Loneliness and Poverty

Abstract

Poverty intensifies loneliness. The impact that lack of money has on the ability to take part in small celebrations and get-togethers that others take for granted intensifies loneliness. The inability to join in and a failure to be able to provide for oneself at a time when young people are meant to be learning to ‘stand on their own two feet’ is accompanied by a strong sense of shame. Poverty is associated with physical isolation in ‘uncared for places’. There can be an association between the shame of poverty and a cycle of mental ill-health and drug use/abuse which intensifies isolation. The concept of ‘social abjection’ is introduced as a means to understand the loneliness associated with poverty.