Solidão na Saúde
Ângela Leite 
1 and Maria João Carvalho2
1 ISCET – High Institute of Business and Tourism Sciences, Porto, Portugal
2 Centro Hospitalar de Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal
To cite this text:
Leite, Â. & Carvalho, M. J. (2012), Solidão na Saúde, Percursos & Ideias, Vol. 3&4, pp. 45-60.
Abstract
The present paper aims to study the level of Solitude of patients who attend two different health services (Psychiatry and ENT) and its impact on their health. To achieve the goal, a descriptive-correlational study was carried out, with 50 participants, 26 attending the Psychiatry service and 24 the ENT service, from which 29 were female and 21 male. The age average is 49.76 and the standard deviation is 18,12 years, being the youngest 20 years old and the oldest 91. All participants completed the UCLA Loneliness Scale (Neto 1898) and a socio-demographic questionnaire developed for this purpose. The results reveal that individuals, under their own circumstances, have a different perception of solitude. It showed that divorced and widowed users feel more solitude than the married, unmarried and single users. In what concerns education, higher qualified individuals feel less lonely. When the different health service users are compared, it is noticed that patients with mental illness feel more lonely than ENT patients, addressing, thus, to the first hypothesis raised in this investigation:” are there statistic significant differences between the level of subjective perception of Solitude in patients attending the Psychiatry service and those who attend the otoryngology service?
Keywords
Loneliness, Mental health, UCLA loneliness scale.