Joyce Carol Vincent’s door was broken down in order to serve her an eviction notice. Instead, they found her corpse slumped on the sofa, with the light from the TV still flickering. By 2006, she had lain there for almost three years. Letters flooded the hallway and the presents she had just wrapped, for Christmas 2003, laid around her skeleton.

It is not clear how she died, but it is clear that it took three years for anyone to discover her death. A 38-year-old lady who had sisters, friends and former colleagues had been failed by her social circle and the wider society. Her flat was in a busy area of north London but no neighbours reported anything amiss.

Comment:

Joyce Carol Vincent’s story illustrates the social isolation condemned recently by Jeremy Hunt, the UK Heath Minister as a “national shame”. Loneliness is deadly in Western societies. So it makes sense that the government should seek to tackle isolation as a public-health priority but is a set-piece ministerial intervention – big speech, press releases, newspaper headlines – the way to tackle this issue? What actually changes after this speech? What has changed after such previous interventions?

Loneliness in western societies has many manifestations. Some children fail to look after their parents, abandoning them as they go in search of jobs or a better life abroad.

Now, loneliness also affects many young people. Surveys by the Mental Health Foundation suggest that young people are more likely to feel lonely than older people. Britain has seen a big rise in people living alone, from 17% of all households in 1971 to 31% now. Many have chosen this solo lifestyle. To what cost?

Added to a culture that exalts individualism, solo living breeds isolation and loneliness. The capitalist economic model prevalent in the West grants its winners all manner of economic freedoms, but it does so while weakening social bonds. People often move looking for work, or moving abroad to get a job, leaving friends and family behind. Facebook, twitter and skype can fill some of the gaps but is no substitute for friends and family in testing times.

This individualism has been exported around the world as other nations embrace the western economic model so even traditionally family-centred cultures like Japan and China have started to experience similar problems.

Islam’s emphasis on maintaining family ties, parents duties towards children and the high reward for those who care for elderly parents are enduring values which are the only antidote to the growing and deadly epidemic of loneliness – in an increasingly busy word.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by

Taji Mustafa

Media Representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain