Practice guidance for social connection
Institute forSocial ConnectionFrameworks & toolkits

Evidence base

PMC

The Epidemic of Loneliness

Measurement & EvaluationProgramme Design

Photograph · Pexels

What it found

This review examines how loneliness has come to be framed as an epidemic, and weighs the evidence used to support that framing.

Why it matters for practice

Before adopting "epidemic" language in programme or funding documents, it's worth understanding what that framing does and does not establish about scale, causation, or trend — this review is a useful check on that rhetoric rather than a source of new prevalence data.