Across the world, loneliness tends to increase after midlife. But for reasons that aren’t altogether clear, the United States is an outlier, with loneliness steadily decreasing from the middle to later years of life, researchers report April 22 in Aging and Mental Health.
Most attention and policies addressing loneliness in the United States target the elderly or, recently, teens and young adults, whose rates of mental health problems have surged. “Middle-aged adults really have been a neglected population,” says Robin Richardson, a social and psychiatric epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta. And that leaves them vulnerable to mental and physical health problems associated with loneliness, including cognitive decline, reduced