The French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, was wrong. Hell is not other people, but the lack thereof. Social isolation and the resultant loneliness are more lethal than smoking 15 cigarettes a day or obesity, according to research published by Brigham Young University. Some researchers even say that loneliness increases heart disease, dementia and death rates. The pandemic has turned a bad situation worse, with some studies showing as much as a 90 per cent rise in loneliness globally. Public health experts in many countries have been debating how to address the “loneliness epidemic” that confronts and corrodes modern life. Japan, where suicide rates shot up precariously during the pandemic, has now appointed a Loneliness Minister, following in the footsteps of the United Kingdom, which in 2018 became the first country to create a similar cabinet position. This is a welcome move: a ministry of loneliness should accord gravity to a mental health concern. But the British experience also shows that ministering loneliness can be a rather lonely occupation with tokenism triumphing over meaningful policy — the unwillingness to implement the suggestions offered by Britain’s loneliness ministry since its inception is indicative of a deeper, troubling institutional and public apathy.

In order to fully comprehend the depth of the crisis, the question that needs to be asked is why do so many people feel isolated at a time when human company, apparently, is a mouse-click away? The emergence of technology promising to connect the world and end social isolation has — ironically — achieved the opposite result, shutting people into the private, soulless, yet all-consuming cocoons powered by handheld devices. A second reason for the uptick in social isolation, research suggests, can be attributed to the broader social churning. The Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness found that the social conditions that allow loneliness to proliferate — the decline of the State’s commitment to the collective and the fraying of ties within community and family — aggravate deviance, violence as well as ennui. Cox, the British parliamentarian after whom the Commission was founded, was killed by an assailant who exhibited all the signs of loneliness-induced mental health ailments. Such transgressions can no longer be ignored. Research by the University of California found that lonely males are prone to hostility and adversarial views.

This perhaps explains the flurry of measures undertaken by governments around the world to confront the social malaise of loneliness. These include programmes that encourage conversation, friendship, and empathy: the founding of community allotments where the lonely might gather, knock-on-door initiatives with volunteers reaching out to those who believe they have been forsaken, exchange programmes between schools and colleges and old-age homes. India, where chronic loneliness is rising not only among the aged but also the youth, must study these templates of intervention to design effective, compassionate models that are likely to be efficient under Indian conditions. Otherwise, the country, in spite of its populousness, would have to confront a different version of Sartre’s Hell.