id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-270570-wttom8eh	Killgore, William D.S.	Loneliness: A signature mental health concern in the era of COVID-19	2020-05-23		.txt	text/plain	1083	50	52	In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most communities in the United States imposed stay-at-home orders to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus, potentially leading to chronic social isolation. We hypothesized that the prolonged social isolation enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic may increase feelings of loneliness, a key contributor to mental health problems such as depression and suicide (Stickley and Koyanagi, 2016) . To assess the impact of current social isolation on loneliness and mental health, we administered the UCLA Loneliness Scale-3 (Russell, 1996) , a validated metric of the construct of loneliness, and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) (Kroenke et al., 2001) , a widely used screening measure for depression, to a nationally representative sample of 1,013 (18-35 years old; 567 females; 446 males) English speaking U.S. adults. While causation cannot be inferred from cross-sectional data, the present findings are consistent with the notion that the prolonged stay-at-home efforts enacted during the pandemic are likely severely increasing loneliness and social disconnection among many people.	./cache/cord-270570-wttom8eh.txt	./txt/cord-270570-wttom8eh.txt