College, especially a huge school like UCLA, can feel really isolating. In high school, you’re used to seeing your friends every day and knowing every second of their lives. However, in college, everyone is doing different activities, jobs and classes and there’s much less common ground to bond over (or even physically to be together on). You’re put (sometimes) far away from home with people you have never met, but you want to have friends and do fun things so you latch on to friends in a less critical way than maybe you did in high school. It feels harder to be picky about who you let into your inner circle for so many reasons — you’re still figuring out who you are, what you want and how the people around you contribute to that. You also just don’t know everyone, so you don’t know the possibilities of who you could know and the activities you could be doing.
During the late 1970s, UCLA researchers, mostly due to the prior lack of effective and simple assessments of loneliness spread and intensity, developed a method of quantifying loneliness. Their questionnaire included twenty “Often, Sometimes, Rarely, Never” prompts investigating participants’ feelings about existing around other people, spending time alone and the quality of their social relationships, among others. The test has since been revised, as the language of the study was slightly unclear and not effective for some of the participants, and provides for more nuance. For example, a prompt in the original test, “I lack companionship,” was modified to ask “How often do you feel you can find companionship when you want it?” Many forget that some of us love being alone and it gives the participant more agency and responsibility in the scenarios provided by the test.
I find it a bit funny that UCLA developed and bettered this test to gauge loneliness and put the effort into the exploration of mental health only to be so sorely lacking in its delivery to students in practice. Getting extensions or exceptions in classes is a long process that isn’t always effective and there seems to be very little sensitivity in the said process toward a student having a mental health crisis. One’s mental health is not stagnant, it’s ever-changing and it feels quite defeating to plead your case, with letters of support from doctors and professionals, to the school only to be told that an exception granted to you on the grounds of medication-induced difficulties (that are out of your control) will be a one-time-only scenario with seemingly no tolerance for any future situation that could arise. It is isolating to feel that you cannot ask for help or leeway in a debilitating situation, and in such a large school, being proactive and having access to assistance from TAs, professors, counselors, etc. is often a huge part of a student’s success. I know it has been a game-changer for me.
I originally set out to write an article surveying peers according to UCLA’s loneliness scale. However, upon reading about the tests, both the original and revised, I realized something bigger. Researchers right on campus acknowledged the correlation between loneliness and depression, and the proclivity for loneliness that students surveyed presented, but sufficient support for student mental health never became a priority. That was compelling to me but also made me look more critically at the ways the university has isolated me and my peers across multiple scenarios. It may also be time for me to do a deeper dive into every resource available and develop a new conclusion based on those findings.