Can a public health awareness campaign effectively address loneliness on a population level?

Abstract

Background

Loneliness has been recognised as a major global public health priority, given its strong associations with increased mortality and morbidity with physical and mental health disorders. Most solutions and strategies aimed at addressing loneliness have focused on individual-level interventions, with relatively limited attention to upstream, population-wide strategies such as public health awareness campaigns. This raises a critical question for public health: can awareness campaigns meaningfully address loneliness at a population level?

Results

This commentary examines the potential role of public health awareness campaigns in addressing loneliness, with a particular focus on stigma reduction, collective meaning-making, and social norms. Loneliness is a subjective, multifactorial experience that occurs across the life course and is shaped by diverse social, cultural, and structural factors. Population-wide campaigns therefore face unique challenges, including the risk of oversimplification, pathologisation, and reinforcing individual responsibility for what is often a socially produced experience. Drawing on evidence from population surveys, we highlight the prevalence of stigma surrounding loneliness, including negative stereotypes, reluctance to disclose loneliness, and concealment of lived experiences. We argue that awareness campaigns must move beyond information provision towards fostering empathy, normalising loneliness as a universal human signal, and promoting shared responsibility for healthy meaningful social connection.

Conclusion

While public health awareness campaigns alone cannot eliminate loneliness, they can play a critical role in reshaping societal understandings, reducing stigma, and creating a more supportive cultural environment for social connection. When theory-informed, co-designed, and rigorously evaluated, such campaigns can contribute meaningfully to population-level strategies to address loneliness.

Background

Loneliness is now identified as a pressing global public health priority by the World Health Organization (WHO)’s landmark report, ‘From loneliness to social connection – charting a path to healthier societies’ [1]. There is strong evidence that this is linked with higher all-cause mortality [2], higher morbidity including coronary heart disease, stroke [3]. Loneliness also leads to poorer mental health outcomes, including depression, social anxiety and paranoia [4].

Despite being underpinned by robust scientific evidence, loneliness continues to be an issue that remains both misunderstood and challenging to address at a population level. Clinical and psychosocial interventions (such as CBT, social skills training, befriending programs) have been the focus so far of strategies to reduce loneliness, with psychological interventions appearing to be the most effective [5]. Mid- and upstream interventions, including population-wide awareness campaigns, community organisation and environmental change has been relatively underutilised and remain underexamined [6]. Examples of community approaches to address loneliness include physical activity, cultural and leisure group programs in neighbourhoods [7] and mental health education and peer support in settings such as universities [8]. Overall, universal programs are both limited as well as under evaluated, with high variety in quality and effectiveness.

On the issue of loneliness, the WHO Commission report recommended investing in five pillars of work to advance loneliness as a public health priority. Specifically, Pillar 5 notes that public awareness of loneliness and connection should align with scientific evidence and gathering community engagement is needed [1]. As of right now, there are only a handful of countries (e.g., Australia, Canada, UK, Japan, the USA, Norway, Sweden, Denmark) in the world have a campaign specifically focused on addressing loneliness in the community.

This raises an important question: Can a public health awareness campaign meaningfully address loneliness at a population level?

Understanding the challenge of loneliness as a public health priority

Loneliness is unlike many other public health issues because it is subjective and multifactorial. For a long time, we have also been fed images of being alone as the equivalent of being lonely, and the stigma against loneliness is further propagated on mass media (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Depictions of loneliness and social isolation in mainstream media.

Example of depictions of loneliness and social isolation in mainstream media. When we searched “loneliness social isolation articles” on Google in 2025, and these are the screenshot of first few articles that come up in the first page. The images depicted are typically used to show loneliness but has a strong emphasis on being physically alone or focused on social isolation. Yet, we know that loneliness can occur without physical social isolation. Loneliness is not equivalent to objective social isolation but a perceived gap between desired and actual social relationships. a) https://thebeautifultruth.org/life/mental-health/male-loneliness-epidemic-the-loneliest-man/ b) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/aug/21/it-felt-shameful-the-profound-loneliness-of-modern-motherhood c) https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250107-why-do-i-feel-so-lonely-even-though-im-surrounded-by-people d) https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/sites/bc-magazine/winter-2024-issue/features/why-are-we-so-lonely-.html

Loneliness needs to be understood as an experience that can occur across our lifespan and not just something that develops in older age. Loneliness is an innate human signal for us to connect with others so that we can thrive and flourish. In other words, it is a normal human instinct to feel lonely so that it can alert us to find meaningful healthy social connection. It’s critical we do not pathologise the experience of loneliness.

Risk factors range from bereavement, chronic disease, isolation or exclusion digitally, and cultural displacement, and in some countries can also include economic migration and war [1]. The multidimensional epidemiology of loneliness further complicates efforts to develop universal messages that resonate widely. A “one size fits all” campaign will risk isolating those whose experiences of loneliness may differ from others. For example, loneliness experienced by an older adult may be triggered by bereavement or the onset of illness, whereas loneliness experienced by a young person may be triggered by cyberbullying or relationship disconnection. Both are valid experiences but a call for connection to both groups has to be crafted differently.

Designing for the wider population: stigma and misunderstandings

In the 2023 State of Nation Social Connection in Australia report [9] which surveyed over 4026 Australians aged 18 to 92 years old, we found that people held negative perceptions of people who feel lonely. 46% of participants viewed people who are lonely as having negative traits. Half of survey participants did not want to be friends with someone who is lonely, and more than half would not like a lonely person. Community stigma was further evident with nearly one in three people believing there is something wrong with someone who is lonely or viewing loneliness as a sign of weakness. It was notable that nearly half of the participants felt hesitant or embarrassed to talk about loneliness and 60% do not want to talk to others about it. Alarmingly, nearly half of people surveyed would actively conceal their loneliness which is likely to prohibit them from getting the help they need.

It is apparent that negative perceptions about loneliness exist not just in people who are currently lonely but also across the population more broadly. This stigma is likely to further perpetuate loneliness and hinder people to seek help when they need it. To effectively address loneliness and its stigma in community, a public health campaign need to address population understandings of loneliness. Such campaigns must move beyond awareness raising to increasing knowledge, promoting empathy, and action, that is campaigns have to take people on a journey towards behavioural change.

Crafting campaign messages and content

The multi-faceted and subjective character of the loneliness experience, and the potential for this to be exacerbated by stigma and lack of a supportive environment for social connection, must be considered in the development of mass media strategies to address this issue. In the public health field, communication campaigns (e.g., for smoking, immunisation) are often guided by knowledge, attitude, behaviour and practice (KABP) models which focus on awareness of imminent health risks and individual motivations to avoid these. Adoption of these models in loneliness campaigns may further pathologize (and stigmatise) this issue and over emphasise personal responsibility as the necessary way for this to be overcome.

Social representations theory (SRT) offers an alternative guide for campaign design, as it is concerned with the meaning placed on issues within social contexts and the framing of these to emphasise opportunities for action that align with existing capacities and values [10]. The ways that SRT may be leveraged to assist the design of mass media campaigns addressing loneliness include: (1) using multiple voices and lived experience stories to highlight how loneliness can affect anyone across a diverse range of circumstances; (2) anchoring loneliness to already-accepted priorities, such as physical and mental health, to emphasise that this is a legitimate health concern and not just a personal struggle; (3) challenging stigmatizing representations by emphasising that loneliness is a natural human signal, like hunger or pain, not a character flaw; social disconnection has structural causes (e.g., work culture, digital life) not just individual ones, and that seeking connection is a strength, not a weakness; (4) building on positive representations that already exist, such as “community spirit” and “self-care”, to link potential responses to loneliness with existing capacities and priorities; (5) disseminating new social representations (e.g., “connection maintenance”, “social fitness”) that frame relationship-building as active and positive rather than needs-based or deficits-focused.

In the application of SRT, the aim of a loneliness awareness campaign would extend beyond awareness raising to transforming the collective meaning systems that affect how people understand and respond to loneliness (not just for themselves but also for others).

As much as possible, this has to draw upon prevailing meaning-making processes within the social contexts of the campaign. This highlights the value of co-design in crafting messages, imagery, and delivery methods. This involves engaging people with lived and living experience of loneliness, their communities, and local organizations and services in campaign design, pre-testing, planning, and evaluation. Co-designed campaigns can ensure that narratives reflect authentic experiences of people who experience loneliness and struggle with building healthy social connection, and call to action that feel feasible and not prescriptive.

As for all public health interventions, evaluation of mass media campaigns can provide valuable insights about reach, engagement and impacts. Most campaigns using mass or social media may be able to use a range of available data (e.g., web analytics, media monitoring reports) to monitor implementation.

Understanding impacts is also vital, particularly when building the evidence base for addressing relatively novel issues for public health campaigns like loneliness. From a SRT perspective, relevant questions for the evaluation of campaigns would be: Do people feel permission to acknowledge and address loneliness?; Is loneliness being discussed differently and more often as a widespread human experience?; Are stigmatizing representations, such as loneliness reflecting a personal failing, reducing?; Are new empowering representations of the actions that individual and communities take in response to loneliness being adopted?

Conclusion

A public health awareness campaign alone cannot eliminate loneliness, but it can play a critical role in changing the conversation to a more evidence-informed and empowering understanding of what loneliness is and is not. The focus on shifting societal attitudes and awareness, reducing stigma, and creating a culture of connection in our environment is critical but must be aligned to where people are in terms of their knowledge and attitudes. When grounded in codesign, guided by theory, and linked with rigorous evaluation, a public awareness campaign can contribute to a healthy culture of social connection - one that recognizes loneliness not as a personal failing, but as a shared challenge across every sector of our population.

Author contributions

MHL: Conceptualization, Data collection, Analysis, Writing, Editing. HLQ: Data collection, Analysis, Writing, Editing. BJS: Analysis, Writing, Editing. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Funding

This manuscript did not receive any funding.

Data availability

Not applicable.

Declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable.

Consent for publication

All authors consent for the publication of this manuscript.

Competing interests

MHL, HLQ and BJS are all associated with Ending Loneliness Together. MHL and HLQ are also associated with the Global Initiative and Loneliness and Connection.