Loneliness and depression among elderly adults are both strongly associated with a desire to die, according to new research from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) at Trinity College Dublin.
However, the study – which was based on responses from over 8,000 adults – also found that attendance of religious services was an “important protective behaviour” against suicidal thoughts.
Published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Public Health, the paper, ‘Social disconnection correlates of a “Wish to Die” among a large community-dwelling cohort of older adults’ sought to explore the relationship between a ‘Wish to Die’ (WTD) and “social disconnection,” an association that the authors describe as “well-established”.
The ‘Wish to Die’, which involves wishes for one’s own death or thoughts that one would be better off dead, is a commonly used indicator to capture ‘death ideation’, the authors note in the introduction, adding that it has been shown to be as predictive as active ideation of a future suicide attempt.
Research indicates that in Europe, 12% of older adults reported current WTD, while 3% of Irish adults reported WTD in the month before the interview took place.
While previous research has identified both loneliness (described as the subjective assessment of an individual’s satisfaction with the quality of their social relationships) and social isolation (described as the objective measure or count of an individual’s social contacts) as risk factors for suicidal ideation, the new findings indicate that loneliness is the more important factor of the two.
The connection between loneliness and WTD was found to remain strong even after controlling for other “markers” of social disconnection, such as depression.
This comes after an EU-wide survey found in 2022 that loneliness was most prevalent in Ireland, with over 20% of respondents on that occasion describing themselves as feeling lonely, followed be Luxemburg, Bulgaria and Greece follow. The lowest levels of loneliness were observed in the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Croatia and Austria.
Religious attendance was found to have a “strong protective role” which may make it a suitable “coping strategy” for elderly adults. However, the study noted that it was unclear whether it was the “spiritual or the social aspect of attending church that provides” the coping mechanism.
“If it is the sociality rather than the spirituality of attending church regularly that is more important, then social activities not only those associated with religious practice may be a more attractive proposition, particularly if the current trend of increasing secularity continue,” it reads.
“While attendance at religious attendance is provided here as an example of a beneficial prosocial activity, there are of course numerous examples of secular prosocial activities. Given the strength of the association between loneliness and WTD, existing interventions to address the former may have the additional benefit of protecting against death ideation.”
Senior Research Fellow at TILDA and lead author of the paper, Dr Mark Ward, said that the researchers wanted to “pinpoint specific types of activities that could protect people against negative feelings like the Wish to Die, loneliness and depression”.
“Attending religious services came through as a really, really important protective factor, and far more powerful than other social activities that we considered such as volunteering,” Dr Ward said.
Other forms of intervention such as cognitive behavioural therapy are noted as potentially helping to alleviate “the burden of loneliness” by targeting depression and anxiety.
Previous TILDA research has also highlighted that those who take part in religious practices are less likely to get depression, see a slowing down of the ageing process and don’t die as early as people who don’t take part in religious services.
Principal investigator of TILDA, Professor Rose Anne Kenny said that there would be social utility in Churches reaching out to Ireland’s lonely elderly.
“We’ve certainly shown in Ireland that people who take part in religious practices are less likely to get depression. They seem to have a slowing down of the ageing process and they die later – they don’t die as early as people who don’t take part in religious services but also experience loneliness,” Professor Kenny told The Irish Catholic newspaper previously.
“Definitely religious services make a difference to social engagement. We’re not sure if it’s the spiritual effect or whether it’s the engaging with others and being involved in part of a community, because we are gregarious animals and we need other people”.