Aliah Wright:
This is Aliah Wright with Social Work Talks. Today we're talking about supporting seniors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even seniors who are not exposed to the virus will still feel its impact because of the isolation of social distancing. Loneliness is especially problematic for older adults. For seniors especially, loneliness is linked to increased mortality. And in quarantine situations, those who need their meals or medication delivered to them may be unable to obtain those services. Lindsay Brine is a former educator who is now a social work student at the Silver School at New York University. As part of her intern placement, Lindsay was placed at the Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island, where she was visiting homebound seniors until she had to stop due to the coronavirus. Now she's calling homebound seniors instead, assessing their needs, sharing resources, and providing comfort over the phone. Welcome Lindsay.
Lindsay Brine:
Thank you so much.
Aliah Wright:
Tell us about the support that you've been providing to seniors. What were you providing before the pandemic? And what support are you providing now?
Lindsay Brine:
Before the pandemic started, I was going into seniors across Coney Island, into their homes and I was doing one hour visits with eight different seniors who are mostly homebound. They are very familiar with feelings of isolation already and loneliness. Life had to come to them and has to come to them still for them to be able to survive. I was doing visits once a week for one hour a week to each of the clients and I wanted to take a moment to highlight the fact that this is my mandatory internship for becoming a social worker. I wanted to shout out the incredible work that my supervisors do every day as their full time job because they really have dedicated their lives to this very vulnerable and often disregarded population.
Aliah Wright:
And what are some things that people can do to help seniors now? Keeping in mind that many of them might not have access to smartphones, apps or high speed internet.
Lindsay Brine:
All of my seniors use the phone regularly. Calling them, and I don't mean just once every week, but calling them as often as possible. Everyone, you have to be really creative during this time. And I'm even suggesting to my friends if they have other friends that they can call and say, "Can I call your parents?" We can all be reaching out, seeking out different people to reach out to during this time where we're all self isolating, hopefully. My biggest thing is to call, call, call and not just once, but as many times as possible. And as someone who is pretty nerdy and who loves learning about the brain, you have these four chemicals, you have dopamine, serotonin, endorphins and oxytocin and they really do get released when someone hears someone else's voice, and even just creating a time, set up time to talk to a senior, the expectation of the call itself and knowing that someone is going to call you can make you feel calmer and safer.
And all of my seniors talk about how much it means to them to just have someone to talk. They all have my phone number at this point and they can call me whenever they need to. Just to know that someone outside of their smaller world is thinking about them. That they're not forgotten, that they're not a disregarded population. I think some of the horrifying narratives that have come out from this virus have really been surrounded our treatment of the elderly and how people didn't really take this seriously until COVID-19 started affecting younger people. And I think we all have to take a pause and really think about what kind of, not to sound too preachy or, we're all under enormous amounts of stress, but these people are people. They're our family, they're our family's family. They need to be front and center in terms of how we're thinking, what we're thinking about and how we're treating each other.
Aliah Wright:
I agree. And I'm thinking about the photos that we've seen of some people partying on the beach in Florida. Yeah. And they've been told that, even if you're healthy and you're not sick, you could get sick and make someone else sick.
Lindsay Brine:
Correct. Okay, so weeks ago when the coronavirus started up in the news, before even my agency or my university was talking about it, I had read some things about it that the fact that you could be asymptomatic and you could give it to people in your lives without knowing it. I reached out to my senior clients and their families and I said, "Listen, I feel great. I'm not sick at all, but there is this kind of threat going on that is becoming increasingly important in my mind and I want to lay that out. Do you want me to switch to phone calls?" This again, this was three, three and a half weeks ago. And every single one of my clients and including their family members understood what I was saying, understood that a virus is a virus, but they wanted me to continue to go to their family members because loneliness is a killer in itself.
Now more than ever, we need to be thinking about how isolation affects mental health and affects our senior population. And if I could plead with those people on the beaches to see the other side of this and see how their individual choices are affecting the collective humanity. I understand the adolescent brain is again, to go nerdy again, but the adolescent brain is definitely different than the adult brain. But that's why adults need to be in these adolescents' lives taking some control and getting them off these public beaches. I just, that part is astounding to me that that is still occurring up until yesterday. I don't know about today.
Aliah Wright:
Let's go back for a second to what we talk about when we talk about isolation and loneliness. There's a distinct desire for companionship despite the risk. What do you think this says about human nature?
Lindsay Brine:
Well, I also wanted to say in addition to calling, if you're living in a high rise building or if you have neighbors, following your health guidelines from your local government, see how you can support those neighbors that are immune compromised and or the elderly by slipping a note under the door saying you'd be happy to grocery shop for them. You would go to the pharmacy for them. Even the note alone can lessen the feeling of isolation because you feel as though someone out there is thinking about you. Caring for you. And just five minutes of our time, every person's time can make a huge impact in the entire day of someone else's life. And that goes back to your question just now about our desire for companionship.
I think that human beings, we all crave connection. We want a sense of grounding, a sense of belonging. That's why communities exist. And social media is a bad and a good thing. It's a double edged sword. But speaking from my own experience and gaining a lot from being part of different online community groups, and if that was taken away from me, I would feel much more alone. Can we teach some of these seniors how to use those tools? Just the simplest tool, FaceTime, just so they can see people's faces. I think that you can't underestimate the power of seeing someone smile or seeing an expression or seeing someone cry. We're all human right now and we're all going through something that no one else has gone through. We need to feel our feelings and this is what precipitates post traumatic stress disorder.
Aliah Wright:
Really?
Lindsay Brine:
Oh absolutely. This is a collective trauma that we're all experiencing in real time. How do we feel our feelings but also be helpers at the same time? And I think that as human beings, we can teach empathy. We can be empathetic. If you take one hour of your day to figure out how you can help your local community, how we can give aid to local food banks, how we can create a network or a community where there wasn't one, how we can just make sure that we do create more and more connections, especially for our loneliest and most vulnerable populations. And people really crave routine and steadiness so the whole world is off their routine. How can we get our empathy to go into overdrive?
Aliah Wright:
These are wonderful points, Lindsay, we also talked just a little bit about self care and I want you to tell our listeners how you practice self care before you talk to these seniors so that your anxiety is not showing through when you're having conversations with them.
Lindsay Brine:
It's easier said than done. But my favorite quote is, "You cannot give from an empty cup." Before my phone calls, I have been meditating. I can really only do it for a few minutes at a time because I do begin to feel really overwhelmed. But I just try to quiet myself. I try to focus on my breathing. I was a former teacher for many, many years, so I love stations. I've been creating stations for myself. I have my stretching station, I have my arts and crafts station, I have my no news station where I just shut off news and my stations by the way are two feet from each other. But there's something about transitioning and going from one thing to another, which makes me feel more centered. Then I try to do those things before I make my phone calls because it really is draining and I have the exact same fears as the people I'm talking to on the phone and I acknowledge that.
I say, "This is really scary and I'm scared too." And then I redirect the phone call to be more centered towards their fears, their anxieties, what they're doing, who's calling them, who is still visiting. The aides of these seniors deserve a million dollars per day. They are traveling on the subway, the buses, cars, et cetera. They're going into these elderly people's homes that are really not going out anymore, and they're taking care of all of their basic health needs. These are the unsung heroes that have been doing for a lifetime already. And hopefully there has to be some silver linings that come from this pandemic, one of which is to highlight the incredible work that these people do every single day when no one's watching, no one's looking.
Aliah Wright:
And these are people who are in New York City. That's an even scarier thing because we were hearing that New York it's an area that's been hit pretty bad.
Lindsay Brine:
Absolutely. Again, another silver lining that's coming from this is that we're seeing who are the essential employees. They're the people at the grocery stores. They're the pharmacists. They're the people that work in pharmacies. They're the medical aid agencies. Obviously the doctors, the nurses, the social workers on the front lines. I'm doing this work from a very safe home where I have all my basic needs met and I'm using my phone. The people that are outside every day right now are truly saving us all. It overwhelms me when I think about it.
Aliah Wright:
Listeners, we'll be right back.
Aliah Wright:
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Aliah Wright:
Lindsay, tell us about your social work journey. You're now earning your third master's degree, this one in social work. What drew you to the field?
Lindsay Brine:
After teaching and working in school administration for many years, I realized I was really trying to seek out a way to blend both micro work, so the client facing work and also how to zoom out and think of the larger picture. What are some of these policies that are affecting the people I work with directly? And I wanted to really focus on the psychology, the social emotional piece of helping. I've always been a helper because I've gotten so much help and I have so much privilege. It was kind of a seamless transition from teaching to social work because it's all about working with people that need problem solving, that need care, that need as many people around them figuring out solutions to large systemic problems.
Aliah Wright:
The coronavirus outbreak could be a chance for society to reset its relationship with older people. As someone who's been working with the elderly, do you believe this is true?
Lindsay Brine:
I am hopeful. I think in a crisis you get a wide spectrum of responses. You get some terrible and some greedy and some hoarding and panic buying and things like that, but then you get much more of the good and eyes are being opened and policies that seemed completely impossible just a month ago are being enacted. And things, progressive policies that were seemingly impossible are starting to be implemented very quickly. That does give me an enormous amount of hope. In terms of the elderly, I think there has to be in a national conversation, narrative change where we begin to see the elderly as just as valuable as they were when they were part of the workforce. They have history. They have stories to tell. They have knowledge to give us.
From the last seven months of visiting my clients, they have taught me so much. And it sounds cliche, but it's really true. If you get them talking about their experiences, you gain so much insight. We as a society need to really figure out how to take better care of them and their mental health. Before this pandemic, people over 85 were incredibly vulnerable to suicide and you don't see that really being discussed that widely. A lot of older adults don't seek out help for depression or anxiety, but they're just as vulnerable to mental health illnesses as we are but they get less support. If there's going to be some positives that come out of this situation, which I really hope that there will be, I think one of the things is how we talk about the elderly in social media, across national media and how we adjust our mindsets to really looking at them as the valuable members of the community that they truly are.
Aliah Wright:
We often witness people's better natures during times of crisis. What can we do to bring out the best in people at this time?
Lindsay Brine:
It's about being human and gentle with ourselves and our friends. Some of the greatest advice I've been receiving from people who are much more experienced in the social work field, is about asking our friends how their head space is before we go into our diatribe or rant about our own fears, our own experiences. Taking that moment to really honor your friend's feelings and be like, do you have the emotional capacity, the emotional space, the bandwidth to hear me out for a few minutes about what I'm afraid of? But also respecting people's boundaries with this. I think that people with underlying mental health issues, some are even calmer now because they've been prepping for a crisis for a really long time, but some people who have had low levels of anxiety or depression may be in really unchartered territory.
How do we slow things down? How do we remain positive when we can be positive? We have homeless populations, we have shelters. These are the problems that we all collectively need to be focusing on and how to fix them, especially of course the elderly but at the same time we do have to take care of ourselves because we can't do any of this work unless we dig deep within ourselves, acknowledge how we feel, and then try to help the people around us.
Aliah Wright:
Well Lindsay, we certainly appreciate all the work that you're doing up there in New York to make seniors feel less isolated. And thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate that.
Lindsay Brine:
Thank you. I hope everyone stays home and stays safe and I really appreciate the chance to be on your podcast.
Aliah Wright:
Thank you.
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