Loneliness often walks hand in hand with a diagnosed mental health disorder. Seemingly, loneliness could be more of a cause than a symptom in some of our commonly recognized mental health issues.
4 recognized mental health disorders that may spring from loneliness are as follows:-
1) Depression - A 5 year study was conducted by the University of Chicago and it found that the presence of loneliness early in the five-year span was an excellent predictor for depression later in the five-year span. This indicates that loneliness may precede depression more frequently than depression preceding loneliness.
2) Social Anxiety - Loneliness may be caused by discomfort getting to know people. While there are extreme forms of this problem — not being able to leave the house, for example — the more mild symptoms of social anxiety can be caused by feeling alone. You may feel as if you’re unlikeable or unworthy of good relationships, causing fear and anxiety about the process of forming them.
3) Addiction - Those who feel lonely before ever taking a drug are much more likely to get addicted to it. Professor Peter Cohen says: “If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find — the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. An example is :- A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because he/she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else. So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
4) Hoarding (Usually related to obsessive-compulsive disorder) - Hoarding involves an element of loss and heartache because when we’re not able to fill up our lives with close friends and family, some people may turn to comforting objects to fill the void. These objects may “fill the emptiness,” but as the emptiness gets bigger, so may the mountain of objects.
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Category(s):Health Psychology
Source material from PsychCentral
