ArticleThe Journal of medicine and philosophy2024
Unshared Minds, Decaying Worlds: Towards a Pathology of Chronic Loneliness.
Article in The Journal of medicine and philosophy, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Social interactions between people of same and different generations shape longitudinal changes in interpersonal neural synchrony, loneliness, and social connection.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Toward a transdiagnostic modifier for clinically significant loneliness in psychiatry: a conceptual mini review.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Review
- Analysing comfort with primary care discussions and openness to social prescribing as mediators of the associations between loneliness and wellbeing among Canadians aged 55 and older.BMC primary care · 2025Article
- Evaluating Feasibility, Value and Characteristics of an Intergenerational Friendly Telephone Visit Program During the Covid-19 Pandemic.The American journal of geriatric psychiatry : official journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry · 2023Article
- Societal- and community-level strategies to improve social connectedness among older adults.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The moment when a person's actual relationships fall short of desired relationships is commonly identified as the etiological moment of chronic loneliness, which can lead to physical and psychological effects like depression, worse recovery from illness and increased mortality. But, this etiology fails to explain the nature and severe impact of loneliness. Here, we use philosophical analysis and neuroscience to show that human beings develop and maintain our world-picture (our sense of what is true, important, and good) through joint attention and action, motivated by friendship, in the Aristotelian sense of "other selves" who share a sense of the true and the good, and desire the good for each other as much as for themselves. The true etiological event of loneliness is the moment one's world-picture becomes unshared. The pathogenesis is a resultant decay of our world-picture, with brain and behavior changes following as sequelae.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.