Front Burner - COVID-19 unlocks wave of loneliness

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

Loneliness posed a public health crisis for many countries years before anyone heard of COVID-19. But how does loneliness manifest at a time -- not sure that's exactly what we're trying to say; suggesting instead: how is loneliness exacerbated when we are forced to isolate for weeks and months? Who is most vulnerable? And what are some of the long-term emotional implications of this lockdown? We explore the different types of loneliness this pandemic is unlocking with cultural historian Fay Bound Alberti.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey, I'm Pia Chattopadhyay. Loneliness is a word we're hearing more and more of these days, a seemingly invisible problem that has taken hold across much of the Western world, but one that can take a dangerous toll on our mental health. So what does all this mean in the age of COVID-19 when we are forced to isolate,

and for weeks and maybe months to come? On today's episode, we tap into the different types of loneliness this pandemic is unlocking, and how the experiences and emotional consequences of loneliness aren't the same for everyone. This is FrontBurner. Joining me is cultural historian Faye Bound-Alberti. Faye recently wrote the book, A Biography of Loneliness, The History of an Emotion. Hey, Faye. Hello. How are you? I'm good. I want to start with a very basic question and one where the answer may seem so obvious. But tell me what exactly is loneliness? between the relationships that we have and those that we want. And really, loneliness is not one thing, although we talk about it as one thing, and we almost presume it's a single emotion,

like anger or fear. But loneliness is made up of lots of different emotions. So you have sadness or anger or resentment or jealousy. And it's those complexities, I think, that make it such a challenging emotional state to understand. And the challenge has predated coronavirus. We know that we live in the midst of what has been called an epidemic of loneliness. When Dr. Vivek Murthy was Surgeon General of the United States, he went on a listening tour of America. That meant addressing opioid addiction, diabetes, and heart disease, and then something he wasn't really prepared for. It turns out that loneliness is associated with a reduction in your

lifespan that is as severe as a reduction in lifespan that you see with smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's greater than the impact on mortality of obesity. But I imagine that because of our physical isolation from one another, the lack of contact, of touch, of communication in the real world, that COVID-19 has exacerbated our loneliness. What types of loneliness or type of loneliness are people experiencing right now? Can we parse that? The most palpable difference right now is that sensorial disconnect. The most palpable difference right now is that sensorial disconnect. So we are very much isolated from other people or we're isolated with other people who may or may not be the people that we want to be isolated with. particularly observed to me. It's thinking about the ways in which social media is and isn't a viable alternative to general in real life human interaction. But really, as you say, COVID-19 has exacerbated existing problems in society. And so it's exacerbated loneliness in the ways that we

might expect, so that people who are already very vulnerable are more vulnerable. This has been sheer hell, really. Before COVID-19, Martha spent hours by her husband Willard's side. He has advanced dementia and lives in a long-term care home. He must be looking for me because he always did. He was always looking to see if I'm coming, if I'm going to be there. So I often wonder what must go through his mind when he doesn't see me, he can't see me, he can't hear me. On the one hand, then we are all in the same boat, right? We're all dealing with our loneliness and our complicated feelings of that in different ways.

But it isn't equitable, is it? Like some people are more prone to be lonely. There are conditions in place in society that make some people more prone to it, yeah? I think that's right. And I tend to focus on the difference between structural loneliness and existential loneliness. So structural loneliness is what I mean when I talk about people being alone and isolated from others because they don't have people to help them. They are in some way have disabilities or they are unwell or they are very isolated socially and this can range from being homeless to being unemployed to being a new mother without any help and then there's existential loneliness which is really about whether we feel we belong to society and to our friendship networks and our families. And that can affect people regardless

of their material circumstances. And it's important too, I think, isn't it, to think about the fact that loneliness and solitude are very different things. What COVID-19 has done is made us think, what does solitude have to do with loneliness? So is solitude a choice versus loneliness being something that is just part of the human condition? I think that historically, solitude has always been seen as being something that could be positive and negative. Time away from other people has traditionally been associated with the ability to commune with God or commune with nature or find some creative pleasure. It's only around about 1800 that we have the rise of a language of loneliness. And at that time, we've already got the emergence of intensive urbanization, industrialization, a decline of God as being the only explanation

for the universe. And so there is this growth of kind of a feeling of disconnect from other people. So loneliness was not something that early modern or medieval doctors worried about in the way that they do now. Yeah, what's changed fundamentally of how we think about loneliness that makes us concerned about it nowadays? I think the rise of loneliness is very much linked to the idea that when we have a world without meaning, which is a very sort of early 20th century existential philosophy view, a world without meaning, without God, without certainty,

we have opportunity on the one hand, and that's what capitalism is all about. But we also have a sense of uncertainty and fear and anxiety. And quite a lot of the way that we live, particularly in the West, is about personal achievements. It's about being gregarious and extrovert and successful in our relationship with others. And that eliminates the differences between people and the fact that some people prefer to be alone and have a more introverted nature. And actually, for many people, there's a lack of meaning in their lives, which cannot be filled by material goods or, I suppose, achievements in a very secular way in which we consider achievements. We have put a certain capital on loneliness. In other words, it is such a huge phenomenon, says the research, that it's become epidemic levels. Polling data from the Angus Reid Institute, conducted in partnership with CARDIS, shows nearly half of the population says they are somewhat lonely or very lonely. That chronic loneliness, some experts say, can actually be lethal.

The situation, as you well know, in the United Kingdom, had the government there appoint a Minister of Loneliness two years ago. The new role will tackle solitude in the UK, where more than one in ten people feel isolated. I've been shocked and indeed humbled by some of the personal stories I've heard. 5.23pm. It was rush hour and I was by some of the personal stories I've heard. 5.23pm. It was rush hour and I was standing up on the tube and there were so many people around me and I was just sobbing. Not one single person looked up or saw me or spoke to me.

So talk to me about the toll of chronic loneliness and what it can take on someone. Because this isn't like, I feel lonely today, tomorrow I'll be fine. We're talking about an ongoing state of loneliness. Yeah, I think, and the emergence of a minister for loneliness and so on represents a recognition that loneliness is very damaging. It's damaging because it costs a lot. Bluntly, a lot of older people who are lonely creates a kind of burden on the state. And that's a lot of the language in which people use when they talk about the

epidemic of loneliness. But people are also talking about teenagers being lonely. In Canada, we've done a study about university students, first year university students, 66% of them feel extremely lonely. Mothers being lonely. You're in this fog of newborn and motherhood and it is a really lonely time. You're questioning everything. Women who are unemployed being lonely. So there's not now a category of society that we can't say is lonely at some point in time. Now the challenge is I think that as you say there's a real difference between being chronically lonely and being temporarily lonely. There are pinch points of existence in which all of us are going to be lonely at some point

while we're working out who we are and what we want from life. But then that's compared to chronic loneliness, which is when it's accompanied by severe psychological and physical health problems often. And that's when it can become a real problem. One of the challenges, I think, with COVID-19 is that we simply don't know how long people will be in isolation and time and loneliness intersect in really complicated ways. And so there have been warnings about, you know, the consequences of the state that we are in right now, things like depression, substance abuse, PTSD, even post-traumatic stress disorder, people taking their own lives. The study warns that the isolation and the anxiety from the lockdown may be responsible for as many as 75,000 drug overdoses and suicides over the

next decade. We're looking at the three things, unemployment, isolation, and of course, the uncertainty. We don't have a vaccine. We simply don't know what's going to happen from day to day. That's the part of this coronavirus puzzle that we're perhaps just seeing the front end of and will play out over time. For me, I think one of the most challenging things of this whole epidemic has been seeing people have to deal with bereavement and loss and not being able to go through the usual rituals that we associate with saying goodbye to someone. And I do think that that is going to have longer term implications on, you know, high levels of grief and mourning in society. And I also think there's going to be a lot of anger too about how certain governments have handled things. So there's going to be a lot of emotions that are coming to the fore after this pandemic.

You said that, look, it doesn't matter what your demographic is. Loneliness doesn't just affect one demographic. And we have for some time now talked about teenagers and young people and the loneliness crisis that has befallen them. We've tied it a lot to them being on their gadgets and their phones and not interacting in a physical way with their friends and so on and so forth. And yet here we are in COVID-19 saying, look, you got to stay away from those friends. You connect on the Zoom or the Skype, how we're talking or all those things. Talk to me about that aspect of it, like teenagers and

kind of the turn we've asked them to make and how that might affect their loneliness? I think it is a real problem for teenagers right now. And as you say, we've often been quite worried collectively about the impact of social media on young people's lives. And part of that is, I think at the moment, we're having to recalibrate our anxiety around social media, because historically, we've always had an anxiety about a new technology that changes how people relate. The same kinds of arguments were made about telephones as they have been made about social media. I think that many teenagers now are at very pivotal moments in defining who they are, and not to be able to see their friends, I think,

is particularly challenging. But it would be a lot more difficult, I think, for teenagers if they did not have social media. It's only really since the 1950s that we've thought of teenage-dom as being a particular state that we have to move through, a particular time of our lives. And it's now associated with a time, as a time when we really define who we are, we make these long-lasting friendships, and we learn how to engage with other people. And I think temporary loneliness is a necessary part of that as we go through life. And it would be only expected, I think, when people are trying to work out who they are, that they will have pockets of loneliness. One of the interesting things, I think, in terms of long-term chronic loneliness

is that there are definite associations between people who are lonely in later life and when they're elderly and people who are lonely in later life and when they're elderly, and people who are lonely when they're young. So there seems to be some correlation between the coping mechanisms and the ways in which we develop relationships as a child and as a teenager with how we are later in life. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

Is loneliness, you know, a pan-world problem? In other words, does everyone just suffer from loneliness no matter what culture you belong to, what society you live in, what country you live in? I think I would have said in the past, no, I would have said that it is particularly prevalent in countries where there is a high degree of individualism. But what we're seeing with globalization, of course, is that societies are becoming very similar, and they're becoming homogenous. So we have a recent rise, for instance, of reported loneliness in Thailand where you have a change in society and an emergent middle class that has a lot more access to consumer goods than in the past and this is a very kind of typical development that we've seen elsewhere and what this does is it reminds us of

that relationship between material goods and loneliness and the ways in which sometimes people who are very lonely, they desire a lot of consumer goods, but then having the consumer goods creates more loneliness. So there's that sort of complex system at work. And at the same time, it becomes very difficult to make these kinds of global comparisons, because countries that are traditionally collective might even have more confidence about saying they're lonely than countries that are individualistic. Yeah. You know, I live in a household with four other people. And so people always say to me, my friends say to me, well, you're not lonely.

You have all these people around you. And I say, you know, there's a difference between being alone and loneliness, isn't there? Yeah, there really is. And I think that adage about us being lonely in a crowd is really important because you can be lonely in a marriage. And many people who are married are lonely. You can be lonely within families because it's about having some sort of connection, an emotional connection between yourself and another person. And it doesn't have to be a crowd of people. There just has to be somebody who you feel understands you and somebody that you feel known by. And so it's really about the kind of relationships that you have and the quality of those relationships, which is probably why at the moment some people are feeling particularly lonely because their relationship networks are so reduced. Whereas we often have different friendships that fulfill different functions.

At the moment, we're asking quite a lot of the people that we are isolated with. That is for sure. You know, one of the descriptors of this pandemic is that it is the quote unquote, great equalizer. What about loneliness amid this pandemic and the way it impacts different parts of the population? I mean, is it serving as some kind of great equalizer when it comes to loneliness? Well, I think I really do take issue with the idea that it's an equalizer just because it impacts people so very differently. And we know that it depends on ethnicity and it depends on wealth and it depends on privilege. In Chicago, Black people represent 30% of residents,

but more than 70% of COVID deaths. Dr. Kwame McKenzie says Canada's practicing bad medicine by not collecting the race of COVID-19 patients. Certain groups of people are systematically disadvantaged. Even, I mean, what I've noticed in the UK is the number of people who live in high rises and have no access to outside space. So the quality of experience when you're able to go outside into your garden is going to be different than when you have literally nowhere to go with young children.

And I think that's important because the environments that we're in do impact on our loneliness. There are well proven associations between being in the natural world, for instance, and feeling less lonely. So it's almost as though the kinds of connections that historically we've found with God or with some sense of meaning outside of oneself, people can also get through the natural world because nature can fulfill some kind of sense of a being that's greater than yourself. So I think that it's not so much an equalizer as we might imagine. And so solitude is kind of a privilege. I think solitude can be a privilege for a lot of people. And one of the things that I've noticed historically in studying loneliness is that we have female writers in particular, like Virginia

Woolf or Sylvia Plath, who might have written about the need for loneliness, not just solitude, but actually to feel that emotional pang of loneliness, to be able to imagine the world differently and to write. But that is a very, it's a very white middle class position. I'm glad you brought up Plath as an example of someone who said, look, look, you need to experience loneliness. It is part of who you are and all of those things. And I guess, yeah, and I'm not asking you to be Pollyanna-ish about this, but is there an upside, a positive side to loneliness? Yes, I think that there is. And I'm always a little bit hesitant of saying this because I'm aware that so many people experience loneliness in negative ways. Being lonely and not just being solitudinous, but being lonely can make us see the world differently. As someone who studies loneliness, I've had lots of emails from people saying they have found it wonderful to be alone. They found it great to know that the doorbell isn't

going to ring. They're not going to be obliged to go to a party. They can have mental peace. They can live in their pajamas all day. They can have a retreat from the kind of craziness of work, partly because sometimes it's because we're overwhelmed with everyday life and we just need to step back. And sometimes because people live very, very sociable lives when they just need a little more downtime. And so that's separate from the ability to write or be creative. There is definitely a need for solitude and even loneliness in life sometimes. We are seeing the opening up of economies around the world, which means we're all getting out a little bit more.

Ormstown, Quebec, students doing something this hour that no child in Canada has done for months, and that is step into a classroom. There's only going to be 28 out of 188 kids coming back to school today. They will go outside for recess, but it won't be a free-for-all staying in those physical distancing guidelines. We're not anywhere back to what we were pre-coronavirus,

but at some time in the future, we come out of self-isolation. And there was this piece recently in the New Yorker that said, this is the quote, that loneliness is grief distended. What are going to be the long-term effects of this lockdown, do you think? I think in terms of loneliness, there are going to be some long-term impacts that will make us really think positively even about what is it that we need from our social relationships? What are the things that have worked for us and haven't worked

for us in lockdown? Are our relationships fulfilling to us? And if not, what can we do to change them? I do also think that this is going to be the first of many lockdowns over the next few years. I don't think that this is going to disappear anytime soon. So in some ways, I think some of the coping strategies that we might have developed this time, some of the ways in which we might envisage the world, and of work and of childminding, the ways in which we can actually do things quite differently, potentially could have positive impacts in the long run. You know, one of the things that I've been, I guess, a little surprised by, but really heartened

by is people in my circles, who probably wouldn't admit out loud that they were lonely just saying that, like, it's okay for us to say to one another right now that I'm lonely. Yeah, I think that's right. And also, I think accompanying that, people who are often lonely have for the first time been able to have a voice which is heard by other people so that rather than seeing lonely people are somehow failing which is what we're very bad at doing I think in the west someone can say I'm lonely and know that they will be understood because many more people have had that experience and it's one that's been imposed on them so in the same way that people with intense anxiety are reporting feeling less anxious because they feel that that experience is now being shared by lots of people like somebody else is carrying the load.

Lonely people are reporting that they also feel understood in a way that they haven't before. And so that is quite ironic, really, because within forced solitude and forced isolation could actually bring people together. It's been nice to think through all this with you together. Really nice to talk to you. Okay, take good care, Faye. Before we go today, I have some news I want to catch you up on. It's a potential game changer as Health Canada approved the first COVID-19 serological test. The test will be able to detect antibodies for the coronavirus. At least 1 million Canadian blood samples will be collected and tested over the next two years. Experts say this will help contribute to a better understanding of whether people who have been infected are

immune to the virus. That's all for today. I'm Pia Chattopadhyay. Thank you for listening to FrontBurner. We'll talk again tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.