Loneliness is one of the strongest predictors of poor health. However, we have few effective strategies to treat or prevent loneliness. This lecture will review recent breakthroughs for how we can tackle this problem as a community. This includes both (a) basic science to understand how and why loneliness affects (mental) health, as well as (b) applied research in the clinic and in the community to both prevent and treat loneliness among marginalised groups. 

About the speaker

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Tegan Cruwys

Tegan Cruwys is an Associate Professor and NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the Australian National University and a former Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow. Her research investigates how social relationships shape mental and physical health — work that is at the intersection of social, clinical and health psychology. She is passionate about the capacity our psychological theorising and methods to help us tackle big problems like discrimination, loneliness, and health inequality. She has authored over 140 papers on these topics, as well as The New Psychology of Health: Unlocking the Social Cure (with Catherine Haslam, Jolanda Jetten, Genevieve Dingle, and Alex Haslam, 2018) — winner of the British Psychology Society’s Textbook of the Year award in 2020.