Loneliness
Loneliness affects people of all ages, but is often triggered by certain life events such as bereavement, divorce, retirement or declining health. Three in ten people over the age of 80 in the UK report feelings of loneliness.
Being lonely can be as harmful to older people’s health as a chronic long-term condition such as diabetes or high blood pressure. Experts say it is as damaging as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and more dangerous than obesity. People who are very lonely are at much greater risk of dying younger.
Loneliness can also increase older people’s risk to falling victim to scams, as the prospect of making conversation with another person can make older people more willing to open the door to a stranger, or engage in a phone conversation with an unknown caller, or respond to emails or letters.
Professional scammers are skilled at developing relationships with their targets, and before long the lonely householder begins to feel that a genuine relationship is building. This can make it very hard to convince the person that they are being scammed. Lonely people also have fewer opportunities to meet with others and discuss finances and to explore with someone they trust whether an offer or relationship is genuine.
However, loneliness is not confined to older people. Psychologists say that teenagers can be especially vulnerable to loneliness because their brains are still developing, and they might misread social cues or people’s reactions. ChildLine counsels around 10,000 children per year about loneliness; the most common reasons given are family problems, issues at school, and bullying.
Middle age can also bring risks of loneliness, as children leave home, people retire from work, or face divorce or bereavement.
Recognising the signs of loneliness
The first challenge in tackling loneliness and vulnerability is getting to those people who need support.
It’s not always easy to spot if someone is lonely, as not everybody who is alone feels lonely, and equally people can still feel lonely even if they appear to have lots of people in their lives.
People who are socially isolated are, by definition, hard to reach and identify. Another problem is that loneliness is largely stigmatised, so people are less willing to self-identify as being lonely.
One way to see whether your neighbourhood has a prevalence of lonely people is to plug in to the loneliness heat-mapping tool developed by Age UK and the Office for National Statistics. This clever tool uses risk factors from the English Longitudinal Survey on Ageing, specifically age, marital status, living alone, and being in poor health. All you need to do is type in your postcode and the tool will tell you how many lonely older people are estimated to be living in your borough. Access the tool here.
Of course, while the tool is a useful indicator, we must not forget that there may still be very lonely older people in low-risk areas.
Another way is to identify people in your neighbourhood with the risk factors for loneliness, such as those who have recently experienced bereavement, or who have limiting health problems.
Click here to read more about the characteristics and circumstances of lonely people, and how feelings of loneliness might be triggered.
What can you do to help lonely neighbours?
If you think there may be lonely people among your neighbours, there are many things you can do to help them to combat their loneliness. In fact, as a Neighbourhood Watch coordinator you could be ideally placed to play a key role in combatting loneliness in your locality.
A recent programme run by the Joseph Rowntree charities, looking at how community activities could contribute to the wellbeing of people at risk of or experiencing loneliness, found that having a key individual to motivate, train, and encourage individuals within a community to interact and get others engaged, can be very important.
Having ‘insider’ knowledge of the community and especially of the culture and any cultural or religious barriers to engagement, and speaking the language of people living there, also helps encourage engagement.
Click here for some ideas about how to tackle loneliness.
Supporting older people
Neighbourhood Watch has a comprehensive online information pack on Older People & Scams, with advice on how to raise awareness of these types of frauds among your older neighbours. The pack provides details about several types of scams – doorstep traders, telephone scams, mass marketing postal scams, investment and pension scams, email and online scams, and romance scams – and contains resources to help you to run campaigns in your local communities. Find it here.
Financial abuse is a particular type of elder abuse. Read more about what it is and who is most at risk from it here.