narrative essay about loneliness

Longreads : The best longform stories on the web

On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets])

Share this:.

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window)

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Sarah Fay | Longreads | March 2020 | 18 minutes (5,122 words)

This Longreads essay, published in 2020, evolved into a chapter in Sarah Fay’s book, Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses , published in March 2022 by HarperCollins.

The change came less as a chrysalis moment, an instant of emergence and blossoming, than after weeks of distress. My apartment at the time was in the rear of the building, away from the street. Even by studio standards, it was tiny — the kitchen too close to the bed, the bed practically touching the bookshelf and the desk. It had a slight view of the Chicago skyline but mainly looked onto a brick wall. My immediate neighbors kept to themselves. They were presences, a series of doors opening and closing. I’d lived contentedly in that remove. It suited me. Then it didn’t. 

Naturally, I blamed my apartment — the claustrophobic lack of square footage, the oppressive brick wall. The moment I walked in the door, I felt a crushing weight on my chest, followed by a pit in my stomach. My environment had to be the cause.

In his essay on solitude, the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne disagrees: “Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself.” Finding contentment in solitude requires self-reliance. (Ralph Waldo Emerson would later agree, though he remained very much engaged in public life.) Montaigne advises us to keep a “back shop,” a private room within the self, where others can’t enter. Plaster and wood have nothing to do with it. We must have “a mind pliable in itself, that will be company.” My inner back shop had somehow transformed from a place of solitude to one of isolation and loneliness.

The ideal of solitude is strength. It’s a skill to be mastered: the ability to be alone without feeling lonely. 

It’s decidedly male and often nationalistic, a symbol of American independence. It’s Thoreau, who writes in Walden that he never felt lonesome “or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude,” except once, for an hour, when he “doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life.” Of course, he may have found “the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant” because his “solitary” cabin was on land owned by Emerson, his very close neighbor. Thoreau often went to the Emersons for dinner, entertained friends at his cabin, and received meals from his mother. (That said, his Walden Pond experiment was less about living alone than living simply in nature.)

It’s righteous. It’s Benjamin Rush, the physician and founding father, who once called solitude “a mechanical means of promoting virtue.”

It’s a source of wisdom. It’s the Buddha on the path to enlightenment, Jesus and Moses in the desert, Muhammad on the mountain. It’s Thomas Merton abandoning the vacuous debaucheries of New York for the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. As he writes in Thoughts in Solitude , “When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority.” For Merton, “interior solitude” is essential. 

Looking back, that time I spent in solitude is bracketed; that’s how it’s punctuated for me now.

Four years. That’s how long I spent in what can only be called solitude. Or can it? What constitutes a solitary life? I wasn’t a recluse. True, I fit the secondary meaning of the word: a person removed from society. But the primary definition is one who retreats for religious reasons, and I didn’t follow a faith. Besides, recluse has an air of eccentricity about it. It’s J.D. Salinger, No. 1 on Time ’s “Top 10 Most Reclusive Celebrities” list, forsaking publishing and granting just two interviews, one of which was to a teenage girl; and Howard Hughes, No. 2 on the list, who holed himself up in the Beverly Hills Hotel and let his finger and toenails grow as much as an inch in length (though in all fairness, he suffered from onychomycosis, which made his nails painful to clip). I wasn’t a hermit, which has an even stronger religious connotation than recluse does. 

It might best be called urban solitude. I resided among people, passing them on the street, but never engaged. Not once did I dine out or go to the movies or to a museum. I held a job — 12 hours a week, 30 weeks of the year, I taught English at a university. I worked out at a gym. I visited my mother. But that was pretty much it. I saw no friends and rarely talked on the phone, even breaking off a friendship with someone who lived in another city and wanted to speak once a week to stay connected, because that much contact was unaccountably burdensome to me.

People — scientists, psychologists, journalists, bloggers — often distinguish between solitude and isolation. The binary is simplistic: solitude good, isolation bad. Isolation is a punishment, thrust upon us and never entered into by choice. The word connotes solitary confinement and incarceration — two tactics rooted in oppression. The common remark that someone with a peaceful mind will enjoy isolation as monkish solitude whereas someone with a troubled mind will suffer solitude as imprisonment woefully misses the point that a monk typically isn’t in a 48-square-foot cell and is free to leave at any time. 

I was free to leave but never went far. Not a single vacation or journey. Not even a quick road trip just to get out of the city. In fact, I rarely went outside a five-mile radius. Same bed. Same breakfast, lunch, and dinner table. Same desk. Same walls.

By definition, solitude and isolation are more nuanced than the good-bad binary makes them out to be. Solitude isn’t all purity and fortitude. It’s merely “the quality or state of being alone or remote from society” and can be “a lonely place.” And isolation isn’t necessarily punitive. The verb “to isolate” denotes the voluntary act of separating from others. It’s benign, even positive: “occurring alone or once.” 

The fears of solitude and isolation have been pathologized. People who suffer from autophobia, the fear of solitude, and eremophobia, the fear of isolation, don’t just go to great lengths not to be alone (overprogramming themselves or their children, a kind of busyness by proxy that only people with the luxury of time and money have the option to do); when alone, they’re choked by a sense of impending doom and danger. The autophobe dreads seclusion to the point of hyperventilation; the eremophobe fears isolation to the point of nausea, sweating, dizziness, even fainting. 

In trying to assuage their anxiety, autophobes and eremophobes face an existential problem: Solitude and isolation aren’t just physical conditions; they’re mental states. (The social neuroscientist John Cacioppo called this “perceived social isolation.”) One need only think one is alone or ignored or unloved to feel enclosed, walled in, bracketed off to the point of anguish. 

The cause of these phobias is unknown although Rush, the same physician founding father who extolled the virtues of solitude and first identified the fear of solitude as “solo phobia,” believed it struck those who thought not enough or too much, letting their guilty minds wreak havoc: “This distemper is peculiar to persons of vacant minds, and guilty consciences. Such people cannot bear to be alone, especially if the horror of sickness is added to the pain of attempting to think, or to the terror of thinking.” (Like many of the founding fathers, Rush is a complicated figure, fighting for humanitarian causes while holding racist and sexist beliefs.) 

Neither affliction has a cure. Treatment might involve cognitive behavioral therapy, where the autophobe confronts the irrationality of fearing solitude. Or exposure therapy, where the eremophobe is quarantined for minutes or hours (though this seems to harken back to ice baths and straight jackets). Or medication, the occasional benzodiazepine or daily beta-blocker. Or talk therapy, the efficacy of which is unknown. Or meditation, relaxation, and breathing exercises, America’s 21st-century prescription for so many ailments.

Autophobia has been gaining attention as a “women’s problem.” A recent article in a women’s magazine told readers that the fear of being alone might be a sign that a woman is just afraid she’s “not good enough to attract someone” or worried she’ll get hurt along the way. The editors of said magazine must not know that this doesn’t classify as phobic thinking, and an article like that does little more than tell women they’re pathologically insecure.

Clearly, I suffered from neither autophobia or eremophobia, nor did I experience an agoraphobic aversion to going out. I had a reasonable dislike of crowded places: music festivals; parades; my nearby farmer’s market, where people gathered to buy $6 pints of organic blueberries and artisan pizzas and participate in drum circles. True, I avoided stores to what some might call an unhealthy degree, ordering everything I could online, including my groceries. Still, I existed in the world; I just happened to spend most of that existence cloistered in a tiny room alone.

Not once in those four years was I lonely. Like the solitude-good, isolation-bad calculation, a similar binary is applied to solitude and loneliness, except loneliness isn’t just bad, it’s dangerous. In the U.S., it’s referred to as an epidemic , said to affect teenagers and the elderly most acutely. It’s a bigger health threat than smoking, contributing to heart disease and increasing the risk of arthritis, Type 2 diabetes, dementia, and suicide attempts. Loneliness affects how we work , making us less likely to succeed and take pleasure in what we do.

But etymologically speaking, loneliness isn’t threatening. The primary definition is “being without company.” Only the tertiary and quaternary definitions emotionalize it as “sad from being alone” and “producing a feeling of bleakness or desolation.” 

Loneliness, like any difficult emotion, gets its power from the conviction that you’re the only one feeling it. As a defense, we reassure ourselves that others feel it, too. We join loneliness meetup groups, hold speed-friending events, even form people haters clubs. Thousands of us like the books cited on the loneliness quotes page on Goodreads. A quote from Jodi Picoult’s bestseller My Sister’s Keeper received 11,000 likes: “Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.” The loner, the lonely one, isn’t to blame; it’s other people. 

During my solitude (or isolation [or loneliness]), it might be assumed that sex played no part in my life, but I had two monthlong relationships. It’s hard to call them relationships given their brevity and the way they played out. Both men lived in other cities, so I didn’t see them more than a handful of times. Both had been in my life years earlier, mainly as friends. Both were solitaries too. One lived on a remote farm in Michigan, the other in Portland, Oregon. Both went about their lives much the way I went about mine, albeit in larger spaces. (Both owned houses. No brick walls blocking their views.) Most of our interactions happened by text, which gives a false sense of intimacy. Frequent texting, with its vibrating interruptions into what might be an otherwise dull day, makes us feel wanted and attractive. But solitaries, I realized too late, don’t do well together. There was a prickliness to us. A certain distance had to be maintained. Both relationships ended fiercely and fast as if each of us had reached our saturation points of closeness and had to retreat or risk losing the edges — those brackets — that protected us. Neither were, to my knowledge, lonely either. 

What about other media? Television? Radio? Do these media release us from solitude, rescue us from isolation, save us from loneliness?

On the internet, one of the most quoted lines about loneliness is wrongly attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby : “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” The quotation appears on Pinterest and Tumblr, in articles and epigraphs. It’s cited on a blog claiming to be an analysis of the novel. It has 7,000 likes on Goodreads.

Although the quotation isn’t from Gatsby , this is: “I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.” Nick admits this after he has attended the three parties that structure the first three chapters of the novel: the dinner at Tom and Daisy’s affluent home, the soiree at Myrtle’s Manhattan apartment, and the flapper bash at Gatsby’s mansion. No one, it seems, can cure Nick’s loneliness. But someone does, albeit momentarily. In the coupé on his birthday, he thinks of his age and his future: “Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.” Then Jordan puts her head on his shoulder and “the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.” Perhaps this actual quotation from the novel isn’t cited on social media or in blogs because it doesn’t fit our narrative that loneliness is inescapable and absolute.

In the past, Gatsby has been a companion to me. I taught the novel to undergraduates at least once a year, rereading it along with my students, nearly all of whom were assigned it in high school and forced to discuss the symbolism of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock ad nauseam. Most students came away from the novel with a completely different take on it. As one student wrote in her evaluation, “It was like I’d never read it before. It’s really good.” 

During my solitude (or isolation [or loneliness]), I listened to six unabridged audio editions, some several times. Of the six, the one that tends to come up first in a Google search is the glitzy Hollywood version narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal. The five other editions range in quality. Anthony Heald’s New York accent is distracting; Nick is from “the Middle West” and, if anything, should sound Minnesotan. Frank Muller’s narration is oddly sinister. (This may be because he also narrates, quite brilliantly, The Silence of the Lambs , and the memory of his performance still echoes whenever I hear his voice.) William Hope’s version is so blithe and Humphrey Bower’s so choppy as to make them unlistenable. The very best version features Alexander Scourby, the only narrator whose reading — with his hesitations and ability to draw out certain words — communicates Nick’s unreliability, an easily overlooked but crucial dimension to the novel. (If you’ve just raised an eyebrow, note that lying and seducing and ghosting women are, in fact, indicators of unreliability.)

Did these audiobooks count as companionship? Given that research has shown that reading narratives can decrease feelings of loneliness and audiobooks have similar benefits to reading, it might be safe to say yes. Other studies have examined how hearing loss increases feelings of loneliness , so the sound of another’s voice in your ears — the gift of Toni Morrison reading Beloved or Gabriel Woolf reading The Brothers Karamozov — must do something for us.

What about other media? Television? Radio? Do these media release us from solitude, rescue us from isolation, save us from loneliness? According to researchers , watching a favorite show staves it off, but a Netflix binge is a sign of it. Watching one episode functions as “social surrogacy” but sitting on the couch for 10 hours to consume an entire season is a red flag. Radio, according to surveys conducted by media strategists and the BBC , can be “a lifeline.” 

I did watch single episodes at a time, mostly Nordic noir — Forbrydelsen and Borgen and Bron/Broen — but didn’t listen to the radio. Instead, I read — a lot. 

My reading selections during those years of solitude (or isolation [or loneliness]) were ironic. For instance, I read all of Patricia Highsmith’s work. Highsmith was also a solitary who spent most of her life in Switzerland among cats. (She, however, was a rabid misanthrope and an alcoholic.) In her stories and novels, she favors degenerate, predatory protagonists who cheat and steal and lie and murder and whom we, perhaps uncomfortably, end up rooting for. I reread Strangers on a Train so many times I lost count. It’s fitting that I would immerse myself in a book about a seemingly fleeting human interaction so potent that one character has the power to influence the other to commit murder. My walls, after all, were up.

Brackets emit a feeling of enclosure. Which is how I now see those four remote years: walled off, the self alone with the self, inside the self.

And social media? Many point to it as the cause of America’s collective loneliness. MIT researcher Sherry Turkle, one of the preeminent theorists of social media’s effects on our relationships, insists that social networking, and technology in general, has made us “connected, but alone .” We text when we should meet, comment and tweet when we should talk. Her research is primarily ethnographic. She observes and interviews, as she puts it in her TED Talk, “hundreds and hundreds of people,” including her daughter and her daughter’s friends, and reaches widespread conclusions based on those interactions; she conducts no scientific studies of her own. Social media, she says, denies us the capacity to find solace in ourselves and makes us lonelier: “Because by being in constant connection, we lose the capacity to feel content in our own company. If you don’t learn how to be alone, you’ll only know how to be lonely.” In her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other , she writes, “People are lonely. The network is seductive.” For Turkle, social media is a contradiction: “We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely.”

Yet many studies are cited without giving us the whole picture; others contradict Turkle’s view. Doctors, psychologists, and journalists often mention a study that found that only negative experiences on social media contribute to loneliness. Another reported social media can contribute to feelings of isolation but couldn’t state definitively which came first: isolation or social media. On the 2018 Cigna U.S. Loneliness scale, people who consistently used social media scored 43.5% whereas people who never used it scored 41.7%. It was a draw. In a Pew Research Center report from late 2018, in which roughly 700 teenagers were surveyed, eight in 10 teens (81%) reported that social media enhances their friendships and two thirds (68%) said they felt more supported by their friends in times of crisis because of it.

Social media made me neither connected nor alone. My followers on Twitter were in the double digits. I had hundreds and hundreds of friends on Facebook whom I didn’t know, even by name. I didn’t have an Instagram account. (How many artistic and abstract photos of my brick walls could I post?) Still, when I did go on social media, solitude didn’t make me immune to its effects. Facebook disheartened me and Twitter overwhelmed me, just as they sometimes do to other people. 

In combating loneliness, Turkle and the Cigna study agree that social media is less a factor than the quality of our interactions and merely having people in our lives does little; one in four Americans feel misunderstood, two in five don’t think their relationships are meaningful, and only half report having meaningful interactions on a daily basis. 

Maybe there’s another cause of loneliness. Edward Hoagland considered what he called “the crab-claw pinch of loneliness” on nature’s terms. As we’ve deepened our connection to technology, we’ve lost touch with the environment: 

We run marathons, visit animal shelters, tend rooftop honey hives, shop organically, and view cooking shows, among other compensations for the withering of nature out of doors — the lawning of America. Nonetheless, we text as we hike, less aware than we were of birdsong, false dawn, forest ponds.

The effect, Hoagland writes, is nature’s “swan song.” Loneliness is “a natural alarm-bell system” warning us to stop our abuse and neglect of the environment. If we don’t, we risk losing the one thing that can cure our lonesomeness.

Each day during my solitude (or isolation [or loneliness]), I went for a walk. My route through the park was relatively secluded. In the winter, it was downright desolate. It was always the same: under the bridge, north along the lagoon, past the driving range, to the harbor, and back. I don’t recall communing with nature; I barely saw the red-winged blackbirds and the monarch butterflies and didn’t notice until much later that an entire row of trees had died as a result of a beetle infestation. Just the route comes to mind, the repetition and orderliness of following the same path. There and back. There and back. 

I may have been outdoors, but I was still inside myself. Blocked off. Looking back, that time I spent in solitude is bracketed; that’s how it’s punctuated for me now. 

I discovered the power of brackets [ ] 10 years ago in the basement of a community center in Brooklyn teaching English as a second language. Most of my students had low incomes. Many were undocumented. These men and women sat in uncomfortable, beat-up school desks determined to learn English — such a difficult language to acquire with its changeling grammar rules and high-maintenance punctuation marks. They did so for three hours, three evenings a week while juggling multiple jobs and taking care of families. I’ve never had students so unabashedly grateful to me for teaching them. My birthday was met with a massive white-icinged cake and blue balloons. 

One night in class, I double-checked the answer to a grammar question. I turned to my copy of Warriner’s English Grammar and Punctuation . The book fell open to the page on brackets. 

Brackets signify a double enclosure in a text. They’re commonly used in citations but can also indicate parenthetical thoughts. Thoughts inside thoughts: (I am solitary [or am I isolated?].) They illustrate the way the mind works (most minds [or perhaps only my mind]) with its reservations and clarifications and contradictions. One thought can be a statement, another a question. One can communicate certainty, another doubt. Though some grammarians say that brackets include unnecessary information, this is far from true: Brackets represent our internal lives, our deepest secrets.

Rarely do we use brackets this way. Most grammarians would opt for commas or dashes, yet brackets occupy the primary position on two keys on the qwerty keyboard while parentheses (which we use more often) are relegated to secondary positions on the 9 and the 0 keys. Perhaps we don’t communicate through brackets to avoid experiencing the depths of ourselves. Commas are but speedbumps of separation, dashes are practically invitations to enter, and parentheses ask us to step over and inside. Brackets, on the other hand, are walls. 

The origins of brackets — once referred to as crotchets, crooks, or hooks — are a mystery. A distant cousin of the chevron <>, brackets are said to have been invented in the 14th century. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, brackets don’t appear in print until 1676 when the English Dictionary defined them as “marks of parentheses.” They show up in Samuel Richardson’s 1747 epistolary novel Clarissa (a tome I’ve actually read) and in Laurence Sterne’s 1759 novel Tristram Shandy (a tome I haven’t) to express material omitted not by the editor or the author, as would later become common practice, but by the characters. Brackets would eventually be used most often by editors to make comments and corrections on a text.

Like marks of parentheses, brackets are broken pieces of what once was whole. When the Elizabethan scholar and rhetorician Angel Day created parentheses, he conceived of them as a circle divided in two: 

  Given this, we might envision brackets as a broken square: 

Although the emergence from solitude (or isolation [or loneliness]), wasn’t a chrysalis moment, a particular morning stands out in my memory as marking the before and after. One day in late January, I woke to the sound of the wind whistling through the unsealed gaps in my windows. I pulled up the shades to find them covered in frost. I couldn’t see outside, couldn’t even glimpse the neighboring brick wall. The weather app showed a “feels-like” temperature of negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit. A Google search revealed that a public-health advisory had been issued, warning people to stay inside. Schools and businesses were closed.

Normally, this would have been just another day in the apartment. I ate breakfast, wrote for a while, and graded papers. I’d just finished washing my spoon and cereal bowl when my skin started to itch. I scratched my forearms, inciting the itch. Soon my skin was red and puffy. I put Cortaid on it, and the itching went away a bit. 

Back at my desk, sitting at the computer, the shades drawn to keep out the cold, my apartment felt oppressively small. The walls didn’t close in so much as I became more aware of their closeness than ever before. I tugged at my turtleneck. My mouth went dry. It felt like I couldn’t swallow. My only thought was, Out .

None of my neighbors were in the hallway. No one joined me in the elevator. The lobby, too, was vacant. 

I stood at the glass-door entrance of my building, which wasn’t covered in frost, and peered out at what might have been a portrait of extinction. No cars passed on the street, no pedestrians on the sidewalk. Whereas once being cut off wouldn’t have fazed me, a wave of solitude (and isolation [and loneliness]) crashed over me. I saw in my reflection a woman very much alone, ready to reach out.

That force, a reach more powerful than the one that had pulled me into myself, propelled me out. It wasn’t pleasant. I became increasingly distressed. My whole default mode was ruptured. I felt exposed, my brick walls and frosted windows demolished. My life was no longer bracketed in the same way. 

Brackets represent our internal lives, our deepest secrets.

One could argue that brackets, like human beings, are fundamentally relational. They communicate to the reader when someone else’s words have been altered. In quotations, they signal when only part of a sentence is being quoted but presented as if it’s a stand-alone clause. A capital letter is substituted in place of the lowercase one, taking Things weren’t great, but he was no longer lonely and changing it to [H]e was no longer lonely . It says these are someone else’s words that I’m using for my own purpose. They are boundaries inserted to connect two voices, causing the meaning to change. Brackets also clarify the context: He isn’t always like this [lonely] . Like people, they can be passive-aggressive, even a little catty, as in the case of sic , which points to an error in the original text: He says he’s never lonly [ sic ] . Not my error; that’s someone else’s.

Eventually, I settled into new patterns. A reasonable part of my day was spent in the company of others — family, acquaintances, colleagues, strangers. And I didn’t just notice people; I took note of them: the cashier at the grocery store, the person behind me in line, my Uber driver, the couple at a nearby table. Each day, upon returning to my building, I rode the elevator and stood in silence with my neighbors. Most of them stared down at their phones. When we reached my floor, I’d wish them a good evening, smile, and try to make eye contact with at least one person. Some responded with surprise, others like I’d startled them. One guy furrowed his brow with annoyance, almost offense, as if I’d invaded his personal space (or solitude [or isolation (or loneliness [as if I’d trespassed his brackets])]). Some made eye contact and wished me the same. Others responded with a mechanical “You too” without glancing up from their phones. 

At first, their responses mattered, but I soon realized they weren’t the point. The key to connection was not to be needy of connection with others. We have to give freely of ourselves, act as social philanthropists who donate anonymously expecting no plaques or appreciation in return. (Turkle and others have pointed to this as the reason why social media doesn’t make us feel connected. Each tweet, post, or friend request is made with the expectation of a response: a retweet, a repost, a like, an accepted request.) 

In this, I go against Turkle and the Cigna study. It didn’t take meaningful interactions to curb my loneliness. Noticing other people was enough. My “have a good evening” and “have a good one” communications were enough. What even constitutes a “meaningful interaction”? What degree of intimacy does it require? What emotions do we need to experience before, during, and after for it to qualify? Holding people to such high standards (or any standards) seems to invite loneliness.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t feel lonely, I did. Returning to my apartment filled me with dread, especially in the winter when I was met by late-afternoon darkness. Loneliness seemed to wait by the door to welcome me home. But the feeling — and loneliness is a feeling, not a fact — passed. 

Would we feel lonely if we’d never heard of loneliness? Ten years ago, I spent a month in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, trying to learn Spanish. It didn’t go well. It was winter. Normally a tourist haven, the town was desolate. The white-sand beaches were viewed, not enjoyed. I liked parts of my stay, particularly the people. Those native to the area, many of them Basque, were forthright and no-nonsense. 

One day, in the sterile classroom of the language school that catered to tourist-students like me, my tutor, who had dark hair and placid blue eyes, told me that she once had a nervous breakdown. Since then, she’d lived alone and didn’t socialize. Every day after work, she sat on one of the breakwalls along the Bay of Biscay and stared out at the water. Depending on the weather, she might stay for hours. Doing so, she said, had cured her. When I asked if she ever got lonely, she said no. In Spanish, there isn’t an exact translation for our concept of loneliness.  In Basque country, or at least for her, “solo” (on your own), “solitario” (solitary), and “aislado” (isolated) don’t quite mean the same thing.

Of course, loneliness is in our vernacular, as are solitude and isolation. At any point, we might find ourselves inside them, bracketed off from others and the world. And then, just as easily, not.

Sarah Fay ’s writing appears in many publications, including   The New York Times ,  The Atlantic ,  Time Magazine,   The New Republic ,  The Michigan Quarterly Review,  The Rumpus, The   Millions ,  McSweeney’s, The Believer , and  The Paris Review .

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands Fact-checker: Matt Hudson Giles Copy-editor: Jacob Z. Gross

More about Sarah Fay and the book

Support Longreads

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

Essaying the pop culture that matters since 1999

Photo by aronoeleinilotta ( Pixabay License / Pixabay )

Short Stories: Solitude and Loneliness

Five short stories—by Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Bharati Mukherjee, Anthony Doerr, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—explore various isolation, solitude, and loneliness pathologies from the perspectives of different lives and cultures.

During these times, many writers, artists, and public figures have taken to sharing their lockdown diaries or pandemic reading lists or advice on how to survive isolation . Thanks to this ongoing spate of articles and essays in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are well aware that solitude and loneliness are not synonymous words .

The respective histories of these two modes of being also show us that solitude is more about an autonomously-chosen, self-reflective time with oneself, while loneliness is about an undesired and imposed lack of connection with the world around us. Solitude is often a privilege while loneliness is seen as a curse. All that said, being unhappy while alone is a fairly modern idea . And, during these times of social distancing, a good number of us are working to understand and leverage our own isolation pathologies better.

The five short stories here—by Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Bharati Mukherjee, Anthony Doerr, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—explore some of these isolation, solitude, and loneliness pathologies from the perspectives of different lives and cultures. Almost all of them have had solitude or loneliness thrust upon them (not due to any pandemic-like situations) and are trying to cope as best they can. As always, fiction allows us to look at aspects of human nature that we are often unwilling to face within ourselves or in our loved ones. What the characters in these stories experience and how they respond to their isolationary solitude or loneliness allows us certain deeper insights that are, at once, both familiar and eye-opening.

“The Bet”,  by Anton Chekhov (translated by Constance Garnett)

In Chekhov’s short story “ The Bet “, a banker and a lawyer make a bet with each other about whether death is better than life in prison. As morbid as this sounds, this story explores more than the usual debate of capital punishment versus life imprisonment. To fulfill the bet’s conditions and win two million rubles from the banker, the young lawyer must live in total isolation for 15 years. The only contact he is allowed with the rest of the world is through letters.The story doesn’t progress as we might expect. But this is Chekhov, so we must put our expectations aside and let him take us on a journey with the evolution of these two characters. Whichever side of the fence we might be with this never-ending debate, it makes us question our beliefs and values while reading.

From a craft perspective, this is classic Chekhov. Even while exploring matters of life and death, there is no moral teaching or didactic personal opinion here. Like the doctor that he was in real life, he probes, diagnoses, and presents every important detail. The prognosis is ours to make as readers. And though the story is written to appeal to the intellect more so than to emotions, Chekhov’s mastery of showing versus telling is always a delight to savor.

Then he remembered what followed that evening. It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker’s garden. It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be free to cross the threshold of the lodge, to see human beings, to hear the human voice, or to receive letters and newspapers. He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books, and was allowed to write letters, to drink wine, and to smoke. By the terms of the agreement, the only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object. He might have anything he wanted—books, music, wine, and so on—in any quantity he desired by writing an order, but could only receive them through the window.

“Miss Brill”, by Katherine Mansfield

Image by monica1607 ( Pixabay License / Pixabay )

Several of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories feature solitary, lonely women. The title character of “ Miss Brill ” is so beautifully and heartbreakingly portrayed that she has become a timeless literary archetype. Almost the entire story takes place on a park bench. And yet, Mansfield depicts the entire life of this singular character so effectively that we feel we know her as intimately as her writer. There is not one superfluous detail and every sentence builds the story, mood, drama, and emotions in the precise, signature Mansfield manner. Even the seemingly excessive use of metaphors and similes serve important purposes if we read close enough.

As Miss Brill sits in her “special seat”, she observes the people around her with a careful, acute curiosity. We’re deep in her point of view so we get to see, feel, hear, think, and sense her precise impressions of all the interactions teeming around her. But her illusions and delusions are thrown into sharp contrast with the twist ending that’s so brilliantly foreshadowed through all her own judging and romanticizing of others and herself.

Although it was so brilliantly fine—the blue sky powdered with gold and great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques—Miss Brill was glad that she had decided on her fur. The air was motionless, but when you opened your mouth, there was just a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip, and now and again a leaf came drifting—from nowhere, from the sky. Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again.

“The Management of Grief”, by Bharati Mukherjee

The New York Times headlined Bharati Mukherjee’s obituary with the label “writer of immigrant life”. She was certainly that. But she also tackled much more with her writing. Often, such labels are too reductive and they put readers off. Jhumpa Lahiri’s clapback at the New York Times when she was called an immigrant writer remains the best response yet: “If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.”

So, while Mukherjee’s “ The Management of Grief ” features Indian immigrants in the US, it’s about a lot more: a woman’s sense of isolation after losing her entire family in a mass tragedy and being surrounded by well-wishers and do-gooders; how communities and individuals deal with loss; how racism and justice play big roles in social acceptance; and how cultural traditions and customs, in the end, are of little help with personal grief.

Having already written an investigative account of the 1985 Air India flight 182 disaster with her husband, Dr Clark Blaise, (see The Sorrow and the Terror ; Penguin Books; September 1987) Mukherjee wrote this short story in one sitting. In a PowellsBook.blog interview , she recalls how she could have been on that fateful flight herself.

Mukherjee’s craft is sharp here as she reveals bits of information through the protagonist’s experiences and observations. We, as readers, begin to piece the tragedy together as Shaila tries to make sense of what has happened. Also, for a lot of readers, this well-anthologized story is their first introduction to this huge disaster that history texts often ignore.

A woman I don’t know is boiling tea the Indian way in my kitchen. There are a lot of women I don’t know in my kitchen, whispering and moving tactfully. They open doors, rummage through the pantry, and try not to ask me where things are kept. They remind me of when my sons were small, on Mother’s Day or when Vikram and I were tired, and they would make big, sloppy omelets. I would lie in bed pretending I didn’t hear them.

“The Deep”, by Anthony Doerr

“ The Deep ” won the 2011 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award—the biggest award in the world for this literary form. Doerr is a much-celebrated writer, well-known for both his novels and his short stories. This story was also anthologized in the New American Stories (Vintage Contemporaries; July 2015; edited by Ben Marcus.)

Death features strongly in this story as well because the protagonist, Tom, is diagnosed with a terminal illness at a very young age. Due to this life-threatening condition, he’s forced to lead a mostly reclusive kind of life until he meets Ruby at school. Ruby takes risks and gets him to sneak away with her to experience the little pleasures of life that his mother has, until then, protected him from. After they’ve gone their separate ways, Tom settles into a safe routine existence. Until he and Ruby meet again as adults.

Rather than giving us a formulaic story of unrequited love, Doerr goes, well, deeper. He shows Tom struggling with choosing how to live his life even as he manages to live past the age his doctor had predicted. In the last scene, when Tom shares his big epiphany with Ruby, Doerr avoids the many possible clichés and has our hearts aching for these two people trying to somehow connect, comfort, console each other.

Where Doerr’s storytelling craft shines is in the cinematically beautiful contrasts of Tom’s life before, with, and after Ruby. The story is set in 1914 Detroit, during the Great Depression and Doerr’s historically accurate details of how exactly the world around them is falling apart are notable too.

You can see actor Damian Lewis, reading an excerpt of this story here .

Tom is born in 1914 in Detroit, a quarter mile from International Salt. His father is offstage, unaccounted for. His mother operates a six-room, under-insulated boarding house populated with locked doors, behind which drowse the grim possessions of itinerant salt workers: coats the colors of mice, tattered mucking boots, aquatints of undressed women, their breasts faded orange. Every six months a miner is laid off, gets drafted, or dies, and is replaced by another, so that very early in his life Tom comes to see how the world continually drains itself of young men, leaving behind only objects—empty tobacco pouches, bladeless jackknives, salt-caked trousers—mute, incapable of memory.

“New Husband”, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“ New Husband ” was published in The Iowa Review in 2003 under this title and then in Adichie ‘s short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck (Anchor; June 2010) as ‘The Arrangers of Marriage’.

A newly-married woman from Lagos, Chinaza, joins her immigrant husband in New York. They barely know each other due to their arranged marriage. As she tries to adjust to both him and her new world, she deals with the inevitable sense of isolation and loneliness. And, while this might read on the surface like yet another immigrant story, it is also much more than that.

While her husband encourages assimilation into American culture, he discourages any ties back with their culture back home. Almost every impression or ideal Chinaza has of America, the land of opportunity and dreams, slowly crumbles on a daily basis as she tries to understand and accept her confusing reality. It is a lonely struggle because her husband, who likely went through his own assimilation challenges when he first moved to the US, can no longer appreciate or sympathize with what she’s going through.

Adichie adds a twist in the story that we’ll leave unrevealed. It’s not entirely unexpected when it surfaces but it does force Chinaza to make a decision, one way or another. That big decision is also inevitable because of how Adichie foreshadows it carefully. The symbolism of the opening door in the final lines is, of course, perfection.

My new husband carried the suitcase out of the taxi and led the way into the brownstone building, up a flight of brooding stairs, down an airless hallway with frayed carpeting and stopped at a door. 5D, unevenly fashioned from yellowish metal, was plastered on it. “We’re here,” he said. He had always used the word ‘house’ when he told me about our home. I had imagined a gravelly driveway snaking between cucumber-colored lawns, a wide doorway that he would carry me over, walls with serene paintings. Like the white newlyweds in the American films that Lagos Channel 5 showed on Saturday nights.

• Short Stories: Characters Inspired by People in Politics - PopMatters
• Chronicling the Non-Event: Anton Chekhov and the Short Story ...
• Short Stories: Women in the Workplace - PopMatters
• Junot Díaz's Favorite Short Stories: the Future of American Literature ...
• The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories (review) - PopMatters
• 'The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories' Is a Perfect Balance ...
• Short Stories: Souvenirs - PopMatters
• Short Stories: The 12 Best Collections of 2018
• Short Stories: American Writers of South Asian Origin - PopMatters
• Short Stories: Refugees - PopMatters
• The Human Animal in Natural Labitat: A Brief Study of the Outcast - PopMatters

Publish with PopMatters

PopMatters Seeks Book Critics and Essayists

Call for Papers: All Things Reconsidered – FILM Winter 2023-24

Call for Papers: All Things Reconsidered – MUSIC Winter 2023-24

Submit an Essay, Review, Interview, or List to PopMatters

PopMatters Seeks Music Writers

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Personality — My Reason for Being Alone and Being Happy about It

My Reason for Being Alone and Being Happy About It

• Categories: Introvert Loneliness Personality

About this sample

Words: 613 |

Published: Jun 6, 2019

Words: 613 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Hook Examples for Loneliness Essay

• The Echoing Silence: Loneliness is an uninvited guest that fills the room with silence. In this exploration of solitude, we’ll dive deep into the profound impact of loneliness on our minds and souls.
• Lost in a Crowd: Amidst the bustling streets and crowded spaces, loneliness can be our most constant companion. Join us as we unravel the paradox of feeling alone in the midst of a crowd.
• The Digital Disconnect: In an era of constant connectivity, loneliness still finds a way to creep in through our screens. This essay delves into the digital age’s contribution to the epidemic of loneliness.
• The Loneliness Epidemic: In an increasingly interconnected world, loneliness is on the rise. Explore the factors contributing to this modern epidemic and the far-reaching consequences it has on our well-being.
• Loneliness: A Silent Cry for Connection: Beneath the surface of a smile, loneliness often hides. Join us as we listen to the silent cries for connection and examine the strategies to combat the pervasive feeling of isolation.

Works Cited

• Cain, S. (2012). Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Broadway Books.
• Dembling, S. (2013). The Introvert’s Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World. Perigee Books.
• Granneman, S. (2018). The Friendship Cure: Reconnecting in the Modern World. Head of Zeus.
• Lane, L. (2018). The Art of Being Alone: How to Live a Happy and Fulfilled Single Life. Summersdale Publishers.
• Morin, A. (2017). 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do: Take Back Your Power, Embrace Change, Face Your Fears, and Train Your Brain for Happiness and Success. William Morrow.
• Rauch, J. (2003). Caring for Your Introvert. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-for-your-introvert/302696/
• Rubin, G. (2010). The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. Harper.
• Seltzer, L. F. (2021). The Happy Introvert: A Wild and Crazy Guide to Celebrating Your True Self. Harmony.
• Storr, W. (2018). Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us. Overlook Press.
• Zimbardo, P., & Radl, L. (2019). Shyness: What It Is, What to Do About It. Pearson.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof. Kifaru

Verified writer

• Expert in: Life

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

1 pages / 384 words

2 pages / 711 words

2 pages / 736 words

1 pages / 514 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Personality

Personality traits are the individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that distinguish one person from another. These traits have been the subject of extensive research in psychology and [...]

I feel that people think I have a nice personality that can help influence others. I always try and act respectfully and consider others feelings. Person 1 said I still need to become more confident in how I word things, which I [...]

On the surface, the discussion of introversion and extraversion may appear insignificant and therefore tends to be disregarded. This is why I believe Rauch’s article "Caring for Your Introvert" (2003) can be viewed as a personal [...]

Personality, the unique combination of thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that make each individual distinct, is a complex interplay between genetics and environment. While genetics provide the foundation, the environment plays a [...]

Everyone has his or her own ideal person in one way or another. When most people talk about whom they admire most, it’s usually a person when they hold in false regard and most commonly someone in the public eyes. Without reason [...]

Frida Kahlo, the most famous female artist to date. Frida was a confident and brave woman, especially for her time. She didn’t let anyone tell her what she could and could not accomplish. Even through her personal troubles, she [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• Open access
• Published: 06 December 2020

Experiences of loneliness: a study protocol for a systematic review and thematic synthesis of qualitative literature

• Phoebe E. McKenna-Plumley   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5627-5730 1 ,
• Jenny M. Groarke 1 ,
• Rhiannon N. Turner 1 &
• Keming Yang 2  

Systematic Reviews volume  9 , Article number:  284 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

5299 Accesses

5 Citations

7 Altmetric

Metrics details

Loneliness is a highly prevalent, harmful, and aversive experience which is fundamentally subjective: social isolation alone cannot account for loneliness, and people can experience loneliness even with ample social connections. A number of studies have qualitatively explored experiences of loneliness; however, the research lacks a comprehensive overview of these experiences. We present a protocol for a study that will, for the first time, systematically review and synthesise the qualitative literature on experiences of loneliness in people of all ages from the general, non-clinical population. The aim is to offer a fine-grained look at experiences of loneliness across the lifespan.

We will search multiple electronic databases from their inception onwards: PsycINFO, MEDLINE, Scopus, Child Development & Adolescent Studies, Sociological Abstracts, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, CINAHL, and the Education Resource Information Center. Sources of grey literature will also be searched. We will include empirical studies published in English including any qualitative study design (e.g. interview, focus group). Studies should focus on individuals from non-clinical populations of any age who describe experiences of loneliness. All citations, abstracts, and full-text articles will be screened by one author with a second author ensuring consistency regarding inclusion. Potential conflicts will be resolved through discussion. Thematic synthesis will be used to synthesise this literature, and study quality will be assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute Critical Appraisal Checklist for Qualitative Research. The planned review will be reported according to the Enhancing Transparency in Reporting the Synthesis of Qualitative Research (ENTREQ) statement.

The growing body of research on loneliness predictors, outcomes, and interventions must be grounded in an understanding of the lived experience of loneliness. This systematic review and thematic synthesis will clarify how loneliness is subjectively experienced across the lifespan in the general population. This will allow for a more holistic understanding of the lived experience of loneliness which can inform clinicians, researchers, and policymakers working in this important area.

Systematic review registration

PROSPERO CRD42020178105 .

Peer Review reports

Loneliness has become the focus of a wealth of research in recent years. This attention is well placed given that loneliness has been designated as a significant public health issue in the UK [ 1 ] and is associated with poor physical and mental health outcomes [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ] and an increase in risk of death similar to that of smoking [ 6 ]. In light of this, it is concerning that recent research has found that loneliness is highly prevalent across age groups, with young people (under 25 years) and older adults (over 65 years) indicating the highest levels [ 7 , 8 ].

Whilst an ever-increasing body of research is situating loneliness at its centre, there is relatively little work which focuses on the lived experience of loneliness: how loneliness feels and what makes up experiences of loneliness. Phenomena that might appear to describe loneliness, such as social isolation, are distinct from the actual experience of it. Whilst loneliness is generally characterised as the distress one experiences when they perceive their social connections to be lacking in number or quality, social isolation is the objective limitation or absence of connections [ 9 ]. Social isolation does not necessarily beget loneliness, and indeed, Hawkley and Cacioppo [ 3 ] remark on how humans can perceive meaningful social relationships where none objectifiably exist, such as with God, or where reciprocity is not possible, such as with fictional characters. Whilst associations between aloneness and loneliness have been richly demonstrated [ 10 , 11 ], other research has found moderate and low correlations between social isolation and loneliness [ 12 , 13 ]. These findings underline the need to better understand what makes up the subjective experience of loneliness, given that it is clearly not sufficiently captured by the objective experience of being alone. Given the subjective nature of the phenomenon, qualitative methods are particularly suited to research into experiences of loneliness, as they can aim to capture the idiosyncrasies of these experiences.

A number of qualitative studies of loneliness experiences have been carried out. In perhaps the largest study of its type, Rokach [ 14 ] analysed written accounts of 526 adults’ loneliest experience, specifically asking about their thoughts, feelings, and coping strategies. This generated a model with four major elements (self-alienation, interpersonal isolation, distressed reactions, and agony) and twenty-three components such as emptiness, numbness, and missing a specific person or relationship. Although this study offered impressive scale, the vast majority of participants were between 19 and 45 years old, and as a result, the model may underestimate factors experienced across the lifespan. The findings might be usefully integrated with more recent research which qualitatively explores loneliness in other age groups (e.g. [ 15 ]). Harmonising this research by looking closely at how people describe their experiences of loneliness and working from the bottom-up to create a fine-grained view of what makes up these experiences will provide a more holistic understanding of loneliness and how it might best be defined and ameliorated.

There are a number of available definitions of loneliness offered by researchers. The widely accepted description from Perlman and Peplau [ 16 ], for example, states that loneliness is an unpleasant and distressing subjective phenomenon arising when one’s desired level of social relations differs from their actual level. However, research lacks an overarching subjective perspective, by which we mean a description of loneliness which is grounded in accounts of people’s lived experiences. This is a significant gap in the field given that loneliness is, by its nature, a subjective experience. Unlike objective phenomena like blood pressure or age, loneliness can only be definitively measured by asking a person whether they feel lonely. Weiss [ 17 ] argued that whilst available definitions of loneliness may be helpful, they do not sufficiently reflect the real phenomenon of loneliness because they define it in terms of its potential causes rather than the actual experience of being lonely. As such, studies which begin from definitions of loneliness like these may obscure the ways in which it is actually experienced and fail to capture the components and idiosyncrasies of these experiences.

A recent systematic review report [ 18 ] has explored the conceptualisations of loneliness employed in qualitative research, finding that loneliness tended to be defined as social, emotional, or existential types. However, the review covered only studies of adults (16 years and up), including heterogenous clinical populations (e.g. people receiving cancer treatment, people living with specific mental health conditions, and people on long-term sick leave), and placed central importance on the concepts, models, theories, and frameworks of loneliness utilised in research. Studies which did not employ an identified concept, model, framework, or theory of loneliness were excluded. Moreover, rather than synthesising how people describe their loneliness, the authors aimed to assess how research conceptualises loneliness across the adult life course. This leaves a gap with respect to how research participants specifically describe their lived experiences of loneliness, rather than how researchers might conceptualise it. Achterberg and colleagues [ 19 ] recently conducted a meta-synthesis of qualitative studies on experiences of loneliness in young people with depression. As the findings are specific to experiences in this population, they may not reflect those of wider age groups or individuals who do not have depression. Kitzmüller and colleagues [ 20 ] used meta-ethnography to synthesise studies regarding experiences and ways of dealing with loneliness in older adults (60 years and older). However, they synthesised only articles from health care disciplines published in scientific journals from 2001 to 2016 and included studies on clinical populations, such as older women with multiple chronic conditions. Moreover, there has been an increase in research output regarding loneliness in recent years, and relevant studies may have been published since this review was conducted (e.g. [ 15 ]). To the authors’ knowledge, the systematic review report on conceptual frameworks used in loneliness research [ 18 ], the meta-synthesis of loneliness in young people with depression [ 19 ], and the meta-ethnography of older adults’ loneliness [ 20 ] are the only such systematic reviews of qualitative literature regarding experiences of loneliness to date. The current systematic review will instead take a bottom-up approach which focuses on non-clinical populations of all ages to synthesise findings on participants’ experiences of loneliness, rather than the conceptualisations that might be imposed by study authors. This will fill a gap in the literature by synthesising the qualitative evidence focusing on experiences of loneliness across the lifespan. This inductive synthesis of the available subjective descriptions of loneliness will offer a nuanced view of loneliness experiences. It is imperative for research and practice that we deepen the current understanding of these experiences to inform how we approach describing, researching, and attempting to ameliorate loneliness.

The proposed research aims to offer a holistic view of the experience of loneliness across the lifespan through a systematic review and thematic synthesis of the qualitative literature focusing on these experiences. To address this aim, there is one central research question: How do people describe their experiences of loneliness?

This research question concerns aspects of loneliness which participants discuss when describing their lived experiences. Whilst we expect that this would concern emotional, social, and cognitive components of the experience, we understand that these findings may also come to reflect perceived causes or effects of loneliness.

This review will also consider the age groups that have been studied and how experiences of loneliness might vary across the different age groups examined in this literature. Loneliness research is often weighted towards investigations of older adults, despite the fact that the prevalence of loneliness is high across the lifespan; recent UK research found a prevalence of 40% in 16- to 24-year-olds and 27% in people over 75 [ 7 ]. This review will also shed light on the age groups that have been included in qualitative research on loneliness experiences. In doing so, this research may identify age groups which have been understudied and may be underrepresented in this field of research, potentially pointing to life stages where experiences of loneliness might be usefully explored in more detail in the future.

Furthermore, given the relatively small number of qualitative studies into the experience of loneliness compared with quantitative research in this area, this review will also consider the reasons that study authors may offer for the relative shortage of qualitative work. This is an important point given that the review will inherently be constrained by the number of studies that exist and the focus that has primarily been given to quantitative loneliness research thus far.

Protocol registration and reporting

The review protocol has been registered within the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO) database from the University of York (registration number: CRD42020178105). This review protocol is being reported in accordance with the reporting guidance provided in the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Protocols (PRISMA-P) statement [ 21 ] (see checklist in Additional file 1 ). The proposed systematic review will be reported in accordance with the reporting guidance provided in the Enhancing Transparency in Reporting the Synthesis of Qualitative Research (ENTREQ) statement [ 22 ]. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement [ 23 ] will inform the process of completing and reporting this planned review.

Eligibility criteria

Due to its suitability for qualitative evidence synthesis, the SPIDER tool [ 24 ] was used to assist in defining the research question and eligibility criteria in line with the following criteria: Sample, Phenomenon of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research type (see Table 1 for details of these criteria). The exclusion criteria are as follows:

Studies not meeting the inclusion criteria described in Table 1

Studies not published in English

Studies with no qualitative component

Studies of clinical populations

Studies which report solely on objective phenomena such as social isolation rather than the subjectively perceived experience of loneliness

Studies in which the primary focus or one of the primary focuses is not experiences of loneliness

Papers will be deemed to focus sufficiently on experiences of loneliness if studying these experiences is a key aspect of the work rather than simply a part of the output. Accordingly, studies will only be included if authors state a relevant aim, objective, or research question related to investigating experiences of loneliness (i.e. to study experiences of loneliness) or if loneliness experiences are clearly explored and described (e.g. relevant questions are present in an appended interview guide). At the title and abstract screening stage, at least one relevant sentence or information that indicates likely relevance must be present for inclusion. The decision to exclude articles which do not primarily or equally focus on these experiences was made in order to gather meaningful data about loneliness experiences specifically and to capture experiences identified as loneliness by participants as much as possible, rather than related phenomena which may be grouped and labelled retrospectively as loneliness by researchers.

Information sources and search strategy

The primary source of literature will be a structured search of multiple electronic databases (from inception onwards): PsycINFO, MEDLINE, Scopus, Child Development & Adolescent Studies, Sociological Abstracts, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), CINAHL, and the Education Resource Information Center (ERIC). The secondary source of potentially relevant material will be a search of the grey or difficult-to-locate literature using Google Scholar. In line with the guidance from Haddaway and colleagues [ 25 ] on using Google Scholar for systematic review, a title-only search using the same search terms will be conducted and the first 1000 results will be screened for eligibility. These searches will be supplemented with hand-searching in reference lists, such that the titles of all articles cited within eligible studies will be checked. When eligibility is unclear from the title, abstracts and full-texts will be checked until eligibility or ineligibility can be ascertained. This process will be repeated with any articles that are found to be eligible at this stage until no new eligible articles are found. Systematic reviews on similar topics will also be searched for potentially eligible studies. Grey literature will be located through searches of Google Scholar, opengrey.eu, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, and websites of specific loneliness organisations such as the Campaign to End Loneliness, managed in collaboration with an information specialist. Efforts will be made to contact authors of completed, ongoing, and in-press studies for information regarding additional studies or relevant material.

The search strategy for our primary database (MEDLINE) was developed in collaboration with an information specialist. In collaboration with a specialist, the strategy will be translated for all of the databases. The search strategy has been peer reviewed using the Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies (PRESS) checklist [ 26 ]. Strategies will utilise keywords for loneliness and qualitative studies. A draft search strategy for MEDLINE is provided in Additional file 2 . Qualitative search terms were supplemented with relevant and useful subject headings and free-text terms from the Pearl Harvesting Search Framework synonym ring for qualitative research [ 27 ]. The inclusion of search terms related to social isolation specifically and related terms (e.g. “social engagement”) was considered and tested extensively through scoping searches and discussion with an information specialist. Adding these terms (and others such as “Patient Isolation” and “Quarantine”) did not appear to add unique papers that would be included above and beyond subject heading and free-text searching for “Loneliness”. Given the aim to include studies focused on experiences of loneliness specifically, this search strategy was deemed most appropriate. A similar strategy has been employed in other recent systematic review work focusing on loneliness (e.g. [ 28 , 29 ]). Moreover, test searches employing the search strategy retrieved all of seven informally identified likely eligible articles indexed in Scopus, indicating good sensitivity of the strategy. A free-text search to capture “perceived social isolation” was included as this specific term is used by some authors as a direct synonym for loneliness. The completed PRESS checklist is provided in Additional file 3 .

Data collection and analysis

Study selection.

Firstly, the main review author (PMP) will perform the database search and hand-searching and will screen all titles to remove studies which are clearly not relevant. PMP will also undertake abstract screening to exclude any which are found to be irrelevant or inapplicable to the inclusion criteria. A second author (JG) will independently screen 50% of the titles and abstracts. Finally, full-text versions of the remaining articles will be read by PMP to assess whether they are suitable for inclusion in the final review. JG will independently review 50% of these full texts. In cases of disagreement, the two reviewers will discuss the study to reach a decision about inclusion or exclusion. In case agreement cannot be reached after discussion between the two reviewers, a third reviewer will be invited to reconcile their disagreement and make a final decision. The reason for the exclusion at the full-text stage will be recorded. After this screening process, the remaining articles will be included in the review following data extraction, quality appraisal, and analysis. The PRISMA statement will be followed to create a flowchart of the number of studies included and excluded at each stage of this process.

Data management

The articles to be screened will be managed in EndNoteX9, with subsequent EndNote databases used to manage each stage of the screening process.

Data extraction

Data will be extracted from the studies by PMP using a purpose-designed and piloted Microsoft Excel form. Information on author, publication year, geographic location of study, methodological approach, method, population, participant demographics, and main findings will be extracted to understand the basis of each study. JG will check this extracted data for accuracy.

For the thematic synthesis, in line with Thomas and Harden [ 30 ], all text labelled as “results” or “findings” will be extracted and entered into the NVivo software for analysis. This will be done because many factors, including varied reporting styles and misrepresentation of data as findings, can make it difficult to identify the findings in qualitative research [ 31 ]; accordingly, a wide-ranging approach will be used to capture as much relevant data as possible from each included article. The aim is to extract all data in which experiences of loneliness are described.

Quality appraisal

Quality of the included articles will be assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Critical Appraisal Checklist for Qualitative Research [ 32 ]. This quality will be considered during the development of the data synthesis. Different authors hold different viewpoints about inclusion versus exclusion of low-quality studies. However, given that they may still add important, authentic accounts of phenomena that have simply been reported inadequately [ 33 ], it is common to include lower-quality studies and consider quality during the synthesis process rather than excluding on the basis of it. Accordingly, this approach will be used in the present research.

Data synthesis

There are various accepted approaches to reviewing and synthesising qualitative research, including meta-ethnography [ 34 ], meta-synthesis [ 35 ], and narrative synthesis [ 36 ]. The current systematic review will utilise thematic synthesis as a methodology to create an overarching understanding of the experiences of loneliness described across studies. In thematic synthesis, descriptive themes which remain close to the primary studies are developed. Next, a new stage of analytical theme development is undertaken wherein the reviewer “goes beyond” the interpretations of the primary studies and develops higher-order constructs or explanations based on these descriptive themes [ 30 ]. The process of thematic synthesis for reviewing is similar to that of grounded theory for primary data, in that a translation and interpretative account of the phenomena of interest is produced. Thematic synthesis has been used to synthesise research on the experience of fatigue in neurological patients with multiple sclerosis [ 37 ], children’s experiences of living with juvenile idiopathic arthritis [ 38 ], and parents’ experiences of parenting a child with chronic illness [ 39 ]. This use of thematic synthesis to consider subjective experiences (rather than, for example, attitudes or motivations) melds well with the present research, which also sets its focus on a subjective experience.

As well as its successful application in similar systematic reviews, thematic synthesis was selected based on its appropriateness to the research question, time frame, resources, expertise, purpose, and potential type of data in line with the RETREAT framework for selecting an approach to qualitative evidence synthesis [ 40 ]. The RETREAT framework considers thematic synthesis to be appropriate for relatively rapid approaches which can be sustained by researchers with primary qualitative experience, unlike approaches such as meta-ethnography in which a researcher with specific familiarity with the method is needed. This is appropriate to the project time frame and background of this research team. The Joanna Briggs Institute Reviewer’s Manual [ 41 ] also notes that thematic synthesis is useful when considering shared elements across studies which are otherwise heterogenous, which is likely to be the case in this review given that the common factor (experiences of loneliness) may be present across studies with otherwise diverse populations and methodologies.

Guidance from Thomas and Harden [ 30 ] will be followed to synthesise the data. Firstly, the extracted text will be inductively coded line-by-line according to content and meaning. This inductive creation of codes should allow the content and meaning of each sentence to be captured. Multiple codes may be applied to the same sentence, and codes may be “free” or structured in a tree formation at this stage. Before moving forward, all text referred to by each code will be rechecked to ensure consistency in what is considered a single code or whether more levels of coding are required.

After this stage, similarities and differences between the codes will be examined, and they will begin to be organised into a hierarchy of groups of codes. New codes will be applied to these groups to describe their overall meaning. This will create a tree structure of descriptive themes which should not deviate largely from the original study findings; rather, findings will have been integrated into an organised whole. At this stage, the synthesis should remain close to the findings of the included studies.

At the final stage of analysis, higher-order analytical themes may be inferred from the descriptive themes which will offer a theoretical structure for experiences of loneliness. This inferential process will be carried out through collaboration between the research team (primarily PMP and JG).

Sensitivity analysis

After the synthesis is complete, a sensitivity analysis will be undertaken in which any low-quality studies (as identified through the JBI checklist) are excluded from the analysis to assess whether the synthesis is altered when these studies are removed, in terms of any themes being lost entirely or becoming less rich or thick [ 42 ]. Sensitivity analysis will also be used to assess whether any age group is entirely responsible for a given theme. In this way, the robustness of the synthesis can be appraised and the individual findings can remain grounded in their context whilst also extending into a broader understanding of the experiences of loneliness.

Risk of bias in individual studies

Risk of bias in individual studies will be taken into account through utilisation of the JBI checklist, which includes ten questions to assess whether a study is adequately conceptualised and reported [ 32 ]. PMP will use the checklist to assess the quality of each study. Whilst all eligible studies will be included in the synthesis (as described in the “Quality appraisal” section), any lower-quality studies will be excluded during post-synthesis sensitivity analysis in order to assess whether their inclusion has affected the synthesis in any way as suggested by Carroll and Booth [ 43 ].

Confidence in cumulative evidence

The Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation – Confidence in the Evidence from Reviews of Qualitative Research (GRADE-CERQual) approach [ 44 , 45 ] will be used to assess how much confidence can be placed in the findings of this qualitative evidence synthesis. This will allow a transparent, systematic appraisal of confidence in the findings for researchers, clinicians, and other decision-makers who may utilise the evidence from the planned systematic review. GRADE-CERQual involves assessment in four domains: (1) methodological limitations, (2) coherence, (3) adequacy of data, and (4) relevance. There is also an overall rating of confidence: high, moderate, low, or very low. These findings will be displayed in a Summary of Qualitative Findings table including a summary of each finding, confidence in that finding, and an explanation for the rating. Assessments for each finding will be made through discussion between PMP and JG.

The proposed systematic review will contribute to our knowledge of loneliness by clarifying how it is subjectively experienced across the lifespan. Synthesising the qualitative literature focusing on experiences of loneliness in the general population will offer a fine-grained, subjectively derived understanding of the components of this phenomenon which closely reflects the original descriptions provided by those who have experienced it. By including non-clinical populations of all ages, this research will provide an essential view of loneliness experiences across different life stages. This can be used to inform future research into correlates, consequences, and interventions for loneliness. The use of thematic synthesis will enable us to remain close to the data, offering an account which might also be useful for policy and practice in this area.

There are a number of limitations to the planned research. Primarily, this review will be unable to capture aspects of loneliness experiences which have not been described in the qualitative literature, for example, due to the sensitivity of the topic, given that loneliness can be stigmatising, or aspects that are specific to a given unstudied population. Moreover, by focusing on lifespan non-clinical research, we aim to offer a general synthesis which can in future be informed by insights from clinical groups, rather than subsuming and potentially obscuring the aspects of loneliness which might be unique to them. Whilst primary empirical studies are not themselves extensive sources, with books in particular often offering rich descriptions of loneliness (see, e.g. [ 11 , 46 ]), this research will focus on primary empirical studies of subjective descriptions to offer a manageable level of scope and rigour. As with any systematic review, some studies may also be missing information which would inform the synthesis. Quality appraisal and sensitivity analysis will aim to capture and potentially control for this issue, but it will ultimately be difficult to ascertain how missing information might affect the synthesis.

By providing a thorough overview of how loneliness is experienced, we expect that the findings from the planned review will be informative and useful for researchers, policymakers, and clinicians who work with and for people experiencing loneliness, as well as for these individuals themselves, to better understand this important, prevalent, and often misunderstood phenomenon. Mansfield et al. [ 18 ] have offered an illuminating systematic review covering the conceptual frameworks and models of loneliness included in the existing evidence base (i.e. social, emotional, and existential loneliness). This review will build upon this work by including research with children and adolescents and taking a bottom-up approach similar to grounded theory where the synthesis will remain close to the participants’ subjective descriptions of loneliness experiences within the included studies, rather than reflecting pre-existing themes in the evidence base. As such, this systematic review will offer specific insights into lifespan experiences of loneliness. This synthesis of lived experiences will shed light on the nuances of loneliness which existing definitions and typologies might overlook. It will offer an experience-focused overview of loneliness for people studying and developing measures of this phenomenon. In focusing on qualitative work, the planned review may also identify processes relevant to loneliness which are not expressed by statistical models. In this way, it may also provide a starting point for more nuanced qualitative work with specific populations and circumstances to ascertain components which may be characteristic of certain experiences.

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable.

Abbreviations

Enhancing Transparency in Reporting the Synthesis of Qualitative Research

Education Resource Information Center

Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation – Confidence in the Evidence from Reviews of Qualitative Research

International Bibliography of the Social Sciences

Joanna Briggs Institute

Jenny Groarke

Keming Yang

Phoebe McKenna-Plumley

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses – Protocol

International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews

Review question – Epistemology – Time/Timescale – Resources – Expertise – Audience and purpose – Type of data

Rhiannon Turner

Sample, Phenomenon of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research type

Department for Digital C, Media and Sport. A connected society: a strategy for tackling loneliness – laying the foundations for change. London; 2018.

Cacioppo JT, Hawkley LC, Thisted RA. Perceived social isolation makes me sad: 5-year cross-lagged analyses of loneliness and depressive symptomatology in the Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study. Psychol Aging. 2010;25(2):453–63.

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Hawkley LC, Cacioppo JT. Loneliness matters: a theoretical and empirical review of consequences and mechanisms. Ann Behav Med\. 2010;40(2):218–27.

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Lim MH, Rodebaugh TL, Zyphur MJ, Gleeson JF. Loneliness over time: the crucial role of social anxiety. J Abnorm Psychol. 2016;125(5):620–30.

Qualter P, Brown SL, Rotenberg KJ, Vanhalst J, Harris RA, Goossens L, et al. Trajectories of loneliness during childhood and adolescence: predictors and health outcomes. J Adolesc. 2013;36(6):1283–93.

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Holt-Lunstad J, Smith TB, Layton JB. Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review. PLoS Med. 2010;7(7):e1000316.

Hammond C. The surprising truth about loneliness: BBC Future; 2018. Available from: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180928-the-surprising-truth-about-loneliness .

Victor CR, Yang K. The prevalence of loneliness among adults: a case study of the United Kingdom. J Psychol. 2012;146(1-2):85–104.

De Jong GJ, van Tilburg TG, Dykstra PA. Loneliness and social isolation. In: Perlman AVD, editor. The Cambridge handbook of personal relationships. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2016. p. 485–500.

Google Scholar  

Savikko N, Routasalo P, Tilvis RS, Strandberg TE, Pitkälä KH. Predictors and subjective causes of loneliness in an aged population. Arch Gerontol Geriatr. 2005;41(3):223–33.

Yang K. Loneliness: a social problem. New York: Department for Culture Media and Sport; 2019..

Coyle CE, Dugan E. Social isolation, loneliness and health among older adults. J Aging Health. 2012;24(8):1346–63.

Matthews T, Danese A, Wertz J, Odgers CL, Ambler A, Moffitt TE, et al. Social isolation, loneliness and depression in young adulthood: a behavioural genetic analysis. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol. 2016;51(3):339–48.

Rokach A. The experience of loneliness: a tri-level model. J Psychol. 1988;122(6):531.

Article   Google Scholar  

Ojembe BU, Ebe KM. Describing reasons for loneliness among older people in Nigeria. J Gerontol Soc Work. 2018;61(6):640–58.

Perlman D, Peplau LA. Toward a social psychology of loneliness. In: Duck S, Gilmour R, editors. Personal relationships in disorder. London: Academic; 1981. p. 31–56.

Weiss RS. Reflections on the present state of loneliness research. J Soc Behav Pers. 1987;2(2):271–6.

Mansfield L, Daykin N, Meads C, Tomlinson A, Gray K, Lane J, Victor C. A conceptual review of loneliness across the adult life course (16+ years): synthesis of qualitative studies: What Works Wellbeing, London; 2019.

Achterbergh L, Pitman A, Birken M, Pearce E, Sno H, Johnson S. The experience of loneliness among young people with depression: a qualitative meta-synthesis of the literature. BMC Psychiatry. 2020;20(1):415.

Kitzmüller G, Clancy A, Vaismoradi M, Wegener C, Bondas T. “Trapped in an empty waiting room”—the existential human core of loneliness in old age: a meta-synthesis. Qual Health Res. 2017;28(2):213–30.

Moher D, Shamseer L, Clarke M, Ghersi D, Liberati A, Petticrew M, et al. Preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis protocols (PRISMA-P) 2015 statement. Syst Rev. 2015;4(1):1.

Tong A, Flemming K, McInnes E, Oliver S, Craig J. Enhancing transparency in reporting the synthesis of qualitative research: ENTREQ. BMC Med Res Methodol. 2012;12(1):181.

Moher D, Liberati A, Tetzlaff J, Altman DG. Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement. Ann Intern Med. 2009;151(4):264–9 w64.

Cooke A, Smith D, Booth A. Beyond PICO: the SPIDER tool for qualitative evidence synthesis. Qual Health Res. 2012;22(10):1435–43.

Haddaway NR, Collins AM, Coughlin D, Kirk S. The role of Google Scholar in evidence reviews and its applicability to grey literature searching. PLoS One. 2015;10(9):e0138237.

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   CAS   Google Scholar  

McGowan J, Sampson M, Salzwedel DM, Cogo E, Foerster V, Lefebvre C. PRESS peer review of electronic search strategies: 2015 guideline statement. J Clin Epidemiol. 2016;75:40–6.

Stansfield C. Qualitative research 2014. Available from: https://sites.google.com/view/pearl-harvesting-search/ph-synonym-rings/structure-or-study-design/qualitative-research .

Kent-Marvick J, Simonsen S, Pentecost R, McFarland MM. Loneliness in pregnant and postpartum people and parents of children aged 5 years or younger: a scoping review protocol. Syst Rev. 2020;9(1):213–9.

Michalska da Rocha B. Is there a relationship between loneliness and psychotic experiences? An empirical investigation and a meta-analysis [D.Clin. Psychol.]. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh; 2016.

Thomas J, Harden A. Methods for the thematic synthesis of qualitative research in systematic reviews. BMC Med Res Methodol. 2008;8(1):45.

Sandelowski M, Barroso J. Finding the findings in qualitative studies. J Nurs Scholarsh. 2002;34(3):213–9.

Lockwood C, Munn Z, Porritt K. Qualitative research synthesis: methodological guidance for systematic reviewers utilizing meta-aggregation. Int J Evid Based Healthc. 2015;13(3):179–87.

Soilemezi D, Linceviciute S. Synthesizing qualitative research: reflections and lessons learnt by two new reviewers. Int J Qual Methods. 2018;17(1):1609406918768014.

Noblit GW, Hare RD. Meta-ethnography: synthesizing qualitative studies (vol. 11). California: Sage; 1988.

Book   Google Scholar  

Lachal J, Revah-Levy A, Orri M, Moro MR. Metasynthesis: an original method to synthesize qualitative literature in psychiatry. Front Psychiatry. 2017;8:269.

Popay J, Roberts HM, Sowden A, Petticrew M, Arai L, Rodgers M, Britten N. Guidance on the conduct of narrative synthesis in systematic reviews: a product from the ESRC Methods Programme; 2006.

Newton G, Griffith A, Soundy A. The experience of fatigue in neurological patients with multiple sclerosis: a thematic synthesis. Physiotherapy. 2020;107:306–16.

Tong A, Jones J, Craig JC, Singh-Grewal D. Children’s experiences of living with juvenile idiopathic arthritis: a thematic synthesis of qualitative studies. Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken). 2012;64(9):1392–404.

Heath G, Farre A, Shaw K. Parenting a child with chronic illness as they transition into adulthood: a systematic review and thematic synthesis of parents’ experiences. Patient Educ Couns. 2017;100(1):76–92.

Booth A, Noyes J, Flemming K, Gerhardus A, Wahlster P, van der Wilt GJ, et al. Structured methodology review identified seven (RETREAT) criteria for selecting qualitative evidence synthesis approaches. J Clin Epidemiol. 2018;99:41–52.

Institute JB. JBI reviewer’s manual – 2.4: the JBI approach to qualitative synthesis. 2019 Available from: https://wiki.joannabriggs.org/display/MANUAL/2.4+The+JBI+Approach+to+qualitative+synthesis .

Carroll C, Booth A, Lloyd-Jones M. Should we exclude inadequately reported studies from qualitative systematic reviews? An evaluation of sensitivity analyses in two case study reviews. Qual Health Res. 2012;22(10):1425–34.

Carroll C, Booth A. Quality assessment of qualitative evidence for systematic review and synthesis: is it meaningful, and if so, how should it be performed? Res Synth Methods. 2015;6(2):149–54.

Lewin S, Booth A, Glenton C, Munthe-Kaas H, Rashidian A, Wainwright M, et al. Applying GRADE-CERQual to qualitative evidence synthesis findings: introduction to the series. Implement Sci. 2018;13(1):2.

Lewin S, Glenton C, Munthe-Kaas H, Carlsen B, Colvin CJ, Gülmezoglu M, et al. Using qualitative evidence in decision making for health and social interventions: an approach to assess confidence in findings from qualitative evidence syntheses (GRADE-CERQual). PLoS Med. 2015;12(10):e1001895.

Bound AF. A biography of loneliness: the history of an emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2019.

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge and thank Ms. Norma Menabney and Ms. Carol Dunlop, subject librarians at the McClay Library, Queen’s University Belfast, for their advice and assistance with designing a search strategy for this review. The authors would also like to acknowledge and thank Dr. Ciara Keenan, a research fellow at Queen’s University Belfast and associate director of Cochrane Ireland, for her completion of the PRESS checklist and guidance regarding the search strategy and systematic review methodology.

PMP wishes to acknowledge the funding received from the Northern Ireland and North East Doctoral Training Partnership, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council with support from the Department for the Economy Northern Ireland. The funder did not play a role in the development of this protocol.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast, David Keir Building, 18-30 Malone Road, Belfast, BT9 5BN, UK

Phoebe E. McKenna-Plumley, Jenny M. Groarke & Rhiannon N. Turner

Department of Sociology, Durham University, 29-32 Old Elvet, Durham, DH1 3HN, UK

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

PMP is the study guarantor. PMP and JG were responsible for the conception and design of the study. PMP, JG, RT, and KY contributed to the drafting and revising of the protocol. All authors approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Phoebe E. McKenna-Plumley .

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate, consent for publication, competing interests.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher’s note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary Information

Additional file 1..

PRISMA-P 2015 Checklist.

Additional file 2.

Search executed in MEDLINE ALL (OVID) 16/11/2020.

Additional file 3.

PRESS Guideline — Search Submission & Peer Review Assessment.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

McKenna-Plumley, P.E., Groarke, J.M., Turner, R.N. et al. Experiences of loneliness: a study protocol for a systematic review and thematic synthesis of qualitative literature. Syst Rev 9 , 284 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-020-01544-x

Download citation

Received : 28 May 2020

Accepted : 25 November 2020

Published : 06 December 2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-020-01544-x

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Experiences of loneliness
• Systematic review
• Thematic synthesis
• Qualitative

Systematic Reviews

ISSN: 2046-4053

• Submission enquiries: Access here and click Contact Us
• General enquiries: [email protected]

• Free Case Studies
• Business Essays

Write My Case Study

Buy Case Study

Case Study Help

• Case Study For Sale
• Case Study Service
• Hire Writer

Loneliness Narrative Essay

Loneliness is not something anybody wants. Feeling lonely is like being empty with no way of food or drink.

Most people live their lives and end up happy with a nice family friends and an entire community of people that they can say are their friends. But there are the rare cases of people that don’t either communicate that well or just are not people persons. This feeling of being lonely can cause great amounts of stress and depression. Of mice and men showed what loneliness can do to a person. Lennie was never actually alone physically, but he knew that he had nothing to hold onto or to live for. Teenage loneliness is a very serious problem.

We Will Write a Custom Case Study Specifically For You For Only $13.90/page!

During the teenage years kids are learning how to interact, make friends and be active, participate in events. A lot of teenagers stride to be the most popular, or to be known by everybody which is not always a good thing but it is better than being lonely. Teenagers tend to be bully’s and pick on other kids and embarrass them. That makes it harder for a child to branch out and meet people. The whole idea of going to school is not only to get an education that will last you all of your life, but also to make friends that will last you all of your life.

Lennie was a very big strong man. He was a migrant worker with not a bright though in his head. He had a very big heart and was compassionate but had a problem with hurting things. His right hand man George was a smaller man but had a sense of how things work and knew what he needed to do to survive in the world and make things happen. But every time George would make a move to help himself and Lennie out, Lennie always found a way to mess it up. Lennie had a mouse that was on of the closest things that he had to a friend.

He didn’t even harm it first. The mouse was soft and gentle with Lennie so he was soft and gentle back. But Lennie was departed from his only friend when his partner George made him get rid of it. Although teenagers being lonely now a days, and grown man being lonely in past times are very different and not alike. Loneliness is the same no matter who is going through it. Everybody comes from somewhere.

We can’t all get along with everybody but the people that we can get along with we should. Because going crazy because you haven’t talked to anybody. There is no way you can get around it. My outtake on loneliness is that you are only lonely if you want to be. Nobody makes you be by yourself, it might be what you need to do at the moment but not where you need to stay in life.

Every body needs somebody and if you are a lonely person you should walk outside and make new friends.

Related posts:

• Loneliness and Companionship by John Steinbeck
• Loneliness Free Essay Sample
• Loneliness Within
• The War of Loneliness
• America's Loneliness
• What Causes Loneliness in People?

Quick Links

Privacy Policy

Terms and Conditions

Testimonials

Our Services

Case Study Writing Service

Case Studies For Sale

Our Company

Welcome to the world of case studies that can bring you high grades! Here, at ACaseStudy.com, we deliver professionally written papers, and the best grades for you from your professors are guaranteed!

[email protected] 804-506-0782 350 5th Ave, New York, NY 10118, USA

Acasestudy.com © 2007-2019 All rights reserved.

Hi! I'm Anna

Would you like to get a custom case study? How about receiving a customized one?

Haven't Found The Case Study You Want?

For Only $13.90/page

Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field.

For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here .

Loading metrics

Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Exploring the experiences of loneliness in adults with mental health problems: A participatory qualitative interview study

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Division of Psychiatry, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Roles Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation The Loneliness and Social Isolation in Mental Health Research Network Co-Production Group, Division of Psychiatry, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Roles Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation NIHR Mental Health Policy Research Unit COVID-19 Co-Production Group, Division of Psychiatry, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Roles Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – review & editing

Roles Formal analysis, Writing – original draft

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Centre for Performance Science, Royal College of Music, London, United Kingdom, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

Roles Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Care Policy and Evaluation Centre, Department of Health Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

•  [ ... ],

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Division of Psychiatry, University College London, London, United Kingdom, Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust, London, United Kingdom

• [ view all ]
• [ view less ]
• Mary Birken, 
• Beverley Chipp, 
• Prisha Shah, 
• Rachel Rowan Olive, 
• Patrick Nyikavaranda, 
• Jackie Hardy, 
• Anjie Chhapia, 
• Nick Barber, 
• Stephen Lee, 

• Published: March 7, 2023
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280946
• Reader Comments

Loneliness is associated with many mental health conditions, as both a potential causal and an exacerbating factor. Richer evidence about how people with mental health problems experience loneliness, and about what makes it more or less severe, is needed to underpin research on strategies to help address loneliness.

Our aim was to explore experiences of loneliness, as well as what helps address it, among a diverse sample of adults living with mental health problems in the UK. We recruited purposively via online networks and community organisations, with most interviews conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 59 consenting participants face-to-face, by video call or telephone. Researchers with relevant lived experience were involved at all stages, including design, data collection, analysis and writing up of results.

Analysis led to identification of four overarching themes: 1. What the word “lonely” meant to participants, 2. Connections between loneliness and mental health, 3. Contributory factors to continuing loneliness, 4. Ways of reducing loneliness. Central aspects of loneliness were lack of meaningful connections with others and lack of a sense of belonging to valued groups and communities. Some drivers of loneliness, such as losses and transitions, were universal, but specific links were also made between living with mental health problems and being lonely. These included direct effects of mental health symptoms, the need to withdraw to cope with mental health problems, and impacts of stigma and poverty.

Conclusions

The multiplicity of contributors to loneliness that we identified, and of potential strategies for reducing it, suggest that a variety of approaches are relevant to reducing loneliness among people with mental health problems, including peer support and supported self-help, psychological and social interventions, and strategies to facilitate change at community and societal levels. The views and experiences of adults living with mental health problems are a rich source for understanding why loneliness is frequent in this context and what may address it. Co-produced approaches to developing and testing approaches to loneliness interventions can draw on this experiential knowledge.

Citation: Birken M, Chipp B, Shah P, Olive RR, Nyikavaranda P, Hardy J, et al. (2023) Exploring the experiences of loneliness in adults with mental health problems: A participatory qualitative interview study. PLoS ONE 18(3): e0280946. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280946

Editor: Giuseppe Carrà, Universita degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, ITALY

Received: March 8, 2022; Accepted: January 11, 2023; Published: March 7, 2023

Copyright: © 2023 Birken et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: Full transcriptions of the interviews analysed in this study cannot be shared publicly to protect the privacy and anonymity of participants. If you wish to obtain access to this data, please contact the UCL ethics committee on [email protected] and/or the corresponding author.

Funding: This paper presents independent research funded by the UK Research and Innovation, through the Loneliness and Social Isolation in Mental Health Research Network (grant no. ES/S004440/1, co-authors MB, BC, PS, JH, AC, NB, SL, EP, BLE, RP, DM, RS, AP, SJ). The study was further supported through funding from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Policy Research Programme, conducted by the NIHR Policy Research Unit (PRU) (grant no. PR-PRU-0916-22003, co-authors RRO, PN, BLE, SJ) in Mental Health. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the UKRI or NIHR, the Department of Health and Social Care or its arm’s length bodies, or other government departments. Neither the funding bodies nor the sponsors played any role in the study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Inter-relationships between loneliness and mental health problems are the focus of a growing body of literature [ 1 ]. Loneliness is defined as a subjective experience where individuals feel there is a discrepancy between social relationships that they desire to have and those they actually have [ 2 ]. Loneliness is more prevalent among people with mental health problems than the general population [ 1 , 3 , 4 ].

Important associations are found between loneliness and a range of health indicators. It is a risk factor for multiple poor physical health outcomes, including early mortality, impaired cognition, hypertension, stroke, and cardiovascular disease [ 5 – 8 ]. Health service use is greater among lonely people, especially older people [ 9 , 10 ]. Regarding mental health, loneliness appears to put people at risk of onset of depression [ 11 , 12 ], whilst loneliness (and a closely related construct, lack of subjective social support) is associated longitudinally with recovering less well from mental health problems [ 13 , 14 ].

Whilst the evidence linking loneliness to mental ill health, as well as its inherently distressing nature, make loneliness a potentially promising focus for developing strategies to improve quality of life and outcomes among people living with mental health problems [ 15 ], few evidence-based and implementation-ready interventions are available [ 16 ]. Strategies to reduce loneliness are more likely to be successful if rooted in an understanding of what people with mental health problems mean when they say they are lonely, how this relates to experiences of mental distress, and what they find improves or exacerbates loneliness. Much of the empirical research on loneliness and mental health has deployed measures that treat loneliness as a straightforward uni-dimensional phenomenon. This is despite philosophical, historical and experiential writing suggesting that the term captures a complex cluster of emotions and experiences [ 17 , 18 ]. Currently used measures are also not tailored to investigating loneliness in the context of mental ill-health, nor have they been developed in collaboration with people with relevant lived experience.

Qualitative research on lived experiences of loneliness among people with mental health problems has important potential to yield a deeper account of the nature of such experiences and what improves or exacerbates loneliness. Such an understanding should underpin further research, including development of interventions, measures and hypotheses for quantitative investigations. The few published investigations are small-scale, and suggest a complex, intertwined relationship. A phenomenological study of people diagnosed with “borderline personality disorder” [ 19 ] found that participants perceived loneliness as rooted in traumatic early experiences and strongly associated with negative feelings about self and others. Participants also described feeling disconnected from those around them and on the outside of social activities at which they were present. Lindgren and colleagues [ 20 ] interviewed five individuals with mental health problems, who described multifaceted and shifting experiences of loneliness that varied with life situation but were also persistent. A meta-synthesis of studies on the experience of loneliness among young people with depression identified a range of factors, including depressive symptoms, non-disclosure of depression, and fear of stigma, which perpetuated cycles of loneliness and depression [ 21 ]. However, the qualitative literature on loneliness experiences among people living with mental health problems overall remains very limited in scope and size.

Our aim in the current study is therefore to develop an understanding of the lived experiences of loneliness among a broad range of people living with mental health problems. This was identified as a high priority evidence gap by the UKRI (United Kingdom Research and Innovation) Loneliness and Social Isolation in Mental Health Research Network, a cross-disciplinary research network established to advance research on the relationship between loneliness and mental health [ 22 ].

We present data from a qualitative interview study [ 23 ] which employed a co-production approach [ 24 ], involving collaboration between people with relevant lived experience, clinicians and university-employed researchers (some of the team had multiple relevant perspectives). Semi-structured individual interviews were used to explore the experiences of loneliness in adults with mental health problems.

Ethical approval was obtained from the University College London Research Ethics Committee on 19/12/2019 (Ref: 15249/001), with a subsequent amendment approved to extend the study to include experience of the COVID-19 pandemic among people with mental health problems, meeting a pressing need for this. In this paper we report only on findings relevant to the original question regarding experiences of loneliness and their relationship with mental health. Findings relevant to the pandemic are reported in three other papers [ 23 , 25 , 26 ].

Research team

A team of Lived Experience Researchers, (LERs), drawing on their own experiential knowledge about living with mental health problems, and other researchers from the UKRI Loneliness and Social Isolation and Mental Health network and the National Institute for Health and Care Research Mental Health Policy Research Unit (MHPRU) planned and conducted the study. The team included clinical academics and non-clinical researchers from a range of backgrounds (including qualitative and mixed methods research, health policy, health economics, and the arts). The research team met weekly by Zoom video call [ 27 ] to plan the study and discuss progress. Most interviews were conducted by thirteen LERs involved in the study, except for eight telephone interviews conducted by MB, an experienced qualitative researcher and occupational therapist. Three LERs were employed in university research roles; others had honorary research contracts with University College London. Eleven of the LER interviewers were female and five were from minority ethnic backgrounds. The LERs received training on conducting face-to-face and online interviews and obtaining written and verbal informed consent. A weekly lived experience reflective space provided LERs with emotional support and space to discuss the research process and emotional impact, peer-facilitated by four experienced LERs.

Sampling and recruitment

Purposive sampling was used to ensure diversity regarding participants’ diagnoses, use of mental health services, and demographic characteristics, including age, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, and whether they lived in rural or urban areas. We reviewed our sample during recruitment and implemented targeted strategies to ensure diversity. These included approaching community organisations working with Black and Minority Ethnic communities and using targeted recruitment materials.

Participants were eligible to take part if they were aged 18 years or over, had a self-reported mental health problem and lived in the UK. We recruited through three London-based community organisations (a mental health charity, a homeless charity and a community arts organisation), as well as through social media, especially Twitter, supported by the Mental Elf. Several charities and community organisations supporting people with mental health problems also agreed to disseminate an invitation to participate to their networks. Potential participants contacted the research team by email. Researchers then checked eligibility, provided a participant information sheet, answered questions about the study, and booked interviews.

Data collection

The topic guide (see S1 Appendix ) was developed collaboratively by members of the Loneliness Network’s Co-Production Group to explore the nature of loneliness experiences, their relationship to mental health, and alleviating and exacerbating factors. Prompts were included for questions asked to ensure topics were fully explored. Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, further questions were added regarding experiences of living with mental health problems during the pandemic (see S2 Appendix for revised topic guide). Semi-structured interviews took place between March and July 2020. Ten participants were interviewed before the introduction of COVID-19 infection control measures, (two face-to-face with LERs and 8 by phone with MB and 49 participated in online interviews with LERs following the pandemic’s onset. Informed consent (verbal or written) was obtained prior to all interviews. All interviews were audio-recorded, with verbatim transcripts produced by an external transcription company. All transcripts were then checked by the researchers and any identifying information was anonymised.

We took a participatory approach to the analysis as a large team of researchers from varying backgrounds. We used Template Analysis [ 28 ], a form of thematic analysis [ 29 ] involving a codebook approach. Analysis involved defining and organising themes using a coding template, which was developed and refined during data analysis through an iterative approach. All interview transcripts were analysed by four Lived Experience Researchers (RRO, BC, PS and PN) and a network researcher (MB) facilitated by NVivo 11 software [ 30 ]. MB undertook a preliminary analysis of three transcripts, reading and re-reading to identify initial themes. Three LERs independently analysed one each of those transcripts and discussed points of divergence. Differences were compared with MBs initial themes identified to highlight areas requiring closer examination and to ensure the coding captured complex and nuanced data relevant to the research topic. The aim was to capture richer data, to guide further coding, and not to seek a consensus on meaning, in keeping with the approach of reflexive thematic analysis [ 29 ]. All themes formed an initial coding template. A further set of five transcripts were then analysed individually and the further initial themes were then discussed between the researchers conducting the analysis. This group reflected on the themes together to ensure important ideas in the transcript had not been overlooked, and to refine the initial coding template.

The analysis followed an iterative process where the core coding team met fortnightly with the wider research team to discuss and refine the developing list of themes in the coding template, obtaining further perspectives on the analysis. All transcripts were then coded following the final template.

Fifty-nine participants were recruited. The majority were female (n = 41, 69%), aged between 25–54, and living in a city (n = 43, 73%). The main ethnic groups reported were White British (n = 32, 54.2%), White Other (n = 8, 13.5%) and Black/Black British (n = 7, 11.9%). Table 1 outlines the demographics of all 59 participants. Our analysis identified four over-arching themes.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280946.t001

Theme one: What the word “lonely” meant to participants

Loneliness was described in a variety of ways, including as an emotional or physical state, or through accounts of lack of connection, feeling of belonging, or love and support. A unifying element was that it was not just an unwanted lack of contact with people but had important psychological elements.

1.1 How loneliness feels emotionally.

Participants often used words synonymous with low mood to describe emotional aspects of loneliness, including “ sad ”, “ depressing ”, “ miserable ”, “ despondent ” and “ tearful ”, and generally conveyed that loneliness was a painful state negatively impacting mental health.

1.2 Not feeling connected.

Being alone featured in definitions, but the experience of not feeling connected to others was more prominent:

“ The last 35 years has been lonely … I mean I’ve got a husband , I’ve got four kids and everything else , but it doesn’t stop you from feeling lonely .” [P47, female, White British, 46–55, urban]

People spoke about emotional, psychological and spiritual disconnection and “ not sharing energy ”. They often described being in the company of others, yet feeling unable to connect with them emotionally. This was a chronic state for some, or coincided with periods of mental unwellness for others:

"Remember becoming very depressed and … with a group of friends doing things I used to enjoy and literally not feel any connection with the people around me , especially if I was having a lot of intrusive thoughts … " [P44, female, White British, 36–45, urban]

Most interviews occurred under COVID lockdown when many social and mental health communications were digital. Physical presence clearly mattered to many people. One participant described loneliness as:

“ Less connection to people and specifically decreasing face-to-face contact .” [P28, female, White British, 56–65, urban]

Loneliness was sometimes conceptualised as a feeling of disconnection going beyond relationships merely with people:

“ Disconnect from the world , both the physical and the spiritual world as well .” [P37, female, Black, 26–35, urban]

Pets were mentioned as valued companions by several interviewees. Connections with them sometimes appeared on a par with humans, and their constancy was an asset that could be either cherished or missed.

“ Not having contact with other people or animals ” [P49, male, British Asian, 46–55, urban]

1.3 Lack of a sense of belonging

Some people described loneliness as related to objective isolation:

“ Some people … they have no choice … they don’t have the care and support from family and friends .” [P38, male, Black, 46–55, urban]

For others, loneliness involved not feeling they belonged in a social environment or community:

“ No , I don’t feel part of this community , not at all … I feel lonely where I live , yes .” [P51, female, White other, 46–55, urban] “ Sometimes the feelings of , well I do belong to that community but do I really ? Am I a bona fide member of it ? Feel like I am a hanger-on in the community .” [P11, male, White British, 66–75, urban]

Some described a sense of thwarted belongingness, being ‘ on the outside looking in’ or ‘ missing someone or something , but not always knowing what . ’

Not being able to find others who shared values and interests was part of the sense of not belonging:

“ I feel like I struggle with my identity sometimes , like who am I and stuff like that . Yeah , I’m always like , trying to find like , my tribe , and like-minded people and stuff like that .” [P29, female, Black, 26–35, urban]

For one participant this feeling of being ‘other’ and not belonging followed relocation from a large city to a more rural area with a different recreational culture:

“ It’s not actually the act of being alone , it’s … not having [the right] people to do things with or to share things with .” [P2, female, 36–45, White British, urban]

Social class played a role in some people’s lack of a sense of belonging:

“ I’m from a working-class background , I’m very around middle-class professionals at work -who speak very differently to me . …I have to constantly think about how I’m coming across , how I’m speaking… makes me feel a bit disconnected…I rarely join them for lunch and things … I find it a bit like I’m an outsider .” [P37, female, Black African, 26–35, urban]

1.4 Not feeling loved, supported or understood.

Not feeling loved or supported underpinned many of the narratives, sometimes resulting in a deep sense of emotional pain. This applied whether participants were objectively isolated or not:

“ Don’t have anyone to speak to or anyone to support you … don’t have anyone to turn to .” [P34, female, Asian, 18–25, urban]

Lack of help and support in dealing with mental health problems was one source of such loneliness:

“ No one helps , no one cares .” [P4, female, White British, 26–35, urban]

Several participants recounted interpersonal rejections that had triggered self-doubts, and these ruminations undermined their mental wellbeing:

“ You think … this person is not interested in me . Then you start to … make some negative judgements about yourself .” [P10, male, Black British, 56–65, urban]

Not feeling understood was also described as increasing feelings of loneliness:

“ When I’m not feeling understood … it feels like I’m on my own little planet .” [P9, female, White other, 36–45, urban]

1.5 Physical sensations of loneliness.

A few participants described loneliness in terms of physical sensations, such as “ tightness or stabbing in the heart ”, and “ a body ache ”, but with most sensations relating to the digestive system, such as “ physically feel nauseous ”, “ hunger ”, “ craving ” or “ a blow in the guts ”.

Theme two: Connections between loneliness and mental health

Participants described close connections between mental health and feelings of loneliness. These included loneliness leading to deterioration in mental health, and feeling lonely because of impacts of mental health problems.

2.1 Loneliness causing or worsening mental health problems.

Social isolation and loneliness may lead to negative thoughts, low mood and deteriorating mental health, and may prevent people accessing support from others that might help them stay well:

“ I think the sense of loneliness would have preceded the mental health problem , because then … if I had the social interaction then I suspect I would have probably managed to find some way to sort it out .” [P49, male, British Asian, 46–55, urban] “ Loneliness can trigger depression in me , it can take me to a dark place .” [P59, male, White British, 46–55, urban] “ The negative thoughts and the looping thoughts get much worse if I’m lonely . So … because seeing people helps interrupt them , without that , the anxious thoughts can get a bit out of control ” [P15, demographic information not available]

2.2 Impact of having long term mental ill-health on loneliness.

Conversely, participants described how having an ongoing mental health problem contributed to erosion of social contacts and to loneliness:

“ My depression involved me sitting in the dark at night with the lights off … I used to be popular . People stopped coming to see me because I’d changed . Yeah , so I became lonely then in the end .” [P10, male, Black British, 56–65, urban]

Ultimately this participant felt there was no choice but to be on their own and anxiety reduced their ability to reach out to people.

Some participants found managing day-to-day life tasks, such as handling household chores, in addition to coping with their mental health problems challenging, resulting in less time available to address their loneliness:

“ Always playing catch up to get everything sorted in my life … I have to find more ways to either quickly execute the things that need to be done to run a life and a flat or be very strict about just cutting things that don’t seem to matter so much and so concentrate more on … finding ways to sort of overcome loneliness .” [P28, female, White British, 56–65, urban]

2.3 Cyclical relationship.

Participants described a cyclical relationship between feeling lonely and changes in their mental health:

“ It’s a bit of a vicious cycle because I think feeling lonely…will make it worse , you need to be able to talk to people … So , it’s a bit of a cycle … your mental health means you can’t connect to people , then not being able to connect makes your mental health worse and then you’re just cycling around .” [P46, female, white British, undisclosed, urban]

2.4 Relationships between loneliness and specific mental health conditions and symptoms.

Some participants identified links between particular mental health difficulties and loneliness, although many themes were found to be cross-cutting rather than condition-specific. Depressive symptoms and loneliness were often described by participants as reinforcing each other, as also described in some of the quotes above:

“ I’ve learnt from the depressive part of my disorder , that when I’m depressed I haven’t got the energy , and it’s … like you inhabit a different space to the one you normally do . It’s kind of like you’re (behind) a glass wall and you’re not able to connect (emotionally) with the person who’s on the other side of the glass , even if you wanted .” [P55, female, White British, 46–55, rural]

Impacts from anxiety, especially social anxiety, were also described, leading to difficulty in social situations and resulting loneliness:

“ So anxiety can make me feel … lonely even if I’m in a party . I can be in a party with all my friends , all just want me to be happy and free and relaxed and dance , enjoy the music . But I can’t come out of my shell . I’m constantly preoccupied with my anxiety and this sense of…not enjoying myself . …Then I do kind of feel very lonely .” [P8, male, White British, 36–45, urban] “ If I’ve got nobody there who can sort of help fight against the social anxiety… the fear of the people around me combined with struggling to start up conversations means I feel very lonely .” [P27, female, White British, 25–34, urban]

Participants also described loneliness resulting from or being reinforced by symptoms of psychosis:

“ When I first developed schizophrenia I felt very , very lonely … I didn’t know , … none of my friends has schizophrenia . I had constant voices giving me orders so ‘you’re not worthy sleeping’ or ‘you’re not worthy’ of sitting down . I’d just stand there in a room .” [P8, male, White British, 36–45, urban] “ Getting out the flat is hard because of mental health and then having conversations with friends , like the voices would tell me stuff like ‘they hate you’ ‘don’t talk to them’ so that side . And then sort of like lacking motivation sometimes to sort of hold conversation .” [P20, female, White British, 26–35, urban]

Others described loneliness as resulting from difficulties in forming relationships that they saw as part of their mental health condition: a participant who reported having a diagnosis of “borderline personality disorder” said:

“ Because of my condition , I worry about having relationships with people and that keeps me isolated and keeps me lonely .” [P1, female, White British, 36–45, urban].

2.5 Stigma and social exclusion.

A key factor reported by multiple participants was the negative impact of stigma related to mental health problems on relationships:

“ People walk away . You mention the word hospital , people walk . You mention the word psychiatry and people walk away .” [P50, male, White British, 56–65, urban] “ I think because of what I have , and the stigma associated with personality disorders … in the press ,… some of the family members , some work colleagues , I think if I’m feeling lonely then that sort … of stigma , I think it just all compounds more ” [P30, female, White British, 36–45, urban]

Cultural taboos related to mental health were reported by some participants as having resulted not only in loneliness but in being ostracised:

“ People within my culture … my family don’t understand and friends from my culture don’t get it so I feel more isolated . I’m losing friends because of this .” [P34, female, Asian, 18–25, urban]

2.6 Choice and control—Social withdrawal and masking as a coping mechanism.

Some participants recognised an element of choice in not communicating with others or living in self-imposed isolation:

“ I could pick up the phone and ring someone anytime any day and I don’t…so that is sort of self-imposed isolation .” [P11, male, White British, 66–75, urban]

One participant, who had experienced childhood trauma said they avoided authentic connections, and always ‘ wore a mask ’ when relating to others because that kept them safe:

“ There’s certain parts of you , you just don’t let people in . And that can be lonely .” [P47, female, White British, 46–55, urban]

Choice and control, however, were complex, and beneath the conscious decisions there could be unconscious barriers or mental health factors:

“ It could be something which is self-inflicted for example , when I was depressed I felt lonely but some of it was that I felt comforted by being left alone and yet I also felt really anxious about being alone as well .” [P49, male, British Asian, 46–55, urban]

Theme three: Factors contributing to ongoing loneliness

As well as impacts of mental health problems, participants identified contributing factors to loneliness that included both historic root causes and current triggers, which were internal and external in nature.

3.1 Root causes of loneliness.

Perceived internal root causes of loneliness included being an introvert, or having low self-esteem and self-confidence, and therefore spending less time around people:

“ Because I have issues of self-esteem and all that kind of thing … For example , I don’t go to birthdays and that kind of thing . Which causes me to feel lonely .” [P41, female, Black British, 26–35, urban]

Participants also identified earlier traumatic events such as bereavement, domestic violence and experiences of being bullied that negatively affected how they viewed other people and their social interactions. Thus, earlier external events such as trauma shaped ways of thinking and choices, resulting in current psychological underpinnings of loneliness:

“ Sometimes I feel comfortable to just go up to them [at work function] and interrupt and join in the conversation but other times I feel like ‘oh they haven’t included me therefore they don’t want me there’ … and I think that has probably stemmed from you know being bullied at school . … . and then feeling like I’m being left out deliberately because that’s how the bullying worked at the time .” [P21, female, White other, 36–45, urban]

Experiences such as bereavement or domestic violence were seen as relevant because they resulted in great deficits in emotional needs being met and then subsequent difficulties in forming warm and trusting relationships, both leading to loneliness.

3.2 Current factors that maintain loneliness.

Current factors influencing loneliness included separation and loss, difficulties in relationships, and physical barriers.

3 . 2 . 1 Loss and separation . Forms of loss that resulted in loneliness included romantic, platonic, physical and emotional loss, encapsulated in accounts of loss of friendships and of love, and loss through bereavement. One participant felt that their independence and well-being, especially their mental health, required them to stay physically away from family and friends, but that this nonetheless resulted in a sense of loneliness:

“ The one thing that I need for my sanity is my own space … although it’s better for me to live here [in own home far from family and long-term friends] because I have that , I do feel lonely .” [P2, female, 36–45, White British, urban]

For some, grief was a factor in feelings of loneliness and in being unable to engage in activities that might reduce these:

“ I have faced grieving for someone that died close to me . I despaired and just be at home alone and just not able to function… ” [P48, female, 46–55, White other, urban].

3 . 2 . 2 Compounding intersectional factors and external barriers . For some participants a physical or age-related disability, was associated with barriers to using transport and getting involved in activities and this contributed to current feelings of loneliness, especially to the lack of a sense of belonging described under Theme 1.

“ I don’t think I have ever felt like not lonely . I think like disability , age , everything else creeps up on to make everything feel a hundred times worse . Loneliness to me is a disability .” [P52, female, 45–54, White Other, urban] “ When I developed a physical disability , I found there was very little in my community as a person in my thirties that I was eligible to do .” [P44, female, White British, 36–45, urban]

Even within groups where they felt they belonged, people could experience inhibiting differences in attitudes, interests, speech style, access or social norms.

Other compounding intersectional factors cited by participants included sexuality, discrimination, race relations and the complexities of age differences in interactions with others.

3 . 2 . 3 Time alone–impacts of solitude . Some participants described negative effects of spending time physically alone, including for some a loss of skills needed to interact with others.

“ It will affect my mood , it will make me feel low . It will affect my loneliness greatly if there are several days I have not been out somewhere or seen someone or had face-to-face time with people …” [P23, male, Asian British, 36–45, urban] “ You forget how to socialise . You become kind of quite selfish , actually , you don’t think about other people’s feelings .” [P42, female, Asian, 36–45, urban]

However, some people described a need to withdraw and ensure periods of solitude, even if this might exacerbate loneliness:

“ I need time on my own to recover and relax and rejuvenate but I don’t think it’s good to be on my own for long periods of time .” [P8, male, White British, 36–45, urban]

Theme four: Ways of reducing loneliness

Two broad sub-themes emerged: external and internal approaches to reducing loneliness. These were categorised based on participants’ emphasis and experiences, but were often intertwined rather than being two clearly distinct categories. Strategies and ideas classed as “external ways to reduce loneliness” are those where participants emphasised how their experience depended on specific needs being met by people or environments external to themselves; those classed as “internal ways to reduce loneliness” highlight internal changes in thought patterns or other psychological shifts in participants’ ways of being and relating to the world around them.

Overall, different forms of social contact were seen as important for many participants in reducing loneliness, with quality of relationships and a sense of “belonging” being attributes of social contact that were particularly pertinent. Mental health challenges could act as a barrier to improving social contact and so addressing this was also seen as a key step for some participants. A booklet [ 31 ] ( http://tiny.cc/Lonely ) drafted by members of the research team summarises suggestions from study participants on coping with loneliness.

4.1 External ways to reduce loneliness.

Many participants described social contact as key to feeling less lonely. Some people had a preference for specific types of contact, whereas for others, any contact with people was important. Participants also described how volunteering gave them a sense of purpose and connection.

For some, just being able to get out, locally or in nature, was enough to lessen feelings of loneliness. Sometimes getting out resulted in unplanned encounters with people, as was the development of hobbies that could be enjoyed alone.

“ Try and communicate with people . Even if it’s going to [botanic] gardens by yourself , you’re going to meet people when you sit down at the café and they’re going to say to you “ isn’t the weather lovely ?” [P38, male, Black, 46–55, urban]

The quality of connection, and being able to talk about how you were feeling was essential for many:

“ My advice would be to talk to … someone that you trust … if you say it out loud … it does lift your feelings a bit because you’ve connected with someone , you’ve shared , you’ve … offloaded to them .” [P32, female, Asian, 26–35, urban]

Accessing mental health support was cited by some as a key first stage in decreasing loneliness by helping to improve mood and anxiety, and being able to reflect on oneself and develop better coping skills:

“ Before I … started medical treatment for my depression and anxiety I felt that being off feeling . Even if I was around people , I felt separated , that there was a kind of barrier that was stopping me from being able to communicate .” [P33, female, white British, 26–35, urban]

Taking part in activities and shared interests was mentioned by many participants, with “ structured socialisation ” being a route into developing new friendships or sense of belonging to a group, and technology being an enabler for some. Often, the shared interests gave purpose and fostered connection.

“ Structured socialisation , it provides that structure and … gives you a purpose so that you feel compelled to keep going and make friends and stuff and be sociable with other people .” [P5, female, White British, 26–35, rural] “ The gym was really great , it was quite near me you know , and I’d never been to the gym before but I really got into that , and I was just getting to know people .” [P6, female, White other, 66–75, urban] ‘‘I managed to find the live role-playing community … I have organised events to help kind of increase the hobby outreach and activities within the hobby .” [P19, female, White British, 36–45, urban]

For this participant, finding her kind of people online led to her then taking the initiative and organising her own online events and thus wrapping this community around her. Naturally occurring proximity, as well as freely chosen activities, could foster important connections: one participant found that living in a multiple occupancy house helped build friendships that increased their sense of belonging despite mental health struggles:

“ I had people that were close… in proximity quite a lot , and we got to become really good friends , and I felt safe in that … friendship and then was able to open up , even when I wasn’t feeling great ” [P5, female, White British, 26–35, rural]

Thus finding a greater sense of belonging in a group or community could help people feel less lonely. Positive neighbourly encounters and informal interactions within a local community lessened feelings of loneliness for some. Others felt less lonely when connected to communities with whom they had something in common, such as people of the same ethnicity:

“ The ones that make me feel less lonely , …for a long time now , are my black friends . I feel more connected… I can express myself more freely without having to talk about certain things … so ethnicity is … playing a massive role in terms of feelings of loneliness .” [P37, female, 26–35, Black African, urban]

Religious worship, volunteering and acquiring a pet were among the other ways of connecting with others and becoming part of a valued group that were discussed:

“ Get a dog , if it’s possible because , you know , it’s much easier to interact with people in that case .” [P44, female, White British, 36–45, urban] “ The [volunteer job] has been life changing … For me that connection … And people listening , realising that they are connecting … I feel like I’m doing something good .” [P9, female, White Other, 36–45, urban]

Some participants reflected that finding new activities and purpose required them to make a concerted effort:

“ I just have this thing that , when you walk around a town … there’s always posters and notices up of things happening… , even in your local [supermarket]… you’ll have what’s happening in your local community … libraries have loads of things happening now .” [P2, female, White British, 45–56, urban] “ When I was [living] alone in a flat … I was much more lonely because I wasn’t tagged into those things which helped me to be less lonely … But we have to find these things and , if they make sense , they give us community .” [P13, male, White British, 66–75, urban]

4.2 Internal ways to reduce loneliness.

Internal strategies leading to better self-awareness, sometimes followed by taking steps to reducing anxiety and improving mood, were mentioned by many participants:

“ I’m more recognising it now in the last few years … what loneliness looks and feels like and therefore , because you can recognise it , you suddenly think oh I haven’t seen anybody for a while , I need to … make more of an effort now .” [P14, female, white British, 46–55, rural]

Participants reflected on relationships and learning to recognise what worked well for them and what made loneliness worse, thus improving the quality and connection in relationships:

“ With loneliness , what I can control is … who I’m around and who I feel most comfortable with , so maybe not hanging on to these friendships that make me feel even more lonely , even more isolated .” [P37, female, black, 26–35, urban]

Some people reported that acceptance of having time by yourself, being connected with yourself and your wishes and desires, was important. Carrying out activities like writing in a journal or art was helpful. For some, internal reflections and time alone led to better quality relationships and a reduction in loneliness.

“ To not beat yourself up , it’s not because there’s anything wrong with you , and that spending time on your own can be good ‘cause you can do things that you can then share with people .” [P2, female, White British, 45–56, urban]

Participants’ thoughts and feelings about isolation could also change because of psychological therapies, potentially resulting in taking steps to increase connection with others:

“ Through therapy and facing what I’ve been doing … in terms of anxiety or depression , I understand that … being sociable , going out and meeting people is healthy , and the longer I stay isolated… the harder it gets ” [P26, male, White British, 36–45, urban]

Main findings

Our findings conveyed how differently loneliness is experienced by different people, as expressed in terms of emotions, or even physical sensations. Loneliness appeared to comprise psychological elements, related to people’s thoughts and feelings about themselves in relation to other people and wider groups and communities, and social elements, related to the impacts of everyday interactions and contacts. Participants described a range of contributing factors to the origins of their loneliness, and the ways that their loneliness was maintained. They also perceived clear links between their loneliness and their mental health, and vice versa, and sometimes a feedback loop between the two.

Our participants’ accounts, as encapsulated in Theme 1, confirm that feelings of loneliness do not simply relate to dissatisfaction with the amount of time spent with others, but, perhaps more centrally, to not feeling connected to them in meaningful ways, and to not experiencing a sense of belonging. Loneliness has long been characterised as a physically and psychologically harmful manifestation of fundamental needs for social connection not being met [ 32 ]. Our findings regarding the importance of sense of belonging can be connected to investigations of loneliness from a social identity perspective, which supports that having multiple valued group memberships is associated with less loneliness and greater well-being [ 33 ]. The ways in which participants described both the nature of their loneliness and its origins were diverse, congruent with quantitative findings that suggest a complex causal web underlying loneliness [ 1 ]. Contributing factors identified included external factors such as losses and transitions or excessive time alone, but also aspects of personality such as introversion or lack of self-confidence, as well as the long-range impacts of trauma and adverse early experiences on the ability to form relationships (Theme 3).

Some of the themes illuminate aspects of loneliness relevant across populations, but a central aim of our work was to better understand loneliness among people living with mental health conditions. We found that loneliness and mental health appear intertwined in several ways (Themes 2). Participants described how feelings of not being connected to others could arise directly from a range of mental health conditions by pathways including feeling negative about self and others; withdrawing when depressed; and feeling unable to connect with others even when in company because of preoccupying social anxiety and hearing inner voices with negative content impeding trust and ability to socialise. This is in keeping with findings of greater loneliness associated with a range of mental health conditions [ 13 , 34 – 36 ]. Some participants also described how their loneliness could lead directly to onset or exacerbation of the mental health conditions they were experiencing including depression, which is congruent with longitudinal studies establishing loneliness as an independent risk factor for depression [ 11 , 12 ], and with findings of a bidirectional relationship between loneliness and depression [ 37 ].

Going beyond direct links from mental health symptoms to loneliness, the actions people took to cope with their mental health problems sometimes also placed them at greater risk of loneliness, such as when they withdrew from the stresses of social contacts and activities in order to recover and to ensure they had time and energy to cope with pressing practical needs. The circular relationship between loneliness and mental ill health identified in Theme 3 evoked the paradox identified by Achterbergh et al. [ 21 ] in their meta-synthesis of qualitative studies on loneliness and depression among young people: social withdrawal to cope with mental ill health can result in loneliness that further exacerbates mental health problems.

Significant contributors to loneliness among people with mental health problems in our sample were stigma and self-stigma associated with mental health problems, especially as impediments to having a sense of belonging. This is in keeping with previous findings of an association between self-stigma and social withdrawal among people with severe mental health problems [ 38 ], and of high levels of persisting mental health stigma despite a longstanding UK public anti-stigma campaign, focused primarily on common mental health problems [ 39 ].

Experiences of stigma and social exclusion related to mental health intersected for many participants with social exclusion associated with being part of other disadvantaged or marginalised groups at increased risk of mental health problems, including racial and sexual minorities and people with disabilities, and with impacts of social deprivation. As Lever-Taylor et al. [ 40 ] argue in their qualitative study of perinatal women, an intersectional focus is helpful in understanding social drivers of loneliness. Participants’ accounts of the many impediments to a sense of belonging, including stigma, reinforce a need to take a societal and community as well as individual approach to understanding loneliness. Thus, loneliness appears to result not only from individuals’ inability to connect, but also from failures of communities to welcome and integrate people living with mental health problems, and from practical barriers to connecting with others that result from poverty [ 41 ].

Many of the themes and sub-themes so far discussed cohere with previous literature, for example illuminating potential mechanisms underpinning epidemiological findings. To our knowledge, our exploration of the strategies and types of help people employ to combat loneliness is novel (Theme 4). We found that many participants were aware of their loneliness and its impacts, and of a variety of strategies that could help: we reflect further on implications for interventions below.

Strengths and limitations

Our study represents a substantial contribution to the limited qualitative literature on loneliness among people with mental health problems. We recruited a diverse sample, encompassing a range of backgrounds, types of mental health problem, service use histories and locations. Although using a digital platform for most interviews will have excluded a substantial section of the population using mental health services, we did conduct some interviews by telephone and face-to-face to accommodate the digitally excluded. Lived experience was embedded in the study at each stage, with people with relevant personal experiences designing interview guides, conducting interviews, analysing data and writing up findings.

Limitations include that we conducted a broad-brush analysis of a large sample of interviews, and searched for commonalities across a group that was very diverse in characteristics and experiences rather than focusing in more depth on more defined groups. Some people discussed links between specific mental health conditions and onset or exacerbation of loneliness, but our sample was very varied and diagnosis was based on self-report, so we cannot discuss links between particular symptoms and conditions and loneliness in depth; a potential direction for future work. We did not measure severity of mental health difficulties, and note that while a majority had used specialist mental health services (inpatient or community teams), thirteen participants reported not having used services for mental health.

The majority of interviews were conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we have reported baseline [ 23 ] and follow-up [ 26 ] findings elsewhere, but the pandemic context may have influenced accounts of loneliness, even though participants were encouraged to talk about experiences of loneliness in general rather than specifically in a pandemic context, and appeared for the most part to be doing so.

Research and clinical implications

The rich and complex accounts given by participants of the nature of their experiences of loneliness, and the great variety of pathways into and out of it, indicate considerable further scope for research to understand associations between loneliness and mental health. In qualitative research, many of our themes warrant more in-depth exploration, including focusing on particular groups at high risk of loneliness, or who are currently lonely. In quantitative research, it would be valuable to investigate further the longitudinal relationships between loneliness and mental health problems, and the extent to which contributory factors identified in our study are also reflected in epidemiological analyses. Much research on loneliness has employed single-item or brief measures not tailored to people with mental health conditions: we reflect that such measures are unlikely to capture the diversity of experiences of loneliness and links to mental health.

As yet there are very few clearly evidence-based strategies for helping with loneliness among people living with mental health problems [ 16 ]. Our findings show people with mental health problems recognising and taking steps to address their loneliness. This supports the greater deployment of co-production approaches, incorporating the forms of help that people with relevant personal experience see as potentially effective. With few exceptions [ 42 ], interventions tested thus far have tended not to be co-produced. The diversity of pathways into and out of loneliness that people described, and of suggested strategies, indicate that a variety of approaches are potentially helpful depending on the nature and context of loneliness, delivered singly or in combination. These would include self-help and psychoeducation about day-to-day strategies that people have found helpful, psychological interventions focused on thoughts and feelings about others, and social approaches to help people develop meaningful connections and a sense of belonging [ 15 , 43 ].

The range of mental health-related factors triggering and perpetuating loneliness suggest benefits to developing or adapting specific strategies for this population rather than deploying strategies developed for the general population. Approaches to loneliness in a mental health context based on peer support seem rarely to have been reported, but have clear potential benefits such as in overcoming obstacles due to stigma and self-stigma, fostering a sense of belonging and supporting people with self-help strategies to reduce loneliness. Finally, our perspective in this study was on improving the support offered in mental healthcare settings, but our findings illustrated the community-level, intersectional and socio-economic drivers of loneliness in multiple ways. We suggest that addressing such drivers will have a central influence on whether levels of loneliness can be reduced among people living with mental health problems.

Lived experience commentary written by Beverley Chipp

This paper must be understood in the context of the COVID-19 lockdown occurring when we had only conducted a few interviews. All participants had already felt lonely as this was our inclusion criteria, but limitations upon movement and social contact imposed by government, and, significantly, the cessation of many support services will have influenced subsequent interviewees’ responses. For some these changes made things worse and for others life became easier. The shifts triggered significant reflections on life and participants’ relationships, and perhaps provided richer data than would have been collected in normal times.

Access to mental health support has been increasingly difficult over the last decade but the suspension of face to face services, or for some, services altogether, exacerbated loneliness leaving many feeling brushed aside.

We learned that loneliness and social isolation were distinct entities and experienced in multiple and diverse ways. The causes and perpetuating factors were more complex than we had imagined, even though we identified with some of the narratives.

Solutions need to take a psychologically informed, holistic approach rooted in community and co-production. Without addressing stigma and other barriers within society–prejudice and discrimination, hostility against those that don’t ‘fit’–people’s sense of belonging will be hindered, and loneliness increased. Where loneliness has childhood origins it may be more difficult to unpick. Simply engineering people to be with other people is too simple a solution for most individuals also living with mental health conditions.

Commonality between lived experience researchers and participants fostered greater trust in interviews and thus sharing of deeper insights. We felt that research often stays within a ‘research bubble’, not reaching the people it directly affects. Recognising the wealth garnered from asking participants ‘what helped?’ and their willingness to offer suggestions, we co-produced a self-help booklet ( http://tiny.cc/Lonely ) which acknowledges their resourcefulness.

Supporting information

S1 appendix. interview topic guide..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280946.s001

S2 Appendix. Revised interview topic guide.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280946.s002

Acknowledgments

The Loneliness and Social Isolation in Mental Health Research Network Co-Production Group and The NIHR Mental Health Policy Research Unit Covid coproduction research group contributed to the development of the study design, conduct of interviews and recruitment to the study.

• View Article
• PubMed/NCBI
• Google Scholar
• 2. Perlman D, & Peplau L. A. Toward a Social Psychology of Loneliness. In Gilmour R., & Duck S. (Eds.), Personal Relationships: 3. Relationships in Disorder (pp. 31–56). London: Academic Press. (1981).
• 17. Svendsen L. A Philosophy of Loneliness. 2017; Reaktion Books.
• 18. Alberti FB. A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion. 2021; OUP Oxford.
• 27. Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (2020). ZOOM cloud meetings (Version 4.6.9) [Mobile app]. App Store. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/zoom-cloud-meetings/id546505307https://apps.apple.com/us/app/zoom-cloud-meetings/id546505307
• 28. King, N., and J. M. Brooks. 2017. Template Analysis for Business and Management Students. London: Sage.
• 30. QSR International Pty Ltd. NVivo (Version 12), 2018, https://www.qsrinternational.com/nvivo-qualitative-data-analysis-software/home
• 31. Loneliness and social Isolation in Mental Health Research Network and NIHR Mental Health Policy Research Unit, Conversations Around Loneliness and Mental Health 2022 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychiatry/sites/psychiatry/files/conversations_around_lonelines_mental_health_18.01.2022.pdf
• 33. Haslam C, Jetten J, Cruwys T, Dingle J, Haslam A. The New Psychology of Health Unlocking the Social Cure 2018; Routledge.

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• How to write a narrative essay | Example & tips

How to Write a Narrative Essay | Example & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A narrative essay tells a story. In most cases, this is a story about a personal experience you had. This type of essay , along with the descriptive essay , allows you to get personal and creative, unlike most academic writing .

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

Table of contents

What is a narrative essay for, choosing a topic, interactive example of a narrative essay, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about narrative essays.

When assigned a narrative essay, you might find yourself wondering: Why does my teacher want to hear this story? Topics for narrative essays can range from the important to the trivial. Usually the point is not so much the story itself, but the way you tell it.

A narrative essay is a way of testing your ability to tell a story in a clear and interesting way. You’re expected to think about where your story begins and ends, and how to convey it with eye-catching language and a satisfying pace.

These skills are quite different from those needed for formal academic writing. For instance, in a narrative essay the use of the first person (“I”) is encouraged, as is the use of figurative language, dialogue, and suspense.

Receive feedback on language, structure, and formatting

Professional editors proofread and edit your paper by focusing on:

• Academic style
• Vague sentences
• Style consistency

See an example

Narrative essay assignments vary widely in the amount of direction you’re given about your topic. You may be assigned quite a specific topic or choice of topics to work with.

• Write a story about your first day of school.
• Write a story about your favorite holiday destination.

You may also be given prompts that leave you a much wider choice of topic.

• Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself.
• Write about an achievement you are proud of. What did you accomplish, and how?

In these cases, you might have to think harder to decide what story you want to tell. The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to talk about a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

For example, a trip where everything went according to plan makes for a less interesting story than one where something unexpected happened that you then had to respond to. Choose an experience that might surprise the reader or teach them something.

Narrative essays in college applications

When applying for college , you might be asked to write a narrative essay that expresses something about your personal qualities.

For example, this application prompt from Common App requires you to respond with a narrative essay.

In this context, choose a story that is not only interesting but also expresses the qualities the prompt is looking for—here, resilience and the ability to learn from failure—and frame the story in a way that emphasizes these qualities.

An example of a short narrative essay, responding to the prompt “Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself,” is shown below.

Hover over different parts of the text to see how the structure works.

Since elementary school, I have always favored subjects like science and math over the humanities. My instinct was always to think of these subjects as more solid and serious than classes like English. If there was no right answer, I thought, why bother? But recently I had an experience that taught me my academic interests are more flexible than I had thought: I took my first philosophy class.

Before I entered the classroom, I was skeptical. I waited outside with the other students and wondered what exactly philosophy would involve—I really had no idea. I imagined something pretty abstract: long, stilted conversations pondering the meaning of life. But what I got was something quite different.

A young man in jeans, Mr. Jones—“but you can call me Rob”—was far from the white-haired, buttoned-up old man I had half-expected. And rather than pulling us into pedantic arguments about obscure philosophical points, Rob engaged us on our level. To talk free will, we looked at our own choices. To talk ethics, we looked at dilemmas we had faced ourselves. By the end of class, I’d discovered that questions with no right answer can turn out to be the most interesting ones.

The experience has taught me to look at things a little more “philosophically”—and not just because it was a philosophy class! I learned that if I let go of my preconceptions, I can actually get a lot out of subjects I was previously dismissive of. The class taught me—in more ways than one—to look at things with an open mind.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

College essays

• Choosing Essay Topic
• Write a College Essay
• Write a Diversity Essay
• College Essay Format & Structure
• Comparing and Contrasting in an Essay

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

Here's why students love Scribbr's proofreading services

Discover proofreading & editing

If you’re not given much guidance on what your narrative essay should be about, consider the context and scope of the assignment. What kind of story is relevant, interesting, and possible to tell within the word count?

The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to reflect on a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

Don’t worry too much if your topic seems unoriginal. The point of a narrative essay is how you tell the story and the point you make with it, not the subject of the story itself.

Narrative essays are usually assigned as writing exercises at high school or in university composition classes. They may also form part of a university application.

When you are prompted to tell a story about your own life or experiences, a narrative essay is usually the right response.

The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2023, July 23). How to Write a Narrative Essay | Example & Tips. Scribbr. Retrieved April 3, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/narrative-essay/

Is this article helpful?

Jack Caulfield

Other students also liked, how to write an expository essay, how to write a descriptive essay | example & tips, how to write your personal statement | strategies & examples, "i thought ai proofreading was useless but..".

I've been using Scribbr for years now and I know it's a service that won't disappoint. It does a good job spotting mistakes”

Theme of Loneliness, Isolation, & Alienation in Literature with Examples

Humans are social creatures. Most of us enjoy communication and try to build relationships with others. It’s no wonder that the inability to be a part of society often leads to emotional turmoil.

Our specialists will write a custom essay specially for you!

World literature has numerous examples of characters who are disconnected from their loved ones or don’t fit into the social norms. Stories featuring themes of isolation and loneliness often describe a quest for happiness or explore the reasons behind these feelings.

In this article by Custom-Writing.org , we will:

• discuss isolation and loneliness in literary works;
• cite many excellent examples;
• provide relevant quotations.

🏝️ Isolation Theme in Literature

• 🏠 Theme of Loneliness
• 👽 Theme of Alienation
• Frankenstein
• The Metamorphosis
• Of Mice and Men
• ✍️ Essay Topics

🔍 References

Isolation is a state of being detached from other people, either physically or emotionally. It may have positive and negative connotations:

• In a positive sense, isolation can be a powerful source of creativity and independence.
• In negative terms , it can cause mental suffering and difficulties with interpersonal relationships.

Theme of Isolation and Loneliness: Difference

As you can see, isolation can be enjoyable in certain situations. That’s how it differs from loneliness : a negative state in which a person feels uncomfortable and emotionally down because of a lack of social interactions . In other words, isolated people are not necessarily lonely.

Isolation Theme Characteristics with Examples

Now, let’s examine isolation as a literary theme. It often appears in stories of different genres and has various shades of meaning. We’ll explain the different uses of this theme and provide examples from literature.

Just in 1 hour! We will write you a plagiarism-free paper in hardly more than 1 hour

Forced vs. Voluntary Isolation in Literature

Isolation can be voluntary or happen for external reasons beyond the person’s control. The main difference lies in the agent who imposes isolation on the person:

• If someone decides to be alone and enjoys this state of solitude, it’s voluntary isolation . The poetry of Emily Dickinson is a prominent example.
• Forced isolation often acts as punishment and leads to detrimental emotional consequences. This form of isolation doesn’t depend on the character’s will, such as in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter .

Physical vs. Emotional Isolation in Literature

Aside from forced and voluntary, isolation can be physical or emotional:

• Isolation at the physical level makes the character unable to reach out to other people, such as Robinson Crusoe being stranded on an island.
• Emotional isolation is an inner state of separation from other people. It also involves unwillingness or inability to build quality relationships. A great example is Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye .

These two forms are often interlinked, like in A Rose for Emily . The story’s titular character is isolated from the others both physically and emotionally .

Symbols of Isolation in Literature

In literary works dedicated to emotional isolation, authors often use physical artifacts as symbols. For example, the moors in Wuthering Heights or the room in The Yellow Wallpaper are means of the characters’ physical isolation. They also symbolize a much deeper divide between the protagonists and the people around them.

🏠 Theme of Loneliness in Literature

Loneliness is often used as a theme in stories of people unable to build relationships with others. Their state of mind always comes with sadness and a low self-esteem. Naturally, it causes profound emotional suffering.

Receive a plagiarism-free paper tailored to your instructions. Cut 20% off your first order!

We will examine how the theme of loneliness functions in literature. But first, let’s see how it differs from its positive counterpart: solitude.

Solitude vs. Loneliness: The Difference

Loneliness theme: history & examples.

The modern concept of loneliness is relatively new. It first emerged in the 16 th century and has undergone many transformations since then.

• The first formal mention of loneliness appeared in George Milton’s Paradise Lost in the 17 th century. There are also many references to loneliness in Shakespeare’s works.
• Later on, after the Industrial Revolution , the theme got more popular. During that time, people started moving to large cities. As a result, they were losing bonds with their families and hometowns. Illustrative examples of that period are Gothic novels and the works of Charles Dickens .
• According to The New Yorker , the 20 th century witnessed a broad spread of loneliness due to the rise of Capitalism. Philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus explored existential loneliness, influencing numerous authors. The absurdist writings of Kafka and Beckett also played an essential role in reflecting the isolation felt by people in Capitalist societies. Sylvia Plath has masterfully explored mental health struggles related to this condition in The Bell Jar (you can learn more about it in our The Bell Jar analysis .)

👽 Theme of Alienation in Literature

Another facet of being alone that is often explored in literature is alienation . Let’s see how this concept differs from those we discussed previously.

Alienation vs. Loneliness: Difference

While loneliness is more about being on your own and lacking connection, alienation means involuntary estrangement and a lack of sympathy from society. In other words, alienated people don’t fit their community, thus lacking a sense of belonging.

Isolation vs. Alienation: The Difference

Theme of alienation vs. identity in literature.

There is a prominent connection between alienation and a loss of identity. It often results from a character’s self-search in a hostile society with alien ideas and values. These characters often differ from the dominant majority, so the community treats them negatively. Such is the case with Mrs. Dalloway from Woolf’s eponymous novel.

Get an originally-written paper according to your instructions!

Writers with unique, non-conforming identity are often alienated during their lifetime. Their distinct mindset sets them apart from their social circle. Naturally, it creates discomfort and relationship problems. These experiences are often reflected in their works, such as in James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .

Alienation in Modernism

Alienation as a theme is mainly associated with Modernism . It’s not surprising, considering that the 20 th century witnessed fundamental changes in people’s lifestyle. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution couldn’t help eroding the quality of human bonding and the depth of relationships.

It’s also vital to mention that the two World Wars introduced even greater changes in human relationships. People got more locked up emotionally in order to withstand the war trauma and avoid further turmoil. Consequently, the theme of alienation and comradeship found reflection in the works of Ernest Hemingway , Erich Maria Remarque , Norman Mailer, and Rebecca West, among others.

📚 Books about Loneliness and Isolation: Quotes & Examples

Loneliness and isolation themes are featured prominently in many of the world’s greatest literary works. Here we’ll analyze several well-known examples: Frankenstein, Of Mice and Men, and The Metamorphosis.

Theme of Isolation & Alienation in Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is among the earliest depictions of loneliness in modern literature. It shows the depth of emotional suffering that alienation can impose.

Victor Frankenstein , a talented scientist, creates a monster from the human body parts. The monster becomes the loneliest creature in the world. Seeing that his master hates him and wouldn’t become his friend, he ruined everything Victor held dear. He was driven by revenge, trying to drive him into the same despair.

The novel contains many references to emotional and physical alienation. It also explores the distinction between voluntary and involuntary isolation:

• The monster is involuntarily driven into an emotionally devastating state of alienation.
• Victor imposes voluntary isolation on himself after witnessing the crimes of his creature.

To learn more about the representation of loneliness and isolation in the novel, check out our article on themes in Frankenstein .

Frankenstein Quotes about Isolation

Here are a couple of quotes from Frankenstein directly related to the theme of isolation and loneliness:

How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow…I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend. Frankenstein , Letter 2

In this quote, Walton expresses his loneliness and desire for company. He uses frost and snow as symbols to refer to his isolation. Perhaps a heart-warming relationship could melt the ice surrounding him.

I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers. Frankenstein , Chapter 3

This quote is related to Victor’s inability to make friends and function as a regular member of society. He also misses his friends and relatives in Ingolstadt, which causes him further discomfort.

I, who had ever been surrounded by amiable companions, continually engaged in endeavouring to bestow mutual pleasure—I was now alone. Frankenstein , Chapter 3

In this quote, Victor shares his fear of loneliness. As a person who used to spend most of his time in social activity among people, Victor feared the solitude that awaited him in Ingolstadt.

Isolation & Alienation in The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis is an enigmatic masterpiece by Franz Kafka, telling a story of a young man Gregor. He is alienated at work and home by his demanding, disrespectful family. He lacks deep, rewarding relationships in his life. As a result, he feels profound loneliness.

Gregor’s family isolates him both as a human and an insect, refusing to recognize his personhood. Gregor’s stay in confinement is also a reflection of his broader alienation from society, resulting from his self-perception as a parasite.  To learn more about it, feel free to read our article on themes in The Metamorphosis .

The Metamorphosis: Isolation Quotes

Let’s analyze several quotes from The Metamorphosis to see how Kafka approached the theme of isolation.

The upset of doing business is much worse than the actual business in the home office, and, besides, I’ve got the torture of traveling, worrying about changing trains, eating miserable food at all hours, constantly seeing new faces, no relationships that last or get more intimate. The Metamorphosis , Part 1

In this fragment, Gregor’s lifestyle is described with a couple of strokes. It shows that he lived an empty, superficial life without meaningful relationships.

Well, leaving out the fact that the doors were locked, should he really call for help? In spite of all his miseries, he could not repress a smile at this thought. The Metamorphosis , Part 1

This quote shows how Gregor feels isolated even before anyone else can see him as an insect. He knows that being different will inevitably affect his life and his relationships with his family. So, he prefers to confine himself to voluntary isolation instead of seeking help.

He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister’s. The Metamorphosis , Part 3

This final paragraph of Kafka’s story reveals the human nature of Gregor. It also shows the depth of his suffering in isolation after turning into a vermin. He reconciles with his metamorphosis and agrees to disappear from this world. Eventually, he vanishes from his family’s troubled memories.

Theme of Loneliness in Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men is a touching novella by John Steinbeck examining the intricacies of laborers’ relationships on a ranch. It’s a snapshot of class and race relations that delves into the depths of human loneliness. Steinbeck shows how this feeling makes people mean, reckless, and cold.

Many characters in this story suffer from being alienated from the community:

• Crooks is ostracized because of his race, living in a separate shabby house as a misfit.
• George also suffers from forced alienation because he takes care of the mentally disabled Lennie.
• Curley’s wife is another character suffering from loneliness. This feeling drives her to despair. She seeks the warmth of human relationships in the hands of Lennie, which causes her accidental death.

Isolation Quotes: Of Mice and Men

Now, let’s analyze a couple of quotes from Of Mice and Men to see how the author approached the theme of loneliness.

Guys like us who work on ranches are the loneliest guys in the world, they ain’t got no family, they don’t belong no place. Of Mice and Men , Section 1

In this quote, Steinbeck describes several dimensions of isolation suffered by his characters:

• They are physically isolated , working on large farms where they may not meet a single person for weeks.
• They have no chances for social communication and relationship building, thus remaining emotionally isolated without a life partner.
• They can’t develop a sense of belonging to the place where they work; it’s another person’s property.

Candy looked for help from face to face. Of Mice and Men , Section 3

Candy’s loneliness on the ranch becomes highly pronounced during his conflict with Carlson. The reason is that he is an old man afraid of being “disposed of.” The episode is an in-depth look into a society that doesn’t cherish human relationships, focusing only on a person’s practical utility. 

I never get to talk to nobody. I get awful lonely. Of Mice and Men , Chapter 5

This quote expresses the depth of Curley’s wife’s loneliness. She doesn’t have anyone with whom she would be able to talk, aside from her husband. Curley is also not an appropriate companion, as he treats his wife rudely and carelessly. As a result of her loneliness, she falls into deeper frustration.

✍️ Essay on Loneliness and Isolation: Topics & Ideas

If you’ve got a task to write an essay about loneliness and isolation, it’s vital to pick the right topic. You can explore how these feelings are covered in literature or focus on their real-life manifestations. Here are some excellent topic suggestions for your inspiration:

• Cross-national comparisons of people’s experience of loneliness and isolation.
• Social isolation , loneliness, and all-cause mortality among the elderly.
• Public health consequences of extended social isolation .
• Impact of social isolation on young people’s mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Connections between social isolation and depression.
• Interventions for reducing social isolation and loneliness among older people.
• Loneliness and social isolation among rural area residents.
• The effect of social distancing rules on perceived loneliness.
• How does social isolation affect older people’s functional status?
• Video calls as a measure for reducing social isolation.
• Isolation, loneliness, and otherness in Frankenstein .
• The unique combination of addiction and isolation in Frankenstein .
• Exploration of solitude in Hernan Diaz’ In the Distance .
•  Artificial isolation and voluntary seclusion in Against Nature .
• Different layers of isolation in George Eliot’s Silas Marner .
• Celebration of self-imposed solitude in Emily Dickinson’s works.
• Buddhist aesthetics of solitude in Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude .
• Loneliness of childhood in Charles Dickens’s works.
• Moby-Dick : Loneliness in the struggle.
• Medieval literature about loneliness and social isolation.

Now you know everything about the themes of isolation, loneliness, and alienation in fiction and can correctly identify and interpret them. What is your favorite literary work focusing on any of these themes? Tell us in the comments!

❓ Themes of Loneliness and Isolation FAQs

Isolation is a popular theme in poetry. The speakers in such poems often reflect on their separation from others or being away from their loved ones. Metaphorically, isolation may mean hiding unshared emotions. The magnitude of the feeling can vary from light blues to depression.

In his masterpiece Of Mice and Men , John Steinbeck presents loneliness in many tragic ways. The most alienated characters in the book are Candy, Crooks, and Curley’s wife. Most of them were eventually destroyed by the negative consequences of their loneliness.

The Catcher in the Rye uses many symbols as manifestations of Holden’s loneliness. One prominent example is an image of his dead brother Allie. He’s the person Holden wants to bond with but can’t because he is gone. Holden also perceives other people as phony or corny, thus separating himself from his peers.

Beloved is a work about the deeply entrenched trauma of slavery that finds its manifestation in later generations. Characters of Beloved prefer self-isolation and alienation from others to avoid emotional pain.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , all people must conform to society’s rules to be accepted. Those who don’t fit in that established order and feel their individuality are erased from society.

• What Is Solitude?: Psychology Today
• Loneliness in Literature: Springer Link
• What Literature and Language Tell Us about the History of Loneliness: Scroll.in
• On Isolation and Literature: The Millions
• 10 Books About Loneliness: Publishers Weekly
• Alienation: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Isolation and Revenge: Where Victor Frankenstein Went Wrong: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• On Isolation: Gale
• Top 10 Books About Loneliness: The Guardian
• Emily Dickinson and the Creative “Solitude of Space:” Psyche
• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to LinkedIn
• Share to email

Have you ever loved? Even if you haven’t, you’ve seen it in countless movies, heard about it in songs, and read about it in some of the greatest books in world literature. If you want to find out more about love as a literary theme, you came to the right...

Death is undoubtedly one of the most mysterious events in life. Literature is among the mediums that allow people to explore and gain knowledge of death—a topic that in everyday life is often seen as taboo.  This article by Custom-Writing.org will: introduce the topic of death in literature and explain...

Wouldn’t it be great if people of all genders could enjoy equal rights? When reading stories from the past, we can realize how far we’ve made since the dawn of feminism. Books that deal with the theme of gender inspire us to keep fighting for equality. In this article, ourcustom-writing...

What makes a society see some categories of people as less than human? Throughout history, we can see how people divided themselves into groups and used violence to discriminate against each other. When groups of individuals are perceived as monstrous or demonic, it leads to dehumanization. Numerous literary masterpieces explore the meaning of monstrosity and show the dire consequences of dehumanization. This article by Custom-Writing.org will: explore...

Revenge provides relief. Characters in many literary stories believe in this idea. Convinced that they were wronged, they are in the constant pursuit of revenge. But is it really the only way for them to find peace? This article by Custom-Writing.org is going to answer this and other questions related...

Is money really the root of all evil? Many writers and poets have tried to answer this question. Unsurprisingly, the theme of money is very prevalent in literature. It’s also connected to other concepts, such as greed, power, love, and corruption. In this article, our custom writing team will: explore...

Have you ever asked yourself why some books are so compelling that you keep thinking about them even after you have finished reading? Well, of course, it can be because of a unique plotline or complex characters. However, most of the time, it is the theme that compels you. A...

The American Dream theme encompasses crucial values, such as freedom, democracy, equal rights, and personal happiness. The concept’s definition varies from person to person. Yet, books by American authors can help us grasp  it better. Many agree that American literature is so distinct from English literature because the concept of...

A fallen leaf, a raven, the color black… What connects all these images? That’s right: they can all symbolize death—one of literature’s most terrifying and mysterious concepts. It has been immensely popular throughout the ages, and it still fascinates readers. Numerous symbols are used to describe it, and if you...

The most ancient text preserved to our days raises more questions than there are answers. When was The Iliad written? What was the purpose of the epic poem? What is the subject of The Iliad? The Iliad Study Guide prepared by Custom-Writing.org experts explores the depths of the historical context...

The epic poem ends in a nostalgic and mournful way. The last book is about a father who lost his son and wishes to make an honorable funeral as the last thing he could give him. The book symbolizes the end of any war when sorrow replaces anger. Book 24,...

The main values glorified in The Iliad and The Odyssey are honor, courage, and eloquence. These three qualities were held as the best characteristics a person could have. Besides, they contributed to the heroic code and made up the Homeric character of a warrior. The Odyssey also promotes hospitality, although...

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’ Review: Running Out of Steam

The latest in the Warner Bros. Monsterverse franchise shows signs of an anemic imagination.

• Share full article

By Alissa Wilkinson

Nothing about “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” makes sense, which is not, on the face of it, a problem. We have not settled into cushy cinema seats with our comfortingly stale popcorn to engage in discourse about metaphors and science; we are here for the stars in the title. About that title: “Godzilla x Kong” (meant to echo various other titles in other, non-Hollywood Godzilla movies) could mean Godzilla times Kong, or Godzilla crossed with Kong, or Godzilla against Kong — some permutation of titans. Whatever it is, there will be punching. We are here for the punching.

What we’re not here for is the humans, which is lucky, because they’ve been dropping like flies. Most of the characters from the last few films — including the 2021 “Godzilla vs. Kong” (also directed by Adam Wingard) — have disappeared, largely without explanation. Our main character now is Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), adoptive mother to a tween, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), a member of the Iwi tribe, who communicates with Kong directly via sign language. I particularly missed Alexander Skarsgard’s Dr. Nathan Lind, whose absence is sort of explained but not mourned, and who has been replaced, for narrative reasons, by a kooky veterinarian to the titans played by Dan Stevens. (For some reason, I assume to signal the kookiness, Stevens sports an exaggerated Australian accent.)

They’re joined once again by Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), the conspiracy podcaster-blogger-documentarian-weirdo from the last film. For some reason, he’s convinced that nobody believes his stories about the titans, even though actual Godzilla is roaming the Earth and shown on the nightly news. (I’m more stuck on the strangely fantastical idea that he’s a popular blogger. Wouldn’t he have a Substack by now?)

5 Films Our Critics Are Talking About

On the Adamant

Not rated | Documentary

This documentary by Nicolas Philibert drifts along, with unnamed patients and their caretakers, on a large houseboat in Paris.

Read our full review.

Lousy Carter

Not rated | Comedy

A college professor gets a grim diagnosis in this comedy from Bob Byington.

The Beautiful Game

PG-13 | Drama, Sport

This heart-string-tugging Netflix movie about a homeless soccer team, featuring Bill Nighy and Micheal Ward, puts the emphasis on play and uplift.

Asphalt City

R | Drama, Thriller

Sean Penn plays a flinty paramedic showing a rookie the ropes in this maddening drama about emergency medical workers in New York.

The Listener

Not rated | Drama

Tessa Thompson’s still and luminous performance makes this post-Covid drama about loneliness, directed by Steve Buscemi, worth watching.

These humans are pretty boring, more anemic than they were in the last movie. They’re there purely for narrative propulsion through this story, which begins with Kong living in the Hollow Earth (exactly what it sounds like) and Godzilla up on the surface. As long as the twain never meet, we’re good — and by we, I mean humankind.

Which means, of course, they’ll meet. The scientists spot Godzilla napping in the Colosseum, then stomping his way through Europe and northern Africa, seemingly absorbing as much nuclear power as he can because he senses some confrontation coming. At the same time, something is very wrong in Kong’s world down below. And Jia is having strange dreams, too — dreams that lead to an expedition into the Hollow Earth.

What follows is an attempt to establish a whole lot of mythology for the Monsterverse franchise. (Their term, not mine.) This is a big mistake. You can tell it’s a mistake, because all of that mythology has to be revealed in tedious expositional dialogue. More important, once you know what happened in the past, you know precisely what will happen in the present, which rips any remaining suspense out of the film, leaving only the punching. (So much punching.)

Besides: Does this series need a mythology? Both Godzilla and Kong have a rich screen history to draw on — this is the 38th movie for Godzilla and the 13th for Kong, and though they haven’t shared the screen until recently, they bring all of their baggage and back story with them. It feels like a desperate attempt for the crossover franchise to justify both its existence and its continuation.

Which is not surprising. This series’ track record induces whiplash. The 2014 film “Godzilla,” a kind of reboot of the original Toho series featuring the character, was a legitimately excellent film, balancing spectacle and human pathos. But then came “Kong: Skull Island” and “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” both meant to build toward a shared universe, both of which were not just bad but real bummers. Next was “Godzilla vs. Kong” which wasn’t, technically speaking, good — but it promised confrontation and delivered it, with a late-breaking coda of unwilling and visually spectacular cooperation between massive ape and nuclear lizard. It was a blast to watch, not least because the climax happened: The two monsters finally had their long-teased meeting.

But with that zenith in the rearview mirror, “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” has very little road left to cruise, and it shows. The best stretches involve Kong lumbering through the landscape, Godzilla stomping around crushing things, and of course the inevitable final confrontation, which has a few surprises up its proverbial sleeves. Kong in particular seems to have no problem communicating without human language, and those extended scenes are so fun to watch that it’s disappointing to swing back to the humans.

Certainly, humans can be a fruitful part of these monster movies. The recent Japanese film “Godzilla Minus One,” produced for a fraction of the “Godzilla x Kong” budget and recipient of the Oscar for best visual effects this year, manages to combine the creature with true pathos and a focus on the human cost of war, guilt and trauma. It’s more in line with the origin of Godzilla, too, as a metaphor for Japanese generational trauma related to the atomic bomb. In 2004, writing for The New York Times , Terrence Rafferty succinctly described the monster as embodying “a society’s desire to claim its deepest tragedies for itself, to assimilate them as elements of its historical identity.”

None of that is here. In fact, “Godzilla x Kong” is evidence the original thread has been lost entirely — a shame, in an era haunted by monsters the movies can only hint at, from climate catastrophe, destructive weaponry and geopolitical strife to power-hungry, brutal authoritarianism. There’s no reflection here at all, not even space to contemplate what might lie beyond the literal. Beyond the main cast, the humans in this movie exist only to get squashed like ants by falling debris and mangled buildings. They are expendable, but it doesn’t matter. The meaning of these films isn’t in metaphor at all. It’s in punching.

Be warned: There’s a lot of guts in “Godzilla x Kong,” guts from mammals and reptiles ripped in half, guts from sea monsters, Technicolor guts, way more than I expected. They feel appropriate, for a monster movie, and aren’t quite gross enough to merit an R rating. But as I pondered the guts, I found myself wondering one thing: When will someone have the bravery — the guts, you might say — to make a movie with Kong, and Godzilla, and various other titans and monsters, and no humans at all?

Or maybe there’s a greater question at stake: When will Hollywood have the guts to make a fun blockbuster like this that dares to acknowledge the real menacing monsters?

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Rated PG-13 for destruction, some mild profanities and so, so many guts. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

“X-Men ’97,” a revival on Disney+ that picks up where the ’90s animated series left off, has faced questions after the firing of its showrunner  ahead of the premiere.

“3 Body Problem,” a science fiction epic from the creators of “Game of Thrones,” has arrived on Netflix. We spoke with them about their latest project .

For the past two decades, female presidential candidates on TV have been made in Hillary Clinton’s image. With “The Girls on the Bus,” that’s beginning to change .

“Freaknik,” a new Hulu documentary, delves into the rowdy ’80s and ’90s-era spring festival  that drew hundreds of thousands of Black college students to Atlanta.

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.