Seniors Are Helped Back Into the Mainstream : Health-Plus participants get counseling, socialize with their peers and develop an action plan that shifts focus from the past to the future.

Although 90-year-old Martha Castrey lives in Leisure World, where nonstop social activities help the widowed ward off loneliness, she became so isolated after her husband died two years ago that she nearly lost touch with the outside world.

Castrey, who has no children, says she went out only to get groceries or go to church and seldom talked to others during her first year and a half of widowhood.

As she puts it, “I would stay at home and sit with the TV on and be bored stiff.”

She didn’t venture out and sample the activities in her community because, she explains, “I’m not one to go by myself. I’m timid in a crowd when I don’t know people.”

Castrey says “it was very difficult” to grieve alone, and she gradually slipped into a deep depression.

Cheryle Ann Wing, a registered nurse with a specialty in psychology, had such seniors as Castrey in mind when she started South Coast Medical Center’s Senior Health-Plus program in Laguna Hills about a year ago for South County residents over age 55.

Wing had visited a number of elderly people in this area as part of an effort to assess community needs. And she had been startled to discover that even in such active retirement communities as Leisure World, some residents were so isolated and depressed that they struggled to find reasons to get out of bed in the morning.

“I was seeing a pattern of older adults who were giving up too soon on life,” Wing says. “They weren’t living up to their full potential. They didn’t have any short-term goals or plans for the future. They were hopeless and powerless. They had poor images of themselves and didn’t have a lot of family support.”

At Senior Health-Plus, Wing brought together a team of medical and mental health professionals to help people who have retreated from life find their way back into the mainstream.

Wing says Castrey is among many who have responded quickly to the program, which transports participants by van three to five days a week to a center where they consult with physicians, discuss their emotional problems in individual and group counseling sessions, socialize with their peers over lunch and develop an action plan that shifts their focus from the past to the future. (There is now a monthlong wait to get into the program. For information, call (714) 380-2565.)

Wing says those who join Senior Health-Plus, which can accommodate 30 participants at a time and in most cases is paid for by Medicare, stay involved for an average of two to four months. During that time, they learn, among other things, how to express bottled-up emotions, improve their appearance, manage stress, maintain a healthy diet and exercise program, increase their confidence and self-esteem, cope with illness, find their way around their community and reclaim a sense of purpose and independence.

Castrey, a former dancer who performed for several years with the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, joined the program about seven months ago at the recommendation of her doctor. Since then, she’s been spending four hours a day, five days a week at the Senior Health-Plus center.

“It keeps me from being lonesome,” she says on a recent afternoon at the center, looking fit in her blue-and-white striped jumpsuit and Reeboks.

Castrey, who could easily pass for 70, now takes a half-hour walk every day and is feeling energetic enough to contemplate even more rigorous activity.

“I wish I had my tap shoes. I’d dance a bit,” she says with a playful glint in her lively blue eyes.

Early on, Wing told her: “It’s important to take risks at any age.” So, when Wing asked for volunteers to audition for television’s “Love Connection,” Castrey agreed to give it a try. She was one of five participants in the Senior Health-Plus program to audition--and the only one selected to appear on the matchmaking show. When asked if she’s interested in dating, she says, “I could be. After 17 years in show biz, I’m not bashful.”

Wing says preparing for the “Love Connection” audition was a self-esteem booster even for those who weren’t selected. It motivated women who had lost interest in their appearance to start paying closer attention to their clothes and makeup.

“A lot of these older women won’t even look in the mirror,” Wing notes. “They don’t like their gray hair or the way their body structure has changed. They have an image of worthlessness.”

In some cases, illness makes it even harder for older people to feel good enough about themselves to initiate social contact. Delores Konzal, a 67-year-old participant in Senior Health-Plus, is extremely self-conscious about the way Parkinson’s disease makes her hands shake.

A former businesswoman who has never married, she’s also frustrated because she isn’t able to do things that make her feel useful, such as helping the sister with whom she lives with household chores.

Wing says Delores was suicidal when she joined Senior Health-Plus in July. She was so depressed that she hardly did anything but eat and sleep for two months. Getting out of bed in the morning is still difficult. “I have to shove myself to get going,” Delores says. But three mornings a week, the Senior Health-Plus van arrives at her doorstep, and she’s always ready.

During a recent group therapy session at the center, Delores received a chorus of supportive words from her peers when she said: “I’m learning to face people. The way I’m shaking, I’m not very good company, but I’m trying.”

Later, Delores, who is preparing to enter the Mrs. Senior America Pageant in Anaheim in January, added: “I’ve made nice friends here. We can really open up and talk.”

Karen Rabin Greenly, a Laguna Hills gerontologist and family therapist who counsels Senior Health-Plus participants, says the accumulation of losses in a short period of time--the death of a spouse, retirement, illness, disability--and the lack of opportunity to talk about grief and anger is what causes many seniors to get so deeply depressed that they withdraw from society.

Many either have no family nearby or seldom see their relatives, Wing says. The attitude toward the elderly that she’s encountered too often among families is: “We want you to fix them. Make them happy because we’re busy with our own lives, and we don’t have time to devote to this.”

Even the most caring adult children may be unable to meet their aging parents’ emotional needs because they’re struggling to deal with their own midlife issues, Greenly notes.

Adult children may also be exhausted by needy parents who become overly dependent after losing a spouse.

Jack Grube was so lonely after his wife died two years ago that he was making phone calls every day to his daughter, who lives nearby.

“Living alone is not a happy thing,” Grube, who is 78, observes.

Grube, who lives at the Regency Hotel in Laguna Hills, says it’s not easy to break into the retirement community’s small social circles.

“It’s a beautiful place with nice people, but it isn’t a melting pot,” he says, noting that most residents are alone in their rooms after 7:30 p.m.

At Senior Health-Plus, he’s found people with whom he can talk about his grief over his wife’s death. “You know everyone in the group has a problem like you do, so there’s understanding. We sympathize with each other. Sitting alone, you just manufacture gloom for yourself.”

Grube also enjoys the program’s weekly outings to such places as parks, museums and bookstores because they “give you leisure time away from your problems.”

Margaret Nelson, an 81-year-old widow who lives with her son and his wife in Rancho Santa Margarita, also finds that her interaction with others at the Senior Health-Plus center keeps her from dwelling on her own problems--and living in the past.

She says her neighborhood is deserted during the day because nearly everyone goes off to school or work. So she’s left with too much time alone to think about “all the things I used to do and what I’ve had to give up.”

What bothers her most, she says, is not being able to drive. She used to do a lot of driving for members of her church who had no means of transportation. “Now people are doing for me. It’s hard to be dependent on others,” she says. “I’ve been praying that I can get used to this and make the best of it.”

Perhaps no one in the Senior Health-Plus program had been more isolated than Claire Halpern, a 77-year-old Leisure World resident who is legally blind and was practically a recluse for eight years after her husband died.

“I stayed in the house and didn’t do anything. I didn’t see anybody or speak to anyone. I was like Greta Garbo,” says Halpern, who has been visiting the Senior Health-Plus program four days a week for about a year.

Halpern gets up at 5 a.m. every day, has cereal and coffee and, when she’s scheduled to visit the Senior Health-Plus center, waits anxiously for the van to arrive at 9 a.m.

She looks forward not only to the companionship but also to the hot lunch she shares with other program participants at candlelit tables. At home, she has little appetite and seldom eats a balanced meal, she admits. Dinner, every day, is a bowl of chocolate ice cream.

But Halpern has found that she is hungry when lunch is served at the Senior Health-Plus center. “When you sit with people, you feel more like eating,” she says.

Karen Greenly points out that one of the main goals of Senior Health-Plus is to help people form lasting friendships and develop the confidence to go out into the community and socialize instead of accepting loneliness as a way of life.

It would help, she adds, if people in this youth-obsessed society did not have a tendency to shrink away from the elderly.

“We need to reach out to the elderly more, and they need to reach out more, too,” she says. “Seniors need to feel good about being alive and feel good about themselves. The name of the game is being connected with people.”