THE PSYCHOLOGIST : New national legislation targets U.S. loneliness crisis: 'It’s irresponsible for policymakers to continue ignoring this epidemic'

New national legislation targets U.S. loneliness crisis: 'It’s irresponsible for policymakers to continue ignoring this epidemic'

I do agree that it is a problem. Ever since "The Lonely Crowd" by Riesman et al. in 1950, it has been accepted that loneliness is one of the regrettable effects of modern society. That the government might be able to fix it is however a surprising proposition. Surely social connections are ineluctably personal. It is notable, however, that the proposition comes from a Democrat

Conservatives are generally better off when it comes to avoiding loneliness. They usually have church, military and valued family connections, whereas Leftists often have none of those. Conservatives are by far the most likely to stress the family whereas Leftists from Karl Marx onward have tended to deplore the family. And when Leftists do have families, they will often be such miserable souls that their families will tend to avoid them. The world is all wrong to a Leftist

Nonetheless anybody can lose social connections through death, illness and much else so the problem is not confined to Leftists. At my age (80) half of my friends are dead and I do feel that loss. I have always however managed to have good relationships with women and I still do. And that helps big-time. I even got myself a bright and attractive new girlfriend 18 months ago and we have become firmly attached. My lifelong appreciation of women is still having benefits. I recommend it.

This week, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) introduced national legislation to address the loneliness epidemic.

“Loneliness is one of the most serious, misunderstood problems facing America today. It may not sound like a problem government should care about, but I believe it’s irresponsible for policymakers to continue ignoring this epidemic,” Murphy said in a press release on the legislation released Tuesday.

The proposed legislation, the National Strategy for Social Connection Act, would require the White House to have an Office of Social Connection Policy to advise the President and “work across federal agencies to develop effective strategies for improved social infrastructure and issue national guidelines for social connection similar to existing guidelines on sleep, nutrition, and physical activity,” according to the senator’s press release. Improving social connections in transportation systems, housing environments, and schools is a part of the act.

This legislation comes on the heels of the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community earlier this year.

“The harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished,” the advisory read. “We are called to build a movement to mend the social fabric of our nation…each of us can start now, in our own lives, by strengthening our connections and relationships.”

At Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference in Marina del Rey, Calif., in April, Murthy said loneliness was a public health crisis. It increases the risk of developing heart disease, dementia, and mental health issues, and its health consequences are comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

“The pandemic has had a number of invisible costs in our country, and the increase in loneliness, the increase in mental health strain, these are part of those costs,” Murthy said at the conference. Nearly 25% of adults 65 and older are socially isolated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“The data is clear about the risks to our physical and psychological health, though before the introduction of this act, we appeared stagnant as a nation to take this on,” Dr. Jeff Katzman, the Director of Education at Silver Hill Hospital, tells Fortune. Katzman studied human relationships and psychiatry and recently attended the Hull International Loneliness Conference in England.

“The concept of loneliness hasn’t been a true component of the mental health conversation—not part of the diagnostic lexicon, not a real target of prevention strategies, and evidence-based interventions lacking organization into a guideline for care.”

The success of this type of legislation will be seen in the ability to address loneliness across generations within systems and communities to instill a sense of belonging and trust, Katzman says.

“We need to consider those interventions that can help facilitate trust and assist individuals in abandoning practices of isolation that may have become comfortable yet dangerous and ultimately self-punishing,” he says.

The act would also ensure funding for the CDC's research on the effects of social isolation.

https://fortune.com/well/2023/07/19/new-national-legislation-targets-u-s-loneliness-crisis/

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

New national legislation targets U.S. loneliness crisis: 'It’s irresponsible for policymakers to continue ignoring this epidemic'

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