Judith Woods
What does loneliness look like in 2020?
The stigma is lifting on many mental health issues, but this is still a taboo
What does loneliness look like in 2020? Is it an elderly Eleanor Rigby dying alone, or a self-contained Eleanor Oliphant pretending to be Absolutely Fine?
Maybe it’s those snowflake twentysomethings afraid to leave their safe spaces, or miserable millennials who work high-pressure hours Monday to Friday, yet spend weekends without speaking to a soul.
It’s easy to dismiss loneliness as a condition of the outsider and the misfit. As human beings, we are programmed to be social and sociable, collaborative and community-minded; the lonely make a great many of us feel uncomfortable, ill at ease, suspicious at an unconscious level.
If we are brutally honest, at some level, we assume they are culpable for the situation in which they find themselves; they should make more effort, put themselves out there, be more proactive.
But what if it’s the Duchess of Cambridge, our future queen consort, confessing to deep isolation after the birth of her first child, George? Her sister-in-law, Meghan, admitting how much it hurt that nobody asked her how she was feeling in those early days of motherhood, when the focus was on her son Archie?
And how to explain the million or so people a week who turn to their GPS seeking help for isolation, anxiety and depression?
The stigma is lifting on many mental health issues. But loneliness remains horribly taboo.
“At an evolutionary level, if someone presents as lonely, then their fellow humans perceive them as having no social worth,” explains Dr Randolph Nesse, eminent psychiatrist and pioneer of evolutionary medicine. “The instinctive logic is that if other people don’t want to be around an individual, then why should they? The result is further ostracism.”
We’d all like to believe that ours is a kinder society. But the bitter truth is that we are a nation in the grip of an epidemic of loneliness. And like all epidemics, it’s catching. Lonely people withdraw, begetting more lonely people who feel abandoned.
Researchers at the University of Michigan Medical Social have shown that social rejection causes similar brain activity to being beaten up; the pain is palpable.
For all our hi-tech preoccupations with online gaming, posting artful shots of our lunch on social media or playing sudoku on our phones, people need people up close, face-to-face, with all the warmth, affirmation and feelgood hormones that such contact generates.
Loneliness is worse for health than obesity or smoking multiple cigarettes a day. It increases risk of death by 29 per cent, and is closely linked to a range of conditions including heart disease, stroke and Alzheimer’s.
It’s shocking that we have allowed this disconnect to happen. For all our social media connections, the atrophying of meaningful, real-life connections is devastating. The dystopia of having hundreds of friends on Facebook but nobody to talk to has come to pass.
Studies show young people, plagued by Fomo (fear of missing out) as they enviously scrutinise each other’s lives on Instagram, are more at risk than the elderly, for whom The Silver Line, one of the Telegraph’s Christmas charities (see coupon, below right), provides crucial support. But no one is immune.
This week, Professor Helen Stokes-lampard, the new head of NHS social prescribing, spoke of the desperate consequences of isolation and the need for GPS to boost patients’ wellbeing with activities such as dancing, book clubs and gardening.
It might sound frivolous, but these radical measures are an indictment of just how we have lost our ability to live ordinary, balanced lives.
Just days later, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show announced that this year’s theme will be “loneliness and mental health”, and the society’s chief horticulturist called on householders to concentrate on their front gardens as a way of interacting with their neighbours.
Meanwhile, the Government, which has just published its first Annual Loneliness Report, laying out its long-term strategy to combat the breakdown of communities, is pumping £1.2million into redecorating village halls to create pleasant places for local people to gather.
This is the reductio ad absurdum of our digital age, and it’s no exaggeration to call it a crisis.
Getting us together is only the beginning; we don’t need Bryan Ferry to remind us, in Dance Away, that loneliness is a crowded room.
“Meaningful relationships are rooted in reciprocity,” says Dr Nesse. “Lonely people can give off an air of such desperation that they repel everyone around them; there’s no instant fix. Both parties in a friendship need to feel needed and appreciated and that takes time and trust.”
Listeners to The Archers will be aware of Joy Horville, the lonely new arrival in Ambridge who was widely avoided because she appeared so monstrously self-absorbed, talking constantly about herself.
When she finally admitted to Tony Archer that she was lonely, it represented a milestone in her pursuit of genuine friendship. I hope she finds her tribe. We all need one.
Experts would remind us that loneliness is, per se, a perfectly healthy impulse. Just as hunger prompts us to eat, and shivering sends us looking for warm, so loneliness is a reminder that we have had enough solitude and need company.
The tragedy is that all too often the lonely reach out – and there’s nobody there to take their hand.