Loneliness is on the lips of every policymaker. It’s even got a Minister of Loneliness, although surely the minister of any government with the most lived experience of loneliness will be the Prime Minister.
It’s a difficult issue for any organisation to tackle, it’s like a ghost that inhabits every visible issue that services are responsible for, be it health, unemployment, homelessness, young people, etc.
Is it because for too long public services have developed identifiable services only based on material needs or because those are the issues people present themselves with?
Imagine what certain newspapers would say if there was a service to tackle loneliness, they would have a field day talking about non-jobs. Either way, it’s a difficult issue to tackle, and even more so for people who are lonely.
You can go to a GP and say I’ve got a headache, or go to a jobcentre and say the restaurant you work at has had to close down and you’ve lost your job, but would you go up to a service let alone a friend and say you’re lonely?
That’s why the solution can’t be a service to help lonely people. Partly because loneliness is a symptom rather than a cause, partly because people are lonely for different reasons and partly because people who are lonely don’t necessarily want to be solved.
I’ve written about working with Loneliness Lab to tackle loneliness, but I want to also talk about how the idea of tackling “loneliness in plain sight” by Janice Johnson, someone I was on the same @enrolyourself programme on, is so powerful.
She organises “Eating with Elephants”, a supper club where people connect over drink and food and break the silence of social stigma. These are on different issues, but the one I went to was on loneliness. At the supper club, I was it, everyone surprised everyone about how they were lonely in a different way. It opens up opportunities for people to open up, to be vulnerable, to share their story and to connect.
What ways have you seen or developed that tackle loneliness?
