The Interface of Loneliness, Hospitalization and Illness by Ami Rokach in Psychology and Psychotherapy: Research Study
This article reviews the experience of loneliness and how it is influenced, and influences, the ill person and the hospitalized individual. Social ties enhance the immune system and help individuals cope with stress and illness. Loneliness has physical, emotional, and cognitive negative effects. Loneliness, which can involve both excruciating physical and mental suffering, is an ancient nemesis. Loneliness is implicated in numerous somatic, psychosomatic, and psychiatric diseases [1]. It is a mundane yet arcane human affliction that is often hazardous to health and hostile to happiness [2]. In this article, I review the experience of loneliness as it affects us when we are not doing well, such as when we are ill or hospitalized.
Sullivan [3] observed that, “For the past 200 years, medicine has pursued the positivist goal of erasing the subject from medical perception. A fully objective view of disease was made possible when the autopsy was integrated into clinical medicine through clinico-pathological correlation...The observed body became the project of modern medicine” (p. 1596). An autopsy is done not for the deceased’s sake but for the disease’s and the cure’s sake. Death has provided medicine with a clear “enemy.” Medical research has focused on conquering death-causing diseases. That goal gave medicine social prestige and almost unending funds. Physicians are perceived as possessing supernatural abilities in their fight against serious diseases and death [3]. It is only lately that are we becoming more aware of the importance of considering who the patient is. Mijuskovic [4] maintained that No one is completely selfsufficient and, thus, could not exist without the society in which he lives, and that his happiness is closely related to the community to which he belongs. Loneliness is a universal experience shared by all humans. Being a uniquely subjective experience, it is caused by the individual’s personality, environmental and social changes, and his history [5]. That history includes, of course, the illnesses and the cultural context of those illnesses that one may have been afflicted with.
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