Loneliness and mental health

Loneliness is a common psychological phenomenon, and is associated with aspects of mental health.

Loneliness has been described and poeticized for as long as time has been time.. Human beings are social animals by nature, but they do not necessarily wish to adhere to their social norms.

Therefore, loneliness can mean the freedom to seek one's own way, but also the exclusion from the outside that a person suffers when not complying with social norms.

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

The impact of loneliness on mental health.

According to data from 2019, in Spain there are 4.7 million single-person households, of which 2 million are people over 65 years old. 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 number of adolescents with suicidal ideas or attempts have expressed feeling lonely and misunderstood as part of the problem.. Likewise, according to psychiatrist Diego Figuera, poverty and loneliness are the main psychosocial causes that favor the onset of mental illness.

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 and unconsoled Pain leads to the deepest madness. Relationship to the development of a mental disorder? All the world.

Absence is night, gloomy night How did we offend the sky one day, when it denies us its warm light? Nublos, by Fernando Celada,

The different forms of loneliness

Next, we will expose the different ways in which this feeling of loneliness manifests itself 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 through 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 to and capture the attention of others in a very effective way, but their problem with showing themselves vulnerable or allowing themselves spaces of intimacy turns this great ability into a shield that, contradictorily, makes a devastating feeling of loneliness persist.

Although team or collaborative work is encouraged in schools, there is still a message from society such as "solve your problems alone, otherwise you are weak", "to pair up is to tie yourself down", "image is the most important thing, learn to dress up and go to the gym".... The only thing it achieves in this way is to continue associating success and strength with loneliness itself.. 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 a symbol of admiration. Both the social skills to bond with others and the frustration tolerance for being alone are ingredients that are lost if we base social interaction on these digital platforms.

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

On the other hand there is the world of video games. Teenagers spend more and more time playing in their rooms, connected with virtual friends to overcome the challenges of those games. The risk here is to instrumentalize those relationships for leisure and not to create close bonds of security in which to confide 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, is when the feeling of freedom is generated, since he can choose the companies, and he can do it according to his needs, without confusing the social networks as a true space for meeting and intimacy. Adolescents need their adult role models to teach them and remind them how it is done, to look them in the eye, to make phone calls, to meet them for a walk, in short, to learn to be present analogically, not so much 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 are physiological-emotional management problems that are closely related to the different mental disorders, both to directly provoke their onset and to drastically worsen them.This is the case of anxiety and depression, disorders that go hand in hand with a feeling of incomprehension that makes communication difficult.

Such is the case of anxiety and depression, disorders that go hand in hand with a feeling of incomprehension that hinders communication. It is difficult to know what came first, if "the chicken or the egg", in the sense that incomprehension can produce frustration, and this affects the time to ask for help, generating a feeling of invasion or excessive demands to those who try to help, intensifying the feeling of incomprehension and, therefore, the loneliness felt, over and over again, loneliness felt, over and over again, as an endless vicious circle..

In other cases, such as bereavement or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the lack of social support enters as one of the risk factors for the chronification of the disease. This means that if after the traumatic event or loss of a loved one there is no support present, either in the form of messages or visits, the brain, the mind and the person will eventually fall apart.

It is possible that continued isolation is seen in this context as a way of protecting oneself from harm, although it can also be seen as a way of protecting oneself from the traumatic event.However, it can also be seen as a way of settling into a personal coffin.

Final Reflection

It is absolutely true that solitude provides opportunities to test oneself, to discover oneself outside one's comfort zone, to listen to oneself, to relax, to expand one's boundaries.... But we will always need a comfort zone to return to, someone to listen and look at us, to challenge us, to understand us..... To paraphrase the movie Into the Wildhappiness is only real when it is shared".