Writing in the Week, journalist Theara Coleman has declared 2023 “the year of the loneliness epidemic”. In May, the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, said loneliness posed a public health risk on a par with smoking and drinking.
“It’s like hunger or thirst,” Murthy said. “It’s a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing. Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows, and that’s not right.”
Our research chimes with Murthy’s assessment: loneliness is a significant global public health issue.
The pandemic, of course, intensified social isolation. Mental health declined, with research pointing to intensified isolation as a primary, if temporary, cause.
Young people have been particularly hard hit. The transition to adulthood means you move from family support to peer support. But online learning and the sustained lack of contact substantially reduced the opportunities for many to develop those social and support networks.
As one student in Sheffield, who matriculated just before the second lockdown in England, has put it: “I worry that, because I’ve [finished] uni and school, I’ve missed out on the best chances I’ll ever have to make friends.”
But even before the pandemic, research showed younger people were experiencing higher rates of loneliness than the rest of the population.
How world governments have started to focus on loneliness
In 2018, the UK government became the first in the world to make loneliness reduction an official parliamentary concern. Other nations, including Japan, have since followed suit, creating ministerial roles to find solutions.
In 2023, the World Health Organization launched a new commission on social connection, framing loneliness as a “pressing health threat” on a global scale and social connectedness as a global priority.
The BBC conducted a global survey of of 237 countries, islands and territories in 2018, dubbed the Loneliness Experiment. This found that younger people may be experiencing loneliness at higher rates than other age groups, which is confirmed by research in the US, New Zealand, Denmark and England.
In England, specifically, the annual Community Life survey shows that from 2017 to 2022, younger people aged 16-24 years old had the highest rates of feeling often or always lonely. While they were closely followed by the 25-34 years-old age bracket, for the latter group, these rates remained relatively stable across the five years.
For the younger group, however, the rates have increased by two percentage points: from 8% feeling often or always lonely in 2017-18, to 10% in 2021-22. What is apparent from this survey, is that loneliness follows a U-shaped trajectory. It tends to be highest among younger people, decreasing towards middle age and then starting to increase again for those aged 75+. While the pandemic led to increases in “lockdown loneliness”, for younger people, these trends for high levels of loneliness were already evident before the lockdown.
What is loneliness?
Research identifies three types of loneliness: emotional loneliness, social loneliness and existential loneliness.
Emotional loneliness relates to a perceived lack of meaningful relationships, including intimate connections.
Social loneliness is feeling as though your network of social relations is deficient in some way. It is a subjective feeling – a personal evaluation – about the gap between how much social contact we want and how much we actually have. In other words, you can have many friends and still feel lonely.
Existential loneliness, meanwhile, focuses on a perceived disconnection from society at large. It is about feeling that your life has little meaning or purpose regardless of the presence of friends or intimate relationships.
Sometimes we experience loneliness as the temporary result of a particular situation – an imbalance that can be fixed. More worrying is when it is chronic.
Nobody wants to feel lonely. It is distressing. It effects on our wider mental health. Our physical health suffers too, with effects including poorer self-reported health, unhealthy lifestyles, increases in chronic diseases, higher cholesterol concentrations and diabetes.
Julia Morgan and Vincent La Placa are associate professors in Public Health and Wellbeing, University of Greenwich.
Interestingly, however, research indicates that even older people report, retrospectively, that they felt more lonely when they were younger. So what is it about being young?
Typically, teenage years and early adulthood is an unpredictable time – a period of uncertainty and transition. Going through puberty and education, becoming an adult, entering the workforce – not to mention finding a partner and starting a family – all involve complex and potentially risky decisions that can increase loneliness.
Risk and complexity do not only play out on a personal level. At this stage in life, you are also potentially more at risk of loneliness due to forces at work at a societal level, that are beyond your control.
Social media use over the past decade has been found to affect the quality of our relationships. Young people are also more likely to now work within the gig economy, which has heightened uncertainty and a lack of control within employment. Not being able to form work relationships in the way you might in more stable working environments can result in greater isolation.
The dual cost of living and housing crises have also hit younger workers the hardest. These too can affect decisions about where to live and whether to start a family, potentially triggering feelings of existential loneliness.
When the world feels like a scary, unpredictable place, it is not surprising that young people feel lonely. Getting help when you feel overwhelmed by loneliness is important.
This sometimes feels harder than it should, though, perhaps because of the mistaken belief that it is something that affects older – not younger – people. It is not uncommon to feel shame or fear being mocked or blamed for feeling this way. You might worry that you’ll burden your friends in talking about it. Which, of course, only reinforces the loneliness you felt to begin with.
This is why a societal reckoning with loneliness as an epidemic – and not a personal failing – is crucial. Social prescribing is now embraced by the medical and social care system. This shows that no single person is, in fact, alone in feeling this way. Individual loneliness will only be tackled collectively.
The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.
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6 Comments
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Skeptical
I note two studies. Both have links to them below.
The first, Social prescribing: where is the evidence?, from 2019 by the British Journal of General Practice. Where the authors noted that Social Prescribing had become a popular topic of the moment. With some advocating ways to expand “the options available for GPs and other community-based practitioners to provide individualised care for people’s physical and mental health through social interventions.” But these authors noted how the concept had taken off and has been adopted “without a concomitant evidence base” to back it up.” They listed all of the difficulties associated with studying the issues, then closed by saying that, it seems to have “potential to greatly benefit individuals with complex health and social care needs.” Nevertheless, they concluded that research was necessary beforehand in order to facilitate any effective model in general practice.
Then the lockdowns came.
But now the concept is back.
And some what to construct entire systems of primary care–based community-links practitioner (CLPs) everywhere.
And proponents hope CLPs will prove a success within the overwhelming mental health needs of the population arising from both the pandemic and from the way that society is evolving that brings about more isolation – some of it being spurred by the heavy use of social media.
Which brings us to the second study. Published three months ago in BMJ Open. Effect of social prescribing link workers on health outcomes and costs for adults in primary care and community settings: a systematic review. Where researchers sought evidence regarding the effects on health outcomes and costs of assigning workers to facilitate social prescribing for patients by connecting them to community resources.
Results? Overall, such workers have “little or no impact.” And the authors found “an absence of evidence for social prescribing link workers.” And they urged a halt to attempts to mainstream such programs. And further: “it is essential that high-quality trials determining cost-effectiveness are conducted so that the evidence can catch up with the policy and we avoid wasting valuable time and resources.” Strong.
End of the day. Practitioners should still reach out to patients, to urge them to understand links between certain lifestyle activities and preventing overall declines in cognitive health in later life. Even light-to-moderate physical activity on a regular basis, combined with an assortment and variety of learning activities, often have a positive effect on potential cognitive decline.
In the absence of cost benefit, patients can be encouraged to take advantage of their local community programs. And local town, city and county parks and recreation and libraries can play a key role in making this happen. Plus insurance companies can do more to encourage and subsidize enrollment in swim and gym clubs, book clubs, dance studios, and athletic events.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6301369/
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/10/e062951
GBR48
Lockdown damaged people of all ages in different ways. Social media offered relief for many. Lots of people get great benefits from using social media, but all you hear from 'academic experts' is how damaging it is.
The gig economy takes endless flack from governments and unions, who have their own agendas, but it offers the opportunity for many to work who would otherwise struggle to do so. Those opportunities are being taken from them with state crackdowns, damaging their lives.
Some folk will benefit from volunteering, socialising, hobbies and puzzles, whilst everyone should be eating healthily and doing some regular exercise. Do folk really need someone in a white coat to prescribe that for them? Having a healthcare degree does not make you adults and all of your patients children. That's a cheap and shoddy way to replace an out-of-favour elitist model.
Beware of politicians trying to deflect attention from their failures - economic damage, healthcare provision for things like cancer detection and the supply of medication, and huge increases in food and energy poverty - by heavily prioritising stuff like this.
smithinjapan
Lockdown is just a convenient scapegoat. We are no longer under lockdown, so if people are lonely maybe they should put down the video game console and go out and meet people the traditional way. You have fools like the "Anti-Christmas League" or whatever they are called demanding other people suffer their insecurities and loneliness and blame everyone else. You have hikkikomori. You have young Japanese who say they don't want to date others, then turn around and talk about loneliness.
Honestly... work up so courage and go out and make some friends. Heck, you can even use social media to find similar interest groups in your area and THEN work up the courage to say hello in person.
For the elderly, especially in homes and who have lost everyone, it's a different issue. We need to do what we can to help those who cannot help themselves. But for those who CAN, the answer should not be for others to do it for you.
TrevorPeace
Some good observations here.
@Skeptical and @GBR48, I don't know who downvoted your contributions, but I gave each of you an uptick. I've lived alone for more than ten years and travelled that way, too. And as a writer I've written about the difference between loneliness and what I call 'aloneness'. In my opinion, both are mental constructs that are exacerbated by do-gooders that have nothing better to do. If you're feeling 'lonely', do as any normally sane person would do - volunteer in your community (it's one of the best ways to feel 'valued'), take up a hobby and enjoy the people who have the same interest, or just get over it.
Gene Hennigh
Tell a person with clinical depression 'just get over it.' They become more depressed. This is a serious problem and these people need a little help. A lot of people over the world have this problem, not just Japan. It's not an easy problem to try to fix. It can be done, but it takes compassion, not a dismissive "you all are crazy."
TaiwanIsNotChina
To be fair, they were going out in the real world and doing stuff. Not clear they were actually blaming people, either.
You shouldn't assume just because someone isn't elderly that they can just step outside and change everything. These things have a momentum behind them, including into further hikkikomori behavior. If you can support the elderly socially, you should be able to support others having trouble.