How Loneliness Can Affect Your Health

876 Words2 Pages

Loneliness is the feeling of one having oneself and no one else. It is an extremely common feeling, and with many people it comes and passes through stages of life. However, the effects of this recurrent sensation are more threatening to people’s health than most realize. The ABC News article “How Loneliness Can Affect your Health,” written by Hallie Levine, claims that loneliness can affect people’s physical and mental health in an extremely negative way. It can cause severe depression, it can weaken the immune system, and loneliness can even make a person more at risk of heart disease (Levine). There are professional scientific journal articles that were also written regarding the possible consequences of loneliness *transition to paper* …show more content…

This article explains an experiment done after a community bushfire disaster. The citizens who participated were first checked for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Baker). Then, the participants were asked to nominate people in the community with whom they felt close (Baker). These nominations were used to produce a social network map that displayed who certain participants nominated and who nominated them (Baker). The map was used to observe the relationship between mental health and social connections (Baker). The data represented that the odds of depression were higher if participants had fewer connections; in other words, the lonelier a person was, the higher the risk of depression he or she had (Baker). The findings also showed that PTSD was higher in a person if he or she was nominated by fewer people (Baker). Again, the lonelier a person was, the more likely that person was to exhibit mental issues. Granted, this experiment was done on a smaller scale compared to the ABC article and focuses on people who have gone through a community disaster. However, the results verify ABC in the conclusion that loneliness has a harmful impact on a person’s mental …show more content…

The purpose of this study was to find “…whether social participation and loneliness predicted health service use,” (McArthur). Nine hundred fifty-four participants went through an in-person interview before their health and social participation were tracked for the next two and a half years (McArthur). At the end of the time frame, the health and social data were analyzed for a correlation between health visits and loneliness (McArthur). It was concluded that the participants who were hospitalized over the two and a half years had an increased chance of re-hospitalization if they were lonely (McArthur). Another conclusion shown in the results was that greater social participation resulted in a lower chance of being put in the hospital for long periods of time (McArthur). It is acknowledged that the results of nine hundred fifty-four people cannot represent all people, so there is a gap between this research and the universal claim made by the ABC article. Nevertheless, both articles support the idea that loneliness has a negative effect on people’s

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