Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black.

Loneliness is a feeling a lot of us have been experiencing lately as we shelter in place or quarantine or

social distance. Our guest on this episode, J.W. Freiburg is a social psychologist and lawyer

who studied and written about chronic loneliness for years. His books on the topic include

four seasons of loneliness, growing up lonely, and the new books

surrounded by others and yet so alone, a lawyer's case, stories of love, loneliness, and

litigation. Thank you so much for joining us today. Talk about a topic that we need to be discussing

right now. How true. Why did you first become interested in the topic? I became interested because of the

kind of law that I practice. I was a practice law at the crossroads of law and psychiatry,

which I mean. I was in a law firm, but I was general counsel to a great number of Boston's social service agencies,

both children and adult, and their clinicians would call me for case consults constantly over 30

years. And more and more as the years went on, they began to mention that clients were presenting in their clinical practices as chronically lonely, along with other issues, of course.

But more and more of them were lonely.

They lived alone.

They felt isolated.

They ate from the pain of loneliness.

And so I set out to study it and hence wrote and

published and have been talking about the books you mentioned. You've written that 37% of

Americans identify as chronically lonely. Tell us more about what people mean when they say they're chronically

lonely and whether you feel it's accurate to say that the number is that high or could it even

be higher? Well, it's going to be somewhat higher now. Those are 2010 figures. So we're 10 years

down the road and it was going up. It was only 20% two decades

...