Is loneliness being medicalized? Trends from articles in the Web of Science database

Public, policy, and media discourses increasingly frame loneliness as a "modern epidemic," raising concerns that this complex emotional and social experience is being medicalized. However, empirical attempts to trace the extent and mechanisms of this process remain limited. Adopting a social constructionist perspective, this article operationally defines medicalization as the process of "making an experience medical" and analyzes 23,182 loneliness-related publications in the Web of Science (1980-2024) to map disciplinary locations, citation impact, and temporal growth patterns. Findings show that while psychology maintains a substantial presence, suggesting a prominence of emotional framings, there is marked growth in psychiatry, public health, and neurosciences. This trend may indicate that loneliness is being increasingly incorporated into mental health and neurobiological domains. Drawing on traditional medicalization theories, the article proposes a four-phase trajectory model as a provisional framework for further discussion. Within this framework, psychologization potentially facilitates an individualization that may serve as a basis for biomedical intervention. Furthermore, public health may play an ambivalent role: while retaining its social-reformist orientation, it could potentially accelerate medicalization by reframing loneliness as a "risk factor." Looking forward, it remains to be seen whether frameworks viewing deficits in the quality and quantity of social relationships as health risks will emerge, potentially extending medicalization to domains beyond the individual as risk and surveillance technology advances. Despite its macro-level scope, this study provides empirical insights for the theoretical development of medicalization by exploring how everyday experience aligns with biomedical domains.