(Anthony Tran/Unsplash)
“Reach out and touch someone,” went the old jingle for AT&T.
Back in the days of paid long-distance (and phones attached to walls) the nation’s first telecommunications company hawked a bargain. Getting a telephone call from a faraway loved one was a time for great excitement.
“Reaching out to touch someone” always was considered money well spent. You lifted someone’s spirits.
Turns out, a simple telephone call really can do wonders to cheer up a lonely person. Research published online today in JAMA Psychiatry shows that calls made to shut-ins by quickly trained youths significantly reduced symptoms of loneliness.
Lead author Maninder K. Kahlon of the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School and colleagues wanted to know if lay people trained on a dime could make a difference in the mental health of the shut ins.
Loneliness can be responsible for several health complications, from stroke to heart disease. It also is associated with depression and anxiety.
Throw in COVID-19 and work-at-home orders and people are feeling more isolated than ever before. “Few interventions have been shown to be effective, and the mental health workforce is already constrained,” the authors said of loneliness in the COVID era.
“With the onset of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), there has been concern about the effect of increased isolation on loneliness and other mental health conditions,” the authors explained. “For older adults, those most socioeconomically vulnerable are likely to be at greatest risk.”
Empathetic callers as good as certified counselors?
Training the callers in empathy meant teaching them to genuinely listen to others and respond with care and consideration.
Just a few calls a week for four weeks kept people at risk for loneliness out of the doldrums. The approximately 240 study participants came from a Meals on Wheels program.
“A 4-week, telephone-based, empathy-focused program delivered during the summer of 2020 reduced loneliness, depression, and anxiety in homebound, largely single, adults who require meals from a community-based provider,” the authors concluded.
“Few prior programs have been shown to reduce loneliness through high-quality randomized trials,” the authors explained. “The studies that have shown moderate to larger reductions in loneliness implement some form of cognitive behavioral therapy.”
Counseling, however, must be delivered by certified therapists. “Compared with other intervention programs designed to reduce loneliness, our program required two hours of training for callers, no degree requirements, and no training on new tools for participants,” the study boasted.
Program easy to deploy to sects of loneliness
The researchers were able to react nimbly with the trained youths to a problem with loneliness in Texas.
“In March 2020, we became aware of the challenges facing Meals on Wheels Central Texas (MOWCTX) clients because of reduced contact,” the authors explained. “In response, we designed a program that could be rapidly spun up and deployed.
“The telephone calls program involves laypeople engaging regularly, with empathetic intention, through telephone calls with participants. Empathy was functionally defined as prioritizing listening and eliciting conversation from the participant on topics of their choice.
“The intervention was modeled as a continual support program, with higher frequency of contact in the first week dropping based on personal preference to lower frequency of contact,” the authors explained.
“Although participants reported a high degree of satisfaction with the calls, we are unable to comment on whether the degree of empathy of callers or duration of conversations affected outcomes.… However, all recruited callers were likely to want to serve this population, suggesting a potential factor in replicating these effects.”
The simplicity of the loneliness intervention is its strength, the researchers said. “The use of lay callers, deliberate but brief approach on training, and the use of ubiquitous telephones made the approach easily deployable and scalable.”