YouTube video excerpt (Ashok Gupta, Gupta Program) addressing social isolation in chronic illness and practical steps to re-engage socially. Gupta highlights that chronic illness can increase feelings of isolation and loneliness and encourages proactively reaching out; a program representative describes a forum-based buddy system offering weekly or fortnightly calls as peer support.
Now I know what it's like. For some of us, having the condition can mean that we feel more isolated from friends and family. We feel isolated from the normal activities we engage in. We can feel lonely, but it can help us to build more connections with others. And this is part of the third r? Re Engaging with Joy. We're going to cover more of that later. And rather than wait for these connections to happen automatically, we can be the ones who reach our hands out first.
On our forum, we have a buddy system where you can connect with other retrainers and you can have weekly or fortnightly phone calls to motivate each other. And of course, online, there are many other ways to connect. There are so many people out there who feel lonely, so let's reach out our hand first.
