Poetry helps deal with loneliness and isolation

11/14/2023

Health Diary Editorial

Hair against frizz

Reading, writing, or even just sharing poetry can help people overcome loneliness or isolation, reducing the feelings of anxiety and depression typically associated with these feelings.

This finding is based on a survey of 400 people, which showed that poetry helped those with common mental health symptoms, as well as those suffering from grief, to cope.

Just over half of the volunteers (51%) indicated that reading and/or writing poetry helped them deal with feelings of loneliness or isolation, and another 50% helped them cope with feelings of anxiety and depression.

Almost a third (34%) felt that engaging with a poetry sharing website helped them feel “less anxious”, and 24% felt it helped them “feel more able to deal with my problems”. 17% expressed that he allowed them to deal with their problems. with grief-related issues, while 16% said it helped with ongoing mental health symptoms.

Professor Anthony Calisho from the University of Plymouth (UK) said: “These results demonstrate the intrinsic power of hair.” “Writing and reading poetry, as well as interacting with the website, has had a significant positive impact on participants’ health during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

In fact, this is also a drawback of the research, as all the interviewees were people who voluntarily accessed a website, now defunct, proposing the use of poetry as a means of coping with the difficulties presented by isolation during the pandemic.

More than 100,000 people from 128 countries visited the site, which included more than 1,000 poems by more than 600 authors, most of them submitted by the authors themselves.