By Deacon Patrice Al-Shatti
My experience with loneliness is broad and deep. In 2012 my husband died by suicide after a long struggle with loneliness and depression, and as a social worker I routinely met patients who had built no network of support and faced serious illness alone. I have seen and felt the devastation wrought by chronic loneliness and determined early in formation that it would be my diaconal ministry.
Loneliness affects half of Americans, who tell researchers that they sometimes or always feel alone. Forty percent feel isolated from others, and half say that they don’t have meaningful social interaction on a daily basis. The most poignant finding in the study of loneliness is that four in ten of us say that we literally have no one with whom to share important news. And loneliness moves far beyond stereotypes. In 2018, 18- to 22-year-olds were the loneliness generation, not the elderly. And the highest suicide rate, a reasonable gauge of chronic loneliness, is among middle-aged men. Demographic trends are concerning, in that we increasingly live alone because we increasingly are unmarried and childless, and the divorce rate among married adults over 50 has doubled since 1990.
Chronic loneliness is dangerous. It is physically corrosive to health—similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day—and lonely people are 50% more likely to die in any given year than well-connected people. Loneliness also impairs our ability to focus, regulate our emotions and perform a variety of cognitive and emotional tasks.
Our current culture is the perfect climate for fostering self-isolation and loneliness, and we all have bad habits that put us at risk. We are highly individualistic and pride ourselves on our self-reliance, so we don’t ask for help. We stay super busy and shy away from the associational life of the community because we believe that we don’t have time. So, we don’t join social activities because we fear being overcommitted, and we often leave other people alone because we don’t want to bother them. We’re on our phones and rely on them to the deficit of our real-life relationships, and social media friends make us feel connected, but research shows that heavy social media use actually can make us depressed. Work has many of us siloed on our computer or working along via telecommuting or gig work. And public health leaders are starting to worry that the community of the workplace is a thing of the past for many people.
All Saints Episcopal Church launched an awareness campaign in 2020, and there are materials at allsaintsoncentral.org/loneliness-project that might help you educate those you care about. The pandemic was an experience in isolation, and perhaps loneliness for almost all of us. Let us learn its enormous lessons. Very little matters more than human connection. We are designed by the Divine to love and care for one another.
Patrice serves at All Saints’ Phoenix, AZ and was ordained in June 2019. She is also a licensed social worker who retired from a long career in medical and geriatric social work in 2014.