World Mental Health Day — Let’s Talk About Loneliness.
Getting home after my first full day of lectures and seminars, I put my bag down, slumped on the settee and saw that I’d got back just in time to catch the first few minutes of Coronation Street.
“Hello, love. How was it then?”
“Yeah it was really good. I had a nice day.”
I remember it dawning on me that this was the first conversation I’d had all day. I left the house early in the morning, around 8, and didn’t get back until just after 7 in the evening. Eleven hours of silence.
I had so much I wanted to tell my mum about how interesting I found my modules and how much I was enjoying getting back into learning after the summer break. But I felt this horrible numbness that completely silenced me. It was the recognition that this might be how I would go on for the next three years and it was incredibly difficult to come to terms with.
It’s a common belief that loneliness is an epidemic that only affects older people, but that’s just not the case. In our recent Prioritise Our Mental Health survey, findings showed that 17% of respondents reported feeling isolated or lonely. I was 18 years-old when I felt the debilitating effects of loneliness. It’s frustrating that so many campaigns, projects and pieces of research are centred around combatting loneliness for those aged over 65; this only serves to perpetuate a false, idealistic narrative of university life being the time of everyone’s life: for many people, that’s a far cry from the truth.
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Today is World Mental Health Day. Let’s continue to foster a culture where it’s okay to talk about how we’re feeling, because it is.
