The pandemic, one may have thought, has been a great leveller in terms of social situation. But is that what the evidence shows?
As someone who has experienced loneliness, I know it isn’t a great time. When I was 19, the only person I felt I had was my then boyfriend, who was going to university in Wales. By this time, I’d left college and injected myself into a sort of limbo where I wanted to study, I wanted to work, and I couldn’t see any sort of marriage between the two. My friends had drifted away thanks to little effort on my part and already crumbling relationships following leaving school, and there was suddenly nothing we had in common anymore. We all went our separate ways. One my lowest day, I’d signed on for my JSA (job seekers allowance) for the first time after weeks of resistance, went to my bedroom where I hadn’t bothered to open my curtains that morning, and cried. I felt the loneliest I’d ever felt, and with no one around to help me out of this hole I’d dug for myself.
But loneliness isn’t uncommon. I was just one of a small percentage of the population. Prior to covid, around 8% of the population in the UK reported always feeling lonely, while just a few months later, in the midst of this still relatively new pandemic, the data had shifted that number up to 18%. Covid wasn’t the only disease spreading, so it seemed. But does this mean that loneliness rose, or does it mean that because so many people were on their own, that loneliness lost it’s stigma and was simply expected?
Some studies show that, actually, covid really didn’t change matters all that much. One study by Groarke (2020) showed that the pandemic didn’t factor in as a risk factor for loneliness, and in fact it was due to circumstance; those hardest hit with loneliness tend to be younger, unemployed, students, divorced or with exisiting mental health struggles, none of the above due to the pandemic in particular. In fact, some studies found that the lonely got lonelier, and the least lonely simply made do with the resources that they had; those least likely to suffer with loneliness were more willing to participate in online classes, have friends they could call, and online events to attend. The pandemic hasn’t created lonely people; it’s simply cut off more ways in which they can emerge back out into the world.
I’m thankful to have the network of friends I’ve built up over the years. One or two of them have experienced loneliness and isolation, but as per the advice websites that cover loneliness online, they have called a friend, sometimes me, and had a chat. But there’s so many people who don’t have friends they can chat to, someone who isn’t a parent or a partner. If I was in the same social situation I was eight years ago during the pandemic as an unemployed, friendless young person with no prospects, I don’t know how I would have coped. To know that there are people who have experienced the pandemic in this very manner is tragic. To feel that loneliness is at risk of becoming normalised due to a pandemic that has made it affect more people in the short term makes me wonder whether those truly isolated people will get the help and attention they need, or whether the sound of loneliness will be the voices of those who experienced it acutely, shallowly, and still with a network of friends around them throughout this whole experience.
Paint a Mental Picture 