Are you lonely? Chances are, according to a Lifeline survey, the answer is yes – but you’re unwilling to talk about it.

The national survey, released on Tuesday, found about 60% of the 3,100 respondents said they “often felt lonely” and 82.5% said they felt loneliness was increasing in society, an answer Lifeline’s chief executive, Pete Shmigel, said was likely a cover for those unwilling to out themselves as members of the loneliness club.

The alternate response was even more worrying: only 1.27% thought loneliness was decreasing in society. The remaining 16.9% were unsure.

That’s a concern, according to Shmigel, because loneliness and isolation are linked to higher rates of suicidal ideation and Australia’s suicide rate is at a 13-year high.

“We have more calls to Lifeline that talk about loneliness and social isolation and family and relationship breakdown than we do of people talking about mental illness,” he told Guardian Australia.

“Loneliness wears down your resilience to crisis. Say you lost your job, or you lost your boyfriend … when you are lonely, or feel that you have no one to confide in, your resilience drops. As resilience drops, risk of suicide increases.”

According to the survey results, while 53.38% of respondents said they had someone to confide in, 33.65% did not.

The health risks of loneliness are not confined to mental health and suicide. A study out of the UK this year found loneliness was linked to a 30% increase in the risk of heart disease or having a stroke. John Cacioppo, a US-based social neuroscientist, has argued that loneliness increases the chances of early death by up to 20%.

Single people aren’t the only ones afflicted. The Lifeline survey found that although those who lived alone were more likely to say they “often felt lonely”, at 77.61% compared to an average of 60%, couples also reported high rates of loneliness.

Of those who felt loneliness was increasing in society, 44.14% were living with a spouse or partner.

Questions about whether social media made people feel more or less lonely were inconclusive, with 31.46% of people saying the former and 29.58% saying the latter.

For Shmigel, the results are linked to the findings of a different study published by another suicide prevention organisation, RUOK. That survey, published last month, found that Australians spent an average of 46 hours a week looking at various screens, from smartphones to televisions, outside of work hours.

“That’s basically like getting home from work on Friday night and deciding that you’re going to spend the entire weekend online, without sleeping,” Shmigel said. “Where do you fit the rest of it – ‘it’ being paid work and the entirety of your real-life human connections – into the other five days?”

He suggested that our lives had become lonelier as they had become busier, and that loneliness was an unfortunate byproduct of convenience.

Loneliness, by this picture, is a married couple who arrive home at 7pm and spend the evening on their respective phones sending emails back to the office and only half-listening to each other’s accounts of the day.

“Relationships, frankly, are inconvenient,” he said. “Society values convenience so much that we actually seek to make things so convenient that they actively seek to avoid human relationships.

“We need to have the stickiness, the gooeyness, the conflict that comes with engaging in actual human relationships.”

• Crisis support services can be reached 24 hours a day: Lifeline 13 11 14; Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467; Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800; MensLine Australia 1300 78 99 78