A mountain of research has linked loneliness to an increased risk of dementia, depression, anxiety, heart disease, stroke and early death.
Loneliness is officially a health emergency in California’s San Mateo County, which is located in the San Francisco Bay Area and includes part of Silicon Valley.
The county’s Board of Supervisors passed a resolution on Tuesday that declared loneliness a public health crisis and pledged to explore measures that promote social connection in the community.
It’s the first county in the U.S. to make such a declaration.
I don’t understand why everyone is saying that loneliness is an epidemic and yet nobody is trying to develop solutions for it.
If it were up to me, I would give funding to social psychologists to have them develop social programs to reduce loneliness. I’m talking about programs that actually get strangers together physically, on a regular basis, to help them form real friendships and communities. (Like Meetup.com, but more structured and more effective.) There are lots of different ways this could be approached, and I wish researchers would start running some experiments to see what works.