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Why Loneliness May Be a Bigger Problem for the Young Than the Old
For young people whose developmental task is to connect with other people, the pandemic can feel like life is on pause
During the pandemic there’s been plenty of public service announcements to check in on your elderly neighbors. Especially now, in an era of coronavirus-driven quarantines, they may be feeling isolated and alone.
However, you might want to redirect some empathy to those quiet young adults living in their studio apartments or parents’ basements. It turns out they are more likely than their grandparents to report feeling lonely.
According to a spate of recent studies, loneliness is a plague of its own, one that predates the pandemic and has hit the young particularly hard. Think of it as another of the chronic but largely ignored societal issues Covid-19 is forcing us to grapple with.
“The frustrated 17-year-old who can’t leave the house is probably in worse shape than a 75-year-old, who probably has better coping tools for dealing with this stressful period,” says University of Southern California psychologist Christopher Beam, PhD, who recently wrote about this phenomenon in the journal Psychological Trauma.
