Loneliness can affect functioning at work.
Atlantico: In the UK, but also in other developed countries, an “epidemic of loneliness” is taking shape. Across the Channel, 40% of women aged 16 to 29 say they “feel lonely often, always or sometimes”, according to an ONS survey carried out in March 2022. The number of young men who spend more than 8 hours alone has increased by 20% since 2011. How can this observation be explained? Is the phenomenon comparable in France?
Xavier Briffault : The current epidemiological literature on loneliness is saturated with work on the effects of the Covid pandemic and the public policies implemented to deal with it. Almost all the information that we find is linked to this pandemic, it is difficult to bring out long-term trends and there is relatively little data on France, because we are not very strong on psychiatric epidemiology. , especially compared to the countries of Northern Europe.
According to a study published in Health Policy in 2022, which compares the prevalence of loneliness in different countries in Europe, states that in 2016, 12% of individuals reported feeling lonely. During the pandemic, this figure rose to around 25%. Mental health parameters have deteriorated significantly as a result. While 80% of individuals declared in 2016 to feel good, calm, active and rested, they were only 50% following the pandemic. All of this is largely linked to the effects of the pandemic, and in particular to the loneliness caused by the various confinements. In France, the proportion of people reporting feeling lonely increased by 15 points after the pandemic, while this increase was less than 10 points in Belgium or Spain, for example. This increase in loneliness was stronger in countries that had lower levels of loneliness, which is quite interesting. On the other hand, what is spectacular is that France is the country in Europe which has seen the greatest increase in people declaring that they feel lonely. Finally, and this is particularly worrying, it is people aged 18 to 25 who have been most affected by the increase in the feeling of loneliness, with no great difference between men and women.
Does living alone increase the risk of unhealthy behaviors? What are the risks of remaining alone for these young people?
Loneliness has a very severe impact on multiple mental health parameters: loss of social support, stress, anxiety, depression, etc. With the risks that this implies, such as suicide, even if young people are less affected by the 9,000 to 10,000 deaths per year than older people. But they are more concerned by the 200,000 attempts that arrive in the emergency room each year in France. Loneliness decreases social support, the ability to speak, to reassure oneself but also operational support. Many studies ask, for example, “if you had to move house, how many people would come to help you?” “. If the answer is 0, this implies chronic stress, the feeling that we will not be able to cope in the event of a problem, which generates deleterious physiological reactions and which goes so far as to reduce life expectancy.
Obviously, loneliness also increases the use of anxiolytics such as alcohol or drugs such as cannabis. Alcohol is very easy to obtain in France, and it aggravates mental disorders (in particular depression), sleep and memory disorders, it generates aggression, accidents, and it is also a factor risk of committing suicide, in particular because of its disinhibiting effects.
Besides the effects on individual health, is there also an impact on societies?
There is already a strong impact in terms of psychiatric morbidity. According to’French Public Health Coviprev survey, 25% of the population today has anxiety disorders, 15% depressive disorders and 70% sleep disorders. All these people can find themselves on sick leave, and psychiatry is the second largest health insurance item. Any increase in mental health problems has immediate consequences on the health system, productivity, functioning at work and ultimately on work stoppages. The fact that an entire population finds itself locked up overnight has shaken fundamentals in our contemporary societies, which were rather stable. The basic substrate of freedom has been shattered and this has created a feeling of uncertainty and of the impossibility of projecting oneself into the future which will long continue to have deleterious effects.
Is there a way to fight this loneliness? Should this phenomenon be considered a public health problem?
It is clearly a public health problem. However, should the solution be the responsibility of public health operators? It is less certain because in general these operators and their policies show great indifference towards mental health issues. When trade-offs were made between reducing viral spread and impacts on people’s mental health, the choices were clearly in favor of viral health, which only affected a small part of the population. However, mental health has very serious long-term consequences, which concern the entire population; mental disorders tend to become chronic and they are very difficult to treat, not to mention that psychiatry is completely saturated in France, which is very serious. Therefore, I am not sure that public health can take hold of this problem, which is much more general and which requires reconsidering the way in which we weight the different components of human life. In 2017, the WHO had a slogan “no health without mental health”. This is very true, but this slogan was very quickly forgotten, with all the dramatic consequences that we have mentioned. The following quote is attributed to Clemenceau: “War is too serious a thing to entrust to soldiers”. Similarly, public health is too serious a matter to be left to doctors alone. Social scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists or even ethicists must also be involved, because they consider the human being and society as a whole, and not only from a limited point of view which takes no account of the complexity of the risk-benefit ratios involved in the different policy options.
To fight against loneliness, we must already avoid all strategies of violent confinement to the detriment of other effective strategies, such as wearing a mask, vaccination, information and targeted and adapted support for groups at risk. Lockdowns are effective in the short term but have too many negative effects to be considered reasonable acts. Teleworking, which has developed a lot over the past three years, has many advantages but also disadvantages, in particular in that it reduces the physical possibilities of meetings and exchanges. Urban planning must also be adapted. They are very important since they can make it possible to meet people, discuss, share friendly natural spaces… or on the contrary promote isolation and break up collectives. We also have to work on more fundamental things because the loss of a “meaning of life” and of an ability to project oneself into the future, both individually and collectively, generates a lot of loneliness. As social animals, we unite around and with value systems that must be common. These values having been damaged, and the lack of a sufficient legibility of the future, reduces the possibilities, the will to engage in collective projects. There is therefore political work to be done to recreate a common system of values, especially since we are going to be confronted with climate issues with many challenges and stressors that risk further increasing the disintegration of social institutions of meaning and the inter-group and inter-individual divisions and clashes that have emerged with the pandemic. This risks not only increasing loneliness and mental health issues, but also impacting our ability to cope with the problem, with potentially life-threatening consequences.