A few years ago, a psychiatrist I was following said something along the lines of:

“Loneliness is the biggest risk factor for physical and mental health that we do not talk about. In medicine, we focus too much on the disease, like blood sugar levels, renal function, or CT scans, and ignore the person’s connection to others.

It is the greatest silent epidemic that medicine is doing nothing for.”

At the time, I found this statement hyperbolic. There are clear clinical benefits for investigating blood markers and imaging – these help prevent and treat a staggering amount of illnesses. In medical school, our exams revolve around being able to interpret and correlate these findings, which are often backed by strong clinical evidence. To say that loneliness was on par with this was, well… surely an exaggeration.

But over the years, my view on this has shifted. Search “loneliness” into pubmed and you will find hundreds of papers in the last year investigating the link between loneliness and health – and that’s physical health, not just mental health. Consider some of these statistics from the CDC:

• Social isolation significantly increased a person’s risk of premature death from all causes, a risk that may rival those of smoking, obesity, and physical inactivity.
• Social isolation was associated with about a 50% increased risk of dementia.
• Poor social relationships (characterised by social isolation or loneliness) was associated with a 29% increased risk of heart disease and a 32% increased risk of stroke.

This is in a context of 1 in 6 Australians experiencing loneliness (a statistic likely underreported), and increasing rates of loneliness in Australian youth aged 15-24 since 2012.

Anecdotally, I have found that patients admitted with few or no social supports tend to have poorer outcomes compared to those with strong, supportive networks. This has manifested in sudden deteriorations or passings that were unexpected. Too often for coincidence.

So a few years on, I think this psychiatrist was onto something. Loneliness is most definitely a crisis. And it is the role of modern medicine to recognise this and intervene, similar to how we would treat a broken femur, or an infected lung: compassionately, alongside patient wishes, and urgently.