‘The invisible enemy’: disability, loneliness and isolation

By Stephen J Macdonald, Lesley Deacon, J. Nixon, Abisope Akintola, Anna Gillingham, J. Kent, Gillian Ellis, Debbie Mathews, A. Ismail, Sylvia Sullivan and 2 more. Disability & Society, 2018

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The aim of this article is to quantitatively explore the relationship between disability, emotional loneliness and social isolation. The data analysis presents a number of statistically significant findings which illustrate that disabled people (N = 250) were at increased risk of experiencing emotional loneliness and social isolation compared with the nondisabled group (N = 355). This study identifies a number of disabling barriers which result in this overrepresentation of disabled people. The study aims to move away from a pathological explanation of linking loneliness and social isolation to disability, in order to explain this occurrence from a barrier-based approach.

Subfields: Demography, Health, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/142fe4e0538428efa088ce7c7116dca3a66365c0