About A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness What's one of the leading causes of premature death in the Western World?
Loneliness.
And whom does loneliness kill?
Who does it not? For every citizen in every one of the world's technologically advanced nations -- from homemakers to business people, from college students to school dropouts, from the elderly to the young -- loneliness is an unrecognized, unguarded-against stalker.
Surprised? You should be. Though it's never cited as the cause of death in the standard death certificate, loneliness, like communicable diseases of old, comes like a thief in the night to claim its victims. While medical science continues to focus on communicable disease, Dr. James Lynch has devoted his career to elucidating a new but equally potent cause of disease and premature death -- communicative dis-ease -- and to explaining its widespread, but little comprehended, medical consequences. In 1977, Lynch became the first to document how loneliness contributed to all forms of premature death, especially from heart disease. His much publicized and oft-cited best-seller, The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness, caused a social and medical stir both wide and deep, and was translated into 10 languages.
Determined now to show how loneliness has festered and grown into a silent epidemic, and drawing on a lifetime of his own original medical research, he makes a number of provocative charges and predictions in his new, groundbreaking sequel, A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness, including:
* Loneliness kills, especially through heart disease. Though loneliness is tied to virtually every major disease -- from cancer to Alzheimer's disease, from tuberculosis to mental illness -- the link is particularly striking in the case of heart disease, the nation's leading killer. Every year, millions of lonely people, unable to communicate with fellow human beings, and brokenhearted, die prematurely. The important new insights contained in A Cry Unheard amount to an entirely new theory on the true causes of heart disease -- communicative -- and the disease's required treatment -- also communicative in nature. * Parents' use of language can either nurture life or inadvertently contribute to their children's premature death decades later. Adults' use of language to consistently hurt, control, and manipulate rather than to reach out and listen to their own children -- so-called toxic talk -- leads to feelings of isolation, depression, and loneliness, and puts children at substantial risk of becoming socially isolated and dying prematurely. * School failure kills. School failure likewise leads to a stunning increase in premature death decades later, and the primary cause is not economic. As adults, children who fail in school find themselves unable to talk with others without undue stress on their hearts, and thus withdraw from human relationships and from society in general. * Technology can exacerbate loneliness. In a world where technology is dramatically expanding our ways of communicating -- a world where telephones talk, and radios talk, and computers talk, and televisions talk -- human speech has literally been extracted from the human heart. The decline in face-to-face dialogue is one of the unfortunate consequences of these new communicative technologies. Worse yet is the increasingly stressful nature of what Lynch labels "New Age dialogue." Technology-induced loneliness carries with it considerable medical risks. * Communicative dis-ease will become as great a health threat in the new millenium as communicable disease, fueled as it is by powerful new social forces, such as the electronic "disembodiment" of human dialogue, and school failure, and by such old negative influences as family and communal disintegration, and divorce.
Hailed by many of our nation's leading medical experts as a pioneer and visionary, Lynch lays out in this seminal work the results of his path-breaking research, demonstrating: * How, during even the most ordinary conversations, blood pressure can rise far more than it does during maximal physical exercise; * How, during the "vascular see-saw of all human dialogue," blood pressure rises when we speak to others, but falls below baseline levels whenever we listen to others, relate to companion animals, or attend to the rest of the natural world; * And how toxic talk, the lack of dialogue, and the loss of dialogue can all place great stress on the human heart.
World famous doctors are pricking up their ears and spreading the word -- "A Cry Unheard is very important stuff." Best-selling author and medical journal editor, Dr. Larry Dossey, writes, "Love and connectedness and empathy are not just feel good issues; they are life-and-death factors for everyone. Dr. James Lynch is THE authority in this field. If we expect to live long, healthy lives, we must come to terms with the information in this landmark book."
Dr. Dean Ornish, of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute, and himself a best-selling author, writes, "In the field of mind/body medicine, Dr. James Lynch is one of the true pioneers. His classic, The Broken Heart, one of the field's most important books, was far, far ahead of its time...This important sequel should encourage many millions of people to begin healing their hearts-physically, emotionally, and spiritually."
When his first book on loneliness came out, Lynch was much sought-after by the media. "60 Minutes" broadcast eight times a segment on his groundbreaking research into the therapeutic benefits of pets for humans. He went on to make numerous appearances on "Good Morning America," "20/20," "Phil Donahue," and many other influential TV programs. His work was also widely reported on in The New York Times, People magazine, Time magazine, and U.S. News & World Report, among many others.
With his new book, Lynch makes a contribution that is necessary, innovative, accessible, and constructive. Echoing time-honored Biblical truths, he wisely warns us that loneliness is a lethal human poison, and that failure to act as our "brother's keepers" forces us all into communicative exile and premature death. He stresses that educators, parents, and policy-makers must not only recognize the lethal consequences of school failure, but foster in students equal amounts of cooperation and competition in order to prevent future tragedies of a massive scale.
He admonishes us that exercises to improve our communicative health must be undertaken with the same seriousness and commitment as exercises on treadmills to improve our physical health. And he emphasizes how heartfelt dialogue is the key to a healthier, happier existence for all of humankind. Indeed, with that rare combination of poet and scientist, Lynch concludes that heartfelt dialogue, framed in love, is the truest and best elixir for longer, healthier, and more fulfilling lives the world over.
