Misconceptions, Stigma and the Complexity of Loneliness: A conversation with Dr Eric Schoenmakers

Loneliness has become one of the most talked-about topics in psychology and public health, yet it remains deeply misunderstood. Is loneliness simply the same as being alone? Does loneliness look different at 20 than it does at 70, or is the experience more universal than we think? And at what point does a normal human experience become something more concerning?

In this edition of Conversations on Psychology, I spoke with Dr Eric Schoenmakers, a loneliness researcher whose work focuses on how we understand, talk about, and respond to loneliness across the lifespan. Rather than a formal Q&A, we wanted this to feel like what it was: two researchers thinking out loud together. We talked about the myths that still cling to loneliness, why it remains so hard to admit, and whether our growing public conversation is helping or quietly making things worse. Eric brought both intellectual rigor and a candidly human perspective to a subject that is too often flattened into statistics.

Ceyda Kiyak: My first question is very general. What is the most common misunderstanding about loneliness, not just among the general public, but one that even researchers and clinicians sometimes get wrong?

Eric Schoenmakers: There are several. One that's still very common is the idea that loneliness mostly concerns older adults and not other age groups. That may be shifting a little, now we hear about older and younger adults, but if you look at the statistics, a large percentage of people of all ages feel lonely. So that's one.

Then there's the cultural assumption: that people from Northern, Western European and US countries feel lonely more often because of individualism, while people from more collective cultures feel it less. That stereotype is still going around, but the picture is more complicated, some studies actually find higher loneliness in more collectivist regions, not less.

And then, of course, the big one: that loneliness is the same as social isolation.

Ceyda: Do you think researchers hold these misconceptions too?

Eric: Mostly it's the general audience. Researchers who have been in the field a long time will know better. But because loneliness is a popular topic, a lot of researchers enter the field only briefly, and the misconceptions tend to fade the longer you stay in it, which makes sense.

What I'd add about researchers is that our funding often steers us. There's simply more money for studying loneliness in young adults and older adults than in other age groups. So, in a way we end up reinforcing the very stereotype, through the funding we receive and the projects we run.

Ceyda: Let's take that last misconception, that loneliness is the same as social isolation. How would you define the difference for someone who doesn't study this?

Eric: The easiest way to put it, though it may not be a complete distinction, is that social isolation is an objective state: you are alone, or more or less alone. Loneliness is a feeling: you feel alone, which can happen even in a group.

Going deeper, in my studies, and especially in interviews, many people feel lonely when they're in a group, or with people they don't really connect with, not necessarily when they're physically alone. In fact, a lot of people who feel lonely in a group will go looking for a place to be alone, in order to cope with the loneliness that being in that group causes them.

Ceyda: So, if social isolation is objective and loneliness is subjective, how do you define loneliness itself?

Eric: Almost the way you just did, it's a subjective state, a feeling. I personally like the more cognitive, psychological framing: loneliness is the gap between the relationships you have and the relationships you want at that moment. It's not really a conscious, cognitive effort, you're not deliberately calculating that you want a certain relationship or a certain number of them. But understanding loneliness as being about a relationship standard you hold is an important addition.

Ceyda: I think that's well put. There's a language dimension too, in some languages it's genuinely hard to separate loneliness, aloneness, solitude, and social contact. But setting the operational definition aside: you said loneliness is a hot topic. So why is it still so hard for people to openly admit? We don't often hear someone say, "I'm feeling lonely”.

Eric: I think it's because we don't want to be lonely. It's stigmatised partly because it's stigmatised, that sounds circular, and it's a hard question. But I think people feel they should be ashamed, or that they should blame themselves for feeling lonely, so they don't say it.

That's one part. The other part is communication. A lot of people have probably tried to talk about their loneliness and got a negative or awkward response from someone who wasn't able to receive it well. Communication is a two-sided issue, the person who feels lonely, and the person on the receiving end.

And then there's the media, government language, and even researchers, all emphasising the "epidemic" or "pandemic" of loneliness. Everywhere you read, it's this very negative thing. Loneliness is a negative feeling, but it's also a very human one. I think it would be easier to talk about if we communicated more that it's a basic human feeling, instead of always emphasising the problem.

Ceyda: Do you think people also take responsibility for feeling lonely, as if it's a personal failure? Because we misunderstand the definition. People assume loneliness means "not having friends," but that's not true. You can have friends, you can be married and still feel lonely. Does that misconception make people think, "If I feel lonely, it's because I couldn't make friends, so it's on me, and I shouldn't say it out loud"?

Eric: I think you're right that it's a perceived failure of yourself. But while you were talking, I realised there's another side. If I were to talk about my loneliness, it would be with someone in my direct environment, my partner, my best friend, my parents. And if I tell them I feel lonely, it might be perceived as blaming them. So, one way it's "I am failing myself," and the other way the listener thinks, "If you feel lonely, maybe I'm doing something wrong." And we want to protect the people we hold dear.

Ceyda: That's a really interesting point. That points to a paradox, though. The people we'd most naturally open up to are the close relationships we already have, so how does someone end up lonely while having them?

Eric: It makes sense, but it's not entirely true. If I feel lonely because I'm missing a particular relationship or even a specific type of interaction with that particular person, I can still tell another relationship about it. And sometimes we do. There are windows where we can talk about it. The easiest example is loss: when someone you love dies, or after a divorce, you can go to a friend or neighbour and say, "I really miss this person, I feel lonely." That can help you cope, even though it doesn't solve the loneliness, because the person you're talking to isn't the person you're missing.

But for a more generic, general feeling of "I feel lonely," if I said that to you, you might think, "I'm probably doing something wrong, otherwise Eric wouldn't feel lonely." And that doesn't make these conversations any easier.

Ceyda: You mentioned the role of media and government in stigmatising loneliness. Do you think the current public conversation is reducing stigma, or unintentionally reinforcing it?

Eric: Maybe both. And going back to your earlier question, admitting to yourself that you're lonely, saying it out loud, does something to your self-image and to the feeling itself. So, staying quiet can be a kind of self-preservation.

On the media, it's genuinely difficult because there's so much of it. I think multiple things might be happening at once. There's still the health-news angle, new percentages, "we have a loneliness epidemic", which is valuable information but never helps break the stigma. Then on a more personal level, often on social media but also in regular media, there's a group of people who are owning loneliness, almost an emancipation movement, normalising it, or naming it as problematic but not as something shameful.

I don't think we should normalise all loneliness, though. Loneliness is a normal feeling, but feeling severely, intensely lonely can be genuinely problematic, and we shouldn't downplay that. So, we have to be careful. On balance, compared to before COVID-19, at least we're having the conversation now. As a society, we're a bit more open about loneliness and mental health, and that benefits some people, while others might lose themselves in being too open. It's very personal what a given message does to you.

Ceyda: That raises a question: where does loneliness stop being a normal experience that we all go through, and start being problematic? How do we decide?

Eric: That's an ongoing debate in the science. In a subjective, unspecific way, I'd say it becomes problematic when loneliness starts hindering or limiting the rest of your life. If you stop doing the social things you'd otherwise do, start caring less about yourself, eat less healthily, stop exercising, if it changes your behaviour in a negative way, that's when it's tipping over. Of course, eating unhealthily once, or skipping exercise for a week, isn't a problem in itself. But it can be the start of something going wrong.

Ceyda: So, it's similar to how we think about other mental health conditions, it's normal to feel down sometimes, but it becomes a clinical concern when it disrupts daily life: sleep, appetite, and so on. There's also the distinction between transient, situational loneliness and chronic loneliness. Is it right to think transient loneliness, like the loneliness of mourning, is a normal experience, and that the health problems we associate with loneliness come specifically from the chronic kind?

Eric: We don't fully know, it hasn't been completely studied. But my gut feeling is that "transient" and "chronic" are slippery definitions, just like "problematic" and "not problematic." How long does a mourning period last before it counts as chronic? If transient loneliness is very intense, I think it can be just as problematic as chronic loneliness. And chronic loneliness isn't necessarily problematic. Sometimes people feel lonely for a long time but cope with that feeling well and keep doing everything they'd normally do. So, to keep it simple: yes, the longer loneliness lasts, the more likely it is to become problematic, but it doesn't have to. And very intense loneliness over a short period can be problematic too.

Ceyda: In trauma therapy, grief is typically understood as a normal human response to loss, something that does not necessarily require treatment, but may benefit from support. We also know that loneliness appears to serve an adaptive, evolutionary function, acting as a signal that motivates us to reconnect with others. So I find myself wondering: can loneliness ever be considered as a normal and even valuable part of human experience rather than simply a problem to be solved?

Eric: That's probably exactly how it works. In your example, at the start you still have opportunities to act on the feeling, it's helping you adapt faster, make new connections, fill the gap. But take the mourning example: if you lose your partner, there are plenty of ways to adapt, but none that truly fills that gap. So, you may end up with a chronic loneliness of missing that one person, and yet it doesn't have to become maladaptive, because you may still have other quality-of-life aspects supporting you.

People are complex. Someone can feel lonely in one specific part of their life and be fine otherwise. I've met students who say, "I feel perfectly happy, but I'd really like a romantic relationship, and I can't find the right person." For them, that's a real loneliness, but it doesn't make them change their behaviour in unhealthy ways. It's not optimal, but it's perfectly liveable.

Ceyda: Your example points to something paradoxical. If loneliness is so common, why does it feel so isolating to express? How can there be so many lonely people, all struggling to talk about it?

Eric: That's the big question. In any Western society that measures it, you'll find roughly 30 to 50 percent of people feel lonely at a given point in time. And loneliness is episodic, so the lifetime figure must be close to 100 percent. Almost everyone has felt lonely to some degree, at some point.

So why is it so isolating? We all understand the feeling. Even if you haven't experienced it strongly yourself, you've seen it in films, heard it in music, encountered it across the arts. Maybe it's simply inherent to the feeling, loneliness is an isolating feeling, and that makes it hard to share. The taboo plays into that. But it would really help if we were more open about it instead of pushing it away.

Ceyda: Going back to your student who wants a romantic relationship, can you say a bit about the different dimensions of loneliness? As far as I know there's social, emotional, collective, and existential. Your student sounds happy in their social life, so it's not social loneliness, but they're missing a close connection, emotional loneliness.

Eric: It's even more specific. They do have parents and close friends, so it's not missing closeness in general, it's missing one particular kind of close connection. Back in the late '90s or early 2000s there was a paper that distinguished romantic loneliness, which was seen as a dimension of emotional loneliness. It has a sexual component and a touch element. We often think of loneliness as missing someone to talk to or do nice things with, but there's also the loneliness of not having someone to touch.

Ceyda: Physical closeness.

Eric: Physical closeness, both sexual and non-sexual. And again, everyone has different relationship standards: a hug might be very important to person A and not at all to person B. There's also research describing cultural loneliness, not understanding the culture you're in, missing your own culture. Often that's national, but it can be a subculture too, like a socio-economic one.

And here's the thing: as scientists we love to group and categorise, it helps us make sense of the world. But for the individual, it's almost always more complicated than the boxes we use. I tend to say in lectures that we have as many types of loneliness as we have lonely individuals. Categories are useful, but they're a model, not the full reality.

Ceyda: That makes me think about digital solutions, and not only romantic ones. There are friendship and dating apps, many of them run by behavioural scientists, people with PhDs in psychology, some who studied loneliness or relationships. There's heavy investment in digital solutions. But do they actually help, or do people get lost in an algorithmic paradox that deepens their loneliness?

Eric: I think both. If you use a digital platform in a way that helps you, and you're someone who can handle the complexity that may come with it, being ignored, being disappointed by others, then it can help. If you struggle with that, it can be counterproductive. But that's true of real, non-digital life as well: our relationships are sometimes helpful and nice, sometimes not, and the question is whether you can cope when they're not.

The other big question is how much of loneliness is societal and how much is psychological. I think everything passes through the lens of the individual. If you have the resources to cope with what comes your way, you'll mostly be fine; if you have less to draw on, it depends on what arrives and whether you can carry that load.

The digital world has genuinely beautiful aspects: for me for instance it's easy to reach people across the globe and have conversations about loneliness while in different countries. But it offers the same easy access to negative conversations and experiences. Maybe real life has more protective mechanisms, it might be easier to walk away in person than online. Maybe. I'm not sure.

Ceyda: That makes me think about loneliness interventions more broadly. What do you think we're missing in current interventions?

Eric: What we call loneliness interventions are often just activities, no detailed plan, community-organised, volunteers doing something for others. Those are important, but more from a social cohesion perspective: we need a strong society with strong relationships. But people who actually feel lonely usually need more. Lonely people don't want to be lonely, they want out. If it were as simple as joining a club or attending one meeting, they'd have solved it already.

So those activities are genuinely valuable for preventing loneliness, if I think I might become lonely, they can help. But if I'm already lonely, already in that problematic, chronic phase, I'd probably need someone to help me really understand the problem first, and then, if possible, find a solution. And "solution" doesn't only mean removing the problem, it can also mean learning to cope with it and accepting it as part of my life.

Ceyda: Looking ahead, two questions. Why have we started talking about loneliness more and more? And what should researchers and clinicians focus on next?

Eric: I don't think we talk about it more because there are more lonely people, the numbers don't show that, with COVID-19 as the exception; we had a peak there. The pandemic explains part of it: many of us experienced loneliness, and there was less taboo around naming that particular kind.

Another part is simply that we're spending more time studying it, making policy, writing about it. The more attention we give it, the more we have to say, and the more it enters public discourse. And from a policy angle, all that research has shown the societal costs of loneliness, in health, but also in participation, which is a powerful reason for policymakers to care. Once policy engages, it filters into communities. I don't think talking more is a problem, it depends how we talk and what we say. I hope we're in a transition where it's becoming more normal to feel lonely and to say so. That may take a while, and it may feel awkward now with so many outlets discussing it. But ultimately, it's good that we can talk about loneliness, both its very negative sides and its human side.

For clinicians, this is helpful. If you see clients, you're often confronted with people who feel lonely but don't come because of loneliness, they come anxious or depressed, with loneliness underneath. It really helps if people are more open to discussing that part of their lives, so the clinician doesn't have to break the taboo first. And for researchers, I see so many wonderful new people going into specific loneliness questions that weren't even asked ten or twenty years ago. Having the opportunity to study all of that is just great, and it exists because society is paying attention.

Ceyda: That's been incredibly insightful, Eric, thank you. I see real value in talking about loneliness more and more, as long as it's done well: not only to show policymakers and the public the prevalence and say "something is going on," but it also helps to reduce stigma, normalise the feeling without over-pathologising it, and move toward actual solutions, not just befriending services. Your answers have left me with even more questions, which is the beauty of science.

Eric: Thank you, and it helps me too. I once wrote a paper about talking about loneliness, and one of the main conclusions was that voicing your feelings and opinions makes you think about things differently. The same applies here: talking to you, trying to structure my thoughts in a language that isn't my native one, gives me a different thought pattern. That's valuable. So, thank you. For further reading: WHY AND HOW TO TALK ABOUT LONELINESS | Journal of Social Intervention: Theory and Practice