Page 3987 - Week 11 - Thursday, 26 September 2019
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The impacts of loneliness affect people differently, depending on their age and circumstances.
For younger people, it has been suggested that social media can displace real social interaction and trigger lonely feelings. There are studies that show a link between higher social media usage and self-reported loneliness. However, it is difficult to ascertain whether social media causes loneliness or lonely people are more likely to use social media.
For older people, those who are lonely are twice as likely to be admitted to residential aged care. In addition, compared to non-lonely individuals, lonely people are also more likely to suffer from cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. Given the high rates of depression and loneliness in aged-care facilities, this can further compound the issue and the health of older people.
All of these mental health impacts and the associated physical health impacts point to the emerging consensus that loneliness is a public health issue. This underscores the need to develop strategies across our communities to address the growing problem of loneliness. To effectively intervene, it is necessary to understand some of the causes of loneliness and junctures in people’s lives where interventions can help. This is an area that is perhaps not entirely understood and in which there are not really obvious answers at the moment.
I note that people have made a lot of practical comments today. There are some really basic issues around a sense of community, a sense of participation, as well as some of the issues that, for example, Ms Le Couteur identified, such as how we plan our cities and the like. Reference has been made to the need for the ability to move around the city easily. These things are obvious at one level, but how we answer some of the individual cases is perhaps more challenging.
Because of the subjective nature of loneliness, it can be difficult to find specific causes to target. However there are some common causes that have been identified, which I have touched on today. Some of them are structural causes, such as communities’ social and physical infrastructure or social and cultural factors, such as work-life balance, the rise of digital media, and even perceptions about talking to strangers. I appreciate the example of a chat aisle in a supermarket. For a lot of people these days there is a sense that it is not appropriate to just chat to people in the public domain or even to smile at them. These are probably unfortunate social trends that we perhaps individually need to take on, just to do our little bit to combat.
There are significant personal life events around transitions that can trigger lonely feelings. This can be things such as moving home or changing schools, the experience of family breakdown and, of course, bereavement. These can all act as triggers for chronic loneliness.
The risk factors also affect different population groups. For example, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people can experience diminished connections to cultural support systems, such as kin, culture and country. This cultural exclusion affects
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