Loneliness and mental health

Loneliness has been described and poeticized since time is time. The human being is a social animal by nature, but he does not have to wish to adhere to his social norms.

For this reason, loneliness can mean the freedom to seek one's own path, but also the exclusion from outside that a person suffers by not complying with social regulations.

In this sense, we understand by loneliness what happens when people live alone voluntarily or involuntarily, but we will focus more on the feeling of loneliness or helplessness, that is, those who do not voluntarily choose to be or feel isolated. The question that in the world of mental health we ask ourselves is: to what extent can loneliness affect illness?

• Related article: "The 6 types of loneliness, and their causes and characteristics"

The impact of loneliness on mental health

According to 2019 data, in Spain there are 4.7 million single-person households, of which 2 million are people over 65 years of age. In addition, different studies confirm that one of the major psychological conditions suffered by this population is the feeling of loneliness.

On the other hand, a large part of adolescents with suicidal ideas or attempts have expressed feeling alone and misunderstood as part of the problem. Likewise, according to the psychiatrist Diego Figuera, poverty and loneliness are the main psychosocial causes that favor the appearance of mental illnesses.

With all this, we also want to point out what poets have written in a thousand and one ways: that being alone implies pain, and prolonged pain without consolation leads to the deepest madness. Relationship with the development of a mental disorder? All of the world.

Absence is night, dark night. How do we offend heaven one day, which thus denies us its warm light? Nublos, by Fernando Celada,

The different forms of loneliness

Next, we will expose the different ways of manifesting that feeling of loneliness and how it affects us psychologically. In addition, we will relate how society reinforces loneliness in its different messages.

Being or feeling lonely

This difference shines when we attend to some people with affective deficiencies in consultation. Money, social and professional success, stable partners, physical and aesthetic health... and yet they are people who bow their heads and shrink when they express how they feel.

They may have learned to relate and attract the attention of others very effectively, but their problem with being vulnerable or Allowing yourself spaces of intimacy turns this great ability into a shell that, contradictorily, persists a devastating feeling of loneliness.

Although team or collaborative work is encouraged in schools, a message from society of the style of "Solve your problems alone, because if you are not weak", "to pair is to tie", "the image is the most important thing, learn to dress and go to the Gym"… The only thing he achieves in this way is to continue associating success and strength with his own loneliness. Once again, a complete contradiction with our social nature.

To this we can add the false illusion of community that is generated in social networks, with emoticons and likes as symbols of admiration. Both the social skills to bond with others and the tolerance for frustration for being They alone are ingredients that are lost if we base social interaction on these digital platforms.

In the end, Instead of being a community that watches a person on a screen (television 20 years ago), we are a person that feels watched by the community when there is only one camera. Yes, technology gives us facilities in our day to day, but there are battles that we are losing, and we fall in the form of a selfie.

On the other hand is the world of video games. Adolescents spend more and more time playing in their rooms, connecting with virtual friends to overcome the challenges posed by these games. The risk here is to instrumentalize these relationships for leisure and not to create close bonds of security. in which to trust the deepest secrets. Playing is healthy and entertaining, but the real world will always be the biggest challenge, living, and we need allies to overcome it.

When a person recognizes in himself this difference between being or feeling alone, it is when the feeling of freedom is generated, since it can choose the companies, and you can do it according to your needs, without confusing social networks as a true meeting place and privacy. Adolescents need their adult references to teach them and remind them how to do it, look into their eyes, make a phone call, meet for a walk, in short, learn to be present analogically, not so virtually.

Loneliness as an element that is aggravated by other pathologies

If we add the loneliness felt as rejection, abandonment and helplessness on the part of the support network to the need for regulation and emotional balance, the result is physiological-emotional management problems that are closely related to different mental disorders, both to directly provoke its appearance and to worsen it drastically.

Such is the case of anxiety and depression, disorders that go hand in hand with a feeling of misunderstanding that makes communication difficult. It is difficult to know which came before, if “the chicken or the egg”, in the sense that misunderstanding can produce frustration, and this affects the time of demand help, generating a feeling of invasion or excessive demand from those who try to help, intensifying that feeling of incomprehension and, therefore, so much, lonely felt, over and over again, like an endless vicious cycle.

In other cases, such as mourning or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the lack of social support is one of the risk factors for the chronicity of the disease. This means that if after the traumatic event or loss of a loved one there is no support present, both in the form of messages and visits, the brain, the mind and the person crumble.

Continuous isolation may be seen in that context as a way to protect yourself from harm., although it can also be seen as a way to accommodate a personal coffin.

Final reflection

It is totally true that loneliness provides opportunities to test yourself, to discover yourself outside your comfort zone, to listen to yourself, to relax, to expand your limits... But We will always need a comfort zone to return to, for someone to listen to us and look at us, to challenge us, to understand us. Paraphrasing the movie Into the wild, "Happiness is only real when shared".