Is Australia experiencing a crisis of loneliness and social isolation?
DOES Australia need a Minister for Loneliness? It may seem like a Monty-Pythonesque job title, but the reality of social isolation in the UK prompted British PM Theresa May to appoint an MP to the job this year – and experts say it may be required here, too.
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A FEW years into my father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis – when he would look at me with eyes that did not take me in; when he became a danger to himself – we reluctantly moved him into a dementia-specific, aged care home.
My mother went to visit him every single day of that long goodbye, and I visited every week, taking him out for drives in the car or to sit in the sun, so he could feel its warmth on his skin. All of which is to say I got to know the staff and residents of the home pretty well, especially a woman I’ll call Sophia.
She was in her late 80s, and although she was Australian, she reminded me of a Southern peach, one of those American women from Georgia or Atlanta who sip iced tea and wear long white gloves.
Everything about Sophia was soft – her silvery-streaked hair cut mid-length with pretty clips to hold it in place, her floaty floral dresses always beautifully ironed, and a string of creamy white pearls at her neck.
“Darling,” she would say when she saw me arrive, “come and talk to me”. And so I would sit beside her on a couch in the hallway, en route to my father’s room, her hand curled in mine.
She was easy company, but in all the years I went there, I never saw Sophia receive a visitor. No matter what time, or what day, or what occasion I went, she was alone. Weekdays. Weekends. Birthdays. Christmas. Easter. Always alone, waiting by the front door for someone to walk through it. And it niggled – how could someone as lovely as her be so bereft of company?
One day I asked the sister-in-charge. “Does Sophia have anyone to visit her?” I said.
“Oh yes,” was the reply. “She has grown-up children and several grandchildren, but they never come because they say they can’t bear to see her this way – they do phone though.”
Then I asked if she had Alzheimer’s, like my dad. “Not quite as advanced,” she replied. “She’s really still quite with it in many ways. The main thing that’s wrong with Sophia,” she told me, “is loneliness.”
ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE
THE world is full of Sophias. People who watch from inside their homes for cars that never pull up; people who lose the things that define them through a relationship breakdown, a death, a job loss, bad decisions, or just plain bad luck. People who spend their lives online with worldwide connections through social media but don’t connect with anyone at all IRL (in real life).
If The Beatles asked today, as they did in the 1966 song Eleanor Rigby, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”, the answer would be everywhere – and they’re growing in number.
In Japan, the 4000 people, usually elderly men, who die alone every week have now been given a name: “kodokushi” (lonely deaths). And on January 17 this year, UK Prime Minister Theresa May announced her government had appointed a Minister for Loneliness.
The announcement caused quite the stir, and not only for the Monty-Pythonesque job title. Were Britons really so lonely that a special Minister, in this case conservative MP Tracey Crouch, had to be created just to keep an eye on them?
Yes, according to the information collected by the UK Government, which prompted the Crouch appointment. Working with several non-profit organisations, it conducted a one-year investigation into loneliness across the UK, including findings from the 2016 Red Cross publication Trapped in a Bubble: An Investigation into Triggers For Loneliness in the UK.
It also used research undertaken in Combating Loneliness One Conversation at a Time: a Call to Action, the December 2017 report into social isolation by the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness (Cox was the British MP who championed society’s lonely, and who was murdered by a right-wing extremist in 2016).
Among the collected findings: nine million Brits or 14 per cent of the population said they “often or always” felt lonely; more than a third of elderly people felt “overwhelmed” by loneliness; 200,000 people over 75 said they had not had a conversation with a friend or relative in more than a month.
The information painted a landscape of loneliness across the UK, and while it might be tempting to point the finger at the stereotypical British coldness – both in its climate and its people – Australia is not doing much better.
AUSTRALIA: THE LONELY COUNTRY?
“Does Australia need a Minister for Loneliness?”: Lifeline Research Foundation executive director Alan Woodward is considering the question.
“I don’t know if we’re quite there yet, but we certainly do have an increasing problem, and we definitely need to look out for our neighbours much more than what we do.”
Lifeline released its own findings on loneliness in September 2016, after surveying 3100 people across Australia. About 60 per cent of the respondents said they “often” felt lonely, and 82.5 per cent said they believed loneliness was increasing in society.
“Loneliness strikes all sorts of people, in all sorts of living situations,” Woodward says, noting that of the 60 per cent of people who said they felt lonely, a large proportion lived with a spouse or partner.
“Statistics aside, there is an undercurrent of loneliness in our society. Anecdotally, many of the callers to Lifeline speak of it, along with social isolation, family and relationship breakdowns, and increasing social anxiety from lack of human contact. And all of those are a reflection of modern society,” he says. (Lifeline receives more than one million “contacts” through its telephone and face-to-face counselling services each year.)
“We are going through a period of great social and economic change – families are far more spread out than they used to be, people are living longer and the social networks may simply not be there to support them. People are also relocating for work opportunities, and that can mean leaving their support network behind.”
Chief executive of Relationships Australia (NSW), and practising counselling psychologist, Dr Elisabeth Shaw echoes Woodward’s words, citing the demise of close-knit communities in generational neighbourhoods.
“We are not taking root in suburbs the way we used to, when families would stay in one suburb, sometimes for generations, establishing real connections within that place.
“People are moving from region to region, state to state, and overseas, and that disruption can lead to disconnection. For example, many people have this idea that they will retire to Queensland, they see it as this sunshine land, this place of surf and sand and endless fun, but they arrive to find it is not that easy to make friends, things are not like they were back home, and that can escalate surprisingly quickly into loneliness and social isolation.”
In turn, loneliness and isolation can escalate surprisingly quickly into feelings of low self-worth, depression, and anxiety.
It’s well known that loneliness can have an impact on physical health. A 2015 study by researchers at Brigham Young University in the US, analysing more than three million participants, concluded that the detrimental health effects of loneliness were equal to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Increased stress levels, poor sleep patterns, compromised immune systems, increased blood pressure, and higher cholesterol levels have all been associated with loneliness in various studies, along with increased risk of suicide. The Brigham Young study linked social isolation to a 50 per cent increase in premature death.
“Most humans do have a need to be connected to others, we are social animals,” Shaw says. “If you, for all sorts of reasons, don’t have that contact, and you want it (Shaw is recognising the oceans of difference that can lie between being alone and being lonely) then the world can seem like a very dark place indeed.”
THE SHUT-IN
“So I got down on my knees and I said ‘God, help me take the fear away, help me not to be scared anymore, help me to walk outside my front door’.”
Gary is 27, he lives on Brisbane’s southside, and until earlier this year, he had not left his small unit during the day for five years. He describes those years as “lonely as f---”, and paints a picture of raw, heartbreaking, self-imposed social isolation from a world that had hurt him deeply.
“I was a gentle kid, a real gentle kid, but my parents f---ed me up, big time, all I knew was their fists. My dad knocked my teeth out when I was eight, they hit when I was awake, they hit me when I was asleep, and I became a very scared person.”
Gary – who asked not to be identified – has been in and out of juvenile care, prisons, and halfway houses all his life. He is also funny, whip smart, quick with a witty retort or a deep chuckle at a shared joke.
He has some mental health problems, associated with his abusive upbringing, which in turn has meant he has found it difficult to hold down a job, or enjoy healthy human relationships.
“I just isolated myself in the end because it was easier, you know? I had big problems trusting people, so I became like a ninja. I only went out at night, so people couldn’t see me. I lived in the shadows.”
Gary describes the night he fell to his knees, howling from loneliness. “It just got too much, I wanted to talk to somebody, anybody, but I didn’t know how. I was too scared, because I thought everybody outside that door would hurt me.”
For Gary, the first steps to “rejoining the living” as he calls it, were through a mental health service, which encouraged him to join a “men’s walk” through local bushland.
“I thought it was just going to be me and the social worker, but when I got there, there was about 20 blokes standing there. My heart was pounding, I didn’t know what to do, so I just started walking.” And, eventually, talking. Gary’s social worker Nick says the change in his client was as dramatic as that of a chrysalis to a butterfly.
“He’s really come such a long way,” Nick says (both Gary and Nick’s names have been changed to protect Gary’s identity). “It has been truly wonderful to see him open up, and laugh.
“Through our service we do see the human face of loneliness, people who for all sorts of reasons are very lonely, living in a world that is increasingly unable or unwilling to accommodate them.”
Gary walks with the men’s group, all referred for one reason or another by mental health services. Once a week he also plays soccer with the group, attends outdoor barbecues and screen printing workshops.
“It’s beautiful,” Gary tells Qweekend. “I’ve never been happy like the way I feel happy now.”
THE CARER
If the world is full of Sophias, it’s also full of Garys, and Emilys and Julies …
“When Emily brought home her first birthday party invitation, she was 10 years old, and all I could do when I saw the envelope in her school bag was cry and cry,” Julie Burgess, 65, says. “I just was so happy for her.”
Julie, a retired schoolteacher and her husband Paul, 70, a former bank manager, live in southeast Brisbane with their daughter, Emily, 38. They also have a son, Stephen, 40, but it is Emily who, Julie says, they have had to focus much of their parenting on.
Emily is non-verbal, she does not speak at all, and never has. She has several physically limiting conditions and is also visually impaired. As her mother says, meeting Emily is, on the surface, like spending time with a toddler or preschooler, but beneath this young woman’s silent existence lies a woman who understands much more “than she lets on”.
But Emily’s condition has meant – increasingly as she gets older – varying degrees of social isolation both for herself and her parents. As Julie notes without bitterness “people just stop asking you out or over because it’s difficult, it’s not an easy thing, and as time goes by you are not intentionally left out, but you are left out”.
Julie clearly remembers the first time she realised her daughter’s “otherness” would mean her family would struggle with inclusion. “Emily was attending the local preschool and all the mothers would wait at the gate as the kids came out, and this mother was handing out birthday cards to every single child in Emily’s class as they walked out. Except Emily.”
There is a long silence, and within it even after all this time, pain and anger. “The thing is, she would have loved to have gone, she’s very gregarious.” And Emily is gregarious, with a social life today that’s best described as hectic.
There’s aqua-aerobics on Mondays, swimming on Tuesdays, morning melodies on Wednesdays, the Sweet Freedom Singers choir on Thursdays (Emily can’t sing, but she sure can sway), flower arranging on Fridays, and Saturday Club, which can mean anything from fish and chips at Sandgate, to tenpin bowling, the movies, or a day at the races.
All of these activities are run by not-for-profit organisations like Blue Care and Communify, and all of them, Julie says, are a lifeline for her family.
“I cannot stress enough the importance of these sorts of organisations and the need for their continued funding. Without them, my daughter would be very lonely indeed, because the only activities she has are organised activities.
“There is a special sort of loneliness that comes from having a disabled child, and if you do not fight for them, fight for them to have experiences and activities yourself, then the truth is they can just be … overlooked”.
GAME CHANGER
The disabled, the elderly, the ill, the recently divorced, the recently redundant, the recently relocated – there are certain groups that appear again and again in reports on loneliness. Their inclusion reflects the world we live in, and the ways in which we live in it. So, it is no surprise to find a new group entering the landscape of loneliness, via their devices and screens.
The Lifeline survey found more than 31 per cent of respondents said they felt “more lonely” using social media, while a national survey from the R U OK? organisation found that Australians spend an average of 46 hours a week of their leisure time looking at their digital devices or televisions – in contrast, an average of six hours is spent with family and friends.
There is a fresh face of loneliness in Australia, and it might look like a married couple in bed, silently scrolling down their Instagram feeds. Or it might look like a parent ostensibly spending “quality time” with the kids, but keeping half an eye on their emails. Or it might look like 15-year-old Thomas, who, his parents say, spends increasing amounts of time in the online world at the expense of the real one.
Thomas’s father, Ben (surname withheld by request), says that sometimes, when he looks into his son’s bedroom to see his boy with his headphones on, speaking into the microphone to other (computer) gamers, he feels torn between demanding that Thomas stop playing, and worrying what would happen if he did.
“Because it’s like it is his world now, and he does have friends within it, and I guess the thing I’m scared of most is if we take away that aspect of his life, and it’s a huge aspect, I’m not sure what he’d have left.”
Thomas regularly refuses to attend school. He has suffered social anxiety, and has been diagnosed with general anxiety disorder. And although he does not know for certain, Ben says he feels his son’s anxiety “has increased alongside his going further and further into this online world”.
Ben says he does not believe his son is lonely, but does worry he might be in the future. “At the same time I think we have to recognise what we feel is important may not necessarily be the same things that our kids feel are important. We are working on trying to find a balance between the world we grew up in, and the world he is in.”
Technology has undoubtedly produced a seismic shift in the way we relate to each other – but not, Lifeline’s Woodward asserts, in the great, human, primitive need for interaction.
“We need to keep a much better eye out for each other,” Woodward says. “With these sweeping social changes and the growing digital landscape comes a whole new set of ways to feel lonely, and we need to be aware of them.
“It might seem simple but go and talk to your elderly neighbour, or volunteer to help at a youth service, or offer to go to a park with a young mother you might know. We live in changing times, but the things most humans long for remain the same.”
For love. For touch. For connection. For a smile. Or a hand on the shoulder. Or a voice joined in song. For the chance to choose between being alone and being lonely.
TOOLS TO STAY STRONG
The following tools can help you navigate the treacherous shallows of solo living:
No.1: Know who you want to be
Pick three adjectives that capture who you want to be. They will change, but they set a platform of values on which to base choices and actions. Act like the person you want to be and eventually you become that person.
No.2: You are in control of how you react
You have to accept that you can’t outrun negative feelings. You have to confront them, or align yourself with these feelings, get to understand them and take control from the inside out.
No.3: Staring loneliness down
Being alone is not the problem per se. It is our minds that create loneliness and it can present as sadness, apathy, listlessness, rejection, tiredness or depression. It is real. Accept that loneliness is part of the human condition. Then move on.
No.4: Shift from ‘loneliness’ to ‘solitude’
Turn your back on loneliness with its judgment and isolation and turn towards its more welcoming sister, solitude. You choose to partake in solitude, whereas loneliness is thrust upon you.
No.5: Happiness on purpose
Research (and common sense) shows that a positive mindset leads to positive outcomes. Experts have proven it is happiness that makes you successful, not the other way around.
No.6: Toughen up with a totem
I have learned lessons in resilience from three wild animals, my unofficial totems. The wild dog’s persistence, the lioness’s resilience and the bison’s ability to confront things directly remind me to stay strong.
No.7: Turn your adventure of living alone into a project
Why not write about or document your story? What advice would you give to others?
No.8: Be kind to yourself
Congratulate yourself on what you have done and don’t fret about what you have yet to achieve. It will happen. Everyone’s journey is different.
No.9: Find your ikigai – your purpose
In Japanese culture, everyone has an ikigai, a passion for something that makes us feel life is worth living.
No.10: Be your own good company, motivator and cheerleader
Pat yourself on the back regularly. You are doing so well just putting one foot in front of another.
No.11: Slam the door in negativity’s face
Instead of whining about why you are in a particular situation, work out what you’re going to do about it.
No.12: Act ‘as if’
The words we choose have a powerful impact on how we feel, the way we approach things and the outcome. Replace “I wish I was successful” with “I am successful” and “I wish I had a job I liked” with “I have a fulfilling job”, and then act accordingly. This frame of mind is much more likely to lead to success.
An edited extract from The Art of Living Alone and Loving It by Jane Mathews, $30, Murdoch Books, out now
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