“It’s proven to be worse for health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day, but it can be overcome and needn’t be a factor in older people’s lives,” he said.
A
former United States surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, wrote an
article for the Harvard Business Review last year arguing that
loneliness needed addressing in the workplace.
It could be associated, he wrote, “with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression and anxiety.”
The British report was commissioned by the Red Cross in partnership with the Co-op, a cooperative supermarket chain, and published by the Cox commission in December.
The group operates in memory of Ms. Cox, 41, a Labour Party lawmaker who was shot dead by a right-wing extremist in 2016,
and who had been a prominent voice in Parliament on the issue, setting
up a cross-party commission that aimed to start a national conversation
and establish the scale and impact of loneliness in Britain.
The
prime minister announced on Wednesday that Tracey Crouch, who is the
under secretary for sport and civil society in the culture ministry,
would lead a governmentwide group to build on Ms. Cox’s legacy and
establish policies on the issue.
In
parallel, the Office for National Statistics would help to establish a
method of measuring loneliness, and a fund would be set up to help the
government and charities to develop a wider strategy to identify
opportunities to tackle the problem.
The
Cox commission, chaired by the lawmakers Rachel Reeves and Seema
Kennedy, said it welcomed the government’s “prompt response” to its
report.
Quoting Ms. Cox, the lawmakers said in a joint statement, “Young or old, loneliness doesn’t discriminate.”
“Throughout
2017 we have heard from new parents, children, disabled people, carers,
refugees and older people about their experience of loneliness,” they
added.
Government
research has found that about 200,000 older people in Britain had not
had a conversation with a friend or relative in more than a month.
Carol
Jenkins, 64, a retired nurse from Berkshire, in southwest England, said
she started to feel lonely when her son moved abroad and she downsized
to a smaller house in a different county.
“It
was a financial decision to move, and I didn’t really have it in me to
start making new friends,” Ms. Jenkins recalled on Wednesday in a phone
interview. “Months would go by without seeing my friends or family, and I
felt really depressed and alone.”
Ms.
Jenkins has since joined a Facebook group for Britons affected by
loneliness, which, she says, has helped her to get out of the house
more.
“It’s
not so much about meeting people on the internet and making new
friends, but it’s more of a motivational support network that gives you
direction on how to cope and fix the problem,” she said, adding that she
was surprised by how many young people had joined the group.
“There
are so many university students who just lock themselves in their rooms
for days because they feel rejected or that they don’t fit in,” Ms.
Jenkins said. “It’s only a matter of time before loneliness turns into
depression. And that’s where it gets dangerous.”
