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This review explored the experience of hospitalization and the experience of cancer patients who were undergoing Ear Nose and Throat [ENT] surgery. Hospitals, which were designed with treatment and healing in mind, are known to be the source of uncontrollable noise, physicians who talk in a language that patients do not understand. Entering the hospital as a patient, one becomes part of that very complex system, which may include being treated as a ‘nonperson,’ not getting enough information, and losing control of daily activities. Hospitalized patients’ social contact is limited to interaction with the medical staff which thus become a key factor in determining the quality of care, and whether the patients can successfully cope with the stress of their hospitalization experience. Loneliness was found to be associated with a range of negative physical health outcomes such as dementia, increased blood pressure, suicidal thinking and unhealthy and damaging behaviors such as smoking, excess alcohol consumption and lack of exercise leading and contributing to increased mortality. Being, both, hospitalized and in the midst of a frightening illness they experience loneliness and isolation.

The present article examines the interaction between loneliness and psychotherapy; the salient features of psychotherapy, the needs of the lonely client, and the promise in the therapeutic process of being an agent of help to the lonely survive and aim at helping them emerge from their ordeal, emotionally strengthened and spiritually enriched.

Loneliness is an experience determined by a person’s characteristics, her situational variables, gender, and background. This review article describes the myriad of studies, with sometimes contradictory results about the relation of loneliness to gender [with women commonly expressing, though not necessarily experiencing, greater loneliness], and the relation between loneliness and collectivistic and individualistic culture.