Neoliberalism
is creating loneliness. That’s what’s wrenching society apart
George Monbiot
Epidemics
of mental illness are crushing the minds and bodies of millions. It’s
time to ask where we are heading and why
Wednesday 12 October
2016 06.30 BST
What greater
indictment of a system could there be than an epidemic of mental
illness? 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.
Social media brings
us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely to quantify
our social standing
Is it any wonder, in
these lonely inner worlds, in which touching has been replaced by
retouching, that young women are drowning in mental distress? A
recent survey in England suggests that one in four women between 16
and 24 have harmed themselves, and one in eight now suffer from
post-traumatic stress disorder. Anxiety, depression, phobias or
obsessive compulsive disorder affect 26% of women in this age group.
This is what a public health crisis looks like.
If social rupture is
not treated as seriously as broken limbs, it is because we cannot see
it. But neuroscientists can. A series of fascinating papers suggest
that social pain and physical pain are processed by the same neural
circuits. This might explain why, in many languages, it is hard to
describe the impact of breaking social bonds without the words we use
to denote physical pain and injury. In both humans and other social
mammals, social contact reduces physical pain. This is why we hug our
children when they hurt themselves: affection is a powerful
analgesic. Opioids relieve both physical agony and the distress of
separation. Perhaps this explains the link between social isolation
and drug addiction.
Experiments
summarised in the journal Physiology & Behaviour last month
suggest that, given a choice of physical pain or isolation, social
mammals will choose the former. Capuchin monkeys starved of both food
and contact for 22 hours will rejoin their companions before eating.
Children who experience emotional neglect, according to some
findings, suffer worse mental health consequences than children
suffering both emotional neglect and physical abuse: hideous as it
is, violence involves attention and contact. Self-harm is often used
as an attempt to alleviate distress: another indication that physical
pain is not as bad as emotional pain. As the prison system knows only
too well, one of the most effective forms of torture is solitary
confinement.
It is not hard to
see what the evolutionary reasons for social pain might be. Survival
among social mammals is greatly enhanced when they are strongly
bonded with the rest of the pack. It is the isolated and marginalised
animals that are most likely to be picked off by predators, or to
starve. Just as physical pain protects us from physical injury,
emotional pain protects us from social injury. It drives us to
reconnect. But many people find this almost impossible.
It’s unsurprising
that social isolation is strongly associated with depression,
suicide, anxiety, insomnia, fear and the perception of threat. It’s
more surprising to discover the range of physical illnesses it causes
or exacerbates. Dementia, high blood pressure, heart disease,
strokes, lowered resistance to viruses, even accidents are more
common among chronically lonely people. Loneliness has a comparable
impact on physical health to smoking 15 cigarettes a day: it appears
to raise the risk of early death by 26%. This is partly because it
enhances production of the stress hormone cortisol, which suppresses
the immune system.
Studies in both
animals and humans suggest a reason for comfort eating: isolation
reduces impulse control, leading to obesity. As those at the bottom
of the socioeconomic ladder are the most likely to suffer from
loneliness, might this provide one of the explanations for the strong
link between low economic status and obesity?
Anyone can see that
something far more important than most of the issues we fret about
has gone wrong. So why are we engaging in this world-eating,
self-consuming frenzy of environmental destruction and social
dislocation, if all it produces is unbearable pain? Should this
question not burn the lips of everyone in public life?
There are some
wonderful charities doing what they can to fight this tide, some of
which I am going to be working with as part of my loneliness project.
But for every person they reach, several others are swept past.
This does not
require a policy response. It requires something much bigger: the
reappraisal of an entire worldview. Of all the fantasies human beings
entertain, the idea that we can go it alone is the most absurd and
perhaps the most dangerous. We stand together or we fall apart.
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