Last year, the U.S.'s highest authority on public health declared an epidemic. Not of an infectious disease, but of something else: loneliness.
Loneliness carries an increased risk of not only anxiety, depression, and suicide, but also dementia, heart disease, stroke, and premature death. Its health risks are comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
And loneliness is widespread: a recent Gallup poll found that one in five Americans experience loneliness for a lot of the day.
As concern about this issue expands, so too have calls for solutions. I sat down with Ashley Kirsner, a former psychology researcher and suicide hotline operator, who started “Skip the Small Talk,” an event aimed at helping people connect.
Note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. It includes a discussion of suicide.
Isabella Jibilian:
What is Skip the Small Talk?
Ashley Kirsner:
It’s an event where there’s a facilitator and we use question prompts based on psychology research to help people have one-on-one conversations that are a little more vulnerable than you might get to.
You talk to one person using a question prompt that we offer and then switch off every 10 minutes or so.
Jibilian:
How did you get the idea for Skip the Small Talk?
Kirsner:
It started when I was volunteering at the suicide hotline. No matter who I was talking to, they generally had someone who cared about them in their life. But when I asked them, “Have you talked about how you’re feeling with that person?” Almost across the board, people would say, “We just don’t talk about that sort of thing,” or, “No, I don’t want to be a burden.”
It was really striking to me that you can still feel lonely even with having someone who cares about you. It just seemed like the determining factor of whether you were lonely or not was whether you felt comfortable opening up to those people.
So I was wondering, can we stick people in the same room where the norm is going to be: we’re all going to try out being more vulnerable with each other.
Jibilian:
What are some of the takeaways from having a deep conversation with a stranger?
Kirsner:
I think of it as a quick dose of human connection. We had a third-party researcher study our events, and they found that the worse the mood that you were in when you attended an event, the larger the mood boost you saw coming out of the event.
People also tell me that when they go home to their roommates, their partners, or their family, they feel more comfortable opening up. I’ve heard a lot of stories of, “I went to this event and then I went home and I actually had the best two-hour-long conversation with my partner.”
Skip the Small Talk has regular events in Providence. For their schedule, see the Skip the Small Talk website.
And for more, watch our story on “Rhode Island PBS Weekly":
