Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
March 15, 2023
Summary:
Objectives:
Loneliness has a long-established link with depression; however, patterns of loneliness, specifically transient (short-term) and chronic loneliness (longer-term), have seldom been researched in terms of their associations with depression and psychiatric distress. We investigated whether chronic loneliness could predict higher levels of psychiatric distress and higher chance of depression diagnosis (via self-report) than transient and no loneliness.
Methods:
We used data from 18,999 participants in Waves 9 and 10 of the Understanding Society survey: a nationally representative study of adults in the United Kingdom. The study used a between-subjects, cross-sectional, design, where participants' scores on loneliness measures across two time points were combined to form patterns of loneliness, and participants were compared on their levels of psychiatric distress and depression diagnoses across the three loneliness groups: chronic loneliness (lonely at both time points), transient loneliness (lonely at one time point) and no loneliness.
Results:
Regression analyses revealed that patterns of loneliness predicted both the likelihood of participants reporting a history of depression diagnosis and participants' levels of psychiatric distress. The chronic loneliness group had the highest likelihood of self-reported depression diagnosis and had the highest levels of psychiatric distress, compared to both the transient and no loneliness groups. Transient loneliness, in turn, predicted higher likelihood of reporting a history of depression diagnosis and higher levels of psychiatric distress than the no loneliness group.
Conclusions:
The study replicates and extends prior findings, suggesting that prolonged loneliness even over the course of one year is a risk factor for poorer mental health.
Published in
British Journal of Clinical Psychology
Volume and page numbers
Volume: 62 , p.112 -128
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/bjc.12397
ISSN
1446657
Subjects
Notes
Open Access
© 2022 The Authors. British Journal of Clinical Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Psychological Society.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
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