“In Paris, were they more or less numerous? » The question bothers some of the hundreds of New Yorkers who, this Sunday 1er October, have set up tables all along the 21e Street, between the IXe ande Avenues. Some “table captains” have heard of the “table d’Aude” which, in September, overflowed from a street in 14e district of Paris. The giant Parisian lunch was an initiative to encourage connections, organized by the “social innovation laboratory” La République des Hyper Voisins. The table in the French capital was perhaps more full (1,100 plates), we respond cautiously, and also organized differently. She had no “table captains”. Like Wen Zhou, for example, who works in fashion and whose mother made all the steamed appetizers served to her neighbors. Or Sherry Overton, who ordered some soul food at Melba restaurant in Harlem: “Because I’m sure there are people here who have never set foot in Harlem. » Or Karen Jacob, manager of a bed and breakfast in the neighborhood, who ordered the members of her table not to sit next to anyone they already knew.
The second edition of this W21 Street Longest Table is part of the initiatives through which associations are responding to the “epidemic of loneliness”, an expression that has entered the vocabulary since it was the subject of a report by Vivek Murthy, the public health administrator (surgeon general) the United States. With his sense of shock formulas, he noted that loneliness weighed as much on life expectancy as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, by this comparison alone shifting the question from the register of the intimate to that of public health . “When people are socially disconnected, the risk of anxiety and depression increases. Just like that of cardiovascular disease (29%), dementia (50%) and heart attack (32%)”he wrote, in April, in a column published by the New York Times.
Many studies show a link between loneliness and poorer health. On October 2, a scientific publication has thus established for the first time a correlation between loneliness and incidence of Parkinson’s disease. Led by Professor Antonio Terracciano, of Florida State University, among 491,000 people followed for fifteen years in the United Kingdom, this study highlights a 37% increased risk of occurrence of this neurodegenerative disease in single people.
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