The Dangers of Isolation

Isolation is a sign and a cause of depression and addiction; engagement counteracts addiction and depression.

We are in the midst of a “deaths of despair” epidemic. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2020), calculate an excess of 158,000 deaths a year due to drugs, alcohol, and suicide brought on by economic dislocation and its psychological consequences.

We get a feeling for those who suffer deaths of despair from the Commissioner of Public Health of West Virginia. That state has (by far) the highest death rate in the nation due to drugs. It is the poorest state in the Union.

Commissioner Dr. Rahul Gupta studied every one of the state’s 887 drug deaths in 2017, and came up with an extremely clear profile:

“If you’re a male between the ages of 35 to 54, with less than a high school education, you’re single and you’ve worked in a blue-collar industry,” Gupta said, “you pretty much are at a very, very high risk of overdosing.”

There is an underlying dimension to a person with these traits: a lack of connection. This constellation includes their being single, the likelihood that they don’t have a stable work environment, and the absence of ties to the surrounding community.

But isolation is not only a characteristic of working-class people. Contentment has plummeted for teens (8th, 10th, and 12th graders) over the last 10 years (according to Monitoring the Future). In “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” psychologist Jean M. Twenge lays this striking decline in contentment (and proportionate increase in depression and suicidal inclination) to adolescents’ immersion in digital addictions (highlighted by iPhones),

What is most notable in Twenge’s description is the isolation of modern teen life, where youths rarely interact directly with others (or the real world). Instead, the prototypical activity in this scenario is a teen on their bed texting and sending clips to “friends” via social media.

And, so, what consequences should we expect from our new “social distancing” requirements? The prospects aren’t good in terms of the mental health and life prospects of our most vulnerable populations — the young and those not embedded in a family, work or a community. In fact, the size of this isolated group will grow, due instantly to social distancing, sheltering in place, ending community activities and group entertainments, closing schools and universities, and loss of jobs and work.

What will be the impact on nuclear families of this tightening of the restrictiveness of social bonds? David Brooks has made the radical declaration “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” He finds that American society’s organization into nuclear family units has been a disaster in terms of our collective contentment. The tight-knit nuclear family, Brooks argues, not only cuts us off from neighbors, friends, and communities, but it overwhelms the familial ties that are our main, or only, social supports.

Taken together, Brooks, Twenge, and Case and Deaton portray a fragmented society experienced worst by socially outcast and loosely connected individuals, but increasingly by even society’s central protagonists.

It is a perfect storm of isolation and all that it portends.