The societal collapse has led to a huge increase in the number of people who remain undiscovered after dying at home, research shows.
Once an incredibly rare phenomenon, the incidence of people being discovered days, weeks, months or years after their death has increased 17-fold in 60 years, a study shows.
Experts from the University of Oxford and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust said the ‘worrying’ trend shows that social isolation is a growing problem in Britain, especially among men.
They admitted that their findings may only be the ‘tip of the iceberg’, with the state of decomposition rarely recorded in official death records.
Researchers analyzed data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and identified deaths where bodies were found decomposed.
Experts say the incidence of people being discovered days, weeks, months or years after their death has increased seventeenfold in 60 years, a worrying trend that shows an increase in social isolation (stock photo)
They studied deaths recorded as ‘unattended deaths’ and ‘other ill-defined and unknown causes of death’.
It revealed a steady increase in the number of undefined deaths between 1979 and 2020 for both sexes, with just 59 deaths recorded in 1961, compared to 1,042 in 2021, the most recent figures.
The proportion of total male deaths exceeded female deaths, with these male deaths increasing significantly in the 1990s and 2000s when overall mortality improved rapidly.
This acceleration in the number of deaths involving decomposing people, especially among men, is a worrying trend, the authors said.
Dr. Estrin-Serlui, from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, said: ‘Many people would be shocked if someone could be left dead at home for days, weeks or even longer, without anyone raising the alarm in the community in which they live.
‘The increase in the number of people found dead and decomposed signals a broader societal breakdown of both formal and informal social support networks, even before the pandemic.
‘They are concerning and warrant urgent further investigation.’
Publishing their findings in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the authors said the vast majority of people who died and developed advanced decomposition would have suffered ‘significant social isolation’.
Previous research has shown that the pandemic has caused a spike in deaths due to enforced lockdowns, but the overall upward trend predates Covid, she added.
It signals an increasing level of social neglect and an exacerbation of the societal breakdown of community, family and social support networks in recent decades, they said, adding that this will only account for a small proportion of those affected by loneliness affected.
It follows the harrowing case of Laura Winham, a vulnerable 38-year-old who suffered from schizophrenia and heard voices in her head that led her to believe her family was trying to harm her.
She was eventually found by her family in a ‘mummified, almost skeletal state’ in her flat in Woking, Surrey, almost four years after her death.
It raised questions about how the death of someone living in public housing and receiving mental health care could go unnoticed for so long.
Kate Jopling from the Campaign to End Loneliness said: ‘While it is shocking to think that someone could die alone and remain undiscovered, we should not really be surprised given what the evidence tells us about the levels of loneliness and social isolation in the whole country.
‘A significant minority of us – around 10 percent across all age groups – often or always feel lonely.
“While it is possible to be lonely even in a crowd, many lonely people are also isolated, and the lonelier we are, the more we tend to cut ourselves off from others.
‘Of course it doesn’t have to be this way. We know that with the right support, people who are lonely can reconnect with their community.”
Researchers are now calling on official measures to identify deaths where people are more easily parsed in routine data.