Industry Voices—Let's Treat Loneliness Like Other Public Health Crises

Fierce Healthcare | By Kyu Rhee, Tom Insel, Dan Russell, Dena Bravata, Boaz Gaon
 
A silent and grossly underserved epidemic of loneliness is affecting 60% of all Americans including 75% of young adults and 40% of older adults—influencing and complicating mental health disorders, physical health disorders, adherence to treatment and increasing hospitalizations.
 
The U.S. Surgeon General, in a recently published and widely discussed “Advisory on our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation”, has stated that “we must prioritize building social connection the same way we have prioritized other critical public health issues such as tobacco, obesity, and substance use disorders.”
 
Numerous experts have called attention to our loneliness epidemic, describing its negative health impact as similar to “smoking 15 cigarettes a day”. It is time for a systematic approach to address the loneliness epidemic that is crippling US healthcare as well as the quality and health of human relationships in America.

A crucial and pressing step toward achieving this goal is universal screening for loneliness. 
What is loneliness?   
 
Social isolation is the objective lack of interaction with others (as happens when people live alone). Loneliness is similar but refers to the subjective feeling of being alone or the gap between one’s expectations of the quantity or quality of relationships and what is actually experienced.
 
In other words, loneliness is a “subjective feeling that the human connections we need in our life exceed the human connections we have." These feelings, as well as comorbid stress, anxiety and depression, have intensified even as the rates of COVID-19 detections have receded.
 
The “Big Resignation” did not start with COVID-19 and has not slowed down since nor has the adoption of social networks and media that over the past two decades have changed how humans connect and engage with each other. 
 
When the Pew Research Center began tracking social media adoption in 2005, just 5% of American adults used at least one of these platforms. By 2011 that share had risen to half of all Americans, and in 2021 72% of Americans reported using some type of social media. Ad-driven social media sites have made it infinitely easier to create new “human” connections — but research has shown that adults with high social media use seem to feel more socially isolated than their counterparts with lower social media use.
 
We are all connected it seems—and yet, we are more disconnected than ever.  

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