Broken lives and premature death: how did loneliness become a sanitary emergency?
This article from L’Express, a recognized French newspaper, explores how loneliness became a top priority topic during these past few years, both for the public and the decision makers.
Individuals’ initiatives
People are feeling the impact of loneliness on their lives. Patrick Bernard, 64, is a local figure who is combatting loneliness on a daily basis. He created a local non-profit, called the Hyperneighbours’ Republic, and through it, built step by step new connections with people in his area. From diners to waste sorting sessions, his initiative have been takled about in numerous newspapers including the New York Times, and is replicated in the United States, in Spain and in Italy.
The Pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic was a pivotal moment for the action and research around loneliness, as the awareness on this matter really rose during that time, to the point that the European Commission decided to have loneliness as one its main priorities in 2023. In France, the struggle remains: more than 11 million people regularly feel alone in the country, even now that social distanciation rules are out of effect. Many people involved in the fight against loneliness would like France to create its own Ministry of Solitude, like in Japan, or the United Kingdom at some point. The idea behind it is to carry the challenges stemming from loneliness to the decision makers’ level. At the moment, France has a strategic committee on loneliness but it only focuses on older adults, even though the most represented group in polls on loneliness is the young adults, alongside people coming from minority groups or a migrand background.
Physical health issues
The research on the physical effects of loneliness is an important factor of awareness. Julianne Holt-Lunstad demonstrated that loneliness has en effect comparable to the act of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, in a paper published in 2015 Perspectives on Psychological Science. Loneliness would even expose people to a mortality increased by 32% according to a paper published during the same year in Nature Human Behaviour.
Relational reeducation
RECETAS finds answers to the mysteries and challenges by acknowledging isolated people’s need to make new connections but also their incapacity to do so. By using nature-based social prescriptions, RECETAS creates a form of protocols of social reeducation, An important element that emerged from this is that one well-trained person can generate the necessary drive for people to meaningfully meet up. In the United Kingdom, a job is even born from this observation: the link workers.
Click here to find out more about the article, our work regarding alleviating loneliness and the other initiatives going in that direction.
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