Loneliness Awareness Week

It's Loneliness Awareness Week!

Created and hosted by Marmalade Trust, their annual campaign raises awareness of loneliness across the UK (and beyond!) and gets people talking about it.

Marmalade Trust is the UK’s leading loneliness charity offering support for all ages and the only charity in the world specifically dedicated to raising awareness of loneliness.

They launched Loneliness Awareness Week (‘LAW’) in 2017 and it grows in momentum each year. This year’s campaign, the 6th, welcomes not just the support they've come to recognise across the UK but has also received global traction in the US, Canada, Germany, and Australia!

Loneliness is a natural human emotion. We are hard-wired to need social connection. Feeling lonely is a useful prompt for us to look at how we can better meet our social needs.

What Marmalde Trust are doing this year

This year’s campaign takes place Monday 13th June - Friday 17th June 2022 and will be highlighting the many and varied instances when we feel lonely to normalise the feeling - from childhood, into adulthood and beyond - with their campaign:

’That Lonely Feeling’

#ThatLonelyFeeling

Why is it important?

Whilst we’re seeing an increase in discussion on the subject, stigma remains and there are some key misconceptions that still need to be challenged. Ask anyone to picture a lonely person and most will imagine an older person living on their own. As such, we often rebuke and dismiss feelings of loneliness because ‘that doesn’t apply to me’.

By identifying and acknowledging all the times that we have personally felt and experienced loneliness, we can start to change our viewpoint, accept it and understand how to take action to manage the feeling (and our social connections) in the future.