Two weeks after slipping on a rug and breaking her leg, Terry Doyle insists the physical pain from her injury does not compare with the mental anguish of spending another holiday alone.
"On a scale of one to 10, the pain of being alone is a 10," said Doyle, 69, teary-eyed, from her bed in the Good Samaritan Society nursing home in Robbinsdale.
Years of solitude have taken their toll on Doyle — and on many of the estimated 226,000 older Minnesotans who live alone. An extensive and growing body of medical research has linked social isolation and loneliness to higher risks of heart disease, dementia, depression and reduced life expectancy. As a risk factor for early death, social isolation now eclipses obesity, according to recent national research.
The dangers of prolonged isolation are getting an unprecedented amount of attention this year. Social service agencies throughout the Upper Midwest are hosting parties, delivering home-cooked meals, and visiting senior centers in an effort to combat loneliness and isolation. As part of the public campaign, more than 620 agencies nationwide will be helping seniors assess their risk of isolation and connect them with services.
But loneliness is an inherently challenging problem to confront. For one, the experience of being lonely is a subjective emotional state, which makes it difficult to quantify and treat, researchers say. Some older people actually prefer to be alone, while others with many social contacts crave more meaningful relationships, studies have found. There is also the unspoken stigma of loneliness, which makes it difficult for seniors to admit their own feelings of abandonment.
Loneliness is subtly evident in the range of calls made to Minnesota's Senior LinkAge Line for services. Often, older people call the line asking for the name of a person they spoke with the day before — and it's evident they really crave a conversation with a real person, said Dawn Simonson, executive director of the Metropolitan Area Agency on Aging, which operates the senior linkage line for the seven-county metro area.
"Sometimes, they just want to talk," she said.
Even broaching the issue of loneliness can be difficult. Sandy O'Donnell, an elder advocacy director for Little Brothers — Friends of the Elderly, a Minneapolis nonprofit focused on relieving isolation, has seen older people break down in tears over simple questions such as, "How lonely have you felt over the past few days?" O'Donnell said that, in recent years, she has been to area funerals where not a single family member is present, and the only other people at the grave site are a county social worker and a minister.
