Although it is well documented men are less likely than women to talk about feelings and to seek help, our research found men's work arrangements can be a significant contributor.

We found loneliness was highest among men in their late 40s but it also occurred at other times, often shaped by how they perceived their careers and income.

This suggests the workplace and societal expectations around work are important in men's experiences of loneliness.

Measuring loneliness

Our findings are based on an analysis of yearly data from 12,117 Australian men, aged 15 to 98, collected for over 19 years for the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.

We measured loneliness by examining men's responses to a question asking whether they agreed with the statement: "I often feel very lonely". The responses range from one (completely disagree) to seven (completely agree).

We then used statistical techniques to ensure we were measuring loneliness and not similar constructs, such as social isolation.

We also used methods that examined how much of men's loneliness was uniquely due to their social relationships (for example, their romantic relationships or friendships), versus other aspects of their lives, such as their living situation or their working arrangements.

The role of work

Given loneliness is a social problem, we were not surprised to find problems in men's social relationships, particularly their romantic relationships, friendships and family relationships were linked with loneliness.

However, we were surprised to see work also played a significant role.

Men who were unemployed or in insecure jobs experienced more loneliness than those with stable employment.

Job loss can impact a person's identity and limits the social connections work typically provides. Unemployment also limits income, making it harder to afford social activities.

Insecure "gig" work, with its often unpredictable and long hours spent alone, disrupts work-life balance and can isolate people.

Our research suggests societal expectations also worsen loneliness for some men.

We measured the degree to which men agreed with the statement: "It is not good for a relationship if the woman earns more than the man".

Men, particularly middle-aged men, who believed they should be the main breadwinners in a household were lonelier than those without this belief.

This suggests traditional views around work in the context of heteronormative relationships can be damaging to social connection.

This once mainstream view not only harms relationships but is also unrealistic when surviving on a single income is increasingly difficult for many households.

Men who believed men, not women, should be the main breadwinner were more lonely. Marion Weyo/Shutterstock

Improving men's personal relationships is only one way to reduce male loneliness. The work sector and social pressures around work should also adapt

Shifting social norms

Public stereotypes that make men feel solely responsible for household income need to shift.

Public awareness and education campaigns can help shift gender norms and stereotypes by building knowledge and awareness, and may therefore reduce loneliness.

Helping men attain better work-life balance can help everyone.

Such change, however, requires major cultural shifts which take time. A shorter term solution, particularly for men at retirement age, is volunteering.

Volunteering provides purpose and opportunities to socialise, although recent evidence suggests volunteering has not returned to pre-COVID levels.

How governments can help

Increasing casualisation of the workplace and the growth of the gig economy offer flexibility but also decrease job security. Our research shows job insecurity or unemployment rates contribute to male loneliness.

Government amendments to the Fair Work Act should help reduce job insecurity by allowing the Fair Work Commission to set fair minimum standards,.

These would include access to dispute resolution for "employee-like" workers, such as Uber drivers, who work through a digital platform.

Governments can also support activities of interest to men by ensuring regular funding for programs like Men's Sheds or opportunities to work with animals.

Social prescribing - where a GP or other health worker links patients with resources and activities to improve health and reduce loneliness - can also involve men in roles which best fit their needs and interests.

How employers can help

Thankfully, workplaces can do a lot to reduce loneliness. A recent review suggests employers can:

1) Create opportunities for social connection, for example, dedicating time for non-work activities such as designing communal areas in offices to support connection.

2) Support flexible and remote, potentially isolated workers by fostering workplace connections using virtual spaces such as online dinners, while still encouraging work-life balance.

3) Foster a people focused culture by building employee autonomy, tolerating mistakes and providing mentoring opportunities.

The relationship between managers and workers is especially important for well-being, because managers can shape working conditions, model positive behaviour and improve staff knowledge, but few interventions target this area.

• First published in The Conversation
• Marlee Bower is a Research Fellow, Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, University of Sydney
• Ferdi Botha is a Senior Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne
• Mark Deady is a Senior Research Fellow, Black Dog Institute, UNSW Sydney

As the pope was speaking, Mariana Scavo, 32, ate leftovers from the fridge of her apartment in Turin, in northern Italy, before collapsing on her couch to watch favourite scenes from the 1973 hit musical "Jesus Christ Superstar."

In the past, the young web designer has celebrated Easter by attending the Saturday evening vigil Mass with friends, then joining her family in the southern city of Bari for a feast with dozens of friends and family.

"This Easter was particularly estranging," she told Religion News Service by phone on April 16. "Up to this point, it has probably been the day that weighed on me the most."

It has been about 40 days since the Italian government imposed safety measures throughout the peninsula, asking citizens to go out only for emergencies or to gather basic necessities, shutting down most shops other than grocery stores and pharmacies.

In the new life these orders have created, solitude has become the sole, unexpected companion for those who live alone or who have contracted the virus and are suddenly living in isolation.

Young people far from home, the ill and seniors severed from society and fearful of contagion are coming to terms with the tenuous distinction between loneliness and solitude.

"When it comes to experiencing solitude right now, it's important to make a distinction between people who are in quarantine and are actually in ICUs and people who practice self-isolation and social distancing," Thuy-vy Nguyen, an assistant professor of psychology at Durham University in England, told Religion News Service in a phone interview.

Nguyen, who studies the psychology of being alone, has been monitoring how people have perceived solitude as the U.K. has urged citizens to stay at home to limit their exposure to others.

With a sample of 800 people between the ages of 35 and 80, Nguyen and her team of researchers found that 80% of people in the country have opted for voluntary self-isolation.

She is currently working on a paper that analyzes the distinction between those who experience solitude in hospitals and those facing it in the confines of their home.

Some groups are more vulnerable to feeling lonely, she explained, such as foreign students or immigrants, who are "prone to loneliness, because of the nature of being away from home."

For others, such as those with preexisting mental health conditions, extended time alone can be a trigger for depression or anxiety. Nguyen has already identified a spike in anxiety as the current crisis, mostly about falling ill.

It's important, she cautioned, that "we don't end up making vulnerable groups feel even more marginalized," either by denying them professional help or simply by applying our own standards of comfort.

Yet, for some people this time in self-isolation at home can be an opportunity, even "calming," Nguyen said. Some might actually benefit from and build upon the changes they've made during the global lockdown once the health measures are removed.

"I see this pandemic as an unique experience that perhaps may activate some new coping mechanism for some people," she said.

Scavo, who calls herself an introvert, said the quarantine has not been too hard on her but admitted that mornings have been rough. It often takes her an hour to find the energy and motivation to get out of bed.

"There's a difference between choosing to be alone and being obligated," she said.

"I miss physical contact with people, especially with my girlfriend. But I also miss that spontaneity of even just a hug," she added.

Part of Scavo's coping mechanism, as Nguyen might call it, is prayer. "I'm used to praying loudly and even getting mad at God," she said. "It's a good way to voice a thought."

She describes herself as a "fan of digital communication," which has allowed her to remain in contact with her parish, friends and family. Her church's Zoom video calls and the papal tweets calling for solidarity have helped her feel more connected to her faith, she said.

Scavo, a convert to Catholicism, found a loving community in a parish in Bari that has accepted her as an LGBTQ person.

But since she came to Turin she has struggled to create a new home for herself. Well before the quarantine, she said, she had learned to be alone.

"I learned how much solitude I could take," she said. "It's important to recognize your symptoms."

For Scavo, the essential remedy to loneliness is routine. Waking up early, getting out of her pajamas, putting time aside for meals are just a few examples of how she makes sure her life is regimented and her mental health is checked.

She also makes sure to reach out to others when her "mood goes down" or when she starts "crying for no reason," she added.

"There is nothing wrong with saying: 'I feel alone,'" she said, "just as there is nothing wrong with saying: 'I'm OK.'"

Some of the techniques Scavo has adopted are reminiscent of those used by hermits and monks who have made social distancing a way of life.

"All those who are monks cannot function without order in their lives," said the Rev. Mario Aguilar, a Benedictine hermit and professor of divinity at the University of St. Andrews.

Aguilar compared the hermetic lifestyle to the army, imposing discipline and "living by the day," so as not to get lost in the resounding solitude of one's own thoughts.

"The eating, studying and the praying need to be organized. Otherwise this quarantine will be a nightmare," he said. "Order and discipline are very important in terms of how you are going to survive this."

Prayer is another key, the hermit explained, suggesting the rosary as an easy roadmap even for the unexperienced with prayer.

"Say the prayers and Hail Mary, and you won't feel like you are completely on your own," he said.

Aguilar, who travelled to his native Chile in mid-March and is now unable to return to his isolated home in Scotland, spent Holy Week and the days leading up to Easter in solitude, following along with Pope Francis' Masses alone in his apartment.

"I found it very meaningful," he said. "Isolation means more time with God."

But Aguilar has also found himself unexpectedly busy. As Easter approached, a top Vatican official reached out to him with a personal message from Pope Francis. "You are the face of God at the moment, keep people going," the simple message said.

"That's the moment I realized I had a task," Aguilar said.

He now hears confession from distanced people by phone and attends to his 80 students, while also answering the door to people looking for help and support. Some just want to talk. "We can serve people in a way that they did not feel that we served them before," he said.

In his latest book, "At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life," the self-described Catholic "solitary" Fenton Johnson follows in the footsteps of great solitaries among the artists and thinkers.

"I think solitude is hard and that it is a more constructive approach to the situation forced upon us to recognize that it's a challenge," he told RNS by phone from Tucson, Arizona. "To engage solitude constructively is a lifelong project."

After losing his partner to AIDS in the '90s, Johnson went to teach at the University of Arizona and sought out the desert, an evocative place for any aspiring hermit.

"For anyone who sits down by themselves for the first time, the first thing that happens is boredom," said Johnson. "After a while, there is really difficult, challenging boredom. Then, if you're persistent long enough, you get to a place that I call transcendent boredom, which is when the mind starts getting creative."

"Solitude is where you learn to love yourself and then loving others and the planet," said Johnson.

"We are at a real crossroads where we can make certain choices and try and shape the world we want to live in, or it's going to shape that world for us, and that's not a good thing to happen," he added.

Though the times are difficult, faith traditions offer models, Johnson explained, of how to be alone in ways that promote growth and creativity.

"The challenge of any institutionalized religion is to convey resources for comfort that are not fantasy, but (are) the accumulated wisdom of those who have come before to teach us how to come to death," he said. "Which means to say, how to live your life."

• Claire Giangravé - Vatican Correspondent RNS. First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

Associate Professor Yoram Barak said a recent Otago University study showed rates of death by suicide for men aged over 85 in the past 10 years were similar to those among younger male age groups.

For every 100,000 people, there were 23.5 deaths among 15 to 19-year-olds annually, 29 deaths among 20 to 24-year-olds, 27 deaths among 25 to 29-year-olds and 27.9 deaths in those aged over 85. Read more

Arbuckle is noted scholar in both theology and anthropology. He is the author of many books, the most recent being: Laughing with God: Humor, Culture, and Transformation (2011); Culture, Inculturation, and Theologians: A Postmodern Critique (2010); Humanizing Healthcare Reforms (2013); Catholic Identity or Identities? Refounding Ministries in Chaotic Times (2013); The Francis Factor and the People of God: New Life for the Church (2015).

In announcing the list, Spirituality and Practice notes: "Every year from the more than 300 books we review on this website, we choose the Best Spiritual Books. In addition to 50 adult books, we also include 15 Best Spiritual Children's Books.

"These are titles that have most impressed and inspired us. Since we only review books that we want to recommend to you for your spiritual journey, this selection actually represents the best of the best."

Spirituality and Practice is a multi-faith and inter-spiritual website, founded by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat.

"The site's name reflects a basic understanding: spirituality and practice are the two places where all the world's religions and spiritual paths come together. While respecting the differences among traditions, we celebrate what they share in common."

Launched in 2006, Spirituality & Practice consolidates nearly 50 years of the work of co-directors Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat and their various publications and projects, including Cultural Information Service, Living Room Learning, Values & Visions, and the Spiritual Literacy Project.

In their review the Brussats commented: "We commend the author for bringing such clarity, depth, and daring to the well-worn topic of loneliness!"

Source

• spiritualityandpractice.com
• spiritualityandpractice.com
• bbi.catholic.edu.au
• Image: chausa.org

The minister would, it's been suggested, work across the health, infrastructure, justice and communities portfolios.

Loneliness is framed in a quintessentially liberal way: as a health-related issue affecting individuals.

But loneliness is a by-product of the liberal social order; by elevating the market above all else and reducing notions of freedom to individual rights, societies have become atomised and fragmented and notions of value are now boiled down to crude forms of economic reductionism.

Similarly, the proposed remedies are extensions of the existing liberal framework.

But there can't be a bureaucratic solution — no matter how many departments the new minister works across — without addressing the underlying social causes.

And there are real questions about whether governments — having surrendered so much of their power to the market — are even capable of doing this anymore.

In our market-dominated societies the majority of people have to sell their labour in order to make a living; we've commodified ourselves and, in order to be marketable, there's been a flattening of the self. Erich Fromm, the Frankfurt School psychoanalyst and philosopher, argued that under these conditions individuals become 'a reflex of other people's expectations' with the effect that the ‘automatization of the individual in modern society has increased the helplessness and insecurity of the average individual.'

Fromm fled Germany shortly after the Nazis came to power and, in 1941, published The Fear of Freedom, in which he examined why parts of the German population were so receptive to Hitler's ideology.

He argued that 'the modern industrial system in general and in its monopolistic phase in particular make for the development of a personality which feels powerless and alone, anxious and insecure.'

He had a pointed warning for the United States, his adopted home, where he saw many of the same features.

There is 'no greater mistake and no graver danger,' he wrote, 'than not to see that in our own society we are faced with the same phenomenon that is fertile soil for the rise of Fascism anywhere: the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual.'

In many ways, it's self evident that lonely people are less healthy.

But more consequential and little remarked upon these days are the broader societal effects and the kind of politics born out of societies made up of alienated individuals.

This was what preoccupied Fromm, though, and he can sometimes read like someone trying to make sense of the current moment:

'If we look only at the economic needs as far as the 'normal' person is concerned, if we do not see the unconscious suffering of the average automatized person, then we fail to see the danger that threatens our culture from its human basis: the readiness to accept any ideology and any leader, if only he promises excitement and offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to an individual's life.' Continue reading

Research has found that loneliness can have a negative impact on a person's health as significant as the effect of "smoking 15 cigarettes a day."

While loneliness is increasing in numbers amongst New Zealanders both young and old, this is not a problem unique to New Zealand.

An essay by the former US Surgeon General claims that loneliness in the US has reached "epidemic levels," while in Britain, following the recommendations of the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness, Tracey Crouch has become the world's first Minister for Loneliness.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Crouch notes her new position has garnered attention from around the world, including New Zealand.

However, our own government have no plans for such a position just yet.

Instead, Tracey Martin, Minister for Seniors has said, the government hoped to utilise the Positive Ageing Strategy, due to be released later this year, to get an idea of the scale of loneliness amongst older New Zealanders.

The British Minister for Loneliness is using her role to encourage awareness of this issue, and to provide the infrastructure for reducing loneliness.

It will be interesting to see how she can overcome one major problem with her role: the government cannot love people.

In fact, when the Minister for Loneliness was first announced US comedian Stephen Colbert made this comment: "They took the most ineffable human problem and came up with the most cold, bureaucratic solution.

How is it supposed to work?

The Ministry has reviewed your application and you're not lonely enough, I'm afraid.

Your application for affection has been denied."

Obviously, this was said this in jest during a comedy routine, but Colbert makes an important point.

There is a difference between getting ready for an appointment with a social worker and looking forward to spending time with a friend you share a long-standing connection with. Personal relationship is certainly going to be much more effective at combatting loneliness, and yet it can't be written into policy.

What does this mean?

We can't ignore that many people in our society are vulnerable to loneliness, and without passing the problem on to government to fix, it can be difficult to imagine how anything might change.

The thing is, the solution is actually pretty simple - it's building relationships and communities that will overcome the loneliness.

Already many communities are doing great things.

Menz Shed's (community spaces for woodwork or electronics), communities where the older generation often lives together with the younger family members, and school kids helping elderly people learn to use smartphones, are just a few ways spaces are being created to build relationships and in turn reduce loneliness.

While it can be easy to get caught up in the fancy titles and big policy ideas it's important to remember that thriving communities and generous people, rather than government and policies, will always be the most effective tools for combatting loneliness.

• Danielle van Dalen leads the Maxim Institute" current research project looking at the intersection of disability, employment, and poverty.
• First published at the Maxim Institute. Republished with permission.

We had spent the past several hours huddled together as Hurricane Andrew battered our South Florida neighborhood with torrential rain and winds near 170 miles per hour.

We saw pieces of homes strewn across the landscape, power lines flung about like pieces of string, and sea creatures stranded in trees, having been blown far inland by the storm.

Like thousands of others, we survived the storm and the many dark days that followed because of the kindness of strangers who brought food, water, and comfort.

Hurricane Andrew forged a deep sense of connection and community in South Florida as the nation rallied around us and as we supported each other.

But slowly, as normal life resumed, the distance between people returned. We went back to our homes, our work, our schools, and our lives, and once again we grew apart.

Looking today at so many other places around the world ravaged by disasters of all kinds, I think about how often tragedy brings us together — and how fleeting that connection often is.

There is good reason to be concerned about social connection in our current world. Loneliness is a growing health epidemic.

We live in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization, yet rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s. Today, over 40% of adults in America report feeling lonely, and research suggests that the real number may well be higher.

Additionally, the number of people who report having a close confidante in their lives has been declining over the past few decades. In the workplace, many employees — and half of CEOs — report feeling lonely in their roles. Continue reading

Sources

• Harvard Business Review article by Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, who served as the 19th Surgeon General of the United States, from 2014 to 2017.
• Image: Woman's Day

I'd been summoned to an editor's office at the Globe Magazine with the old "We have a story we think you'd be perfect for." This is how editors talk when they're about to con you into doing something you don't want to do.

Here was the pitch: We want you to write about how middle-aged men have no friends.

Excuse me? I have plenty of friends. Are you calling me a loser? You are.

The editor told me there was all sorts of evidence out there about how men, as they age, let their close friendships lapse, and that that fact can cause all sorts of problems and have a terrible impact on their health.

I told the editor I'd think about it. This is how reporters talk when they're trying to get out of something they don't want to do.

As I walked back to my desk in the newsroom — a distance of maybe 100 yards — I quickly took stock of my life to try to prove to myself that I was not, in fact, perfect for this story.

First of all, there was my buddy Mark. We went to high school together, and I still talk to him all the time, and we hang out all the . . . Wait, how often do we actually hang out? Maybe four or five times a year?

And then there was my other best friend from high school, Rory, and . . . I genuinely could not remember the last time I'd seen him. Had it already been a year? Entirely possible.

There were all those other good friends who feel as if they're still in my lives because we keep tabs on one another via social media, but as I ran down the list of those I'd consider real, true, lifelong friends, I realized that it had been years since I'd seen many of them, even decades for a few. Continue reading

• Billy Baker is a feature writer for the Boston Globe's metro section.

This is the conclusion I draw from touring England over the past few weeks, talking about loneliness and mental health. Everywhere I have been so far, I've come across the same, double-sided story: stark failures of government offset in part by the extraordinary force of human kindness.

First the bad news: reminders of the shocking state of our mental health services. I met people who had waited a year for treatment, only to be given the wrong therapy. I heard how the thresholds for treatment are repeatedly being raised, to ration services. I met one practitioner who had been told, as a result of the cuts, to recommend computerised cognitive behaviour therapy to her patients.

In other words, instead of working with a therapist, people must sit at a screen, using a programme to try to address disorders likely to have been caused or exacerbated by social isolation. Why not just write these patients a prescription instructing them to bog off and die?

At least then they wouldn't have to wait a year to be told to consult their laptops. I heard of children profoundly damaged by abuse and neglect being sent to secure accommodation - imprisoned in other words - not for their own safety, or other people's, but because there is nowhere else for them to go.

These are not isolated cases. It is a systemic problem. There has been no child and adolescent mental health survey in this country since 2004 (though one is now planned). Snapshot studies suggest something is going badly wrong: figures published last week, for example, suggest a near quadrupling in the past 10 years of girls admitted to hospital after cutting themselves.

But there are no comprehensive figures. Imagine the outcry if the government had published no national figures on childhood cancer for 12 years, and was unable to tell you whether it was rising or falling. Continue reading

• George Monbiot is the author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain.

Yet plagues of anxiety, stress, depression, social phobia, eating disorders, self-harm and loneliness now strike people down all over the world. The latest, catastrophic figures for children's mental health in England reflect a global crisis.

There are plenty of secondary reasons for this distress, but it seems to me that the underlying cause is everywhere the same: human beings, the ultrasocial mammals, whose brains are wired to respond to other people, are being peeled apart.

Economic and technological change play a major role, but so does ideology.

Though our wellbeing is inextricably linked to the lives of others, everywhere we are told that we will prosper through competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.

In Britain, men who have spent their entire lives in quadrangles - at school, at college, at the bar, in parliament - instruct us to stand on our own two feet.

The education system becomes more brutally competitive by the year.

Employment is a fight to the near-death with a multitude of other desperate people chasing ever fewer jobs. The modern overseers of the poor ascribe individual blame to economic circumstance. Endless competitions on television feed impossible aspirations as real opportunities contract.

Consumerism fills the social void. But far from curing the disease of isolation, it intensifies social comparison to the point at which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves.

Social media brings us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely to quantify our social standing, and to see that other people have more friends and followers than we do.

As Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett has brilliantly documented, girls and young women routinely alter the photos they post to make themselves look smoother and slimmer.

Some phones, using their "beauty" settings, do it for you without asking; now you can become your own thinspiration. Welcome to the post-Hobbesian dystopia: a war of everyone against themselves. Continue reading

• George Monbiot is the author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain.

Neither of us had imagined having a winter wedding, but we needed to marry by January in order to be posted together for our next assignment. We both work as diplomats, our lives divided into chunks of time separated by tours abroad.

The timing of the wedding was not a drastic change of plans; we had decided to marry within months of our first meeting. We were like two lumbering comets destined for one another all those years but stuck in the stillness of space - parties, other relationships, the passing of loved ones, bad jobs, all the experiences in between - before the romantic collision that was our first hello in 2010.

"Today I met the boy I'm going to marry," I confided (and almost sang) to a friend over the phone. "And if it doesn't work out, don't ever bring this up again."

We knelt at Immaculate Conception church, in my home town in New Hampshire, in a white-knuckled grip before the altar only a year and a half after I first agreed to have lunch with him. In front of us, we watched as Aaron's grandfather read from the Old Testament: Genesis 1:26-28, a reading I had picked out, being the more religious one.

He approached the pulpit dressed in a blue-checked suit, blue shirt and striped tie, an orchid pinned to his lapel. "Be fertile and multiply; fill the Earth and subdue it."

My husband had consented to a traditional ceremony, which meant hours of marriage counselling in Bahrain, where he was posted. I took the 30-minute flight from my post in Qatar, and we spent the entire weekend in a room full of Filipinos in an officially Muslim country, becoming certified to marry in a Catholic church. Continue reading

• Christen Decker Kadkhodai is a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State

Here is what I wish for.

I wish people knew that the soul of someone who dies of suicide is as perfect as the moment God created it, that depression is an involuntary shadow that hides their true identity.

I wish people would offer those who struggle with depression the same compassion they offer to friends with rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, breast cancer or any other socially acceptable illness, that they would question those discriminations and judgments reserved for disorders that fall under the umbrella of "mental illness."

I wish people knew that a depressed person is capable of fake laughing for two hours through a dinner only to go home and Google "easiest ways to get cancer"; that most depressed persons deserve Academy Awards for outstanding acting; and that it can be practically impossible to pick up on the desperation and sadness in a person who wants so badly to die, because chances are she is the one cracking jokes in a crowd.

I wish people knew that the worst part about depression is the sheer loneliness, the inability to express the anguish that rages within, and that the smiley-face culture we live in worsens that loneliness because depressed persons are so scared to tell the truth.

I wish people knew that the hardest thing some persons will ever do in this lifetime is to stay alive, that just because staying alive comes easily to some, it doesn't mean arriving at a natural death is any less of a triumph for those who have to work so very hard to keep breathing.

I wish people knew that taking one's life can feel like sneezing to a severely depressed person, that it can be a mere reaction to the body's overwhelming message, that after fighting a sneeze for years and years, some people simply can't not sneeze anymore, that they should not be condemned or demonized for sneezing. Continue reading

Source

• Therese Borchard in National Catholic Reporter

Therese Borchard is the author of Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression and Anxiety.

Many have chosen to avoid romantic relationships during college entirely in favour of "hooking up," no strings attached.

As they (and their male partners) describe it, money and status matter; but they don't just happen-they are the result of hard work.

If you want to become the head of the World Bank, you have to put in the hours. Relationships, therefore, become an afterthought at best.

The theory is that anyone can find a partner later in life and have a couple of kids.

This situation is troubling-but not because these women want to "put themselves first." It is important to have a good sense of one's identity and needs before giving that self to another.

The problem is that they seem so miserable while doing it.

Much like the sex had by the characters on Lena Dunham's HBO series, "Girls," the sex described by the Penn undergrads in the story sounds sort of grim; less like sex and more like work.

One woman describes the man she regularly sleeps with this way: "We don't really like each other in person, sober. We literally can't sit down and have coffee." Talking about their hookup she sounds bored, like the oldest 19 year old in the world: "[W]e watched TV, had sex, and went to sleep."

One woman said, "I have to be drunk in order to enjoy it" and reported being barked at to "get down on [her] knees" and thinking, "I'll just do it...it will be over soon enough."

Because the sex occurs outside of committed relationships and alcohol is involved, hookup culture can quickly lead to a culture of sexual assault.

Without love or friendship we are left with the language of an economic exchange, the sexual partner as service provider.

The women in the story speak of the "cost-benefit" analyses of having a relationship, and the "low risks and low investment costs" of hooking up versus putting the time and energy into a real friendship, which, they argue, may not lead to anything long term. Continue reading

Source: America Magazine

Image: Brennan Boom

Anna Nussbaum Keating is the co-owner of Keating Woodworks in Colorado Springs, Colo, and is co-writing The Catholic Catalogue, a field guide to Catholic practice and culture.

"Many of those people are living alone, and they have lost connection with their families…. they haven't made the networks that possibly they could make, and possibly should make." Age Concern chief executive Ann Martin says

Age Concern met with the Minister for Senior Citizens this week to brief him on the issues facing older New Zealanders, including this growing number of senior citizens suffering from chronic loneliness.

A new report in Ireland has found that loneliness is also the biggest problem faced by older people living alone in that country

The Irish report covers attitudes to growing old, the younger generation, family links, income support, crime, housing, religion and employment.

Read the Irish report

Source

• TV3
• Image: Exclaim.ca