March 28, 2024

Are you lonely tonight?

Songs about loneliness are legion and range from the soppy and sentimental, like Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” to the irony of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”. I’ve always been a sucker for Ralph McTell’s “The Streets of London”, with its piercing lyrics about homeless people in a big city. 

Perhaps the reason loneliness is such a potent theme is that we instinctively realise how dangerous it is. 

It turns out that loneliness is (a) a major social and health issue and (b) a widespread phenomenon. One US researcher has even estimated that it affects as many as 45% of retired Americans. This seems far too much, but the levels are certainly high. And since it increases the odds of an early death by 26%, I’d call it a challenge for bioethics. How can we heal the frayed and broken bonds of social cohesion?

A feature in this week’s JAMA examines the cost of loneliness – and the lack of solutions. We report on it below

Michael Cook
Have we found a new challenge for bioethics?
1509362040