Addressing Loneliness

This is a volume on loneliness and what can be done to address its pain. While most books simply describe loneliness from one author’s point of view, this volume includes a comprehensive review of the literature and employs top researchers in the field discuss their own research findings, conclusions and clinical experience. It explores the relationship between loneliness and sexuality, loneliness and optimism, and parental loneliness during pregnancy and childbirth. It also addresses loneliness throughout the life cycle in children, adolescents, the elderly and disabled, leading to a variety of coping and therapeutic modalities aimed at helping those who suffer from loneliness in its various forms.

Social isolation and loneliness are serious yet underappreciated public health risks that affect a significant portion of the older adult population. Approximately one-quarter of community-dwelling Americans aged 65 and older are considered to be socially isolated, and a significant proportion of adults in the United States report feeling lonely. People who are 50 years of age or older are more likely to experience many of the risk factors that can cause or exacerbate social isolation or loneliness, such as living alone, the loss of family or friends, chronic illness, and sensory impairments. Over a life course, social isolation and loneliness may be episodic or chronic, depending upon an individual's circumstances and perceptions. A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that social isolation presents a major risk for premature mortality, comparable to other risk factors such as high blood pressure, smoking, or obesity. As older adults are particularly high-volume and high-frequency users of the health care system, there is an opportunity for health care professionals to identify, prevent, and mitigate the adverse health impacts of social isolation and loneliness in older adults. Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults summarizes the evidence base and explores how social isolation and loneliness affect health and quality of life in adults aged 50 and older, particularly among low income, underserved, and vulnerable populations. This report makes recommendations specifically for clinical settings of health care to identify those who suffer the resultant negative health impacts of social isolation and loneliness and target interventions to improve their social conditions. Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults considers clinical tools and methodologies, better education and training for the health care workforce, and dissemination and implementation that will be important for translating research into practice, especially as the evidence base for effective interventions continues to flourish.

This is a volume on loneliness and what can be done to address its pain. While most books simply describe loneliness from one author’s point of view, this volume includes a comprehensive review of the literature and employs top researchers in the field discuss their own research findings, conclusions and clinical experience. It explores the relationship between loneliness and sexuality, loneliness and optimism, and parental loneliness during pregnancy and childbirth. It also addresses loneliness throughout the life cycle in children, adolescents, the elderly and disabled, leading to a variety of coping and therapeutic modalities aimed at helping those who suffer from loneliness in its various forms.

"A Therapist's Guide to a Little Bit of Everything" is a comprehensive and invaluable resource designed to support therapists in navigating a wide range of topics and issues they may encounter in their practice. With a focus on practical guidance and evidence-based approaches, this book offers insights, strategies, and tools to enhance therapeutic effectiveness and promote the well-being of both therapists and clients. The aim of this book is to provide therapists with a comprehensive understanding of diverse areas of mental health and human experience. Each chapter delves into a specific topic, providing in-depth exploration and practical guidance for therapists to better support their clients. From navigating bereavement and understanding addiction to addressing work and career issues and exploring gender identity, the book covers an extensive range of topics relevant to contemporary therapeutic practice. The book embraces a reader-friendly style, combining accessible language with a wealth of research-backed knowledge. Each chapter presents a clear overview of the topic, followed by practical strategies and reflective exercises to facilitate learning and application. The content is presented in a manner that encourages therapists to engage in self-reflection, explore their own biases, and continually develop their skills and competencies.

Based on groundbreaking research showing that prolonged loneliness can be as harmful to your health as smoking, Loneliness is “one of the most important books about the human condition to appear in a decade” (Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness). University of Chicago social neuroscientist John T. Cacioppo pioneered research on the startling effects of loneliness: a sense of isolation or social rejection disrupts not only our ability to think and will power but also our immune systems, and can be as damaging as obesity or smoking. On the flip side, social connection can be a powerful therapy. Cacioppo’s sophisticated studies relying on brain imaging, analysis of blood pressure, immune response, stress hormones, behavior, and even gene expression show that human beings are simply far more intertwined and interdependent—physiologically as well as psychologically—than our cultural assumptions have ever allowed us to acknowledge. Loneliness traces the evolution of these tandem forces, showing how, for our primitive ancestors, survival depended not on greater brawn but on greater commitments to each other. Serving as a prompt to repair frayed social bonds, the pain of loneliness engendered a fear response so powerfully disruptive that even now, millions of years later, a persistent sense of rejection or isolation can impair DNA transcription in our immune cells. This disruption also impairs our ability to read social signals and exercise social skills, as well as limits our ability to internally regulate our emotions—all of which can combine to trap us in self-defeating behaviors that reinforce the very isolation and rejection that we dread. Loneliness shows us how to overcome this feedback loop to achieve better health and greater happiness. As individuals and as a society, we have everything to gain, and everything to lose, in how well or how poorly we manage our need for social bonds.

“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.