Background:
Sometimes thoughts hovers around my round head that what if the time comes when in my state i am totally left alone with neuronal brain along with all the brains of semiconductor chips? As i feel i am man of faith, critical thinking, love, freedom,respect, compassion and loneliness.I find the complications of feelings, sense of individuality, existence of God etc and which obviously differs with those having wired brains.
In the recent times of World many among us might have almost felt the hypothetical question in real. To be honest, i personally can say that i was/am more surrounded by the man made devices than those living social individuals driven by AI. This has definitely changed our attitude of living , changed our gestures on social adhesion also made us more reliant on the virtual world and more like a showoff person. I am not a committed health freak person but i try to be healthy with sound mind having the criteria like emotions, social, mental, spiritual being fulfilled. Many of us looks into mirror and search for abs but at the outset we skip morning workout in the greedy of few extra minutes of sleep. Me being in the age group of early adult could hardly achieve anything of those criteria so preferably i assume that most of us with varied age definitely suffers from the same cause.
Introduction to the impact of new age of IT:
Not many days back i was sitting in the balcony of my hostel room enjoying the scenic beauty of nature along with my tweeter feed being open in my gadget.I saw an article from THE WALL STREET OF JOURNALS that teen girls are developing tics and doctors say TikTok (popular small video sharing platform) could be a factor. So i wonder whether the world we are progressing is that what we wanted for?? Many say that this age of IT, AI has introduced most of the depth of subject on Mental health than ever in the history. And i agree with them also definitely we are concerned about it and Mental health is a huge topic.
Introduction to new AI age
Today I am a graduate of Medicine in the era of AI driven world also who started the journey of medical school in the time of Covid so these challenges made me a stronger version of doctor than what I dreamt of and I am proud of it. In today’s world people are making their own diagnosis with LLM like Chatgpt, Gemini, Grok etc which is the misuse of it . For us the it has made a great improvement in quick diagnosis, better criterion of diagnosis and easy management. These all are evolving and people are becoming weak in sound mind. We are so alone that todays world we get infected with fake news ,misinformation faster than a virus as we are driven by AI and social media. With regard to my introductory lines i divided into one of the least favourite topic that is LONELINESS. So let’s together discuss and talk about it.
Loneliness:
It is not defined as the number of friends or persons you are in touch with rather it’s about the feeling connected.
People can live relatively solitary lives and not feel lonely, and conversely, they can live an ostensibly rich social life and feel lonely nevertheless.
Perceptions of social isolation, or loneliness, increase vigilance for threat and heighten feelings of vulnerability while also raising the desire to reconnect. We social beings tries to live in a society, town and city instead of living individually, staying in the country side.
UCLA(University of California,Los Angeles) scale of Loneliness
A 20-item scale designed to measure one’s subjective feelings of loneliness as well as
feelings of social isolation. Participants rate each item as either O (“I often feel this way”),
S (“I sometimes feel this way”), R (“I rarely feel this way”), N (“I never feel this way”).
Loneliness is a common experience; as many as 80% of those under 18 years of age and 40% of adults over 65 years of age report being lonely at least sometimes. However loneliness is a chronic, when ignored loneliness has serious consequences for cognition, emotion, behavior, and health.loneliness predicts increased morbidity and mortality.
Loneliness and complications on health:
Influence on health of individual by the state of loneliness has adverse effects. Recently cognition impact was accessed and outcomes seemed susceptible to the influence of loneliness. As it is found associated with personality disorders and psychoses, suicide, impaired cognitive performance and cognitive decline over time, increased risk of Alzheimer’s Disease, diminished executive control, and increases in depressive symptoms.
Loneliness and Implications for health:
The increased sense of connectedness, social adhesion and decreased feelings of loneliness are the primary goals. Now questions arises
Would a successful intervention to lower loneliness produce corresponding benefits in physiological mechanisms and physical health outcomes? A study of 235 lonely aged individuals above 75 years by an anonymous organization could address the above questions. The individuals were grouped to 8-10 closed control groups. The closed small group individuals met with two professional facilitators once a week for 3 months to participate in group activities in art, exercise, or therapeutic writing. The control group continued to receive usual community care. Relative to the control group, individuals in the treatment group became more socially active, found new friends, and experienced an increase in feeling needed. This was accompanied by a significant improvement in self-rated health, fewer health care services and lower costs, and greater survival at 2-year follow-up.But the study could not influence loneliness dramatically because they fail to address the hypervigilance to social threat and the related cognitive biases that characterize lonely individuals. As the intervention provided new opportunities but the approach of individual remained same. So the reduction of loneliness as per theory should come from within innerself.
Conclusion:
Hence the outer intervention is of very less importance into it.Chronic perceived isolation (i.e., loneliness) is characterized by impairments in attention, cognition, affect, and behavior that take a toll on morbidity and mortality through their impact on genetic, neural, and hormonal mechanisms that evolved as part and parcel of what it means to be human. Future interventions to alleviate the health burden of loneliness will do well to take into account our evolutionary design as a social species. Man are social animal they will evolve and we should evolve against the social evils and this is our duty.
Dr Jafor Ikbal Laskar , MBBS, GMCH i/c Medical Officer Vernarpur NPHC, Lala
Dated- 18/03/2026