Social Isolation and Its Impact on People of All Ages

Abstract

This paper offers an insight into how people of all ages and societies face social isolation at some point in their lives. No matter if they are rich or poor, young or the elderly, parents, their kids, people with disabilities and how being socially isolated packs a huge impact on their life mentally. This paper also talks about how urbanisations plays a major in forcing people to become socially isolated. The growing city and how it further separates people with different socio demographic sectors.

Introduction

Social relationships, a fundamental and vital component of human life, have important impacts on health. While positive social relationships are protective for health, a wealth of evidence has shown that weak social relationships are associated with a wide variety of adverse health outcomes, among which depression is an important focus. Social isolation and loneliness are reflections of objective and subjective characteristics of weak social relationships. Social isolation, the objective absence or near-absence of social relationships or connections, is a quantitative measure of network size, network diversity, and frequency of contact and describes the extent how an individual is socially isolated. Loneliness is the extent to which the individual emotionally feels socially isolated due to unpleasant experience or unmet needs in either quantity or quality of social relationships. Loneliness, which is conceptually distinct from social isolation, can occur in the presence or absence of social isolation. Social isolation and loneliness have been individually identified to be associated with depressive symptoms in multiple studies. Previous research among older population has identified a wide range of social isolation indicators having impacts on depression, which include being single, living alone, having a weak or small social network and infrequency of social interactions. However, different indicators of social isolation are rarely studied together and inconsistent findings are yielded, making it difficult to determine which components of social isolation are more deleterious for depression.

Sections

The extraordinary rise of living alone is among the most significant social changes of the modern world. Consider that, until the middle of the 20th century, not a single society in the history of our species sustained large numbers of people living alone for long periods of time.There’s good reason to believe that this spike in living alone, and particularly ageing alone, affects health and health care. But we don’t yet have enough research to understand exactly how. One possibility is that there is a causal link between living alone, being socially isolated, and feeling lonely. But these are three distinct conditions, and experiencing one (living alone) does not necessarily mean experiencing one or both of the others (being isolated or feeling lonely). Of course, identifying the risks of social isolation is just the first step of addressing it as a public health problem. After that, we need to know how common isolation is in different places and subpopulations, and what can be done to reduce it. Here, it is especially important that we not conflate living alone, being isolated, and feeling lonely, because each condition requires a particular form of diagnosis and a specific intervention. Social isolation may be less widespread in the general population than many believe, but it is more common among some people and places than others. Older people are at higher risk for isolation because of physical frailty as well as deaths in their family and friendship networks. Since individual, group, and neighbourhood conditions determine who is living alone, policies for reducing social isolation should attend to each of these levels.

For relatively healthy people at risk for isolation, such as widows and widowers, older single men, and older single lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people who live alone, a warning about the danger of isolation and simple encouragement to be socially active may help promote social interaction. Those who suffer from isolation and loneliness are vulnerable to a vicious cycle that leads to social withdrawal, and they would likely benefit from psychological care as well as social activity.

Certain people at risk for isolation need more support. People who are ageing alone in impoverished areas with degraded social infrastructure would benefit from neighbourhood revitalisation, but that would require considerable investment from the public and private sectors, and there is little reason to think either will come through soon. Old, frail, and reclusive people who live alone may require home care and specialised services such as meal delivery or social visits. In these cases, care workers should understand that they likely serve as a vital source of interaction. They should be trained to recognise when an isolated person is in danger and no longer able to live alone, and how to connect that person to appropriate sources of support. Unfortunately, home services are expensive, and poor people living in poor communities often suffer from inadequate attention and support. There are a handful of volunteer-based organisations attempting to fill the care gap (for instance, Little Brothers, Friends of the Elderly), but not enough to substantially reduce isolation at the national or international levels. As the population ages and the number of people ageing alone grows, societies throughout the world will need to develop new supportive housing programs and new forms of elderly care. Few nations have recognised this challenge, and fewer still have made real investments in devising solutions.

The National Mental Health Survey (2015-16) in 12 states of India covering 39,532 people found that one in 20 people suffers from depression. “Depression was reported to be higher in females, in the age-group of 40-49 years and among those residing in urban metros,” the report observes. Most of the effect, however, is due to the socio- demographic characteristics of people living in the city. Yet even when we adjust for these characteristics, a small effect of urban residence on subjective powerlessness remains. This remaining effect is explained by the experience of disorder in one's neighbourhood. People who live in urban areas and high-poverty neighbourhoods report more neighbourhood disorder; this disorder, not the city nor the neighbourhood poverty per se, affects perceived powerlessness. People who report living in a disordered neighbourhood have significantly higher levels of perceived powerlessness, in small part because they lack social ties with neighbours. In 2013, Human Rights Watch released a report on the lack of accessibility for people with disabilities in India. The report recognises 26-year-old Mona, whose limited mobility requires her to use a wheelchair. However, Mona lives in a third-floor apartment that is only accessible by stairs.

Consequently, “she often does not leave it for several months at a time and cannot meet with family and friends.” This would take its toll on any human being, causing painful experiences loneliness and social isolation. The report found that as of 2013, there were at least 13 million people with disabilities in India. It also found that for the majority of these individuals, participation in basic daily activities is “extremely difficult or even impossible due to a range” of barriers. These barriers are physical, such as the lack of ramps and elevators, as well as psychological, including discrimination from employers, transport operators and shopkeepers. Furthermore, they are unable to access transportation due to difficulties “entering train stations or bus stops, boarding transport, or communicating with transport operators.” This lack of accessibility isolates people with disabilities, preventing them from participating fully in society. Indeed, “many people with disabilities may rarely leave home, have incomplete or substandard educations, and may never start a family or have meaningful employment.” However, this trend is certainly not exclusive to India. People with disabilities face isolation in cities across the world. The World Bank reports that one billion people – 15% of the world’s population – experience some form of disability. Accessibility is a vital component for an inclusive city, yet globally, people with disabilities are forgotten in the shadows. There exists a pervasiveness of the “’disabling city’ – the urban setting that restricts, ignores and excludes people with disabilities from regular participation in everyday social, cultural, economic and recreational activities.”

Social isolation is a state of estrangement, in which social connections are limited or absent. Loneliness, on the other hand, is a subjective feeling of distress, arising when social connections are perceived to be inadequate or unfulfilling. Crucially, although isolation and loneliness tend to co-occur, they can also be experienced independently of one another: it does not follow that isolated individuals necessarily feel lonely, nor does an abundance of social connections preclude one from experiencing loneliness. Thus, although there is overlap between these two constructs, there are important conceptual distinctions between them. It is therefore important to incorporate measures of both isolation and loneliness, without treating them as interchangeable.

Due to cultural differences, such as in ascent or language, the migrants are often unable to form intimacies with people around them and fail to construct a decent social identity. Social identities guide behaviours, make any social acts meaningful, and are enacted in social relationships. Therefore, failure to form a decent identity leads to mislaying the competence of functioning in interpersonal relations. It is a set of difficulties that begin with the feeling of alienation and experiencing relational complications that eventually lead to interpersonal objections. More often, the long- term non-involvement in the formal economy increases the vulnerability of becoming poor and subsequently becoming poor makes it more problematic to return to a proper employment. Thus, a vicious circle of exclusion is being created. Although social isolation and unemployment may not be directly related, the problem of poverty is a common trait among the socially isolates. Further, living in a very poor neighbourhood increases social isolation and reduces access to social resources. Any effort to be secured in formal employment in any labor market is, more often than not, characterised by expanding dependencies upon non-poor neighbours and personal contacts.

Conclusion

Social isolation is rampant if any individuals lack social support that includes both tangible and emotional support along with the support of the acts of others. It is found that, despite the equal level of satisfaction with the available social support network, men were more isolated than women, primarily because the contention that men, in general, satisfy their emotional needs by having discussion with their spouses, while women satisfy their needs by talking with their female friends. Sometimes, people begin to consider themselves as socially isolated merely due to the fact that they may have failed to acquire a good education and proper respectable job. This results in the belief that they may face an acquisition of being corrupt quite unreasonably by the respectable part of the society. Hence, they begin to consider themselves being rejected by members of respectable society and decide to disengage from the larger community. Ironically, they begin to get less opportunity to become a part of integrated society equally with those who are truly accused of being corrupt.

The consequence of the feelings of social isolation lies in the implication of the perceived social situation and available social relations around the people. In another way to say it, social isolation is inversely associated with the learning of information relevant to one’s interpersonal security. Hence, the assumption that social relations are associated with overall well-being and the fact that social isolation is linked to the expectation to the development of a feeling of inadequately connected to the wider society make the importance of subjective perception of the individuals evidently clear. The empirical findings seek to correlate social isolation variable with parity in both poor and socially excluded people simultaneously controlling for age, sex, education, and occupation. There were no differences in powerlessness between these two groups. The urban environment contributes to social isolation in a multitude of ways. A combination of physical barriers in the built environment and rapidly-occurring global trends has resulted in the exclusion of large cohorts of the world’s population. However, there is hope. If we focus on understanding the needs of urban populations, particularly those who are vulnerable, we can build inclusive cities. Using existing programs and policies as models, this paper aims to demonstrate how we can diminish social isolation and build social connectedness through human - centred, inclusive urban planning.