Theatre and the Good: The Value of Collaborative Play By Mark Fe ...

Certain studies already seen as classics in this field of research have produced dramatic findings: in the 1980s, David Spiegel’s study of women with metastatic breast cancer found that those who met just once per week with a facilitated support group of other women with the same illness lived on average twice as long as women who did not meet with such a group.⁴ Eight large-scale studies of social connectedness and disease conducted between 1979 and 1994 in Europe and the United States found that, as Ornish summarized the data, “Those who were socially isolated had at least two to five times the risk of premature death from all causes when compared to those who had a strong sense of connection and community.”⁵

More striking to me than the disease outcomes in these community-based epidemiological studies is the decay of institutions of social support. The surprisingly rapid deterioration of the social fabric of industrialized and technological societies forms the sad background of the research. Social networks which our parents or at least our grandparents took for granted (family and extended family in situ, face-to-face contact with co-workers, friendly relations with neighbors and the sense of belonging to a neighborhood, religious affiliations, even club and lodge memberships) have declined to such a degree that the narcotizing pleasure-world envisioned by Aldous Huxley in (1932) is coming true. Individual “entertainment experiences” like the “feelies” taken in by Huxley’s characters have come to substitute for actual human contact. When we do meet others face to face, our interactions are ever more superficial, mechanical, inhuman.