In today’s societies, the deterioration in the quantity and quality of social relationships is evident. This situation is due to different factors, among which are a reduction in intergenerational coexistence, the difficulty in relating to others, greater social mobility, a delay in the age of marriage, a greater proportion of single-person households and an aging population. coupled with an increase in dependency situations. The pandemic has also contributed to increasing the prevalence of loneliness and people living in social isolation.
Unwanted loneliness differs from the concept of social isolation. While being socially isolated corresponds to an objective situation, related to the existence of little social contact, the situation of loneliness is the subjective perception that the individual has of that situation.
Feeling alone is a negative emotion that is generally defined as the situation of having fewer or worse quality social relationships than one would like to have, hence the term unwanted loneliness. In this sense, a person could have a lot of social contact, but feel lonely.
In order to obtain the prevalence of loneliness among the population over 15 years of age, we prepared a specific questionnaire with questions about suffering from loneliness and its causes, among others. For this purpose, we contacted 4,004 representative individuals of Spanish society by sex, age and location size.
From their answers, we estimated an overall prevalence of unwanted loneliness of 13.4% (14.8% in women and 12.1% in men). By age groups, the highest prevalence is obtained among the population between 16 and 24 years of age (21.9%) and people between 25 and 34 years of age (16.5%). It would follow the population between 55 and 64 years and the population over 74 years with a prevalence of 12.4% and 12.2%, respectively. These results confirm that the prevalence of loneliness does not follow a linear relationship with age, obtaining a relationship of U: higher in young adults, reduced in middle-aged adults, and increased again in the older population.
According to the results of the study, on average people in solitude have been in this situation for approximately six years. Regarding the main causes of unwanted loneliness, 79% are related to external causes, mainly the “lack of coexistence or family or social support” (57.3%), especially for these reasons:
Work-related causes represent 11.1% of the total causes, and overwork is the main work-related cause of their loneliness (6.2%). The last two groups of external causes refer to reasons for isolation due to the environment (8.6%) and acting as a caregiver for other people (2.1%). Regarding internal or intrinsic causes to the person, the difficulty in relating to others represents 12.7% of the total causes declared, and loneliness derived from poor health represents 6.4%.
Compared to the population that is not alone, single people have higher prevalences of certain diseases. The perception of their state of health is also worse:
Thus, while 70% of the population who do not state that they are in this situation perceive their health as good or very good, this percentage drops to 51.1% among people who suffer from unwanted loneliness.
At the same time, single people frequent health services more, mainly consultations with specialist doctors and emergency services. There is also a greater consumption of prescribed medications for diseases related to their loneliness situation, highlighting the consumption of relaxing tranquilizers and stimulant antidepressants (33.1% vs. 12.9% and 23.5% vs. 5.3% , respectively).
Direct healthcare costs amounted to a total of 6.101 million euros. 92% of these costs correspond to frequenting health services. In the indirect costs item, a total of 848 premature deaths associated with unwanted loneliness have been estimated, which generates a loss of 6,707 potential years of full-time productive life. This loss of years of productive life is equivalent to a total of 191 million euros per year for Spanish society.
According to the results, almost 21% of people living alone have some type of disability, mainly mobility and vision. In addition, 6.5% of people with loneliness state that they are severely limited, compared to 3.85% of people who do not feel lonely.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation.
Berta Rivera Castiñeira is Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Coruña; Bruno Casal Rodríguez is Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Coruña and Eva Rodríguez Míguez is Professor of Economics at the University of Vigo.
