Groups 4 Health: Managing Loneliness and Social Disconnection, Facilitator Guide (Treatments That Work)

GROUPS 4 HEALTH (G4H) is an evidence-based intervention that targets social disconnection and loneliness. It aims to give people the knowledge and skills to build and maintain their sense of social connectedness to enhance their health and well-being.

Built around five modules that involve a range of activities and workshops, the strength of the G4H program lies not only in its ground-breaking new understanding of how to tackle social isolation, but also in offering an in vivo experience of positive group connection - allowing participants to learn and experience at the same time. G4H is suitable for anyone who is concerned about, or currently experiencing, distress due to social isolation and loneliness. It is a program that can be used for prevention, for those at risk of loneliness, or as a cure for those experiencing the health consequences of loneliness.

This G4H Facilitator Guide provides detailed instructions and step by step guidance to support facilitators in program delivery. The accompanying Workbook functions as a key resource with useful activities and worksheets that support client engagement with the program.

Catherine Haslam is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Queensland and a clinical academic whose work focuses on the social and cognitive impacts of identity-changing life transitions and interventions to manage these. Her research on social connectedness, health and well-being has contributed to a body of work on the social cure published in two volumes - Social Cure: Identity, Health and Well-being (2012) and The New Psychology of Health: Unlocking the social cure (2018). This work has informed the Groups 4 Health program, a manualised social identity intervention supporting people to manage their social connectedness to support health.

Tegan Cruwys is a Professor and Clinical Psychologist at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on how social relationships shape mental and physical health. This research agenda is concerned both with advancing theoretical understanding of the social determinants of health, and with translational impact that improves outcomes for marginalised communities. With over 160 publications she has made internationally recognised research contributions to the study of social identity, depression, eating behaviour, loneliness, group psychotherapy, physical activity, and health risk taking. Cruwys has held three research fellowships from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

S. Alexander Haslam is Professor of Psychology and Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland. He has written 16 books and over 300 peer-reviewed articles exploring the contribution of group processes to social and organizational functioning with a particular emphasis on leadership and health. Alex has received a range of major awards from scientific bodies around the world including recognition for distinguished contributions to psychological science from both the British and Australian Psychological Societies. In 2022 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia “for significant service to higher education, particularly psychology, through research and mentoring”.

Dr Sarah Bentley is a Research Scientist who specialises in improving group processes, particularly in the context of people and technology. Sarah works from a social identity perspective - a theoretically grounded framework with which to understand human psychology in terms of the socio-contextual landscapes in which it is situated. Sarah previously conducted research at The University of Queensland where she designed and delivered digital solutions to tackle issues related to social isolation, whether in the workplace, in the classroom, or within broader community settings. Sarah now works at CSIRO's Data61 (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia), where she specialises in the conceptualization and articulation of innovation in ways that focus on the intersection of technologies with the humans, groups and societies that have the most to gain or lose from them. Sarah was recently awarded the WAI (Women in Artificial Intelligence) Education award, 2024.

Jolanda Jetten (PhD, University of Amsterdam, 1997) is Professor of Social Psychology and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland. She has published widely on topics relating to social identity, (intra)group processes and intergroup relations in small interacting groups and larger social structures such as organizations and social categories. More recently, she has focused on how social identity processes play a role in mental health and well-being, how they affect the consequences of economic inequality and how we respond to collective level change, including adjustment and resilience in the aftermath of collective level change.