Social isolation is as significant to mortality rates as smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity and lack of physical exercise. Studies have show that people who are isolated but healthy are twice as likely to die over the period of a decade or so as others with the same health. Men are at more danger than women.
2. Man is experiencing a new loneliness; it is not in the face of a hostile nature which it has taken him centuries to subdue, but in an anonymous crowd which surrounds him and in which he feels himself a stranger. (Papal Writings, 14 May 1971).