TGIF! Greetings from the land of organized chaos, aka my life!
I have not been writing as regularly as I would like. For one thing, as I keep pointing out, there are lulls in the action with AMD. You adapt to a certain level of loss and things are calm until the next loss of vision occurs.
Crank up the magnification and soldier on until the yet next disaster. Lulls are not all that page worthy…and I don’t need a disaster right now.
The other reason is my days have been flying! I am taking more counseling clients and my days are jam packed. Nothing like being busy to make the time fly!
All of this by way of saying, I am sliding into a holiday weekend (Happy Memorial Day!) and I am going to try to pound out a few pages over the next few days.
We stopped for deep dish pizza on the way home. (The new comfort food!) I walked the Beastie Baby in the neighborhood and the field. She drank from every rain puddle (mud flavor! Yum!) and we investigated what looked to me like bear scat (poop, no bear. Life is good). Well fortified and with the ‘adventure’ out of the way, I guess I am ready to go.
The topic was suggested by one of our readers. She is located in Massachusetts and has just helped to launch a new, vision loss support group. (Kudos!) The topic had come up in her support group: vision loss and social isolation.
The short answer is “yep”. Problem is, I rather doubt I can make a page out of that. In trying to flesh things out a bit, I came upon a publication by the Thomas Pocklington Trust. Published in 2013, this literature review contained 44 pages on the topic. Good resource. [Lin/Linda: it’s 44 pages if you download the Word version; 8 pages for the PDF version which is what I’ve linked to.]
The review starts by pointing out loneliness is not part of natural aging. Loneliness and social isolation are also not inevitable for the elderly, visually impaired population. (So maybe “yep” is not the short answer?)
That said, however, it is easy to see how vision loss, loss of function and depression can lead to social isolation and how social isolation can loop back around and cause more depression, etc. People with vision loss can really end up in a nasty downward spiral.
The review acknowledges the problems that can come from not recognizing faces and facial expressions. Without nonverbal cues to go by, communications can easily breakdown.
Lack of good social communication can break down social relations and lead to a drop in feelings of self-efficacy. Feeling you are not able to adapt and cope with your loss once again leads to all sorts of issues and perpetuates the downhill slide.
I think I mentioned before that feelings of self-efficacy are exceptionally important to mental health. The “I can do it myself” attitude can be reinforced by success in using assistive devices. In another page I believe I quoted something that said one of the best predictors of life satisfaction is access and use of assistive technology, both high and low tech.
OK. To be continued. Since some of us have trouble reading long text, I will stop here for now.