A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness

With information technologies such as the web rapidly expanding our capacity to communicate with each other via electronic technologies, “A Cry Unheard” describes the lethal consequences of the rise of loneliness in modern life. This plague has emerged as one of the leading causes of premature death in all technologically advanced nations. Fueled by powerful social forces that contribute to the disturbance and disruption of human dialogue-including school failure, family and communal disintegration, divorce, the loss of loved ones- it is as if some electronic Pandora’ s box has unleashed and fostered an ever-spreading plague of “disembodied dialogue” in our midst. Unlike our ancestors a century earlier, we live in a world in which telephones talk, and radios talk, and computers talk, and televisions talk, and there is “no-body” there. Human speech has literally been extracted from its own biological home, extracted from the human heart, as if we could really speak from “no-place” to “no-body.” And while the lack of human companionship, the absence of face to face dialogue, and the “disembodiment” of human dialogue and loneliness has been linked to virtually every major disease, from cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, tuberculosi,s and mental illness, the link is particularly marked in the case of heart disease, the world’s leading killer. Every year, tens of millions die prematurely, no longer able to communicate with their fellow man, lonely and brokenhearted.

Drawing on a lifetime of his own medical research, Dr. Lynch outlines recent discoveries that explain how such disparate socially isolating experiences as school failure, divorce, and living alone share a common disease, a “communicative dis-ease” that literally has the power to break the human heart. Hailed by many of our nation’s leading medical experts as a pioneer, visionary, as well as THE expert in “affairs of the heart”, Dr. Lynch predicts in this seminal and groundbreaking book that “Communicative disease will come to be recognized as every bit as important as communicable disease as a major health threat." His path- breaking research on the power of human touch to affect the hearts of patients in intensive care units, (as well as the hearts of animals in laboratory settings) and his discovery that during the course of even the most ordinary conversations, blood pressure can rise far more than it does to maximal physical exercise are but a few pieces of a health mosaic depicting the power of friendships, human dialogue, and community to influence our very survival. With that rare combination of poet and scientist, he describes in moving terms the “vascular see-saw of all human dialogue- blood pressure rising when we speak to others, and falling below baseline levels when we listen to others or attend to companion animals and the rest of the natural world. He admonishes us that “exercises to improve communicative health” must be taken every bit as seriously as exercises on treadmills to improve physical health.”

School failure and other childhood experiences with “toxic talk,” as well as adults use of language to hurt, control and manipulate rather than to reach out, hear and listen to others, contribute to an unbearable type of loneliness that literally breaks our hearts. Dr. Lynch shows that when we speak to others-whether it is our own children, or those we are attempting to love- we touch their hearts as well. Echoing the time honored Biblical truth, he pleads with us to recognize the wisdom that we are indeed “our brother’s keeper,” and that failure to recognize that simple truth forces us into communicative exile, and ultimately premature death. Truly, he concludes in this moving book, that “dialogue is the elixir of life, and loneliness its lethal poison.” The choice we face is quite clear: we must either learn to live together-or we shall die prematurely, alone.