{"id":78,"date":"2020-04-06T15:45:21","date_gmt":"2020-04-06T15:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/covid-19\/?p=78"},"modified":"2020-04-06T15:45:21","modified_gmt":"2020-04-06T15:45:21","slug":"social-distancing-and-loneliness-community-and-oneliness-in-the-age-of-coronavirus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/covid-19\/2020\/04\/06\/social-distancing-and-loneliness-community-and-oneliness-in-the-age-of-coronavirus\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Distancing and Loneliness: Community and \u2018Oneliness\u2019 in the Age of Coronavirus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blog by Dr Fay Bound Alberti, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Reader in History at the University of York and author of A Biography of Loneliness: the history of an emotion<\/em> (Oxford University Press, 2019).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like loneliness, Coronavirus has become a global pandemic, and with the introduction of social distancing, these two threats are being conflated. Fears of being alone, and spending too much time alone, are presumed to be synonymous with loneliness. But this assumption is simplistic and detrimental to our understanding of loneliness and its impact on human health.<\/p>\n

Loneliness is not a single emotional state, but a cluster of different emotions\u2014from anger and shame to sadness and jealousy. Emotional response varies by gender, age, ethnicity, health and location. Rural loneliness is different from urban loneliness; the loneliness of a single mother on the breadline is different from that of an elderly man whose peers have died. So there can be no one-size-fits-all policy in addressing loneliness. And physical separation is not the same as emotional separation. We can all be lonely in a crowd.<\/p>\n

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Photo by John Cameron<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before 1800, people talked about \u201coneliness,\u201d which meant physically alone, but without any emotional deficiency. \u201cLoneliness\u201d became more common when traditional ways of viewing the self, the body, and the world changed, and when the idea of \u201ccommunity\u201d as a space for mutual obligation was replaced by the ideals of philosophical and economic individualism.<\/p>\n

Existential loneliness or alienation, a sense of not belonging to the world, was linked to the drastic social, political and economic changes that characterized industrial society from the late 18th<\/sup> century. Along with a decline in the certainty of God, the structural changes brought by industrialisation and urbanisation created new ways of being alone. Some of these changes have become more pronounced under late 20th<\/sup> and 21st<\/sup>-century neoliberalism. We are more than ever encouraged to focus on the individual at the expense of the social\u2014to put the self first. And so, people stockpile toilet roll.<\/p>\n

A few weeks retreating from social life, even running out of basics, won\u2019t kill most people, but it can have devastating effects on those already compromised by a lack of social care, structural inequalities, poor health and infirmity, especially when accompanied by fear and anxiety. Thus, the way we talk about social distancing, self-isolation, and loneliness matters. Transient loneliness is different than chronic loneliness, and what we might call \u201cstructural\u201d loneliness (brought on by poverty, disability or infirmity) is akin to social abandonment. What, then, can we do to help those whose isolation will<\/em> make loneliness unutterably worse, and maybe even fatal?<\/p>\n