An OpEd written by Julia Stoumbos, director of aging-in-place programs for The Henry and Marilyn Taub Foundation and co-facilitator of the North Jersey Alliance of Age-Friendly Communities, was published Jan. 30 on the NJ Spotlight news site:
Here’s an excerpt: In a culture where images dominate most of our communications, there is one social phenomenon we only have the faintest sketches of — social isolation.
Lonely people don’t take selfies and post them to their Facebook timelines. Many of us might stop and wonder about the people inside these quiet homes, but we can’t fill in the outlined images of lives lived mostly in seclusion.
To treat what is increasingly being viewed as a health threat as insidious as obesity and smoking, we need to see more than the broad strokes. That’s why the North Jersey Alliance of Age-Friendly Communities was gratified to see the advance of state legislation requiring a deeper look at the growing epidemic of social isolation.
Click Here to Read the Full Article.