Image via Senior Living Residences
‘Loneliness is as big a threat to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day,’ UK researcher Janet Morrison told the recent International Arts and Health Conference in Melbourne.
Morrison’s research suggests that loneliness is more detrimental than obesity or a lack of exercise. Particularly in older people, a lack of social connection correlates with higher levels of depression and lower levels of physical health.
Morrison, who is CEO, Independent Age UK and Co-founder, End to Loneliness Campaign UK, believes it is essential community-based activities are put in place before loneliness became a major problem in the community.
She identifies the arts as key to ensuring the growing number of singles and solo-households across the western world does not lead to an epidemic of loneliness.
Executive Director of Arts and Health Australia Margret Meagher said with the increasing number of people living alone, we are on the cusp of an issue that is yet to fully enter the social discourse.
‘People’s understanding of depression can be different, but it’s pretty clear from the research that feeling of a lack of social connection is significantly deleterious for health and wellbeing,’ she said.
Meagher said over the past decade, the issue of social exclusion or inclusion had become a hot topic and it was likely the resulting question of loneliness would be an is increasingly an important area to address.
Understanding loneliness
Co-author of Art As Therapy and School of Life Philosopher-in-Chief John Armstrong said the issues behind loneliness must be questioned and unpacked in order to grapple with them adequately. ‘Loneliness has a lot of different dimensions, but one big one is going to be the feeling of a gap of what it is like to be you, and what seems to be going on for other people,’ he said.
‘There’s this sense that your experience of yourself feels odd, and unlike what it is like for other people. That’s not the whole of loneliness, but that might be one way in to how people experience loneliness.
Armstrong said that is it through art, and art making, that one can find a much more accurate sense of normality. ‘Art fundamentally is accurate emotional expression, so that might be in music or that might be in photography. It doesn’t have to be a painting hanging in a gallery on a wall’ he said.
‘I think it’s about accurately latching onto the emotional things that help us. That’s a learned skill.’
How the arts help
Sydney author and art therapist Sally Swain uses art and art making as a tool for building social inclusiveness, through facilitating participatory arts workshops in the aged care sector.
She said by focusing on a creative activity, the art allowed people to create community with a positive purpose.
‘It can feel like simply a bunch of friends gathered together, each producing their own creation while in the company of others. This is in stark contrast to the medical model in which clients are continually reminded of their pathology and their loss of ability,’ she said.
‘This sort of creative community environment goes a long way to reducing the epidemic of social isolation. It helps people find joy, meaning and connection in the moment and can provide a sense of potential and possibility.’
Swain told ArtsHub she has seen the firsthand effects of using art as a therapeutic way of combating loneliness. She said the experience of engaging socially isolated workshop participants with practical, skill-based arts could give people brought them out of their ‘little bubble of isolation and sadness’. Sometimes it literally gave them something to live for.
‘Art making, especially in relationship with an art therapist, can help provide a sense of connection, meaning and purpose. It helps an aged care resident remember who they are, that they are more – much more – than a body to be mobilised from bed to table to toilet and back to bed again. It helps put them in touch with their aliveness. It helps them contact and preserve existing abilities, and even develop new ones.’
Swain has seen aged care residents who had lost speech start to speak again while engaged with an art activity. ‘Even people who might not be able to communicate with others or who rarely interact with other residents will be really motivated to give positive feedback to other residents about their artwork,’ she said.
Live performance is another method of reaping mental and physical health benefits for the chronically lonely. Meagher: ‘When you’re standing with a bunch of other people, singing a song and it’s sounding good, your body is responding to the effort of singing and you have people around you smiling because you’re engaging and having a good time, the impact of arts and health can be as simple as that,’ she said.
‘For older people, being applauded by an audience is a novel experience that builds self-confidence and self esteem. If you have self confidence, then you’re more motivated about your ability, your mobility and thinking about balance, energising your brain.’
Meghear said the arts can reach into places where it is hard for governments or health services to go. ‘I hear stories all the time about older people who have been identified as being lonely, but they’re been totally cut off from social communication. There are people living by themselves and their main source of connection with society is the television, and that’s a very one-sided passive connectedness. That’s why we have this emphasis on participatory arts.’
Meagher said arts organisations have a social responsibility to reconsider how their practice can be utilised to improve the lives of people within their own communities.
‘Artists have always been recognised as being great advocates of social justice, we now need artists to recognise there is also a responsibility to people in our community who are marginalised,’ she said. ‘There is still a lot of stigma around being old, and older people can be perceived as being a burden on society, where as what we’re trying to promote through arts and health is the value of older people and enable them to celebrate what they’ve celebrated in their lives, but also to continue through volunteering and other community contributions.’
