Over the last decade or so, huge progress has been made towards tackling the stigma of mental health.
Yet despite of the pandemic showing how loneliness can affect anyone, still shockingly little social progress has been made on loneliness in de-stigmatising the topic.
It is young people that are most affected by this stigma, with a survey by Co-op foundation showing that 81% of young people wouldn’t admit to feeling lonely for fear of embarrassment, mockery, judgment, or being treated differently.
There are many things fuelling this stigma, but perhaps the biggest driver is the pervasive negative stereotypes and ill-founded links between anti-social or reclusive behaviours, social ineptitude, personality faults and loneliness.
Far from this being the case, a growing body of evidence loneliness shows it’s circumstances, life transitions and life events (such as financial situation, moving cities, bereavements etc.) that are actually the main drivers of loneliness.
How Stigma Operates
There are a number of ways that the stigma adds to the experience and prevalence of loneliness, limit awareness and prevent solutions to it.
A) The stigma causes shame and self-blame, which leads to depression, anxiety and low-self worth. This self-blame can also causes young people to socially withdraw – leading to chronic loneliness.
B) Mental Health services aren’t aware of the scale of the problem, aren’t able to act as provide an early intervention (only able to support when it’s too late) and struggle to understand who and how to support.
C) Negative stereotypes and misconceptions are allowed to self-perpetuate, against no competing narrative – creating a vicious cycle.
D) Young adults feel alone in feeling lonely. They feel unable to speak out how they are feeling, forced to suffer in silence and as no-one else is speaking out – they feel that they are the only one who is experiencing these issues.
Damaging Misconceptions
The urgency of this issue is underscored by the alarming ONS statistics indicating that nearly 60% of young people report to experience some degree of loneliness on a weekly basis.
And yet, the general population remain largely unaware of the scale and impact of the loneliness crisis.
Hampering social progress on this issue are damaging misconceptions still exist today that consider loneliness a problem that predominantly affects the elderly.
Contrary to that, young adults are shown to be twice as likely to experience loneliness than the over 70’s and five times as likely to struggle with chronic loneliness than over 65’s.
Yet whilst there are countless interventions and funding for the elderly – funding and attention to tackle this growing health crisis amongst young adults is incredibly limited.
As a result, heartbreakingly, young people feel that society simply don’t care – with a survey of young people by the Co-op Foundation, while an overwhelming majority (65%) agreed that loneliness is a serious problem for their age group.
The Silent Killer
The silence and inaction on the matter is costing lives, with suicide within the 20 to 34 age group accounting for 22.9% of all deaths, the proportionally highest cause of death groups in England and Wales, for any age group.
And in a paper by Samaritans in 2019, in a study of young people found loneliness was the single common factor amongst young adults experiencing suicidal thoughts.
Loneliness stigma is deeply ingrained in today’s society, but we believe that it can be tackled.
And to help do this, we run campaigns to seek to encourage a national conversation, challenge the narrative, normalise the experience of loneliness and above all, empower young people to speak out about it.
But we can’t do this alone, and we need individuals and organisations with influence to stand up with us to help beat this pervasive stigma, that’s causing untold harm to young people today.
And so if you’d like to support our work in tackling the stigma of loneliness or our wider campaigns, or partner with us, we’d love to hear from you.
