Youth and Older Adults: Loneliness, Mental Health, and Ageism

The intersectional identity of age can be found across all communities. Today’s youth and older adults are experiencing unprecedented levels of loneliness and isolation, as well as facing ageism that impacts their mental and physical health outcomes. When we look at creating spaces of healing and belonging, we should focus our attention on these generations and bringing them together.

US Surgeon General Declares a Youth Mental Health Crisis

For the past two years, the US Surgeon General’s Advisory has warned that we are deep in the throes of a youth mental health crisis, one that can be traced to the experience of loneliness. Loneliness is a felt experience. It can be social, caused by actually physically missing the presence of others; it can also be emotional, when a person is surrounded by people and yet still feels alone. According to a 2021 CDC survey, 61% of 18–25-year-olds reported feeling serious loneliness- “frequently” or “almost all of the time or all of the time” in the four weeks prior to the survey.

While the crisis deepened due to COVID-19 and its repercussions, young people had already been trending towards higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality for a decade. In fact, in 2018 suicide was the second leading cause of death among people 10–14 years old and 15–24 years old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gen-Z is considered the loneliest generation in history.

Older Adults and Social Isolation

Older adults have historically struggled with high levels of social isolation and loneliness as well. The University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging (NPHA) released its report on Loneliness Among Older Adults: Trends from 2018 to 2023 in March. “In 2023, one in three adults age 50–80 (34%) reported feeling isolated from others (29% some of the time, 5% often) in the past year. This represents a marked decline compared with the 56% (43% some of the time, 13% often) who felt isolated in 2020, but a greater proportion than the 27% (22% some of the time, 5% often) who reported feeling isolated in 2018.”

A similar arc followed companionship. The report shared that “more than one in three older adults (37%) reported feeling a lack of companionship (29% some of the time, 8% often) in the past year, compared with 41% (32% some of the time, 9% often) in 2020, and 34% (26% some of the time, 8% often) in 2018.”

Feeling isolated or lonely is strongly correlated with poorer mental and physical health as well as other factors such as having a disability, being unemployed or retired, or having household incomes of less than $60,000, according to the report. All of these factors all fall under the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH).

Disparities Shared Across Generations: Loneliness, Isolation, and Health

Intersectional disparities across ages and affinity groups include:

• 70% of Black/African American adults are lonely at least 10 points higher than what is seen in the rest of the population (Cigna Health);
• LGBTQIA+ youth are twice as likely as their cisgender*, straight peers to report persistent sadness, (CDC); and
• LGBTQIA+ older adults are twice as likely to live alone than their cis-gender, straight peers (National Academies for Sciences, Engineering, and Mathematics).