One is the Loneliest Number: Connecting Elders to Each Other

My story starts when I was 18 months old, and I was adopted in London by a white, British, middle-class family. I think when the social worker handed me over, she would have thought that on that day she was handing me over to a good life, to a happy life and a happy adoption.

I have to say, in my very early years, that was true. I couldn’t have wished for more. I was Daddy’s girl. I was spoiled and had everything I really wanted. My early childhood years were just brilliant, just a brilliant time from being adopted up until the age of 12, when life really just changed for me overnight.

My best friend was my father. And when I was 12, my father raped me.

From that moment on, my life went out of control. If you were to ask me, would I have told anybody? Absolutely not. He was my best friend. Would I have told my mother? Absolutely not. I wasn’t particularly close to her.

I stayed in that cycle of abuse for a couple of years, being abused on a weekly basis, really just trying to get through day to day and believing that actually this was my fault and I was to blame.

At 14, my mother got up and left, and left me with my father. And he said to me at that time, “From now on, you can sleep in my bed every night.”

And I knew, from 14 years onwards, that, well, I felt my life was over.

I sank into suicidal misery and despair. I was self-harming. I was taking tablets. I was drinking. I was running away from home. I was trying to do everything to block out what was happening to me, to anesthetize myself from what was happening to me.

And I remember, on one occasion in London, I had run away and I was sleeping rough for a couple of days, still going back home, bizarrely. It was my way of coping.

But I remember sleeping rough and going into a phone box, if any of you can remember the days before cell phones. There was a time before we had cell phones. And I went into a phone box, and there was a phone number in there for an organization called Samaritans, which is a UK organization that has been around for about 60 years, and it’s there for people who are in crisis, who are suicidal.

I phoned that number that day. I didn’t know what to expect. I felt very, very alone. I didn’t want to lose control. I didn’t want anyone swooping in and taking control away from me. But I just knew I didn’t want to be here, and I didn’t know what to do next.

If any of you have ever felt suicidal, you’ll know that’s the scariest place in the world, because being scared of what’s in your own head is really, really scary. How do you get away from your own head?

Anyway, I called the number, and a lady called Pam answered. She talked to me, and over a series of a few phone calls, which actually repeated over a few weeks and a few months with different people who answered that phone, I eventually got to a point where I could seek support and seek help.

It wasn’t something that happened overnight, but it got me on that road to getting that support.

And the reason I got that support in the end was because that service was free, confidential and available 24/7. I felt in control, and I wasn’t talking to anyone who was a clinician.

Nothing against any clinicians in the room or medically trained people, but actually, at that point, I didn’t want to talk to anybody who was going to sort this out for me. I wanted someone to stand alongside me and go through the pain that I was experiencing.

And that’s exactly what Samaritans did.

Now, the reason I tell you that story, because I realize we’re at an End Well conference, and you might be wondering why I’m telling that story, is just so you understand a bit about me, about my motivation, about my journey and what I’ve gone through. Because actually, that’s important to what happens next.

I think if you cut me in half, the words “helpline, confidential, 24/7” would probably fall out of me. So that’s who I am, and that’s what I’m about.

So I’ll talk about what I’m supposed to be talking to you about now.

I come from London with news. I’ve got good news, and I’ve got bad news. Okay? You might want to take note of this groundbreaking revelation.

The good news is we’re all living longer.

Okay, the bad news is we’re all living longer.

You might want to take note of that. You may not have realized this groundbreaking news was coming.

The good news, yes, is we’re all living longer. One in four children born today will live to 100.

The bad news is that loneliness and isolation are now becoming a huge epidemic, particularly among older people.

We now know, from what has been reported over the last few years, that the health risks are as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. We know it increases the incidence of heart failure. We know it increases the incidence of early-onset dementia. We know it increases high blood pressure. We know it can lead to drug and alcohol dependence.

Loneliness is bad news. It’s really, really bad news.

And for any people who like stats in the audience, I was reading recently that if the population grows in the same way it has over the last 20 years, at the same time as the loneliness epidemic continues, if we think of a country like China, with the huge population there, by 2050 there will be 90 million lonely older people in China.

Just one country. Ninety million older people.

This is a juggernaut. And I feel we do still have the ability to stop this juggernaut.

Loneliness is not something that happens to other people. All of us may have felt lonely at a time in our lives. But this is something we can influence and that we can change.

A definition of loneliness that I particularly like is that it’s a subjective mismatch between the quality and quantity of relationships that we have and those that we want.

And for me, that explains why some people can live alone all their lives, maybe have a very small group of friends and not feel lonely. Other people can be surrounded by huge numbers of people and still feel lonely.

It’s actually the mismatch between the quality and quantity of those relationships, and the mismatch between what you would like and what you have.

So this is a huge problem for us. And I haven’t come here to depress you with bad news. Hopefully, now I’m going to talk a little bit about the solution and what we’ve done in the UK to try to address this.

Now, I don’t know whether to be delighted or sad at this fact, because I think internationally this is now a topic people are talking about. Last year in the UK, our government appointed a Minister for Loneliness.

Now, is that good news, or should I be ashamed? Because actually, we might as well say, can we have a minister for talking to each other? Can we have a minister for being connected? Can we have a minister for just talking to your neighbor?

In a way, it’s embarrassing that we have to have a minister to point out to us that we might want to talk to our neighbor.

I mean, it’s great. I don’t want to be against the British government. We won’t do politics. And you’ll probably get one one day as well, a Minister for Loneliness.

And if you can work out what they’re doing as well, that’s great.

But I think it’s sad at this point that we have to have a minister to tell us to connect with each other and to look out for each other.

Back in 2012, we had a broadcaster and journalist in the UK called Esther Rantzen, who is very famous and has a high profile. Her husband died, and she wrote in the paper about her own loneliness and isolation.

She received such a huge response from the public, people saying, “Esther, if you can say you’re lonely, that gives me permission to.”

And I think what she realized was that there’s a whole stigma. The first problem is the stigma around talking about loneliness and isolation.

She contacted me because she knew me through my work with Samaritans. I’d later gone on to become a volunteer, and I got to know Esther through Samaritans.

She contacted me and said, would I come along and work with her just to test out an idea? If a helpline like Samaritans had helped me so much, would something as simple as a free, confidential, 24/7 helpline for older people be the answer?

So she invited me along. Weirdest job interview ever, to be chief executive of myself, because the organization didn’t exist.

My board meetings were the best in those days. It’s all gone downhill since.

But I became chief executive of myself, and we set up the Silver Line in 2012.

Why did we call it the Silver Line? I see I’m on brand here with the silver hair. But actually, silver is a precious metal, and we very much thought that older people are precious.

This isn’t about, “You poor older person who’s lonely. Ring this helpline.” This is about precious people who have a lifetime of memories and experiences.

So we set up a pilot of the helpline in 2012 in the northwest of England.

For any of you involved in the charity world, you know funding is really, really hard. And one of the main challenges when you’re looking for funding is evaluating impact.

It’s very difficult to evaluate impact. If someone’s 95 with a terminal illness, it feels pretty dreadful to actually say, “How did you feel before you called the helpline? How did you feel afterward?”

There are some things we can fix and some things we can’t, so it’s very difficult to measure that impact.

But over that year, we did a lot of that evaluation. We started out with very little money in the bank, but as a result of that, we attracted some funding from a large trust and foundation in the UK, which enabled us to launch the helpline nationally in 2013.

What we offer through the helpline is a 24/7 service.

We have a mixture of volunteers and paid staff. They’re not professional people. Similar to Samaritans, they are there all the time, listening and not giving advice, but being empathetic and being alongside people.

We also have volunteer befrienders who make weekly phone calls to older people.

We knew when we did our survey that 80 percent of the people we talked to said television was their main form of company, and 15 percent said they had not talked to anyone for the last three to four weeks.

So we knew we were trying to reach the most isolated older people.

One thing we wanted to do when we thought about the name Silver Line and what we are was not to describe ourselves as a helpline for lonely older people. Because the moment you put the word “lonely” in, no one’s going to ring you, because there’s a stigma.

So we’re very vague. We are a helpline for older people. We don’t even state an age, because we don’t want someone to feel they can’t ring.

We offer the 24/7 helpline. We offer the friendship service, through which volunteers make weekly calls.

We also offer something called Silver Circles, which are group friendship calls.

One man said to me that this was the first time he had talked to more than one person in 10 years. We take talking to more than one person for granted.

And we have these brilliant calls. We have a gardening group. We have a book group. We have the funniest one, which is the music group, where people actually play musical instruments down the phone.

Have you heard anything like it?

They’re not necessarily playing the same tune at the same time. It is something like music. But actually, sharing music with another person is just really, really important.

So we’ve got these brilliant groups going on.

What we also found, and I think this comes from my work with Samaritans, is that I went back to volunteer because I felt Samaritans had helped me so much.

What we find with the Silver Line is that a lot of people who are helped by the Silver Line are now volunteering for the Silver Line.

And again, we don’t want to call people service users. People who use our service are called Silver Liners. They see themselves as part of our club. They want to be part of the club.

Our oldest volunteer is 93, and she supports a 96-year-old.

Who’s supporting whom? I don’t know. But there’s reminiscence there.

Actually, this isn’t about saying, “You are the poor, lonely older person over here, and you are the supreme volunteer.”

It’s saying, “You’ve got some interests. You can talk to each other, and you can actually help each other.”

And that’s really, really important.

So we launched in November 2013. To date, we’ve taken just under three million phone calls. We have more than 230 staff, and we’ve trained 4,500 volunteers who make weekly calls from their own homes.

This is a really, really simple idea. In a way, we wonder why we didn’t do this before. But the impact has been huge.

We are now evaluating, with the people who call our service, what the difference is to their well-being and how connected they are now.

Some people have actually said, “I don’t need a volunteer now. Release my volunteer to someone else, because actually, I’m out in my community and I’m doing stuff.”

We want to connect people back into the local community, but we want people to be part of the family. And that’s really important to us, to be part of that family.

So what can all of you do?

Now, I would love you all to set up a Silver Line. I can demonstrate, I guess, that it is possible.

We started with very few resources. We have absolutely no government funding at all. We now raise five million pounds a year in public donations to fund our service.

But it is critical. And the reason it’s particularly critical is that 24/7 element, and also supporting a generation of people who don’t want to burden their families.

These people may have lots of family around them, but actually they say their family members are very busy.

We’re all guilty, I think, of sending text messages rather than ringing people, or ringing people rather than dropping in to see them.

So this is a generation of people who are saying, “My family is really busy.” And they certainly wouldn’t ring their family at two in the morning if there was a problem.

So we can be there and be that safety net.

In terms of what you can do, I guess there are a few things.

You can replicate that model. We’re very happy to share what the model looks like. We’d be very happy to share that with you.

We’re obsessed as a society with planning for our future in terms of financial planning for retirement. Everywhere I go, people tell me they’re worried about their pension pot. They’re worried about how much money they’ll have when they retire.

How often do we emotionally plan for our retirement?

If we were one of those magazines with the quizzes where it’s mostly A, B, C and D, I would ask you to do one of those sorts of quizzes yourself. Not now, but later.

Actually think, in the last week, how many people have I spoken to where it has not been about work? How many conversations have I had outside of working hours? How many people have I spent time with outside of working hours where it has not been about work? How many contacts do I actually have that are not work-related?

One of the things we find very much at the Silver Line is that people haven’t prepared for retirement.

So actually, they do go over a cliff edge, because after the first few months and the first few reunions, they realize they’ve invested everything into work and into those relationships.

That’s particularly true with the generations we support, where it may be more traditional. With the older people we support, perhaps the man has always gone out to work and the wife has stayed at home.

And actually, when the man particularly loses his wife, that can have a double impact, because he may no longer have contact with his work colleagues, and his wife may have been the one with the social connections.

I’m making very broad statements, but that’s what we find.

So the first thing I say is, take care of yourself first.

The second thing, and this sounds very cliché, is to look out for each other.

It goes back to my point that surely we don’t need a minister to tell us to talk to each other. But I think we should not be afraid to ask people how they are, not be afraid to knock on a neighbor’s door if you haven’t seen them for a few days and see how they are.

The worst thing they can do is shut the door in your face. I hope they won’t do that. That’s the worst they can do.

But just don’t be afraid to make those connections.

A couple of new things we’re trying in the UK now are, I don’t know if you’ve heard of these, but we’ve got chatty benches.

So in parks, we’re now trying benches with the words “Chatty Bench” on them. Literally, we have to go back to basics.

We have to explain to people, if you want to use your phone, if you want to play music and you don’t want to be connected, don’t sit on a chatty bench.

But if you want to chat, sit on that chatty bench and we will chat.

The other initiative being trialed at the moment is slow queues in supermarkets.

Now, we all know how frustrating slow queues are. But actually, in a world where everyone’s rushing through and trying to use quick pay, what we’ve got are some slow aisles where you go as slowly as you want through that aisle, and the cashier will talk to you.

Everyone will talk to you. You can spend half your day going down that queue.

And the people jabbing you with the trolley can go in another queue and get through very quickly, because they’re very busy and very important. So they can go through there.

And the slow queue means you can chat.

It’s really, really simple, isn’t it?

Listen, I’m going to finish.

Mother Teresa was quoted as saying, “The worst poverty of all is that of loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.”

We come across some issues that just feel unsolvable. We can solve this one.

It is simple stuff that we can do day to day that can solve this.

And I was thinking about whether I might throw out a challenge here. Because we’re all going to live to over 100. We’re all going to be around for quite a while.

And I was thinking back to that China statistic, that in 2050 there will be 90 million lonely older people.

So invite me back in 2050. You can all come back. This is my pledge. If you come, I’ll come.

I would like to be able to stand on this stage and say, “I’ve got good news, and I’ve got good news. The good news is we’re living longer, and the good news is we’re living longer.”

That would be the legacy, if we can do that.

I’ll probably come on a rocket, because it will take three minutes rather than 11 hours.

But I’d like to see you in 2050 to do that.

Thank you for listening today.