THE LONELINESS OF YOUTH
Research shows that teenagers and young adults experience social isolation more than other age groups. Samantha Gee reports.
You won’t catch Zoe¨ Jurgeleit posting on Instagram or sending a Snapchat to her friends. That’s because the 14-year-old doesn’t have a social media presence.
It’s not because she isn’t allowed to, although she admits her parents had restrictions on it when she was younger. It’s just not something she wants right now.
‘‘I’ve always had pressure from other people to do it, but I have just got to that point where I have been the odd one out for so long that I have gotten used to it,’’ she said.
‘‘It is something that’s unique about me, and I don’t think there is a big benefit to have it in my life.
Jurgeleit said she could see the advantages of using social media to keep in touch with people, but felt she could maintain a good social life without it. ‘‘I’m very busy and I spend a lot of time socialising with all the activities . . . I find my spare time, I want to spend chilling with myself – I don’t need to connect with other people.’’
She said she didn’t know of anyone else who had chosen not to have social media, and only a handful of people who didn’t have it because their parents wouldn’t let them.
Not being on social media meant she had less reason to be on her phone, which freed up a lot of time, she said.
‘‘I think it tells me the value of my friendships. On social media, you can have hundreds of followers but you only actually talk to five or six of them.’’
Her friend and fellow student Lotte Ketcher said that while social media was part of her life, she could monitor the time she spent on it.
‘‘I have friends down in Westport and I use it to talk to them, and I use it to talk to my friends in the weekends and sort things out. If I didn’t have it, it would be kind of difficult to contact people.
‘‘I think some people are lonely. I think it is because of our age, we think we need to be a certain way to fit in.’’
Jurgeleit and Ketcher are aware of how social media can contribute to feeling lonely or isolated. Together, they started The Positivity Project in their digital technology class at Nayland College.
On an Instagram page set up for the project, they posted challenges and positive quotes and celebrated a ‘‘positivity week’’ at school. Instead of adults telling kids how to behave online, they wanted that message to come from their peers.
‘‘It’s about encouraging students
to use the power of their voice to be able to make an impact on people positively,’’ Jurgeleit said.
She said adolescence could be a tough time, and there was room for negativity.
‘‘Being social is a big part of our life. We reflect a lot of our selfworth on how social we are – that’s why social media is a big part of it.’’
She said social media was used to portray the best of someone’s life but was not an accurate reflection of how they felt about themselves.
There was no reason social media couldn’t be used to connect people positively, Jurgeleit said.
‘‘People feel like they are lonely because they might feel like no-one else experiences those things, but they do.’’
More isolated? Or more likely to say so?
A 2016 Ministry of Social Development study into isolation, called The Social Report, found that those aged 15-24 reported the highest levels of loneliness (16.8 per cent), while those aged 65-74 had the lowest levels (9.6 per cent).
Females (15.6 per cent) were more likely than males (12.1 per cent) to report feeling lonely sometimes, most of the time or always, during the last four weeks.
But child development expert Nathan Wallis said it might not be the case that young people experienced loneliness more often, but that they were more likely to report it.
Teenagers, he said, had ‘‘supercharged’’ emotional brains. ‘‘If you are ever going to be feeling sorry for yourself, miserable or unhappy, it is likely to be when you are a teenager.’’
The development that occurred during adolescence involved forming an identity, which could be a difficult time for young people, he said.
‘‘You could get lost a little bit in no-man’s-land, feeling you are not quite connected to parents any more but not quite fully accepted by your social group, so you might be more set up to feel a bit more isolated as you transition between those two.
‘‘I do think, obviously, teenage years is a very vulnerable time. With our very high rates of suicide, it is a difficult time for teenagers.’’
The latest suicide statistics released by the Ministry of Justice show that the 20-24 age group has the highest suicide rate, with 76 deaths in the last year. NelsonMarlborough was the region with the lowest rate of suicide, with eight deaths per 100,000 people.
Wallis said isolation was the number one contributing factor to mental illness, while connectedness was the number one contributing factor to mental wellness.
‘‘Human beings are an interdependent species, they are not designed to be by themselves. The whole brain function is designed to be interacting with others.’’
Recent research had shown a direct link between mental health issues and device time, but this didn’t mean young people needed to be device-free 24 hours a day, he said.
When it came to social media, Wallis said that as long as young people had real-life, face-to-face friendships as well as social media interaction, they seemed to do well.
He said kids who were not experiencing any device-free time, unless it was at bedtime, associated being awake with being connected to an instant gratification device.
‘‘As long as your kid has two hours every day that they associate with not having a device, it is not a guarantee, but it is the biggest thing you can do to protect them from mental illness.’’
Working with isolated youth
Support worker Kay Guyton-Miller says social isolation in the community, particularly among youth, is a bigger issue than people realise.
For the last six years, GuytonMiller has worked under the name Angel In My Street. Funded by the Nelson Tasman Charitable Trust, she is a community worker of sorts – she links those who are struggling with the support they need.
Through her work, she said, she knew of an ‘‘unbelievable’’ number of people who were so isolated that they spent most of their time in the confines of their bedroom.
‘‘Life just got too hard for them, and they didn’t know what to do or what direction to go in.’’
This was especially the case for young people if they didn’t have parents or role models to guide them, she said.
At one stage, she worked with two teenage girls who barely left their home. One of them had attended school for a short time but left due to bullying. They came to her attention because she had noticed their house but never really saw anyone coming and going.
To begin with, Guyton-Miller would stop by and drop off essential items from her Angel In My Street van. At first, the girls wouldn’t let her in the house, but she went on to spend five years working with them.
She started by taking the girls to the supermarket with her. She organised for them to be enrolled in correspondence school, took them to doctor’s appointments, and slowly helped them build up their confidence.
‘‘It was daunting, because they were so used to just the four walls.’’
Guyton-Miller said there were lots of reasons why people were isolated, including mental health issues, bullying and health problems.
‘‘What’s missing for people out there that are isolated is there are no support people to go with them to things or coach them to come out.
‘‘A lot of young people I work with have anxiety, and that makes it really hard for them to go out the door.’’
Talking about it
A Youthline counsellor, who has asked to remain anonymous, says loneliness comes up quite often in conversation with young people.
She said she volunteered at the national youth helpline several times a week, and that callers often expressed loneliness in a general sense, through feelings of not being wanted, needed or appreciated by others.
‘‘I get a sense that for a lot of young people, they can feel alone despite having people in their life. That is perhaps because they feel like their supports don’t or won’t understand them.’’
The counsellor said she asked people what they would like to happen when they were lonely, which gave them a sense of empowerment. The things that helped included being listened to and heard.
The helpline received a lot of text messages from youth, she said. It received 179 texts in the past 12 months that contained the word ‘‘lonely’’.
‘‘That makes me think young people feel safe reaching out in this way – they are in their own space.’’
She said that for some, isolation was a form of protection from the distress of loneliness. ‘‘A lot of our young people talk about social isolation, feeling really on the outside and different to everyone else.’’
Statistics from Youthline showed loneliness and isolation was a specific issue for 2.4 per cent of callers and 4 per cent of texters, but anecdotally, it often came up amongst many other issues.
‘‘It is a difficult time for teenagers.’’
Nathan Wallis, child development expert