'The world's greatest psychological experiment': When the loneliness epidemic met the coronavirus pandemic | GoodWeekendMag
It was the kids who told Noreena Hertz something was up. Well, not so much kids: young adults in their early 20s, the postgraduate students in the business class she taught at Amsterdam University who carried their loneliness in on them, like a chill.
Economist Noreena Hertz says loneliness incorporates how "powerless, invisible and voiceless so many of us feel ourselves to be"., to be published in Australia next week. As the title underlines, its big, bold thesis is that coalescing currents have driven the developed world to ever-greater levels of isolation over recent decades. Longer term, those currents have included post-war demographic trends such as increasing migration, urbanisation and affluence.
Hers is a book that toggles constantly between the macro and micro, the structural and anecdotal, revelling in the often surreal colour of contemporary loneliness. Like Brittany, the Cornell-educated 23-year-old whom Hertz hires for an afternoon in New York from the Rent a Friend agency, who describes her customers as “lonely, 30-to 40-year-old professionals. The kind of people who work long hours and don’t seem to have time to make many friends.
Van Hoof, an expert in stress, burnout and trauma who chairs the Belgian Superior Health Council’s corona mental health working group, warned on April 9 of a looming secondary mental health crisis in an.
In the first wave of findings of a larger, six-month survey of more than 2500 Australians that Melbourne’s Swinburne University launched in April,respondents reported feeling lonelier since COVID hit. Those who were lonely reported more mental health concerns, and young adults reported higher rates of loneliness, depression, anxiety and stress. The single most protective factor against loneliness and its associated mental health concerns, the report said, was living with family.
Speak to him at length and it becomes apparent that his affable manner is a largely learnt response, honed to foster connection. His earliest memories are of loneliness, he says, though he didn’t have a word for it back then. And like any condition that turned chronic, he has learnt to live around it.
He points to previous recessions, like the 2007-09 global financial crisis, from which the young suffered most and longest, as illustrations. Nor is suicide the only way loneliness kills. Meta-studies conducted by American academic Julianne Holt-Lunstad over the past decade have found not only that loneliness significantly increased the risk of dying prematurely, but that the magnitude of the risk equalled or exceeded that of obesity, or drinking more than six alcoholic drinks or smoking 15 cigarettes daily.
She strayed from the prescribed path. While she hopes to return to law one day, having completed her studies, she now works part-time and helps care for a family member with a mental illness. “It requires a 24/7 thought process because you never know when you’ll be needed,” she says. “You don’t really get the opportunity to pack out your day with activities or address your loneliness, which is where it really increases for me during lockdown.
NMHC CEO Christine Morgan: "When the chips are down and we’re absolutely losing everything, we need each other."Over her career, loneliness hadn’t loomed largest among mental health concerns. “The concept had certainly been in our ether, as part of the checklist for things like depression. But I don’t think we as a sector were necessarily looking at events through the lens of loneliness.” That all changed with last summer’s bushfires.
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