Article: Isolation, Loneliness, and COVID-19: Pandemic leads to sharp increase in mental health challenges, social woes

October 14, 2020 – As COVID-19 cases surge and public health officials plead with Canadians to stay home and minimize their contact with others whenever possible, a new study from the nonprofit Angus Reid Institute sheds light on the monumental shift in social behaviours in Canada this year and the corresponding effects it has had.

The Angus Reid Institute conducted an online survey from September 25 - 28, 2020 among a representative randomized sample of 1,845 Canadian adults who are members of Angus Reid Forum. This study, as with its predecessor in May of last year, sorts Canadians along two key dimensions: social isolation (or the number and frequency of interpersonal connections a person has) and loneliness (or their relative satisfaction with the quality of those connections), to recreate our Index on Loneliness and Social Isolation (ISLI)

To read the full report/results, click here.

The Angus Reid Institute (ARI) was founded in October 2014 by pollster and sociologist, Dr. Angus Reid. ARI is a national, not-for-profit, non-partisan public opinion research foundation established to advance education by commissioning, conducting and disseminating to the public accessible and impartial statistical data, research and policy analysis on economics, political science, philanthropy, public administration, domestic and international affairs and other socio-economic issues of importance to Canada and its world.