Unwanted loneliness is not a problem for the elderly. It especially affects young people and more frequently girls. 31% of women between 16 and 29 years old claim to feel it, and 20.2% of men of that age as well. It is more pronounced in the central segments of youth, between 22 and 27 years old, and it is not a specific or temporary phenomenon, since three out of every four young people who feel alone have been feeling this way for more than a year and practically the half for more than three years.
This is revealed by the first report carried out in Spain on unwanted loneliness in young people, which has been prepared by the State Loneliness Observatory and promoted by Ayuda en Acción and Fundación Once.
It follows that youth loneliness is very heterogeneous and multi-causal, although there are factors that seem to have a significant impact, such as access to employment, place of residence or family origin. On the other hand, others that are assumed to be determinants, such as the use or abuse of social networks and the Internet, are not important for unwanted loneliness.
What differentiates young people who feel alone from those who don’t is not that they use social networks more or less. The differentiating factor between them is face-to-face relationships: among those who do not feel alone, eight out of ten interact mainly in person with their friends; among those who do feel alone, just over half (56%).
And the amount and type of social relationships are a relevant factor in explaining unwanted loneliness, explain the authors of the study. Those of friendship are the ones that count the most, above family ones or those that are maintained with work or study colleagues. The percentage of young people dissatisfied with the quantity or quality of their relationships is much higher among those who feel lonely than among those who do not.
They also detect that the attitude towards these social relationships is key in youth loneliness: people who do not feel alone have greater trust in others and also have more communication skills or feel comfortable asking others for help if at any time they feel alone .
On the other hand, a strong relationship is observed between bullying at school or at work and unwanted loneliness: the percentage of young people who have suffered bullying at some point in their lives is almost double among those who suffer unwanted loneliness (58%) than among those who do not feel it (32%).
The results of the telephone survey, carried out with a total of 1,800 people between 16 and 29 years old, also show the impact of educational background on feeling alone. Young people who have a university education are those who have the lowest levels of loneliness. On the other hand, those who have repeated a grade at some time have a prevalence ten points higher than the rest, and those who left school early also feel lonelier.
Rates of youth loneliness are also higher among boys and girls who are unemployed, or those who live in households with economic difficulties. And the same occurs among young people who feel discriminated against due to disability, their sexual orientation or because they or their parents were born abroad.
The place of birth or residence is also a risk factor for suffering unwanted loneliness, especially when economic conditions do not allow leaving there. However, despite the general idea that the greatest youth isolation occurs in small towns or large cities, the study shows that it is young people who live in medium-sized municipalities who suffer from it the most.
Specifically, those who live in towns with between 20,000 and 100,000 inhabitants are those with the highest prevalence of unwanted loneliness, 30%, compared to 19% in smaller municipalities or 24% in large cities, with more than 500,000. population.
The reason, the authors of the study explain, may be that the feeling of loneliness is closely related to being or feeling different and to friendship relationships, and in small municipalities interaction is easy despite the differences, while In big cities there are more opportunities to access people similar to yourself.
Another risk factor for youth loneliness is health. Young people who feel lonely perceive their health status as much worse than those who do not. And that has an impact on their level of self-esteem: 35% have it low, compared to only 10% of those who do not suffer from loneliness.
In this sense, the authors of the study explain that people with perceived or diagnosed mental health problems are 2.5 times more likely to suffer unwanted loneliness, and the incidence of depression or anxiety is much higher among those who feel alone (78%) than among those without (35%). A greater prevalence of self-harming thoughts and practices is also detected among the former.
During the presentation of the study, the Minister of Youth and Children, Sira Rego, admitted that the phenomenon of unwanted loneliness among young people “concerns us all”, it is a “collective responsibility”, which “cannot be discharged on the good or bad destiny of the individual.” She assured that “we must get out of the obsession with individual success and replace anxiety about performance with the need for care, and build close relationships where we can give space to our vulnerabilities.”
In his opinion, there are too many people who live alone due to inequalities. And he pointed out that, with regard to the Government’s responsibility, “we are going to continue strengthening the public services system”, to work “to guarantee that activities and culture are accessible and present in all neighborhoods”, so that leisure “is not a luxury”, to promote housing “to be a right” and so that work “does not consume all the time”.
In that sense, he recalled that his department will implement the first youth law of democracy, a text that will be developed through a participatory process with young people and will be articulated around four axes: economic rights and social coverage; democratic rights and political participation; mental health and well-being; and ecosocial crisis, intergenerational justice and rights of future generations.
During a discussion following the presentation of the report, Matilde Fernández, president of the State Observatory of Unwanted Loneliness, and Matías Figueroa, director of the Europe Aid in Action program, have urged to prevent unwanted loneliness from an early age, through of a more inclusive education.
And they have also demanded interventions through youth care services that reinforce social inclusion policies and support in the transition of young people from studies to employment, from youth to adulthood. Figueroa emphasized that the levels of loneliness are alarming and more tools are needed to care for young people.
