Five of this week’s papers ran into the same wall from different directions. A systematic review of green prescribing could not pool a single outcome. A meta-analysis that triples the odds of a poor depression outcome turns out to rest on four studies, all in older adults. A paper in JPSP had to collapse a seven-point loneliness scale into…

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Four of this week’s items came apart when someone opened the document underneath them. A feasibility trial that reports meeting its progression criteria turns out, against its own registered thresholds, to have hit amber on the criterion that counts recruitment properly. A Dutch survey headline of 45% rests on 584 people, 92% of whom sit on…

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Correction to the Money section above, which reported that no new funding call opened in the window. That was wrong. The Fondation des Sciences Sociales call on “Solitude et isolement” was published on 1 September 2026, inside that issue’s window. It closes on 7 November 2026 and it is carried in the issue for the week of 14 September.

Correction to the RECETAS item above. The issue reported the Barcelona trial as “254 with baseline plus follow-up”. The paper gives 320 randomised and 320 analysed in the intention-to-treat analysis. The 254 figure is wrong and the null result stands on the larger number, which makes it a stronger null than the issue implied. Flagged by…

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Set two of this week’s events side by side. On Wednesday the European Commission proposed a Regulation that would prohibit design features which simulate interpersonal relationships with children in ways likely to create emotional dependency. On Monday, a Danish evaluation of a nationwide youth counselling service reported that six months on,…

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The first brief in the LONELY-EU series is about how the project is organised rather than about loneliness itself, and that turns out to matter more than it sounds.

Judith Merkies describes the Evidence-to-Action Board: a standing group of researchers, policymakers, practitioners and people from international organisations, launched in…

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Three of this week’s strongest papers report an absence. A preregistered trial of a university wellbeing app moved loneliness by about a seventh of a standard deviation and failed to reproduce its own earlier findings on belonging. A mediation analysis of the UPSIDES peer-support trial across five countries found no direct effect of peer…

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Ties is the network of the LONELY-EU consortium. It is where the people working on social isolation and loneliness across Europe can find each other and each other’s work: researchers, practitioners, national and local policymakers, funders, civil-society organisations, people with lived experience, and journalists. It is published by LONELY-EU…

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Hi all,

This is the first of what I hope becomes a weekly habit. The idea is simple and slightly stolen: every week, one post that tells you what actually happened in social health — research, policy, practice, and money you can apply for — so that none of us has to keep fourteen tabs open to stay current.

A note on how this is made, because…

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