Can talking kill you?

If you're lonely -- and maybe even if you aren't -- just the act of speaking can elevate your blood pressure to dangerous levels, says psychologist James Lynch.

By Joel N. Shurkin

Jul 5, 2000 | About 30 years ago, Baltimore psychologist James L. Lynch came up with an intriguing theory: that people can die of loneliness and a broken heart. He believed that those who are depressed and live alone, without close family or friends, have a hidden risk factor for cardiovascular disease and possibly cancer. You may assume the medical establishment, which was never much for existentialism, did not love the idea.

Since then, scores of medical tests by researchers have reached similar results. The relationship between how we live and communicate has an effect on our health. The problem, of course, is trying to figure out how this process affects the physical body.

Now Lynch, in a new book, "A Cry Unheard: New Insights Into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness," thinks he has solved at least part of the riddle. He believes that being lonely and talking can increase one's chances for heart disease.

He has found that everyone's blood pressure goes up when they talk and goes down when they listen. People who are more likely to be lonely -- the divorced, the inadvertently single, the recluse in the mountain cabin, the shy maiden aunt or uncle -- can have surges of blood pressure when they have to speak. Words may eventually kill them. Conversation becomes so stressful for them that they withdraw even more and the surges during their growingly infrequent conversations become simply lethal.

Lynch believes that virtually every person has this risk factor, as well as people with heart disease, migraines and hypertension -- millions of us.

Am I one of them? I wanted to find out, so I went to visit him at his office in Towson, Md., a suburb just outside Baltimore. When I sat down for the interview, Lynch almost instantly hooked me up to an automatic blood pressure machine -- a ritual he does with all his patients -- so he could monitor my risk for cardiovascular disease during our discussion.

You've written that being lonely has a profound effect on children as they grow up.

Well, look at the murders in schools. In every single case, the kids doing the shooting were the outsiders, the lonely, the angry. In 1998, Kip Kinkel murdered his mother and father, then drove to school, killed two classmates, and wounded 25 others. He had been held back in class because of undiscovered dyslexia and when it was obvious he wouldn't live up to his parents' expectations, he retreated inside himself. He became socially isolated and was no longer able to communicate. He wrote in his journal: "I sit here all alone. I don't know who I am. I want to be something I can never be. I try so hard every day. But in the end, I hate myself for what I've become." In every school shooting, you will find a kid like that.

You talk to any child psychologist or psychiatrist today and they will all tell you the same thing: We are all seeing disturbances we never saw before and escalating levels of it. Politicians want to put more computers in the schools when these children already lack constructive human dialog. The best we can do is create very bright killers if we're not careful. Computers may make the alienation worse. You notice I don't have one in my office.

How does this process shorten life even if the kid doesn't turn into a murderer?

If you use talk to humiliate, abuse or ridicule a child you shame that child, you break the child's heart. I call it toxic talk. Now the child goes to school and all education is based on talking. You asked the shamed child to talk and the blood pressure goes way up. It's the flight/fight reflex, and it was designed to stimulate the whole body as a form of defense. In this case, it is a weapon of self-destruction because the defense is unnecessary. They have to flee, and one way to flee is to drugs; another is to drop out, or become violent.

However, for the rest of their lives, every time these kids try to communicate, they get massive excessive surges of blood pressure that wears down their bodies. This is all while they are withdrawing further from the world.

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