One in five Canadians who are 65 or older experience loneliness, and immigrant seniors are more likely to feel alone than their Canadian-born peers, a new study suggests.
According to the Statistics Canada report, these older Canadians have felt a lack of companionship, left out and isolated. Women in general, meanwhile, are significantly more likely than men to have been lonely (23 per cent versus 14.6 per cent).
While racialized immigrant men had a significantly higher prevalence of loneliness than men born in Canada, immigrant women of European background were more likely to report they felt lonely than their Canadian female peers, said the report, “Immigrant Status and Loneliness Among Older Canadians,” which was released Wednesday.
“What we know is loneliness is a public health emergency across the life course,” said Laura Tamblyn Watts, CEO of CanAge, Canada’s National Seniors’ Advocacy Organization. “It’s not just a sad feeling of being disconnected. It’s one of the most important social determinants of health here.”
The findings of the study were based on data from the Canadian Health Survey on Seniors (CHSS) through interviews conducted between January 2019 and December 2020 with 41,635 people 65 and older, both in person and by telephone.
The sample represented 5.9 million people living in the community in the 10 provinces.
Lixia Yang, a psychology professor at the Toronto Metropolitan University, said it’s not surprising that immigrants who came as adults feel more isolated than their Canadian counterparts, as they had to uproot themselves to start a new life from scratch.
“They are disconnected from their old friends in the country of origin. When they come here, they have to start a new social network. If they come at a younger age, they can go to school and make friends,” said Yang, whose research focuses on aging and cultures.
“For older immigrants, it’s going to be more difficult to integrate, probably, also because of language and cultural barriers.”
About 26 per cent of the study population were immigrants (12.8 per cent European and 12.9 per cent non-European); 23 per cent of older Canadians were long-term immigrants who had arrived 20 years ago or more; and 16 per cent of older Canadians were immigrants who came to Canada as adults.
The majority of the population, at 61.5 per cent, was 65 to 74 years old; about two-thirds were married or common-law; 57 per cent had a post-secondary education; 71.3 per cent were living with two or more chronic conditions; and about one-quarter reported barriers to social participation.
The study said immigrants who migrated as adults had 1.6 times higher odds of experiencing loneliness than the Canadian-born population, even after adjusting for the other variables, while long-term immigrants had 1.4 times higher odds of loneliness.
Both men and women who were married or living common-law were less susceptible to loneliness, it said, while those age 65 to 74 were more likely to report loneliness than those in the other age cohorts.
For elderly people, mobility and transportation can also be a challenge to getting around and staying engaged, added Yang, who is launching a virtual program this fall to help Chinese Canadian seniors stay active.
Kwame McKenzie, health equity director at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, said loneliness is becoming a big health concern.
“We don’t spend enough time thinking about social connections. We don’t spend enough time facilitating social connections from a policy perspective,” said McKenzie, who is also the CEO of Wellesley Institute, a think-tank with a mandate to improve health and health equity.
“We don’t put enough money into making spaces and supporting local groups. And that’s a problem, because if you can build people’s networks and social capital, that is a benefit to them in the future and that is a benefit for us all.”
The U.K., he said, takes loneliness as a health threat seriously and has a cabinet minister for loneliness, who is charged with tackling loneliness in communities, a mission that became particularly crucial amid the social isolation of the pandemic.
It has funded and supported programs to encourage people to talk about loneliness and to seek help, to enrich the understanding of loneliness and to ensure relationships and loneliness are part of policymaking and delivery by organizations across society.
“Text doesn’t work. Social media is not good. There’s really no substitute for meeting people,” said McKenzie. “The more people retreat away from face-to-face meetings and proper human connection, then we’re going to find more people who say they’re lonely.”
Tamblyn Watts pointed to some of the successful initiatives that help older people stay connected, such as Men’s Sheds, a national program that brings together senior men to learn or teach new skills and find new opportunities and interests while making new friends.
Another initiative called Canada HomeShare matches older adult homeowners with students, usually in graduate schools, to create mutually beneficial living solutions.
“We know that just some reliable, sustained attention to the issue of loneliness is not just a nice-to-have when we’re looking at what our health-care systems are burdened on,” said Tamblyn Watts.
“We can reduce visits to hospitals and can reduce admissions to long term care by just making sure that we’re paying attention to that 1.1 million current seniors who are already chronically lonely.”
Source: Toronto Star
