The Doctor’s Surgery
Studies show the lonely do suffer physically from stress
Hell, no doubt, is other people, but it is also, for many of us, the absence of other people. Loneliness is a wretched state, but one to which many of us are condemned by either temperament or circumstance.
I’ve often noticed when I wander in cemeteries that the wife (less often the husband) of the above did not long survive the above. Was this coincidence, or did the demise of the one bear a causal relation to the demise of the other?
On the other hand, there are those widows – rarely widowers – who the tombstones testify long survived their spouse. Were they merry widows or grieving Miss Havishams? Is there, in fact, a bimodal distribution of survival after spousal death: those who experience it as a liberation and those who regard it as but a purgatorial trial before their own death?
It has long been known that loneliness is not good for health or, at any rate, the lonely are not healthy. But is the relationship between loneliness and ill-health causative and, if so, in which direction? After all, abandonment of the ill is far from unknown: as every hospital visitor knows, the ill are not much fun and chronic complaining is rarely attractive.
A study in the journal Heart, which followed up several thousand people, aged on average 64, examined whether those who reported themselves to be lonely or socially isolated suffered more from cardiovascular disease (heart attacks, strokes and so on) than those who felt themselves to be neither lonely nor socially isolated.
I had supposed that loneliness and social isolation were more less coterminous, but they are not. Any person who, like me, detests parties and has nothing to say at them, knows very well what it is to be lonely in the midst of a crowd, while a walk on a moor gives rise to no feeling of loneliness. Social isolation, on the other hand, is an ascertainable fact. Loneliness is subjective – a question of ‘my truth’, as Ms Markle might put it.
The authors found, perhaps surprisingly, that feelings of loneliness, but not social isolation, were associated with an increased likelihood of cardiovascular disease. For those who felt lonely, the risk of a cardiovascular illness was raised by as much as 30 per cent, comparing the least lonely with the most lonely.
Needless to say, such a statistical relationship does not mean causation, even when the authors have done their best to control for other factors.
Human life is composed of a near-infinitude of factors. In any case, the study would have to be replicated – which almost certainly it never will be, at least not exactly – before its findings can be accepted as definitive.
But when authors have gone to immense pains to find a statistical association, they almost invariably proceed to explain why the association that they have found is causative.
In this case, the answer is the indispensable concept, stress. The lonely are peculiarly susceptible to it, and stress means illness.
I confess that these results were not altogether congenial to me, suggesting as they did that a feeling, objectively justified or not, had more effect on health than an objectively real situation.
Of course, the study was conducted on a generation who had not yet been fully socialised into a culture that regards self-pity as the highest form of compassion. But it bodes ill for years to come, when people will delight, if that is quite the word, in using their misery as a bottomless well – and also as an excuse for their failures and failings, and possibly as a source of income into the bargain.