Transcript for
How is loneliness impacting young people in Australia?

Narrator (00:02):

Welcome to the Emerging Minds Families podcast.

Nadia (Host) (00:06):

Hi, I’m Nadia Rossi, and you’re listening to an Emerging Minds Families podcast. Before we start today’s episode, we would like to pay respect to the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast is recorded, the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. We also pay respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their ancestors, and elders past, present, and emerging from the different First Nations across Australia.

(00:36):

Today’s episode is part one of a two-part series where I am joined by Amber Brock Fable and Dr. Ben Lohmeyer. Amber is the founder of the South Australian Youth Forum, and Ben is a senior lecturer in social policy within the College of Education, Psychology, and Social Work at Flinders University. In this conversation, Amber and Ben share the findings from their co-designed study on loneliness and its relationship with young people’s experiences of bullying and overall wellbeing.

(01:07):

We talk about the rise of loneliness amongst young people in Australia, and the importance of creating safe spaces for young people within and outside of the school environment. Ben and Amber, thank you so much for joining us today, I’m really looking forward to this chat, and I’m so happy we’ve been able to have you both with us today. Before we start our episodes, we do like to ask a question about your families. We acknowledge that families come in very many different forms. So, Amber, if we can start with you about who makes up your family.

Amber (Guest) (01:39):

Yes. Well, thank you so much for having me involved. Who makes up my family? I’m very lucky to have a beautiful, resilient family, my mum, dad, and my two sisters. I’m the middle child, I think that’s the best position to be in, and my beautiful boyfriend, Ryan.

Nadia (Host) (01:54):

Amazing. Thank you. And Ben?

Ben (Guest) (01:56):

Yeah. Thanks again for the chance to come have a chat. Yeah, my little family is myself, my wife, and our two kids. And I’ve got one in primary school and one just going into high school.

Nadia (Host) (02:04):

Oh.

Ben (Guest) (02:05):

So, a whole new adventure ahead of us as a family.

Nadia (Host) (02:06):

Yeah. A lot of transition. My daughter is just about to start school, so we’re in transition mode as well. So, it’s all very new and exciting.

Ben (Guest) (02:17):

It is exciting, but it’s slightly stressful.

Nadia (Host) (02:18):

Yeah, exactly. Ben, you are joining us to talk about your research into youth loneliness and bullying, which led you to co-design a paper with Amber and the SA Youth Forum on this topic. So, can you tell us a bit about your background for our listeners just to know a bit more about you, and what led you to this work?

Ben (Guest) (02:37):

No worries. So, I started out my career in youth work, mostly working around schools, but also in some alternative accommodation settings for young people under the guardianship, those sort of spaces. And that was really enjoyable, I really valued that as a starting place for my career, and continues to be something I’m very passionate about. I got a point with my career though where I wanted to do a bit more around the evidence base for the practise we’re doing. I wanted to see if we could learn a bit more and evidence the kind of things that we were doing. So, I just studied a PhD in sociology, so that’s my academic discipline. Sociologists are really interested in social context, the institutions, social systems, and so now that shapes the way I think about problems like loneliness and bullying. And so, I have been working at Flinders for the last five years, and working on a few different research projects.

(03:15):

I’m very, very lucky to work in partnership with the SA Youth Forum, and Amber, and we can tell a bit of a story about how this project came about. This project is fairly unique, and particularly from my experience as a level of young people’s participation and really leadership in the projects. It’s got a genuine co-design to it. And we throw that word co-design around a lot at the moment, it’s a really popular word to use, but it’d be nice to talk about what that actually looks like in this context.

Nadia (Host) (03:39):

Absolutely, that’s why I really loved the work that you both coming together and really bringing that lived experience of youth into the conversation, because I feel like sometimes it’s the part that’s left out, really sitting down and talking to people with lived experience, and actually getting from them how they’re feeling, and how they’re affected. I don’t think you can get a better window into what’s actually going on. Amber, so if we can talk about the youth forum as well, you founded the SA Youth Forum when you were 17, in 2021, which is very impressive. Can you tell us a bit about why you started the SA Youth Forum, and how you came to co-design this study with Ben and Flinders University?

Amber (Guest) (04:16):

So, like you said, I started it when I was 17, it sounds all impressive and whatnot, but it really was just a call-out to young people I knew, mostly friends at school, to start meeting once a month on picnic blankets in the Adelaide Parklands, because there’s not a lot of community spaces out there that allow young people to just hang and meet, and I guess we were kicked out the library for being a bit too loud.

(04:37):

So, started in 2022, our first program, and it was mainly from a passion of really wanting to get my voice heard as a 17-year-old, not being able to legally vote at the time, and coming out of COVID-19 as well, a lot of opportunities were really not there through my high school experience. I also moved schools, and a teacher really influenced my passion around social justice and social change, and I realised that there’s a whole world out there that I can really make a difference in. And I also wanted to meet more young people as well. So, the first program for 2022 was for 14 to 18-year-olds, and I’d put together these agendas based on topics that I thought were really impacting young people. And then, would just have a chat for two hours on these picnic blankets about each other’s experiences, storytelling, views were challenged and reshaped.

(05:30):

And along that first year, more young people rocked up, which was just absolutely phenomenal for me. Eight young people joined me in February 2022, and I just remembered that moment, I just thought I started a revolution or something. I was just so happy that young people joined. Mum had to keep donating more picnic blankets so everyone could have somewhere to sit.

Ben (Guest) (05:51):

That’s a good thing. Yeah.

Amber (Guest) (05:52):

And yeah, I just thought that these conversations needed to go somewhere beyond the picnic blankets. So, I started minuting these discussions that we were having, we also did some local research and gathering some more information from peers that couldn’t join us on the picnic blankets, various reasons, and then we put together our first annual report with all these meeting minutes and stories in them. And we, I guess, marched into parliament and presented it to politicians and MPs, and also academics, like Ben.

(06:24):

And what surprised me the most when we presented it to Ben was, I guess, his unshakable commitment to actually doing something about the issues we presented, and one of them was about loneliness, and he was just committed to looking into that topic a little bit more. So, I guess that’s how it all started. Four years later, we’re still going, now with a bit more structure and an actual venue, which is great, and we’ve got another branch for our 18 to 24 year olds, and continuing this project with Ben.

Nadia (Host) (06:53):

That’s amazing. So great to hear how it has grown and continues to grow, and then how you came to meet Ben, and you’ve really championed the work and the SA Youth Forum, and are able to work together in this. I wanted to talk about the topic of bullying and loneliness and the main focus of the paper, and why, Ben, when you heard SA Youth Forum talk about this, why it was such an important topic to you, and to you Amber as well. But what made it that you both wanted to be so involved in it and take it forward?

Ben (Guest) (07:22):

It’s a good question. I think at the time when Amber and I first met, we were at a youth work conference, I invited Amber to come and speak on the panel that was talking about green youth work, and we got chatting about some of the different topics that had come up in their discussion and their report. I was finishing up another project on loneliness around the time, and it wasn’t a really central focus for what I was doing, it was just something we’re kind of interested in. But the fact that it had been important to young people at that time was the most important part. The kind of work that I do is about centering young people in their voices and what’s important to them.

(07:54):

So, it’s fortuitous that it was similar, but it could have been something else. I think we’re just lucky enough to go, oh yeah, we’re both kind of interested in this, and let’s focus on that and see where it goes. That’s quite distinctly unique in a practise as well as a research context, because even with great intentions to do youth voice and co-design, it’s still often adults going, we should do youth voice and co-design. So, it starts with these adults who want to do this project, and then they probably even have a topic in mind and say, oh, we should do it about this thing, and so co-design becomes part of that process.

(08:26):

To have it start with a shared mutual interest is rare, I think, and a unique opportunity. So, that was really cool. And then, we initially thought, well, maybe we’d need some funding or something to do this. Of course, you can never find funding straight off the bat for anything, let alone something like, we’re going to explore this vague area and see what we find. So, instead we started to get started and did a few workshops with the forum to start designing the method. So, what research message should we use, and how should we explore that?

Nadia (Host) (08:51):

Amber, did you have anything to add about why the topic was so important to you and the forum?

Amber (Guest) (08:56):

I think coming out of COVID-19, and I guess growing up in general, loneliness was really taboo and really stigmatised. In one of these monthly meetings, it came up, and I remember having a irky feeling in my tummy like, oh my gosh, this is so taboo and whatnot, but we really talked about it, and really unpacked it, and it felt really good, and I felt so connected to my peers because we were talking about loneliness and our own experiences. And when we went to Ben, and Ben’s commitment to doing something about it with us, I ran with it because I knew that I’m not the only one that would feel just alone talking about loneliness, and that more research and more conversation needed to happen around it. And loneliness is such a paradox in an era of unparalleled digital connection, particularly with our generation always coined the most connected.

(09:48):

And so, when we were starting out this project, it was really interesting with the maps, and the direction that our young people took them in. I remember asking around mapping out loneliness in your life and a space, and map out where you feel lonely or where you feel connection. And some young people would map a bedroom, a school, and then others would map their entire day in a life circle and say walking the bus was a bit lonely, but on the bus wasn’t that bad. And then, we had a more robust discussion about how our young people interpreted what we were talking about, and I guess how those life cycles that young people did, then mapped to the particular rooms or classrooms that the other young people mapped out.

(10:32):

So, it was really interesting around the flexibility we went into this. And I think the whole project was built on not having any expectations at all and really just building it from the ground up. We really did it without any resources or funding, and [inaudible 00:10:48], just like the forum, it’s grown into something that’s remarkable.

Nadia (Host) (10:51):

I find the mapping so interesting that you are able to show that some young people are having similar experiences and others are not, because I think being able to look back on it in a visual way, and map it through can help young people reveal and understand how they are really feeling. And I wanted to talk about the social and emotional wellbeing of children and young people, and what your findings revealed to you both about how they are feeling.

Ben (Guest) (11:19):

The short answer is lots, right? It’s really, like Amber was saying before this, this project seems to grow, and initially I think we understood a little bit of the reason to do it, like your group’s interest in it, and then we did a little bit of background research to say, okay, how does this issue look? And some of the interesting statistic around 15 years ago, I think in Australia, young people were the least lonely age group, according to the national data called HILDA, I can’t remember exactly, it’s like a household income, labour… I can’t remember the rest of the acronym. But about 15 years ago, young people were the least lonely age group. And then, since then they’ve just progressively increased over time, and then until during COVID, they peaked as the most lonely age group in Australia.

(11:58):

And it’s dropped a little bit, there’s some debate around how to measure it, and what the best measures are, and where young people fit. But now there’s a general consensus, it seems in the literature that there’s a U shape across life, and it starts with a little bit lonelier, and then you get less lonely over time, and then at the end of life, you get a little bit more lonely again. And we can think about maybe some of the reasons why that makes sense at the older stage of life, but I think this project is discovering the reasons why it’s true in the earlier stages.

Amber (Guest) (12:23):

I think the world is moving in a direction of acknowledging loneliness. At the international level, the World Health Organisation has declared it a global health priority, and here in South Australia, the Uniting Community Survey has shown that 91% of young people feel lonely often or always, which is alarming. So, I think that just adds more depth to our understanding and the direction that we wanted to take.

Nadia (Host) (12:50):

And it’s really, you’ve brought up COVID a few times, and I think that it’s, as an older person, not really, for me, not fully realising the impact that that really had on that younger generation that we’re really in a pivotal moment of growing, and how that personal connection got just completely stripped away, and how we’re having to rebuild that as well. I wanted to move into the connection of loneliness and bullying, and what you can tell us about that and how they connect with each other.

Ben (Guest) (13:22):

This is one of the areas that was really interesting, I think, because there’s an intuitive connection there rather, you can imagine a lonely young person at school, being bullied, and so there’s kind of a logic to it. But when we think about the way loneliness has predominantly been thought about, or intervened in, or defined, it’s usually in terms of that loss of or an absence of some sort of connection. So, usually the absence of a desired connection is the short way of saying it. And there’s more nuance to it than that, but that’s the popular way. Whereas, this finding that we had in our project, as well as some work by a UK academic, his name is Keming Yang. He was looking at a large data set in the UK, called the Millennium Cohort, and he sort of posed this idea that there was a connection in the data between young people who are feeling lonely and undesirable connections, which has flipped this idea around.

(14:10):

And rather than desiring more connections, there might be people who are present who you don’t want to be around. And so, that’s where we started thinking through our data, looking through this lens, and what we noticed is in our relatively small cohort that we did some work with, and this is qualitative exploratory work, but they talked about the presence of bullies, and the presence of other unwanted people in their spaces that made them feel lonely, which is quite surprising, you’d think, has not necessarily how we’ve been thinking about in the past. But there is also this element to it where it’s not that these young people didn’t have friends, they had other connections in the space, they had friends that were in their circle, or friends that sometimes they’ve been separated from through class makeup… Sometimes you go put into a class and none of your friends are there.

(14:55):

So, you have friends more broadly in school, but not in your class, or they had other adults, like youth workers, or social workers, or management staff, or teachers, who they had a good connection with, but it’s still the presence of those unwanted connections still impacted. So, that’s a really different way of thinking about it is you can be lonely in a crowd is another common way of thinking about it, but lonely because you’ve got these mixed relationship experiences. So, that was something that we’ve explored a bit more.

Amber (Guest) (15:24):

Around bullying and loneliness, I think we also challenge the traditional view that these are not personal problems, but more constructed in its social system, and that in this case being schools. And this introduces what the paper talks around, like effective economies… Which I’ve got a definition here. So, around emotional harm that emerges from social systems rather than just individual behaviours. This is also really relevant to when we think about young people experiencing loneliness or experiencing bullying, that it’s not their fault or it’s not on them, but rather how schools are designed to enhance potential social hierarchies and exclusions, which can innately produce feelings of isolation and exclusion as well.

Ben (Guest) (16:12):

Sometimes these issues, loneliness and bullying, we look at trying to solve them at the individual level. So, we think individually, if you’re lonely, what you need is more connections. We can do some interventions that are getting a lot of attention at the moment, things like social prescribing. So, you go and see your doctor, and your doctor says, you just need to have some more connections, so I prescribe to you to go and join this group or this club. And there’s quite a bit of evidence around that, particularly if you’re thinking about some of the potential health impacts of loneliness, and they’ve been compared to things like excessive drinking and smoking. If you address the loneliness, some of those other issues seem to also get addressed. So, great intervention, but that’s at an individual level, right? So, it asks the individual to do more work to solve the problem.

(16:54):

Whereas, we’re taking a slightly different approach and saying, let’s look at the context, let’s look at the school because that’s where young people are, and there’s other spaces in their lives, and how that creates opportunities for loneliness or for connection. And what maybe we can change the environment a little bit. So, similar with bullying, bullying has a very long history of being investigated at individual level, where it’s perpetrators, victims, bystanders, those sort of people are identified as needing to take some sort of action or intervention, but there’s another area of bullying research that says, well, no, again, let’s look at the school context. How are schools structured?

(17:29):

This process of, and really brutally, they’re a process of assessed value and development of hierarchy over time. You go into the school in batches, and then you get approved to go to the next level. Schools are also really great places, there’s lots of good things about it and they’re full of really great people like teachers and youth workers, but these are some of the contextual things that we can also think about in this space, the impact on things like bullying and loneliness.

Nadia (Host) (17:52):

And you mentioned spaces and schools creating safe spaces, how do you feel that schools can create those safe spaces without… Like I feel when there’s a safe space created for someone, and you know that’s where I can go. But then is there also an isolation and a loneliness that comes with that person going to that safe space because then everyone knows that they’re going to that safe space? Is there a complexity around that and how young people feel about when schools… Maybe Amber, you can touch on this. When schools introduce those safe spaces, how are young people feeling about those spaces that are offered?

Amber (Guest) (18:30):

Yeah. Like Ben was talking about before around the definition of loneliness as both the absence of desired social connection, but also the presence of undesired social connection, that can lead into feeling unsafe in crowds, but also feeling unsafe through being perceived as being watched. And we are moving into schools a lot, focusing on the open plan designs, and really glass everywhere and whatnot, which is intentional to create inclusivity, and being seen, but also can create feelings of continued surveillance. And this is what our study touched on a little bit, and the feeling of always being watched and perceived as a loner or alone, and not just being able to sit comfortably in those feelings. So, in the school, we studied the Specialised Assistance School for Youth, which I’ll go by as SASY. They have designated Zen Dens.

(19:32):

And in these spaces, you can control the lights if they’re on or off, also there’s weighted blankets, pillows, and these are retreat spaces for young people to go to be alone, or to retreat when they’re feeling isolated. They’re kind of tucked away from the areas where young people gathered in the café area. So, you’re not being perceived as going to these spaces, or your friends can see you in these spaces, which I think were really positives. And the young people talked about these spaces as really beneficial to their learning and to their connection as well.

Ben (Guest) (20:06):

It’s a really good point, I’m so glad you talked about those, because the contrasting experience I remember in another focus group we had was people talking about going to see a counsellor or something in the school, and that experience of the going, to having to cross the school, cross a yard potentially where there’s people who are playing and being visible in that sense, it’s the surveillance piece that you were talking about, then going to the other end of the schools or the distance, and then having to sit outside the office and wait your turn, and you’re in a corridor, and everyone’s walking past. So, there’s this element of surveillance and attention and stigma that goes with that about going to seek help, and so this intent and need for help and the resources is there, but just the process or where it’s located can make a huge difference.

Nadia (Host) (20:50):

And something really for schools or education spaces to think about when they’re planning these best of intentions to create these safe spaces for the young people, it’s even thinking about where you’re actually physically placing that safe space, and the journey to and from that safe space. In the study, I noted that some of the young people were talking about having a youth worker that just gets them.

Ben (Guest) (21:11):

Yeah.

Nadia (Host) (21:12):

And I just really, I loved that and could feel that through the study, how important that was for them to just have a grown up, an adult, in that space that just gets them. And so, I wanted to ask you, how important is it for young people to have grownups that get them in their school setting?

Ben (Guest) (21:30):

There’s a couple of different things I’m thinking about. One is this conversation, really, I hope, shows some of the constraints and limitations that schools have to work with. So, you’re thinking about where the counselor’s office is, that’s a design thing, like the layout of the school, and you may not be able to fix that really easily in a existing school layer, that’s why we’re really lucky to work with a school like SASY because they have a very unique space that they work in, and they’ve had the opportunity to refurbish the space and particularly focus on those needs. But similarly, they’ve got a really important emphasis on wellbeing as important as curriculum in their school. And so, their school has really high ratios of youth work, wellbeing staff to students. And so, they, again, have really intentionally designed that, and then that’s something that’s about the system and the structure of the school of the institution.

(22:20):

And as a sociologist, that’s what I’m really interested in. But that I think investment shows how important those relationships are, how wellbeing isn’t just for learning, it’s a thing for itself. We should value wellbeing, and to do that, you can give lots of investment and support for those young people. There’s an idea in youth work training back when I was doing that, that you would think about the number of significant adults that a young person had in their lives, and there was a bit of popular wisdom not necessarily like evidence-based, where we would say, every young person should have five significant adults who thinks the world of them in their life, who no matter what their circumstance, they’ll always have this unconditional positive regard. Whether there’s five or four, I don’t think it really matters, but it’s that task of going, well, who are the significant adults that somebody has?

(23:05):

And maybe parents, and if they’re lucky, they might have two of those, and maybe some extended family, but that’s where teachers or youth workers or a sports coach or somebody else in their community who’s a significant adult is really important to have that unconditional positive regard for them. So, yeah, it is really important, and that story and paper does show that it offsets some of the negativity that comes with bullying and loneliness. That young person was talking about an experience where they recently were bullied, and felt lonely as a result of that, but then there was this youth worker. And it’s not like it fixes all the problems, but the young person said it definitely made life better.

Amber (Guest) (23:41):

I think there are really strong quotes in the paper, and there’s a good juxtaposition there of the youth worker that gets me and an overall great human being, and then also not liking teachers at previous experiences that would talk down on me and I feel like a toddler. So, I guess that relationship of seeing the young person as a person is really important. The relationship built on trust, and honesty, and respect, and that mutual trust and respect as well is really important for young people to build social connections with an adult, but also build those skills, make good connections with their peers as well.

Nadia (Host) (24:20):

Thank you for listening to part one of this episode, and thank you to Amber, Ben, and you, our listeners, for joining us. Please join us for part two of this episode, where we’ll talk more with Amber and Ben about their findings, and steps both families and practitioners can take to support young people. So, I hope you can join us again for the second half of the conversation soon. Bye for now.

Narrator (24:43):

Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.Au/families for a wide range of free information and resources to help support child and family mental health. Emerging Minds leads the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health. The National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care, under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.