. The woman cried and begged for mercy, explaining that her grandchildren were starving, and she only stole the bread to give them something to eat. The grocer was resolute: she had to be fined to send a message to other thieves that the same would happen to them.

It is said that La Guardia then banged his gavel and found the woman guilty and charged her a fine of $10 but even as he pronounced the fine, he was reaching into his own pocket and threw $10 on the bench to pay the fine. La Guardia then banged his gavel again and announced that everyone in the courtroom was guilty of living in a city where a grandmother has to steal bread to feed her children and he order the bailiff to collect a fine of 50 cents from everyone in the courtroom and to give the collection to the defendant. . . . a fine that a red faced, and angry grocer was also made to pay. 

Folks, we all live in a nation that is imprisoning the poor on our behalf. Our tax dollars are keeping those 15,000 kids in deplorable concentration camps at the border. Our elected government is a reflection of who we are as a nation and that is what must be changed. Immigrants are not the reason there are so many poor people in America. Race is not the cause of crime in America. The people on death row will not hurt you. I know that I should always end a sermon like this with meaningful suggestions about what we can do to change things but the first thing that needs to be said here, is that Americans must stop being afraid all of the time.

Don’t vote out of fear of criminals, immigrants, minorities, or vegetarians…. Don’t you see that they are leaving more bacon for the rest of us?

I’m glad that I have access to good health care, but I get to live in a better world if all of you do too. I am glad that I was able to feed and educate my daughter, but the world is better if your kids get to eat well and go to college too. We must reject the politics and religion that allows us to find some satisfaction, no matter how private, from the suffering of others. Sincere empathy, radical compassion, is the spiritual choice we want to make but we have to practice it every day until we don’t have to live in a city where a grandmother has to steal bread to feed her grandchildren.

America's diseases: Depression, Addiction, and Suicide"

America's diseases: Depression, Addiction, and Suicide"   July 14, 2019

                                                             Dr. Roger Ray & Dr. Paul Thomlinson

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Johann Hari’s Lost Connections pp 74-75

Feeling lonely, it turned out, caused your cortisol levels to absolutely soar - as much as some of the most disturbing things that can ever happen to you. Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack. . . .  It turned out that [isolated people] were three times more likely to catch the cold than people who had lots of close connections to other people. . . .  Loneliness itself, . . . seemed to be deadly. 

I got to know Paul Thomlinson 25 years ago when I, as a board member at Burrell Mental Health, wrote a grant request to research the explosion of methamphetamine addiction in Missouri. Paul was appointed to head up the research project. Like a lot of people starting a research project, I thought I knew the answers going in. I assumed that we would find people using meth to cope with the tedium of factory jobs, or to control their weight, or to self-medicate for depression or bi-polar disorders. 

I was so sure of this that in the interviews that I conducted, I very literally looked for confirmation of my bias. But it wasn’t there. What Paul and I and the six or seven other people involved in interviewing addicts learned is that there was almost never a conscious reason for their first use of meth. They all reported that they were introduced to meth in a social setting in which it was given to them and they used it to fit into the social setting they were in. 

To ask someone to “just say ‘no’” is a tall order when what most people in our era suffer from the most is loneliness. The desire to fit in, to have a peer group, a circle of friends, reliable if not meaningful connection . . . in the absence of the confidence that comes from strong family ties, a meaningful love connection, a really positive and reliable connection to friends, neighbors, co-workers, people are terribly vulnerable to almost any suggestion . . . even a suggestion as colossally stupid as, “Here, take this.” Paul will be speaking here in a few minutes and he will speak most directly to the best practices in suicide prevention, preventing and treating drug addiction, and in treating or avoiding serious episodes of depression.

But for my part, speaking pastorally, when you think about your 20-year-old college student walking into a party where someone might offer them meth, or now heroin, fentanyl, or oxy, what do you think is their best defense? A really good course on the physiological and psychological effects of these drugs, or a secure knowledge that they are loved, accepted, and that their future life has meaning and purpose? Now, people can feel lonely, unloved, and un-needed even when they are surrounded by loving friends and a family for whom they are virtually heroic. There is no perfect predictor or perfect prevention.

And I want to add, when we went into this research, we knew that meth was highly addictive, in fact, of the more than 60 addicts we interviewed, all of them used meth a second time in less than 24 hours of their first use. That is about as bad as it gets. But, given what we have all heard about meth and meth addiction over the past few years, what would you think if your pediatrician suggested that you give your kid a dose of meth once or twice a day to help them focus in school?

Adderall is the name Shire Pharmaceuticals gave to their prescription form of meth. Yes, the drug given to Nazi soldiers to keep them awake and make them dive into battle, the drug used for orgies and in the sex trade, is the drug we are giving to kids and lots of adults to help with ADD. Now, I am not a medical professional and I realize that ADD is serious and people need help but there are more than 5 million people in America taking legal meth. Do 5 million people need prescription meth? And is Adderall any less addictive than the meth people buy on the street corner? Well, what do you think? And if you doubt me, check the “google machine” and you will find countless articles in major newspapers about Adderall addiction. I have lost patience with the protections our government gives to the pharmaceutical industry. They are killing us, and turning our kids into a generation of tweakers. I would love to ask the experts on ADD, is meth really the best idea you’ve got?

But I must turn the page . . . 

Whenever Paul and I talk about suicide causes and prevention, I always return to examples like Robin Williams and Anthony Bourdain because almost everything we say is either a telling warning or an effective prevention does not apply to those two high profile cases . . . which only means that all of our conversations about depression, suicide, and addiction must also contain some humility and a willingness to not be entirely correct. 

Again, in matters of psychology, we say that when we hear hoof beats we think about horses rather than zebras. When we ask ourselves, “Why did this person commit suicide?” there are always a host of possible causes or reasons, many of which will never be mentioned in a suicide note. 

But if I may offer a large umbrella of causation, and I’ll be interested to know Paul’s take on this, but most suicide victims felt that they were a burden, an embarrassment, that they were somehow in the way and unneeded by the people closest to them. 

And to say that you have to set aside all of the suicidal gestures made for attention or control by people with borderline personality disorders and things of that ilk. People commit suicide because they have been publicly humiliated, or because they have become a financial burden or a liability to their family. 

Paul and I have done a lot of conferences together over the years but a couple of years ago, we were meeting with a committee planning a teen suicide prevention 

 event. I brought up this fact . . . suicide is the number 2 reason for death among teenagers but gay teens, of all racial and ethnic groups, are four to five times as likely to commit suicide as heterosexuals. 

There are a lot of complicating factors when you talk about suicide. This isn’t one of them. This one is easy. Let me take you back to your freshman logic class.  People commit suicide because they feel shame or that they are a burden. Gay teens are four to five times as likely to attempt suicide and so it follows … or, therefore, gay teens are much more likely to feel shame or that they are a burden.

Who teaches gay kids that it is not ok to be gay? Who makes them feel fear? Who teaches them to fear that their families would reject them if they find out?

And this, ladies and gentlemen, was when I was told that I would not be allowed to speak at the conference. A survivor whose husband had committed suicide looked at me several times during our lunch meeting and declared, “My husband was not gay.” And I never said that he was. I never said that most teen suicides are gay, I’m just saying that gay kids are fives times as likely to commit suicide as their straight peers. But gay kids only make up between five and ten percent of the population.

It is important to hear me saying, a suicide attempt is not conclusive evidence of anything about sexual orientation. But the fact that this woman felt the need to repeat over and over that her husband was not gay tells us a couple of things:  one is that she reflects the continuing negative stigma attached to being gay, and secondly, given that she kept bringing it up after the conversation had moved on, forced me to wonder if, perhaps, her husband had been gay.

But, as they say, that’s none of my business.

But here is what is my business because I am a minister. . . here is what I might have said if I had been allowed on the stage with Paul at that event:

Being homosexual is no more a sin than is having red hair or brown eyes. Your gender orientation, while it may be somewhat influenced by environment, it is indisputably overwhelmingly a condition of birth and judging anyone for their sexual orientation, whether that is family judgement or religious judgement is flat out wrong. This is not opinion, this is medical, psychological, and I will argue, theologically true. 

I will leave it to Paul to talk about suicide prevention in the broader context, but we are in a church and I am a 40-year veteran of the clergy and I need to speak to this specific piece of real estate:

The Catholic Church’s 16 century long oppression of women, treating them as second-class citizens who can never become a member of the clergy, and their continued insistence that being homosexual is a sin for which one will burn eternally in their imaginary and non-existent hell, is not acceptable. I don’t care that there are progressive priests who are trying to change this, I don’t care that most Catholics ignore these antiquated and abusive beliefs: that fact is that there is a casualty count here. Children and adults kill themselves because of the condemnation of the church. It is 2019. If you changed today, you would still be two generations late. You don’t get more time. Your time is up.

And the evangelical churches, of which the Assemblies of God, the Baptists, the Pentecostals and such may be the worst offenders but the Methodist Church just voted in favor of maintaining this bigotry and a lot of other denominations that have enjoyed being called “main stream” have sat on the fence for way too long. 

If you knew someone who was taking their kids to some cult that taught them to loath themselves, to despise who they are and cannot help being, you would report them for child abuse. . . wouldn’t you? How is the fact that the Catholic Church has been doing it for 1600 years make it different? How is it that most Protestant churches can get a pass on this child abuse just because they have been doing it for 500 years? It is unacceptable. It has to stop. 

Parents, you cannot look at your kids and just know which ones are or will be gay. If you take them to a church that teaches them that hell awaits gay people, you are setting your own children up to become a victim of suicide. I have a modest proposal:  parents, love your children. All of your children. No matter what. 

America’s Diseases: Depression, Addiction, and Suicide

Drs. Roger Ray & Paul Thomlinson

I want to talk about root causes today. We are always looking for root causes in health care, and in behavioral health, where bad outcomes are a fact of life. We are always trying to get upstream so we can figure out why people are sick, why they die from alcoholism or opioid overdose, why they are depressed, why they die by suicide. In fact, there is a technique we use in root cause analysis called The Five Whys, wherein we ask why up to five times in order to get upstream far enough to understand the cause and effect chain. 

For example: I got a speeding ticket. 

Why? Because I was late for work and driving fast to get there. 

Why was I late for work? Because I overslept. 

Why did I oversleep? Because my alarm clock didn’t go off. 

Why didn’t my alarm clock go off? Because the batteries were dead. 

Why were the batteries dead? Because I forgot to replace them. 

Ahh, there’s the root cause, and it’s what we need to do something about to prevent a recurrence of getting speeding tickets and getting to work late. 

Of course, this is a very simple example to illustrate The Five Whys, but I can tell you I’ve done a lot of root cause analyses over the years, and when you ask why the depression, why the addiction, why the suicide enough times, you will almost always eventually get to the root cause of disconnection from othersand the terrible downstream consequences that come from being in that state of loneliness, isolation, and even alienation. 

What Do We Mean by Loneliness?

It should be clear that loneliness is not at all related to the actual number of friends or social contacts one has. Most of us have probably had the feeling of being alone in a crowd. Roger mentioned Anthony Bourdain and Robin Williams, two fabulously wealthy and famous men “with friends possessed,” who died by suicide. Yet, in retrospect, a psychological autopsy would almost certainly conclude that they were excruciatingly lonely. Loneliness is that emotional state created when people have fewer meaningful relationshipsthan they want, fewer than they need. That is, they have inadequate relationships to make them feel known and understood. How do we define it? Basically, irrespective of the number of folks in your contacts list, your Facebook friends list, or your social network, if you feel lonely, then you are lonely. 

Loneliness is characterized by emotional suffering created by feeling separate, isolated, alone and disconnected. You can listen to the Hank Williams masterpiece “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” for a musical deep dive into the emotional experience of loneliness. Loneliness is literally painful, and it is also fearful:at the heart of it is often a deep-seated fear that our life-giving and nourishing attachments to others are either missing or are at risk of being pulled apart or shattered. These are fears that most of us experience at some point, carrying with them a disturbing sense of impending incompleteness, insecurity, and lack of grounding. 

I want to point out the crucial distinction between distressing loneliness as I’ve been describing, and a healthy sense of solitude. Aloneness differs from loneliness. Of course, we known that Eastern and many meditative and mindfulness approaches regard solitude as an essential and healthy state. It is a state characterized by feelings of trust, security, and wholeness that leads to equanimity and calmness, rather than distress.  That is a sharp contrast to the aching chasm of loneliness in which so many find themselves these days. 

The Epidemic of Loneliness

Although living alone does not always equate to being lonely, we know that a quarter of the US population, and 28% of older adults, live alone. Nearly half of adults characterize themselves as lonely right now…about twice as many as a couple of decades ago.  Thirteen percent of people report that there are zero people who know them well! We are living through what may rightly be called an epidemic of loneliness. I had the privilege of hearing former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy recently, and it stuck with me when he said, “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes…it was loneliness." 

Why The Epidemic? 

There is no single answer to the question of why twice as many people now feel lonely as did a few decades ago, and why the average American's number of close confidants has shrunk by more than one-third since 1985. But here are some possible causes: 

·      One reason could be the aging of the Boomers, who had fewer children and more divorces than their parents, leaving many without companions in their, ahem, our old age. About 10% of Americans over 50 do not have a spouse, romantic partner, or living child—so about one in six Boomers live alone. 

·     It is possible that the new gig economy and the increasingly transient nature of our work is also making people lonely, as Americans are often forced to leave their families and hometowns for their careers or paychecks. 

·      Maybe we have somehow gotten dramatically worse at meeting basic human needs, which every Psych 101 student who ever took a gander at Maslow’s hierarchy could tell you is really crucial. As Johann Hari puts it in his simple but radical book, Lost Connections: “We all know that every human being has basic physical needs: for food, for water, for shelter, for clean air. It turns out that, in the same way, all humans have certain basic psychological needs. We need to feel we belong. We need to feel valued. We need to feel we’re good at something. We need to feel we have a secure future. And there is growing evidence that our culture isn’t meeting those psychological needs for many — perhaps most — people.”

What Is The Impact of Loneliness On Our Health and Well-Being? 

Some time ago, we heard from a Mayo Clinic physician named Dr. James Levine, that sitting is the new smoking, warning us of the harmful health effects of a sedentary lifestyle. 

I am here today to assert that it is no stretch to say that loneliness is the new, new smoking. The health impact of loneliness and social isolation can roughly be equated to the effects of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And the same study that established this, also shows that loneliness causes a 26% increase in mortality. 

Why or how is physical health affected by loneliness? What is the virus, the bacterium, the teratogen embedded in this equation? Not surprisingly, it is stress.We are animals, right? But we are exquisitely entrained social animals, almost above all. Feelings of loneliness are an evolutionary phenomenon, for certain. In the same fashion that hunger drives animals to seek and find food, loneliness drives humans to fervently desire and seek out the protection of connectionto the group, thus increasing our chances of survival. There is safety in numbers, right? By the way, on this point, I love how University of Chicago neuroscientist and loneliness researcher John Cacioppo has put it: Denying you feel lonely makes no more sense than denying you feel hunger. 

How does this relate to stress and negative health effects? Well, we know from psychoneuroimmunology research that our loneliness (that is, feeling separate, isolated, vulnerable on our own) triggers the release of stress hormones, cortisol in particular. This stress hormone is remarkable and necessary, and in small doses, helps make us more alert to the dangers in our environment. But when our bloodstream is flooded with cortisol and other stress hormones over prolonged periods, they inflict great harm by causing high blood pressure (of course, one of the most potent risk factors for all cardiovascular diseases), increased inflammation (which we are learning is related to all manner of horrible health outcomes from gingivitis to heart attack to stroke), and a weakened immune system (which makes us susceptible to opportunistic infections, of which there are seemingly endless new and terrifying strains afoot in the world). 

Without a warm, nourishing emotional support network (or even just one single source of such support), lonely people are undoubtedly more likely to fall prey to unhealthy habits, including substance abuse, overeating, and not exercising. Ahh, so perhaps loneliness is the root cause for sitting too much after all…another point in favor of my previous assertion: Loneliness is the new smoking.  

I also want to summarize and put a finer point on loneliness and America’s diseases of depression, addiction, and suicide. There is no question after reading the credible research that lonely individuals are more prone to depression. It is also very clear that addiction is very often rooted in disconnection and alienation from others—like those solitary rats in an empty and desolate cage who consumed the heroin-laced water. Why? Because their lives sucked and were devoid of connection to anything other than that heroin nipple and the resulting high.  And we know that loneliness and low levels of social interaction predict suicide, in all age groups, but especially in older age. The very best research-based model of suicide, developed and tested by Dr. Tom Joiner at Florida State University, shows that those who hold the twin psychological states of lack of belonging and a sense of burdensomeness will eventually consider taking their own lives. And of course, they often succeed. 

Is Loneliness A Root Cause for Political Polarization? 

The rise in loneliness may also be one of the root causes for America's seemingly hopelessly polarized politics, and the accompanying viciousness on social media. How? Psychiatrists Schwartz & Olds describe loneliness as theelephant in the room of American politics.The reasoning goes like this: Social isolation makes people less empathetic and more likely to view the world in the bipolar terms of us and them. Olds puts it this way: "I think comparing notes in a civil way is the antidote to a polarized society in which we don't understand a point of view other than our own. If we are so lonely that we have no one to compare notes with, we tend to become more polarized." Also, it may be, as Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska asserts, that we are turning to political tribalism for the essential sense of communitywe used to get from simple connection to those around us. I think Senator Sasse nails it in his book Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal, when he writes, "Alienated from each other, and uprooted from places we can call home, we're reduced to shrieking." 

The Connection Solution

Loneliness is an epidemic, but it is preventable, treatable, and manageable! Psychologists and social scientists have known for a long time that both intellectual and social engagement prevent loneliness and its damaging physical and psychological effects. The active ingredientis relationships that are high in quality, not merely extensive in number—ones having authenticity and meaningfulness, richness and reciprocity. As an antidote to loneliness, there is no real substitute for having someone to talk to regularly, someone with which to share the contents of our hearts and minds.

There is also good evidence that mindfulness exercises can help reduce feelings of isolation by creating a sense of connection to the world, to others, even to the universe. In fact, I think we need to be careful about expecting the benefits of connection to others while ignoring the most crucial connection of all—the connection to ourselves. There is a reason that Dr. Dan Goleman and others have called self-awareness the cornerstone of emotional intelligence. There is a reason the Oracle at Delphi dispensed the exhortation to know thyself! 

God bless good-hearted warriors in the fight against loneliness, like Robin Caruso, whose "Togetherness" initiative aims to combat the epidemic among seniors through weekly phone calls, home visits and community programs. By the way, if you are thinking about how to reach out and connect with someone you think is suffering loneliness, it is not enough to just talk to and engage with them in efforts to ease their suffering. It is important how we talk to them, and how we interact with them. Lonely people very often have the perception that others are not listening to them, not taking them seriously, not making eye contact, and basically dismissing them. So, we need to be careful to do the opposite of all those things…be not false in your affections, use active listening skills, lean into it, reflect back that you heard what they said, and you may help add years to someone’s life as well as life to someone’s years.