Are we living through an epidemic of loneliness? Well, it depends who you ask. One Red Cross study found that more than 9 million people in the UK – almost a fifth of the adult population – are often or always lonely, and in January Tracey Crouch was appointed the so-called “minister for loneliness” to tackle the problem.
But the experts can’t decide if things are actually getting worse. At Cheltenham science festival last week Aparna Shankar, from St George’s, University of London, described levels of loneliness in the UK as having been “fairly consistent” since the 1940s.
Indeed, when I interviewed the renowned loneliness researcher John Cacioppo, he told me that 5% to 10% of people in industrialised nations feel lonely frequently or always, and that the figure “has increased slightly” over the past 15 years, “but not by leaps and bounds”.
However, in her book iGen, the US academic Jean M Twenge cited studies showing that 31% more American teenagers felt lonely in 2015 than in 2011, which she attributes to the rise of the smartphone.
But this is the least interesting question to be asking. Interviewing experts in neuroscience, genomics, evolutionary biology, psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis has helped me understand something about what loneliness does to our brains, bodies and minds. These conversations introduced me to the theory that loneliness evolved as a biological warning sign, like hunger, thirst or pain, to tell us that isolation is a threat to our health, and we need to find some social nourishment.
You cannot simply cure loneliness by shoving a load of lonely people randomly in a room together, because loneliness is not defined by being alone, but by feeling alone even when surrounded by others; it is about the quality of the connection, not the number of our social relationships. Feeling lonely makes your sleep worse, and transforms your immune response. Greater loneliness means poorer outcomes for people with mental health problems.
Speaking to Guardian readers who have overcome chronic loneliness about how they did it, and reading the shattering testimony of more who are still caught in its grip, has shown me that what works for some is simply not possible for others.
So what can be done? It seems Crouch had high hopes when she took up her position, speaking of her plans to make “significant progress in defeating loneliness”. I wonder how she will manage this when her government’s policy of austerity continues to result in the closure of local services that provided not just a sense of community but of vital support to people who are most in need of it. More than 100 libraries closed in 2016, more than 500 children’s centres have closed since 2010, and in the same period almost one-fifth of specialist refuges for victims of domestic abuse have closed. So, too, have many day centres for people with autism, dementia and learning difficulties.
This hypocrisy of a government that declares its aspirations to “defeat loneliness” while cutting services that support those most at risk of feeling socially isolated is not surprising. As David Bell, a psychoanalyst and consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust, tells me, it fits neatly in a neoliberal worldview in which “individuals are thought of in an atom-like way, disconnected from the cultural and social determinants that form their lives”.
This is our culture of self-help, where we must meditate ourselves out of loneliness by being more mindful, or pick ourselves up by going for a run and a yoga class. It is not a culture where we think about our responsibility for each other and for the systems of social and health care that were built to protect people at their most vulnerable – systems that are now being pulled apart.
Loneliness is not only something that happens to an individual, it is something structural that permeates a society, as it is permeating ours right now. While it can and does affect people from all backgrounds, loneliness rises as income drops. Bell says there are particular social, cultural and material conditions that mitigate loneliness, that help provide individuals with feelings of connectedness with their world.
They include employment in a job in which they feel respected, reasonably secure material conditions, and a home in a community in which they feel they belong. It does not take a career in psychiatry to work this out, he says: “It is common sense, but common sense that is easily lost.”
So we can throw some statistics around, come up with different studies and try to pinpoint exactly how many more of us are lonely than however many decades ago, but in the meantime, this government, with its first ever minister for loneliness, will continue to decimate the services that care for our citizens who are most at risk, leaving them with no one to turn to.
• Moya Sarner is a freelance feature writer