Category Archives: Loneliness

Communist Kids

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Fellow Feeing, Health, Loneliness

 

If anyone has been following my posts about Romania, they know I love the country and the people of Romania.  There is however one serious black spot on that record. It goes back to the closing days of the Communist regime led by Nicolae Ceaușescu.

 

The one more aspect of the Ceaușescu regime I want to talk about is its attitude to children. This may seem surprising. It was surprising to me.

 

First of all, we must remember that under Communist dictatorship the economy in the late 1980s had sunk badly. Things were so bad that many good people could not feed and clothe their families anymore. Many of them believed they had no choice but to give up their children to the state. Imagine how desperate they were to do that!

 

President Nicolae Ceaușescu’s attempts to implement family policies led to a significant growth of the population and as a result the ailing economy could not keep up and instead the country saw a growing number of illegal abortions and increasing numbers of orphans in state institutions. Frankly, I don’t understand entirely how this could happen, but it was the result of an economic mess.

 

Ceaușescu, like so many conservative political leaders including Donald Trump and his mentor Viktor Orban of Hungary, are Natalists. Ceaușescu for example wanted each Romanian woman to rear at least 5 children. They supported efforts to increase the local population, rather than admitting immigrants.  They wanted more of “us” and less of “them.” Donald Trump really is doing the same thing. In the US, “us’ of course means the white nation who must be protected from the assaults of the immigrants and other strangers. Even though Trump says the country is full and there is no room for more immigrants, he wants the population to grow. Just not with immigrants.

 

The Ceaușescu government increased restrictions on abortion. Added to that, the communist regime was also opposed to family planning. As a result, the population increased dramatically, but could not handle the increase, partly because of their sick economy.

 

In Romania Ceaușescu’s policies led to disaster. These policies together with decaying economics led to a strong uptick in abortions. In Romania, many people felt they could not support families anymore so they gave them up to orphanages to a shocking extent. And orphanages are the not the best place for children to be raised.

 

Money became even scarcer for these institutions when the Ceaușescu regime decided it needed to divert funds to pay for its foreign debt and expenses for the massive People’s Palace that had to be paid. Because of the economic reversal, electricity and heating was reduced as well. Food was often scarce and there were just not enough staff to give the children the loving care they needed.

 

The absence of personal loving care and attention was the major problem in the orphanages. Because of the neglect of the children, many of the children grew up with physical and mental development delays. Some of those children were given false diagnoses from untrained physicians and nurses. Jon Hamilton, a journalist with National Public Radio in the US said this,

 

“A lot of what scientists know about parental bonding and the brain comes from studies of children who spent time in Romanian orphanages during the 1980s and 1990s.”

 

Those studies were made with extreme subjects. The neglect of children there and their subsequent suffering led to many of them growing up with severe mental and physical health challenges. The conditions of the Romanian orphanages showed that not only is nutrition vital to a child’s development, so is “basic human contact.” This is what I call fellow-feeling.

 

Because of the absence of basic human contact, many babies in Romanian Orphanages developed without stimulation which led to self-stimulation such as hand flapping or rocking back and forth. These conditions also led to frequent misdiagnoses of mental disabilities that forced children to go to inappropriate institutions for inappropriate treatments. Many of those children were given the wrong medications or were tied to their beds to prevent self-harm.

 

As many North American adoptive parents learned, after those Romanian children were adopted, the children still had serious problems in forming attachments to their new parents. Some of the them could not discriminate their new mothers from complete strangers. Scientists also learned that many of the children in orphanages grew up with smaller brains than average children.

 

 

I think it is generally acknowledged that the most important aspect of ideal care for infants is for the child to develop a healthy relationship with at least one caregiver. That is essential for the child’s successful social and emotional development. It is particularly important to help the child to learn to regulate his or her emotions and feelings. According to NPR, “In the Romanian orphanages, children had grown accustomed to neglect in early infancy.” These were lonely beginnings so many of the young children of Romania, particularly in orphanages were not nurtured with love and care. Of course, when people from North America and other places came to adopt these children, many of those children had trouble forming good solid emotional relationship with their loving adoptive parents there. Many did not get a good start in America and Canada either. They brought the pain here.

 

This led to absolute disaster. I will talk about that in my next post. It is a gruesome story.

Point Prim Nova Scotia

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Geology, Loneliness

 

In the afternoon at Digby Nova Scotia  we took a very short drive to Point Prim lighthouse at the tip of a small peninsula facing the Bay of Fundy. In my view the standard place for a photograph, from the trail leading to it, did not offer a good place for photographs. So I walked out to a rock shelf overlooking the beach and in the opposite direction offering the lighthouse. It was a bit of a perilous viewpoint however. At least to a big chicken like me. I was too scared to walk to the edge like some local kids were doing. We met a man here who was running for the municipal election, but sadly, I forgot his name so later could not determine if he had won or not. He seemed like a good man on a family walk in the park.

 

Point Prim is a special place for local. At one time the foghorn was a constant reminder of the lighthouse nearby and helped to attract many of them out to the park. A plaque referred to it as “a wondrous trumpet echoing across the bay.”

 

It is also a great place to see the channel between the Annapolis Basin and the Bay of Fundy. The locals call this the Digby Gut. In Mi’Kmaq it is called Tuitnuk, meaning simply, the outflow. The Bay of Fundy gets its name from a French word fendu meaning “split”.

 

Chris enjoying the sun along the coast

In 1605 Samuel Champlain and Pierre Dugua de Mons ventured through this area which they estimated could hold 200 boats. Later that year he returned to establish the first European settlement north of Florida and called it Port Royal in honour of the King. It is still there but the name has changed to Annapolis Royal.

 

The first lighthouse here was built in 1804 long before Confederation. It only lasted for 2 years before it burned to the ground.  A replacement was built in 1817 by the regional coast guard.

 

This is called Krumholz.  In German that means “crooked wood.”  That is trees created by winds off icy coast that makes it difficult for branches to grow on the windy side of the tree.

 

 

The exposed bedrock on which I was clambering was created 201 million years ago. The volcanic rock was the result of eruptions that occurred when Pangea, the massive continent that was at the time the only continent in the world, started to break up into separate continents. The octagonal (sort of ) shapes of volcanic columns that are now just stumps as a result of thousands of years of erosion.  When we travelled to Ireland in 2009 we saw large columns  of such rocks as part of the Giant’s Causeway, that were protruding out of the ground, because they had somehow escaped the glaciers. Here the ice has pummelled them down to bedrock.

The Digby Gut was a channel  that was formed by thousands of years of erosion mainly from continental glaciers, along a fault line that is now the Bear River. That is where we travelled next.

 

 

Epidemic of Despair  

Alienation, Health, Loneliness, Social Issues, Substance Abuse

 

When Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who besides being a physician is also a periodic commentator on CNN  first started looking at the deaths in the white middle class that included deaths by opioid overdose, suicide, cirrhosis of the liver, it felt a bit mysterious. He was struck by the numbers but did not really understand the causes. It took some time for him to piece things together.

 

He found an interesting article with an interesting title. This was “The Epidemic of Despair Among White Americans: Trends in the Leading Causes of Premature Death, 1999-2015” published by Elizabeth Stein, MD. MS, Keith P Gennuso, PhD, […] and Patrick Remington, MD MPH in the medical journal American Journal of Public Health. An epidemic of despair? That is very strong language? Is it justified? Gupta wanted to know. So did I.

Dr. Gupta wanted to know, ‘what causes those deaths of despair?’ That is an important question. He was not satisfied with the medical causes of death. He wanted to know ‘the cause of the cause.’ He, like me, thought that was a much more significant question. But this one is harder to tackle.

Why are people taking so many opioids?  Why are they becoming addicted? Part of it is overprescribing for which physicians are responsible. Why are so many people drinking to excess? Why are so many people dying of suicide. Is there a common cause of the cause?

As Neurosurgery Resident Kumar Vasudevan put it, “We are living in a time in which we are very, very good at treating diseases, we are less good and less proficient at understanding health.”  I would add, that many of us are reluctant to look at social causes, and, believe it or not, political causes. Is that possible?

As Dr. Gupta said, “deaths of despair seem to be a symptom of an underlying problem, rather than the problem itself.” Cyril Wecht believes that the underlying problem is that American society is increasingly stressed. Pressures make lives more and more difficult. Pressures of making a living, depersonalization, families breaking up, and what he calls the “robotization of society.”

But there were also things that happened on the side of medicine. The idea began to flourish that people should not have to suffer. If they suffer that was seen as a failure of medicine. There always seem to be simple solutions–write a prescription. Drugs can take care of any problem. But simple solutions are often the most dangerous. And prescriptions were one of them.

Of course there is more to it than this. Let’s look farther.

A Uniquely Stupid Decade

2016 Trip to Southwest USA, Alienation, Decline of the west, Health, Loneliness, Social Issues, Social Media

 

A few years after he appeared on the Bill Maher show which I posted about yesterday, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, showed up on Amanpour and Co. expanding on his ideas about moral mistakes of the past. He was again explaining how social media was a problem but as always he did so in a very nuanced fashion and based his comments on scientific data. He is not free range pundits spouting off without restraint. Now don’t make nasty suggestions about me.

 

Haidt spoke with Hari Sreenivasan about the corrosive effects of new technology and how they have transformed the face of society, how they could be improved, and how drastically they have affected young people in North America. They talked a lot about an article he had written in the Atlantic with the engaging title “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” It actually sums up nicely a lot of his thinking. He is actually working on book on the subject that I am looking forward to reading.

 

Haidt has been researching what social media is doing to the minds of children, the behaviors of children, and how maybe that contributes to the larger issues he is thinking about. He wants to go beyond the effects of new technology, and consider the effects on society. His research has showed how kids were the canaries in the coal mine and the ill effects they suffered were also suffered by adults later on. He says social media helped to make the decade from 2010 to 2020 a stupid one. Sreenivasan called it “stupefaction.”

 

This is how Haidt summed it up on Amanpour & Co. on American PBS in 2022:

 

“…something changed, something fundamentally changed in the nature of this social universe, in the early 2010s. And everything got weird and kind of stupid after that. And we see it clearly — most clearly with that the kids. All kids have been on screens all the time. When I was a kid, when you were a kid, we watched too much television. We couldn’t take the television with us to school or into the bedroom, and something changed when kids got smartphones. And it’s not just the phone, it’s especially social media. The girls went right for the digital platforms. Instagram and Tumblr. The boys went more for YouTube and video games. And at the time, people said, well, you know, maybe this is good for them to have so much stimulation. But actually, what happened, beginning in 2012, was that rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide all began going up. I mean, it wasn’t a gradual thing, it was like they were sort of stable until 2012 and then, it’s like a hockey stick. They’re now — most of them are 100 percent higher, we kind of doubled it, of the rates of suicide, self-harm, depression and anxiety. So, that has really drawn me in because this, I think, was a national emergency. One that is tractable. And I’ve been studying this in depth to try to figure out what is the evidence that social media actually is a contributor, and there is a fair amount now.”

 

Haidt is sensitive to the fact that many people will shout out that analysts like him and others have cried wolf in the past about the evil nature of modern technology. As he said.

 

“…there’s a long history of moral panic, especially around technology. And I’ve been engaging with other psychologists who say I’m fomenting a moral panic. And they’re right to be concerned about that because most of the previous times we freaked out about technology, it hasn’t been actually anything. This time, we believe is different for a couple of reasons. The first is that there’s never been a hockey stick graph, like that that sudden upturn in mental health problems. So, this time, it’s different. Two is that the timing is exactly what you would expect for social media. It’s not a gradual thing. It’s not like something changed and then something else kind of changed. As soon as most kids get on social media and right then, the next very year, rates of depression and anxiety start going up. And then, a final kind of data is, the kids themselves say it. I mean, when we were growing up, we didn’t say, yes, you know, television is making us crazy. Mom and dad, you know, do something. But if you talk to the kids,  about Facebook, Instagram, they talk to the kids and guess what, they say, yes, Instagram is what’s making us depressed and anxious.”

 

I have been trying to show that there is some serious rot in western society. Not that it is all bad. But there sure is some bad stuff around. Any society that allows it is to some extent in serious decline even though there are many good aspects  to it to. I will continue on the this in my next post.

 

Social Connections

Alienation, Loneliness

 

A lot people believe if they just have a little more money all will be well. Even extremely wealthy people tend to believe this. They all think they need a little bit more.

These people don’t realize that what makes people happy (as long as they have a basic minimum of money and resources) is genuine social connections.  This is what provides fulfilling lives, not more money. Most of us have plenty of money (except me, I need a lot more of course). Many of us have insufficient social connections, or at least insufficient quality of social connections. We should work on improving the quality of our social connections, less on earning more money. Those who have these are the lucky people. Not the wealthy people.