Social isolation: A silent killer

On June 14, 2020, Sunday, we lost a bright star of India’s movie world —34-year-old Sushant Singh Rajput who Mumbai Police said died of suicide by hanging —prompting us to ask if we are ready to deal with a post-COVID-19 suicide epidemic?

A deadly combination of social distancing mandates, area-wise lockdowns and high stress due to job losses are a recipe for a coming disaster. It is speculated that Rajput’s last message on his Instagram, where he records his gut-wrenching feelings for his late mother, red-flagged his emotional state of mind. Maybe things would have been different if we had a robust system in place to spot those red alerts and have a sort of emergency responder system for those hurting mentally like him. We don’t know.

Physics can help us gauge the cataclysmic chemistry of the Covid-19 lockdown that has compressed millions of people inside a pressure cooker of sorts, steaming hot with fear, stress and anxiety: what if the cooker’s safety valve fails to withstand the pressure and the steam breaches the danger mark?

For several months, almost three billion people —a big chunk of them children —were confined to their spaces via government diktat, leaving us with a potential pressure cooker explosion that can leave us with a big mess in the kitchen, taking years and trillions of dollars to clean up from what a Brussels clinical psychologist calls “the world’s largest psychological experiment”.

The International Labour Organization estimates more than two billion workers in the global informal economy being at high risk in these times. Millions of migrant workers, caught in a crossfire between the Centre and the states, are part of this economy. Stressed and burned-out, they have sailed straight into the eye of the storm, in the face of an apathetic administration.

The deluge of COVID-19 media coverage is equally depressing: an abundance of depressing news, the constant dirge of doom from an endless roll of economists and epidemiologists, the never-ending missiles of disinformation on our media platforms and the high anxiety-inducing proclamations of pessimism from our leaders.

Shaken and stirred, you get a concoction of calamitous proportions. Damming the deluge of bad news or distorted COVID-19 coverage —an infodemic, as it were —will help us stave off a mental health-related epidemic.

Paul, one of the most prolific New Testament authors, writing to his friends in a Roman colony Philippi, summed it up well: “Friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse.” When facts replace fear, leaders can inspire faith and confidence.

Dr Elke Van Hoof, Professor, health psychology and primary care psychology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, warned in a recent World Economic Forum note that we could see “a secondary epidemic of burnouts and stress-related absenteeism in the latter half of 2020.”

We are a social species, social creatures and are hard-wired to move and have our being in the community, with face to face, hands-on interactions. Our faith ecosystem has been hit the most: online religious services are welcome, but they are no substitute to greeting your fellow brothers and sisters across the church pews or praying at the local mosque or offering pujas in temples.

Others enjoy their brand of faith experience in smoky beer bars, noisy food joints or even messy marketplaces. In other words, we are simply not designed for social isolation, pathogens or not, as studies on the effects of social isolation show us.

Social recession

Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University in Idaho, USA, knows this subject well: her 2015 meta-analysis of 70 studies, surveying 3.4 million people across the world, studied the impact of social isolation, loneliness and living alone. And her bone-rattling results: loneliness increases the rate of early death by 26%, social isolation by 29% and living alone by 32% no matter the subject’s age, gender, location or culture.

Juxtapose that against the 1.3 billion Indian population, 20% of the world. Prof Holt-Lunstad’s warning, in a recent New Yorker story, is eye-opening: “So, just like we’re worried about an economic recession, we should worry about a social recession—a continued pattern of distancing socially, beyond the immediate pandemic, that will have broader societal effects, particularly for the vulnerable.”

Prof John Cacioppo, author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, said the need to interact is deeply ingrained in our genetic code. “So much so, the absence of social connection triggers the same, primal alarm bells as hunger, thirst and physical pain,” he wrote, demonstrating the negative impacts social isolation has on both mental and physical health when there are no social connections.

The key is to deal with social isolation as that is a silent killer behind the coming Great Depression which will be different from the 1930s Great Depression that swept away thousands of jobs in America and Europe. Today we are left dealing with the deadly effects of social isolation no matter how close we can get online with friends and family on the other side of the phone or the computer.

Harvard psychology professor Matthew Nock was quoted saying in May 19, 2020, New York Times piece, “There’s not only an increase in anxiety, but the more important piece is social isolation…We’ve never had anything like this – and we know social isolation is related to suicide.” With the World Health Organisation reporting close to eight lakh deaths by suicide every year that’s a warning we cannot take lightly.