Social Isolation, Loneliness, and Living Alone: Identifying the Risks for Public Health

The extraordinary rise of living alone is among the most significant social changes of the modern world. Consider that, until the middle of the 20th century, not a single society in the history of our species sustained large numbers of people living alone for long periods of time. Today, however, living alone is ubiquitous in developed, open societies, with one-person households accounting for more than 40% of all households in Scandinavian nations such as Sweden and Finland; more than one third of all households in France, Germany, and England; and more than one quarter of all households in the United States, Russia, Canada, Spain, and Japan.1 There's good reason to believe that this spike in living alone, and particularly aging alone, affects health and health care. But we don't yet have enough research to understand exactly how.