Episode 25: Fighting Loneliness for Well-being

In this episode of Let’s Talk Poverty, Meaghon Reid connects with Dr. Richard Lewanczuk, Edmonton-based endocrinologist and Senior Medical Director of Health System Integration for Alberta Health Services to discuss loneliness and its impacts on health and well-being. 

In this episode 

• 34% of Canadians report feeling lonely, with 14% of Albertans reporting severe loneliness, the worst rate in the country. Learn about the health implications of loneliness and  solutions to combat social isolation. 
• Multiple different studies show the negative health impacts of loneliness.  

Three key takeaways 

• When people are isolated, the body perceives this as a form of stress. This stress can lead to health outcomes like brain fog, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia and other health problems.  
• While policy changes and urban planning address social isolation on a larger scale, individuals can combat loneliness by getting to know their neighbours. While technology and social media can be a tool for connecting, it does not replace the positive effects of face-to-face contact.  
• Municipal planning is changing to try and facilitate interactions to combat loneliness. In the past there were town squares that promoted organic interaction and planners are now trying to reintroduce these public spaces.  

About Dr. Richard Lewanczuk 

Dr. Richard Lewanczuk is the Senior Medical Director of Health System Integration for Alberta Health Services (AHS).  In this role he works within AHS as well as with provincial government ministries, municipalities, the volunteer sector, primary care and businesses to “help Albertans be as healthy, well and independent as they can be in their homes and communities.”   Prior to this, Dr. Lewanczuk was the Senior Medical Director for Primary Health Care for AHS from its inception until 2019.  Dr. Lewanczuk is also a Professor Emeritus within the Department of Medicine at the University of Alberta where he co-chairs the Social Determinants of Health Working Group.  

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Transcript

Intro: 

Would you describe yourself as lonely? About one in ten Canadians say they're always or often lonely. But did you know that loneliness can have serious consequences for well being and is even associated with poverty? 

Welcome to Let's Talk Poverty, the podcast that helps you understand poverty in Calgary through the lens of Enough for All. It tackles the stigma surrounding poverty, challenging biases and assumptions. From the voices of lived experience to community members, to highlighting raw data. We speak with subject matter and policy experts, community leaders and you to explore the root causes of poverty in our city and how we can come together to make changes that matter.  

Let's Talk Poverty is recorded in Treaty Seven, the lands of the Blackfoot nations, the Siksika, the Piikani and the Kainai. We also acknowledge the Tsuut’ina and Stony Nakoda First Nations and the Metis Nation of Alberta, Districts 5 and 6.   

Meaghon: 

Welcome to Let's Talk Poverty. I'm Meghon Reid. Today we are so grateful to be joined by Dr. Richard Lewanczuk, the Senior Medical Director of Health System Integration for Alberta Health Services. In this role, Richard works within AHS as well as with provincial government ministries, municipalities, the volunteer sector, primary care and businesses to help Albertans be as healthy, well, and independent as they can be in their homes and communities. 

Richard is also a Professor Emeritus within the Department of Medicine at the University of Alberta, where he still co-chairs the Social Determinants of Health working group. Richard has been exploring loneliness and its impacts on health and well-being since 2018, and we are so pleased he could join us today. 

Richard, how are you doing today?  

Richard: 

Really good, and thanks for the opportunity to be here.  

Meaghon: 

Amazing. Maybe first, uh, you could tell us a bit about what we're seeing in the news and how that relates to your work. So one of the things that we talk about a lot in our work at Enough for All is about isolation and loneliness and how that's actually a contributor to poverty. And poverty reduction is quite predicated on our social contracts with one another. So maybe if you could just start with letting us know a bit about your work and how you do that work  and how that relates to loneliness and how we relate to one another. 

Richard: 

Sure, loneliness is a really important area. Your interest, that of the viewers, relates to poverty. But remember that Mother Teresa said that loneliness is the greatest form of poverty, and she was actually right. Because if we had an ideal world or in a utopia, the ideal community and community supports, there would be no such thing as poverty because we would be looking after each other. 

That's, uh, not that far from the truth, because even in Alberta, those organizations like yourselves, um, now the City of Calgary, certainly the City of Edmonton, and even Alberta municipalities all subscribe to the asset based community development approach, which is really sort of people looking after people, and I've seen it in action.  

So people in communities where this is really operational, experiencing poverty, the neighbors will help address this. So this is where we could end up in an ideal world, not that far from where we're headed.  

Meaghon: 

That's very interesting. There's a couple of threads there in what you said that I think are quite something. Mother Teresa's quote, quite strangely, also reminds me of the Blackfoot definition of poverty. So of course, we're here in Treaty Seven and we also have a Blackfoot name for the Enough for All strategy is iih kanii tai staiiwa, and it means everything is there. Like, we have everything we need to solve this problem. But in Blackfoot, there isn't a direct translation to poverty. It actually means to be kind to one another and to have compassion. It's quite interesting, um, if you think about kind of that thread of what is required to alleviate poverty and what some of the roots of that are, um, are quite interesting. I think from our perspective, we would say that Indigenous community has done a really good job of protecting against some of that loneliness that we see in a way that could be threaded to asset based community development in a different way.  

Richard: 

Yeah, absolutely. That's a really excellent point because as you said and as has been said, if we all looked after each other and had that strong, strong, vibrant community, as I said earlier, there would be no poverty, there is enough for all. Paradox is, I think we all know examples and circumstances where these mega rich people, and there are a lot of movies made about it, have all the material things that they need, or they think they need, yet they're lonely and not happy. It is a bit like mental health and mental illness. It doesn't know sort of socioeconomic lines, does it? It doesn't recognize those.  

Meaghon: 

And I think that's such a great point. We know that, um, about 34% of Canadians report feeling lonely. I have to imagine that if that's a self-reported number, that number might actually be a little higher. How do you think we're doing here in Alberta related to this? Does that stat resonate for you?  

Richard: 

Yeah. Yes, it does. 34% is a Canadian average and it represents feelings of loneliness and depression combined. If you look at just pure, pure loneliness and isolate that out, about 14% of Albertans from that same study report severe degrees of loneliness. The worst rate in the country, unfortunately. The other 34% was Ontario seemed to be the worst. But Alberta and Quebec were number two positions. So we don't rank very well that way. So a lot of room for improvement.  

Meaghon: 

So I'm not trying here to, uh, create links or causation at all, but it is interesting to hear sort of Alberta and Ontario and those top numbers, those also happen to be the provinces that always land in the top three of wealth inequity in our country every year. So the gap between people who make the lowest amount of money and the highest is always the most significant in Alberta and Ontario. And I wonder if there's anything there. There might not be, but I'm curious to see if you have any thoughts.  

Richard: 

I do have thoughts, but I have no proof. Yeah, no one does have to wonder whether our focus on materialism, ah, acquisition, where we miss exactly. Like you said, the Indigenous philosophy of that's not what's important in life more the relationships tend to be. And actually I shouldn't say that there isn’t evidence that know, relationships really are important.   

Meaghon: 

Absolutely. I grew up in a very small fishing town in Newfoundland, which is a very economically depressed province, I would say, and always has been. I would say anecdotally, but I've seen other kinds of metrics around how some of the social bonds there are kind of very different than in the rest of the country, sort of despite that kind of economic status. And I do wonder if that lack of focus on the material that you just said is a contributor to some of that. It's a very different experience.   

Richard: 

Yeah, I really think so. There's been a lot of work in Alberta that may be not visible to everyone, but people like Cormac Russell, who know, major proponent of asset based community development and who has been to Alberta a number of times, had started working with the City of Edmonton, for example, on the importance of developing a city of a thousand villages. And now I'm pleased to know that Calgary is following down the same route and to know that our municipal leaders leadership through municipalities, Alberta also embraces the same sort of, uh, thinking that having vibrant, strong, cohesive communities, it sounds a little bit like 1950s white picket fence type of thing, but it actually is true. And they're extremely important for our overall well-being, whether it's physical, mental, spiritual, economic.  

Meaghon: 

Absolutely. There's something to that 1950s kind of model, though, even with the white picket fence, we used to have many more front porches and front yards and used to have those natural built, environment ways to interact with our neighbors much more than we do now. 

Richard: 

Yeah, absolutely. So other things that are going on is our municipal planners and they meet regularly, actually know this, they know what we're talking about. So municipal planning is now changing to try and design and facilitate interactions, and public spaces. So if you think about it way back in the day, you had the village square or you had the village market, or people would have their social interactions through, things such as religious services. 

And we know that some of those things have been dropping by the wayside. So people don't have those opportunities to interact. And we never realize the benefit of this. So, what our city planners are doing is, they're trying to reintroduce public spaces, so squares and parks where people, will congregate and talk to each other. 

So let me give you an example, two examples actually, because they're stealth examples. One is the new design of playgrounds. The new playgrounds are typically designed round and benches are put around the periphery, facing inwards. Because two sets of children are playing with each other, their parents or guardians will sit on the benches and they'll start to talk to each other.  And so that's purposely designed to help facilitate that parental or adult interaction.  

The other thing has to do with pet ownership, specifically dogs. And so one of the things that certainly Edmonton is purposefully doing, Vancouver does it as well, is to promote dog and pet ownership. Because if you think about it, if you have a dog, you have to take it out for a walk. You're supposed to take it out for a walk a couple of times a day. Now, two people walking down the street that meet each other, both with dogs, what will they do? They'll talk to each other. I challenge you to go out in the street and stop a random stranger and try and strike up a conversation and see how awkward that is. But if you have a dog, you've got an excuse to talk to each other. So City of Edmonton also understands that when you have dog parks, the dog owners will talk to each other. And so they've been facilitating off leash dog parks. And that's one of the reasons why they explicitly do this, is to try and promote interaction between people. 

Those are just two examples. There's many, many other areas they're trying to design 15 minutes communities where you can walk everywhere. There's encouragement of supporting local business. We all like it when the business owner, when the person knows you, they know your coffee order, we appreciate that. So these are just some of the ways in which we're trying to address loneliness at a civic and municipal level. 

Meaghon: 

I love that, that civic and municipal level and the levers of planning are just so critical. And I will vouch for uh, the owning of a dog and being able to meet people. It's how I met, I have a dog and it's how I met most of my neighbors initially when I moved here six years ago was in the local dog park where you walk. So that's amazing that the City of Edmonton is actually encouraging that I wasn't aware of it. I know here in Calgary that Councillor Evan Spencer is very keen on asset based community development and really working with that moving forward, especially in planning. We're also part of a large project out of the University of Montreal on Quality in the Built Form. And I learned through Dr. Brian Sinclair who's an architect and professor at the U of C that our downtown in Calgary was absolutely built with the notion of keeping oil and gas workers sort of warehoused downtown. So that's why you have all these plus fifteen’s and there's no sort of ground level beauty or stimulation or areas to interact. And so we are now trying to back ourselves out of that through our forward planning as a city. But certainly now when I go downtown and I sort of see the coldness of the sidewalks and how you really are just trying to get from one place to the other without seeing anybody, it is quite amazing how our planning has and our orientation towards work over socialization has contributed to this. 

Richard  

Yeah, absolutely. That's true. We went down the wrong path, exactly as you described. Even in our housing, the way in which a few years ago, maybe a decade ago, a lot of the ways in which houses were designed to minimize interactions. So you wanted maximum privacy. So the builders built houses so that you could drive into your garage, nobody would see you if you went out into your back porch. It was sort of blocked from the view of the neighbors and so I'm not so sure that good fences make good neighbors necessarily. So now there's been this realization that now they're reverting back to ensure that people do have the opportunity to encounter each other on the street and talk to each other. 

Meaghon: 

Absolutely. How far do you think COVID set us back and some of those ambitions at a city level?  

Richard: 

That's a really good question. Absolutely. It set us back, I was really hopeful at the beginning of COVID for perverse reasons, not because of the COVID and the illness and that. But I think if we all remember at the very beginning of COVID, it's a little bit like the fire truck phenomena or like the dog phenomena I just described, is that people won't talk to each other. But if all of a sudden the fire engine pulls up and there's a fire, people will gather and they'll talk to each other. 

It gives them an excuse to talk to each other. The same thing seemed to happen to COVID. People couldn't go anywhere. But all of a sudden, everybody was out on the streets. Everybody was concerned about their neighbors and people were talking to each other on the street. And then we got into those more than doldrums, into that apathy where just everything shut down. 

We had no opportunities for socialization. The initial novelty of putting the lawn chairs in the garage in a big, wide circle to talk to each other or on the driveway, that sort of melted away. And so our businesses tell us that. Absolutely. Our businesses and entertainment facilities tell us that COVID was a big hit. And it's sort of only now that they're starting to come back. And I think we learned a little bit to not be as social and be a little bit more independent, which is not a good thing. So I think COVID did have, uh, an impact, for sure.  

Meaghon: 

That's interesting. The very beginning of COVID there's a group of people that we work with at Vibrant Vommunities who are people experiencing poverty right now, because that voice of lived experience is quite important. And so we sort of gathered them on a Zoom call for the first time. We didn't know what Zoom was, and we were there, and I would say as staff, we were quite concerned if you were living in poverty at the beginning of that pandemic, it was very uncertain before CERB or anything what was going to happen. So I'll speak from my perspective. I came on, I thought, okay, what are we going to do to support this community of lived experience? This is a very scary and unprecedented time. And one of the people in the group said, well, how are you as staff doing there? We're more concerned about you. We're all very connected and know how to help each other. And I thought it was sort of, that statement never left me because I thought, that's interesting. You are very differently equipped to manage this kind of crisis than people who are perhaps less connected and who rely on going out and watching things in movie theaters or whatever as a way to socialize.  

Richard: 

Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good point. I've seen exactly as you say, that sometimes people we would think are in more challenging social situations actually have developed the relationships and networks to look after each other and support each other. 

 We as sort of the system, try and come in and Cormac Rusell teaches us, we come in and we try and do things to people, or maybe we try and do things for people and that sort of paternalistic things. And then we've got nothing for me without me. But the most mature model is we'll do it ourselves. We'll tell you what help we need. You're welcome to help us and support us, but we know what's best for us. We know how to address our issues. So if we can get into that space where we can help. People are smart, people have lots of assets, everybody brings something. So if we can just help facilitate that, that will go a long way and that turns out to be the most effective way of doing things. 

Meaghon: 

Absolutely. And that framing as an asset is quite important. We did a shared measurement study of poverty across a lot of metrics in Calgary called Beneath The Surface. And one of the things that we did find actually was that the sort of social cohesion amongst more economically depressed groups in the city was much stronger than with other people and groups. And I think for that reason, this notion of hyper independence and getting things done and how our workplaces look have kind of fostered that in a large way amongst other economic groups.  

Richard: 

Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. And we have a lot to learn.  

Meaghon: 

We do. So pivoting a little to the health overall implications of loneliness, we know that all these systems exist in a very interrelated fashion, right? So we can't just tackle loneliness over here and not look at its impacts on physical health or overall mental health. What are some of those impacts of loneliness on our health as Albertans?  

Richard: 

Yeah, that's a really important question because the impacts of loneliness I don't think people realize the degree to which it impacts our health. And when we talk about health, we're usually meaning physical health, or we might understand mental health, but it actually is much more encompassing than that. So I guess you could say we've heard it said that people are social animals and we are, we need to have that human contact. 

We know that we have proof because of the converse. So when people don't have human contact, in other words, when they're lonely or when they're isolated, all sorts of bad things happen. And just to further frame this, when you think about some of the eastern traditions that talk about mind body, they were exactly right. 

 The mind is part of the body. There is no separation. So what happens? Well, when we're lonely, socially, um, and or socially isolated and don't have the contact that we would, human contact we would like to have, the body perceives it as a form of stress. So your body doesn't differentiate between appendicitis or a burst appendix, a broken bone, mental stress, psychological stress, emotional stress, it's all stress. The adverb is irrelevant. It's just plain stress, because the body's response is identical, no matter what the stress. And so your body perceives danger, so it sends out the patrols to watch for this danger. So it heightens the immune system, for example. 

And so I don't know, if you're walking through an old, dilapidated building and you imagine there might be spiders in that building, and all of a sudden a leaf falls on your shoulder, but you slap the leaf because you think it's a spider. Well, that's what your immune system does, metaphorically, is it starts sort of recognizing stuff it shouldn't recognize. 

And so it sets up this low level inflammation in the body, which affects all parts of the body. So in the brain, for example, it can alter the neurotransmitters and lead to things like depression and anxiety. It can lead to even things like brain fog, which is one of the things that's now recognized as long COVID. 

And it's because of that exact same inflammatory process. It can affect the blood vessels, leading to high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. It can cause abnormalities such that cancer cells aren't recognized and increase the incidence of cancer, facilitates dementia. So, basically, any bad thing that you can mention physically. 

So I'll give you a short list. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia are all facilitated by loneliness. We know there's study after study that have shown that people who experience loneliness have more of these bad things and have a shorter lifespan and increased mortality. One of the commonly quoted statistics that's been used for a long time now is that being lonely is the equivalent of smoking half a pack of cigarettes per day. 

That came out of a study in 2010 where they looked at all the impacts of loneliness that it could have, and they also looked at the impacts of other health sorts of things, like drinking too much or smoking too much or being sedentary or being obese. And anyway, the impact of loneliness, that's where it came from is that the impact of loneliness was the same as if you were a smoker. 

So that's how bad it is for our health. So it has this both physical and mental things that you would never imagine and never think about. And it's been the other way, is that if you start dealing with loneliness, you can reverse this. But even more scary is some experiments that were a little bit of an experiment that went wrong, or unintentionally went wrong, is they wanted to study the effect of loneliness and social isolation in people. 

And so they took healthy volunteers, which usually means university students that needed money, and they literally put them in solitary confinement for four weeks, 28 days, just like a prisoner would be in solitary confinement. And then after that, 28 days, they looked at what the physiological outcomes were, and what they found was that there were changes to the genetics, there were changes to the epigenetics. 

So epigenetics are sort of like the decorations on your genes that alter how the genes are expressed or suppressed. They, um, looked at the inflammatory markers, brain, all sorts of biological markers, and they found that there was this very significant impact on all of these aspects - all of these biomarkers, the genetics, the epigenetics, the inflammatory mediators. 

Then they brought them back six months later. And the really scary thing was that they found that some of these changes were permanent. Scientists have looked at this, and we can now draw a direct biological line or link between loneliness, social isolation, and all of these things that go wrong. 

 So we can explain why cancer rates are higher, why cardiovascular rates are higher, dementia rates are higher, depression rates are higher. So we know why we can explain it. It's not just airy fairy sort of stuff. I mean, that is alarming and urgent, I would say, in terms of the health impacts there. 

Meaghon: 

Some of the work we've looked at is in the US with the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, and calling loneliness the new smoking, which was very famously attached to the surgeon general's mission in the United States. There's a number of policy implications for that, and I would argue they're sort of talking a bit more about it in social policy circles, potentially in America, in ways that they hadn't been before. 

From that perspective, do you think that we are talking about it in the sort of policy realm as it relates to these health concerns as much as we should be here in Canada or in Alberta? 

Richard: 

I don't think so. So, as you point out, the United States Surgeon General has now highlighted this. It's certainly been highlighted in Great Britain, where they have a loneliness minister, I believe New Zealand also now is introducing one. World Health Organization, a few months ago also highlighted the importance of loneliness and social isolation on people's overall health and well-being. But maybe we're not really quite as aware as we should be here in Alberta and Canada. 

 Meaghon: 

One of the things if you work in poverty reduction, that kind of happens a lot, is that people will sort of touch the subject, engage with it for a little while, and then distance themselves from it, because poverty is hard. Poverty is hard and it's difficult, and it feels hard. It's hard to touch. So it's an interesting thing when you're working with a subject like poverty and trying to raise awareness of that in the social conscience to see how people react to it. In your experience, have people had that same sort of feeling about loneliness, is that like, a hard thing to dig into and to be around? 

Richard: 

I think it is. Everybody's been lonely at some time in their lives, so we've all experienced it. We know it's not a pleasant feeling, but I think sometimes we expect somebody else to solve it. So our federal government, like in Great Britain, is going to solve it, or our municipal government is going to solve it - somebody else's job. You need to do this to me, or you need to do this for me to solve the loneliness problem. But let's see if I can give you. If we do this, I'm pointing the finger at you. You're the trouble, you're the fault. But what are these things? These three fingers are pointing back at me. So that brings up the question, well, what's the solution to loneliness? And while I've given you examples of how our municipal governments, for example, or other governments can help and can contribute, it really is up to us, to the individuals to address loneliness. 

They did really good work in Great Britain around loneliness, and they did surveys, and they know, what do lonely people miss, particularly elderly people. They miss just sitting with somebody. They miss talking to somebody, they miss holding hands. They miss a hug, they miss sharing a meal. They miss going on a holiday. How much does that cost to deal with? It costs absolutely nothing. And it's not necessarily up to the senior center or the government or something to do it. Go to the neighbor next door, to the left or to the right or across the street. We can do something individually about loneliness. 

And it is for the greater good that we should be doing this. We know that the benefits to us to go help do something or help alleviate someone's loneliness, the good things that happen to us. Let's go back to these physiological measures. If we physiologically measured ourselves, all sorts of good things would happen to us. 

We would improve our mental health, we would improve our physical health and also make the person less lonely. So not only do we help the lonely person, we help ourselves, but we also help our society by doing this as well, because there's a dark side to loneliness as well. 

Meaghon: 

Very, yes. In systems change, we talk about the systems change iceberg and resource flows and policy, et cetera. But one of the bigger things there is around the mental model, how we're all thinking about something in any given time. If you think about smoking, there was the sort of, policies that were brought in and studies of the health implications. But it took like, quite a while for people's society's mental model around that to change. So thinking about the fact that cities are starting to plan differently, and hopefully healthcare systems are starting to really understand the importance of that prevention, investment and loneliness, what do you think it is about us as individuals in our society, from a mental model perspective, that needs to change? What is that barrier? That's just, we know it's good for us, but, like, exercise sometimes, but we're just not taking that step.  

Richard: 

That's a really good question. There's a little bit of natural sort of fear and hesitancy about doing that. It's a little bit like the fire engine example or the dog walking example I gave you where we need that excuse. We'd really like to, but we're afraid to make the first move. There's also a little bit, maybe there's a little bit of this selfishness too, or self interest, where we're so busy, as we said earlier, trying to make more money and accumulate more material possessions or whatever, and we miss what's important in life. 

And as I said, I don't think that we really recognize the overall benefit to our communities and to our society by ways in which we individually can address loneliness and decrease the prevalence, incidence and severity of loneliness.  

Meaghon: 

Maybe for listeners, I imagine a question that might start to arise is there's a strange paradox in that in some ways, I can open one of seven apps on my phone and I'm connected theoretically to all sorts of people that way. So these sort of social media connections and whatnot, that's just not the same, is it, though? That's not what we're talking about.  

Richard: 

That's absolutely correct. And that we have been deluded by technology, unfortunately. So, best way to explain it is Friday night, you want to go out on a date, or it's date night with your partner. So what do you do? You go to different rooms and zoom each other, or do you go out in person? What do you want to do? And it has been shown that, that physical to physical, face to face encounter really is important. It's not that technology is bad. I shouldn't go down that road. It's a tool. So, in COVID, if you couldn't have face to face, then, yes, it's a substitute. However,it's a really tricky area because there's also been studies that have been done and shown that the greater the social media and technology use, the greater the loneliness, and the more unhappy people are and that's why we all think about the lonely senior or the senior living alone, all lonely. 

And the paradox is, there's an inverse correlation between age and loneliness. It's actually younger people who are the more lonely. So, short answer. Social media is not a solution for face to face contact. We really, really need and crave that contact. And I don't want to distract us, but physical touch is also important.I did a whole talk on the importance of physical touch and hugs. And in my area, we hug each other. 

Meaghon: 

We're huggers here on this team as well. And I think I read some things and I couldn't be quoted on it, really. But in the pandemic, if you lived alone and actually didn't touch somebody for months, that does have an effect on your brain after some time, right? 

Richard: 

Yeah, absolutely. Let me quote you two studies, one in Sweden and one in England, that were done. And I guess this could be applicable to COVID. But they took, again, the proverbial university students. And both studies were almost identical. They divided them into two groups, one way, or they just characterized them as people that had high social contact and people that had low social contact. Then they purposely exposed them to a cold virus. They gave them a spray of cold virus up their nose, and they looked to see how many people got colds. And I bet you can guess what the result was. The people with high social contacts got fewer colds than people with low. 

So the lonely people actually ended up with more infections. But now we know why. Because they're lonely, they're stressed. Their immune system isn't working properly, necessarily in a good way. It's sort of working the wrong way. But then they also took uh, the group and they divided them, sliced and dice them a different way - high huggers and low huggers. And you want to guess what the result was? The high huggers got fewer colds than the low huggers. So what did we do with COVID? We isolated people, we prevented physical touch. And then we thought that was going to prevent COVID, which, I mean, it did. But the paradox is that human touch, that human contact actually has a physical benefit in preventing infections.  

Meaghon: 

Wow, that's incredible. One thing that we read in a piece of research that was done locally here in Calgary about coming out of the pandemic and how we didn't do that well was that after most natural disasters or wars, there's always been venues for collective grief. We didn't have collective grief after COVID, which, if you think about it, I guess from the sort of social cohesion or loneliness perspective could probably have. We've missed something there, haven't we? Coming out of it.  

Richard: 

Yeah, that's right. Again, the community needs to come together and community, however you define community.  

 Meaghon: 

You spoke quite a bit about, uh, planning a focus on asset-based community development. But to round us out, if you had a magic wand and could point at orders of government to take a first big step to address loneliness, what would some of those steps be?  

Richard: 

This is going to sound silly, but I, uh, would have our leaders, our premier, our mayor, our prime minister, whatever, go on, whatever media, TV, whatever, and say, everybody please walk out your front door, go meet the neighbor on your left, meet the neighbor on your right, meet the neighbor across from you. 

Whether it's a country mile or a country 1.6 kilometer or next door in the apartment, next door in the house. Get to know them. One of the things we know that our cities are doing, they're looking at environmental disasters and environmental challenges. And what they point out and what we've learned actually in Canada, because we've had a lot of everything, floods, fires, ice storms - so we've sort of been the epicenter of learning about this. But what we have learned is that first responders are not - we think of them as police, fire, animals, but first responders are your neighbors. Who's going to look after you if your power goes out and theirs doesn't, or if your power goes out? 

You can't cook food. Well, maybe the neighbor has a barbecue or a propane stove. Maybe they've got some water that they can share. If you're injured, maybe they'll help you. So your neighbors are your first responders, they are the people that will help you. So just being selfish about it, get to know your neighbors. 

 So we've actually met in City of Edmonton and I'm hoping City of Calgary is going to go the same way as well. They're well on the road and all of Alberta, all of Canada, all of the world in fact, is to be able to create ways in which, help create ways in which we can get to know our neighbors. We have the idea of the block party which in the olden days used to have a permit, you used to have to pay to have the street blocked off. Now you don't need a permit, you don't need to pay. And the city council in Edmonton, if you would send them an invitation, they'll show up with ice cream actually. So they're trying to promote simple block party as a way to get to know each other. So it's very simple. If you know somebody next know promoting this idea that is lonely and isolated, go take them a meal, have the meal with them, nothing sophisticated or challenging. It comes back to that individual level promotion, facilitation, explanation, education around just what we could do as individuals and sort of a little bit of not only will they benefit, we'll benefit twice as much.  

Meaghon: 

It's so aligned with something we say here all the time and certainly through the pandemic, which is that our best poverty reduction strategy is to get to know your neighbor. And that's often surprising when we say it in the media or somewhere else. But I think you have tenfold helped us understand why that's the case. And so deeply want to thank you. Is there anything that we didn't cover in our time together that you'd like to highlight before we round out? 

Richard:  

Well, there's one other aspect, it's a dark aspect. So if you're like my wife at the scary movie, then now is the time to close your eyes because there are other societal consequences to loneliness. And we do know that some individuals who experience loneliness, they become disenfranchised and they start to blame their problems on others - people with different skin colors, people with different religions, people from different cultural groups and some of the research that has been done, and this came out in the very unfortunate incident in London, Ontario, in the trial. And then the information came out around know loneliness and social isolation can lead to these forms of extremism and blame against these nebulous groups. 

So, we have to take some responsibility and accountability for that as well. So it's not just the elderly, widowed neighbor. It can be the young person next door who seems to have no friends and we know that community can really mitigate against those sorts of things. 

Meaghon: 

Richard, I'm so glad you brought that up, because it is such an urgent challenge. I think a lot of us are finding right now is the difficulty to have conversations in a way that aren't in a very polarized ecosystem or one where people are kind of feeling quite angry. Conversations we have now are very different, I would say, at least in our sector, than they were five years ago from a public realm. So if we post a media story, we might have done with a topic that seems actually relatively benign, can get a lot of just sort of online hate, for example, for just one viewpoint of many. It's so interesting to hear tackling loneliness as a way to start, to sort of curb some of that polarization and extremism as well. I don't know that that gets the attention. It should.  

Richard: 

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And it really should get that attention. And, uh, we're really good at the not in my backyard. So some of the urban planning that's going on in Alberta, again, very much an awareness of, we need to have mixed and blended communities, different ages, different income levels, different cultures, this whole mosaic because that really promotes understanding, as it's a little bit cliche of a lot of the bad things that can happen in society happening because of fear and lack of understanding. 

And that is true. But when we do create neighborhoods and living spaces where we can interact and understand and meet people, a variety of people, that also helps, uh, overall. I know our police chiefs of police would tell us exactly the same thing. The best way to prevent crime is by what we just described, not by more police. 

 Meaghon: 

Incredible. Thank you so much. My deep gratitude for the work that you are doing and for shining a light on this. It is perhaps one of our most pressing crises, I think, in a way, to really tackle. And we are very good at talking about homelessness and climate, which, of course, we agree are in crisis as well. 

But if we're not, um, equipped to work with each other in a way, to, uh, tackle those together as communities, one could argue there's almost no point in starting. We have to be able to connect first to more better tackle those big challenges, wouldn't you say?  

Richard: 

Yeah, absolutely. And again, as I said at the beginning, if we had vibrant communities, if we knew each other, we wouldn't have homelessness. We wouldn't have poverty, we wouldn't have food insecurity, because we would be looking after each other. We like to partition. People say, it's them, it's them, the poor, it's them, the whatever. It's not them, it's us. They're all of us. We are all one together. And I like to say that Costa Rica, who has very high health standards, likes to say or quote that health is a form of wellness created by community. 

 Meaghon: 

Powerful words to leave us on. And if you are listening to this podcast, a challenge to you would be to leave your house, your apartment, whatever space you're in, and to go and get to know your neighbor. That will be the best thing that you can do for your health and if we all do that for our community's health. So thank you so much for spending this time with us. We like to close out with a bit of a fun question. I'm going to take a different spin on what we usually ask people. If we were to come meet you in Edmonton, uh, next week, what's the best sort of social loneliness busting space you could bring us to up there? 

 Richard: 

Oh, any of our parks in the city, they're trying to again, promote social interaction, but there's also one coffee shop or cafe that's a combined bookstore and cafe. And I met sort of a mentor or advisor on asset based community development there. But it brings people in and the tables are in between the shelves of the books and it, uh, really brings people in from the community. And just this is that real community business. It's a coffee shop and a bookstore all in one and literally merged. It's not the coffee section in the bookstore. It's all mixed in together.  

Meaghon: 

Wow.  

Richard: 

Be one of the two places.  

Meaghon: 

That sounds amazing. Hope to meet you there someday. And we love a competition between Edmonton and Calgary. So Calgary, there is a challenge to come up with a similar local business. That actually sounds really amazing. Well, thank you again for spending this time with us.  

Richard: 

Thanks very much and thanks for the opportunity. 

Outro: 

Thanks for listening to Let's Talk Poverty. Subscribe, check out more episodes on enoughforall.ca and follow us on social at @vibrantcalgary. Thanks for listening.