Only the Lonely
The epidemic and the ambassador
Dr. Ruth Westheimer, cute and candid sex therapist many of us grew up listening to across radio/TV in the 1980s-90s, at the mere age of 95 has just been appointed by Governor Hochul New York State’s Ambassador to Loneliness. You may know her voice, her smile, and her tiny stature, but her personal history is worth further exploring to see what a great fit she really is for this role—not because she’s been so lonely but perhaps because she can best connect those who are.
Dr. Ruth’s bio in the JewishVirtualLibrary outlines a pretty epic life, most notably marked by being orphaned in the Holocaust. She was born Karola Ruth Siegel in Wiesenfeld, Germany to orthodox Jews. In 1939, after her father was taken by the Nazis, she was sent away to Switzerland along with 100 other children via the “Kindertransport.” In 1941, she stopped receiving letters from home at the Swiss orphanage she lived in; in 1945, she discovered her parents had been killed, possibly at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Following the war, she emigrated to Palestine and joined the Haganah (Jewish militia) in Jerusalem. “Because of her diminutive height of 4 ft 7 in., she was trained as a scout and sniper. Westheimer was seriously wounded in action by an exploding shell during the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, and it was several months before she was able to walk again.”
Like a little storm trooper, she went on to study psychology in France and came to NYC in 1956, earning multiple advanced (from masters to post-doc) degrees in sociology, education, and human sexuality, some of that while as a single mom between marriages and working as a housemaid/learning English. Writing and talking about sex is what made her a household name in books from Sex for Dummies to her show “Sexually Speaking.” She was married three times, with her third husband as the “real one” whom she met at a ski tow in the Catskills (aha, my man-hunting grounds!). She mourned his loss in 1997 after 36 years together but didn’t miss a beat remaining active and moving forward.
If you have about 45 minutes more of interest in learning more about Dr. Ruth’s life in her own words, here’s an in-depth interview with her at the U.S. Air Force Academy on “being an orphan of the holocaust, a sniper, and a single mom” and also literally being stowed on a bookshelf when wounded by a cannonball and bedspace was limited in the hospital.
She is recovering now from a minor stroke but remains clear and lively as ever as she talks in recent interviews about discovering along the way that being a therapist was the best way to help people. Now as ambassador, her biggest advice is to start from within: “if they feel lonely, they have to admit it, that’s the most important thing, they have to admit it to themselves.”
This announcement of her appointment comes months after U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an epidemic in May. Of all the mental health crises we desperately need to talk about more and address with real policy, this loneliness is woefully new to the conversation and extremely impactful. New York is the first state in the U.S. to declare such an ambassador, but of the course the world has been on it for a while. United Kingdom, for instance, created a Ministry of Loneliness in 2018.
From the Governor’s Press release:
As New York works to fight the loneliness epidemic, some help from honorary Ambassador Ruth Westheimer may be just what the doctor ordered. Studies show individuals experiencing loneliness had a 32 percent higher risk of dying early and we need leaders like Dr. Ruth to help address this critical component of our mental health crisis.
More than a third of adults 45 or older experience loneliness, with nearly a quarter of adults 65 or older considered socially isolated, a recent study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found. Loneliness is defined as the feeling of being alone, regardless of the amount of social contact, while social isolation refers to a lack of social connections.
Social isolation significantly increased the risk of premature death from all causes, the study found, rivaling the risk posed by other detrimental health conditions or behaviors, including smoking, obesity, and physical inactivity. Social isolation has been associated with an approximately 50 percent increased risk of developing dementia, while poor social relationships—characterized by social isolation or loneliness—have been associated with a 29 percent increased risk of heart disease and a 32 percent increased risk of stroke.
Death, dementia, detrimental health outcomes—not to mention depression. From a 2014 paper in the National Library of Medicine exploring “The Relationship Between Loneliness, Psychiatric Disorders and Physical Health,” scientists state:
Human beings are social species which require safe and secure social surroundings to survive. Satisfying social relationships are essential for mental and physical well beings. Impaired social relationship can lead to loneliness…
Lonely people suffer from more depressive symptoms, as they have than been reported to be less happy, less satisfied and more pessimistic. Further loneliness and depression share common symptoms like helplessness and pain. There is so much similarity in between loneliness and depression that many authors consider it a subset of depression.
My scapegoat for all human ailments these days is technology—specifically our growing addiction to screens from our phones and watches to our computer/televisions. Though what we’ve done to our brains on these new numbing devices is still a bit experimental at point in this test-pig stage of our evolution, the studies are accruing ever more data now that many us have been conjoined with smartphones for nearly 15 years.
Is “Technology Making Us Lonely?” asks this article in GCFGlobal. The answer is yes.
Many experts believe that having constant access to technology, specifically smartphones, can prevent us from making personal connections. For many people, it’s become a habit to reach for a smartphone any time they have a free moment, and this behavior could be making our loneliness worse. A University of Arizona study supported this idea, finding that smartphone dependence predicted a higher rate of loneliness and depression in young adults.
Experts also confirmed that too much social media usage can cause emotional harm. A 2017 study found that heavy social media users were three times more likely to feel socially isolated than casual users. Social media can also make people feel like they’re missing out on meaningful social events, leading to feelings of exclusion, stress, and insecurity.
That said, the article goes on to speak from the other side of its mouth about how tech can also help make these connections and bring people together. Yes, but. Along with the 1,001 examples I’d like to list of the detrimental impacts of too-much-tech, I work at Town Hall in a role I can loosely label constituency services and I’d say the vast majority of people who reach out for assistance are those largely rendered invisible and obsolete by technology—our seniors, minorities, and lower income residents who may not have the education or the economics to connect with the devices required now to “connect.” They come to us for help navigating impossible governmental systems with clunky software that is hard enough for everyday citizens to deal with, let alone those at these disadvantages of age and access. Our seniors are often left out of this equation of connection via tech, unless, as in my family, we repeatedly try to set up Grandma Jojo with Facetime on her iPad and guide her during our videochats to aim the camera at her face and not the lamp to her left. I gave up setting her up with email passwords years ago, which probably spares her the risk of being targeted for a swindle.
The pandemic of course upped the isolation ante. Me, I loved it, as I always secretly wanted the world to shut down so I can go home and hide with no pressing plans to stress me. I wasn’t hunkered down alone but with my kids, half the time, but I found both the time alone and with the kids more precious than the usual—quieter, easier, more peaceful. Extroverts during this time did not fare as well as those among us who love being alone and struggle more socially. I also don’t typically associate with the word lonely, even when I’m navigating the dating apps and dodging ghosted mines. I’ve only tended to feel lonely in, and recovering from, unfulfilling relationships than when just leaning in to being single and living life solo (as much as a mom could ever be solo). Being attached seems to create rather than fulfill needs. After a breakup, I tend to breathe a sigh of relief that I’m back to being able to worry about just me (and my kids) again. Loneliness is just a vague overriding ache through life, likely a low level depression as they linked in the data above, and way more existential in nature. No one will ever “get” me. We are all ultimately unknowable. No matter the crowd around us, those more inward among us, still live, and definitely die, alone.
At 50, I’ve tipped decidedly into middle age and quietly growing like a barnacle on this precarious boat is that Fear of Dying Alone. As many seniors try to navigate how to live longer term without the means or networks to support them, loneliness escalates. Part of the Governor’s announcement directly addresses plans for the aging:
Under Governor Hochul’s leadership, New York State is taking steps to develop age-friendly communities and build a more robust system of mental health care. Last year, Governor Hochul signed an executive order to create the state’s first-ever Master Plan for Aging to ensure older New Yorkers can live healthy, fulfilling lives while aging with dignity and independence.
The New York State Office for the Aging (NYSOFA) is now working with the state Department of Health to develop this comprehensive plan, which will recommend age-friendly policies to influence community development, transportation, and other supports needed to allow all New Yorkers to participate socially as they age. Last summer, the Master Plan for Aging’s council and advisory committee released a preliminary report, with the final report slated to be delivered by 2025.
Until then, and in lieu of three husbands, I feel a lonely trilogy coming on:
Part 2, next week: the loneliness that drives some people to marry dolls/characters!
Part 3, on living alone: my reactions to the book I’m reading, Going Solo.
And parting words to uncouple from our iPhones in the interest of interacting IRL, from Dr. Ruth in the YouTube above:
What worries me is that everybody has that iPhone… I’m very worried that the art of conversation is going to get lost and not only that but young people are going to develop physical ailments because they are constantly looking down. So put that iPhone away when you have dinner with someone with something to say.
I have a teacher friend who's commented on how the noise in the halls of her high school has changed. Where before there was this loud jubilant racket of voices (which I sure remember from mine), now it's much quieter, with so many students staring down at their phone silently while they walk.
On the subject of books re: going solo, I came across Fenton Johnson's "At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life" maybe two years ago. It was the first time I'd ever experienced the sense that someone was writing about me personally. In it he compares artistic figures (he starts off with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, which makes a fascinating pairing) who have a mystic streak, and shows how richly their lives are connected to the world around them, if not necessarily to a specific partner. He calls these people "solitaries" and also shares his own experience as a solitary, as a connective thread. For the record, he does say that some of the best relationships he knows consist of two solitaries who know how to respect each other's space. To kind of repeat, and what had a lot of meaning for me, was his perspective of these people not as loners or emotionally disconnected, but the opposite. Dickinson is shown so passionately activated by her one acre of the world that it's not surprising she didn't venture much farther as it would've no doubt overwhelmed.
“Put that cell phone away and have dinner with someone who has something to say.” Kristi and I make a point of doing this. Earlier in our relationship, the ubiquitous cell phone often interfered until we made that rule.