A Bill for Loneliness?
Proposed legislation would fund more research and social support—and create an office to advise the President
A decade ago, official Washington wasn’t thinking about America’s loneliness epidemic. “Congress was paying zero attention to this issue, the executive branch was paying zero attention to this issue,” says Andrew MacPherson, chair of the Foundation for Social Connection Action Network, a DC nonprofit that advocates for federal policy to address loneliness.
Times change. Today, MacPherson says, multiple pieces of legislation are focused on the problem, including two introduced in June by Democratic Connecticut senator Chris Murphy. One of them, the Addressing Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults Act, would provide $62.5 million in annual funding to community organizations for social outreach and other support for lonely senior citizens—many of whom struggle to build and maintain social connections as they age and face health and mobility challenges.
The other bill, the National Strategy for Social Connection Act, calls for more funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to advance research on loneliness and fostering connection. It also would create an Office of Social Connection Policy within the executive branch to advise the President—following the lead of countries such as Japan and the UK, which have established government ministers to address loneliness.
Murphy, who has described loneliness as both a public-health problem and a “full-blown crisis for our democracy,” told Politico in 2023 that he didn’t “know how much of the decline in friendship and increase in loneliness is reversible. But I don’t think the answer is to not try.”
A Pill for Loneliness?
Social isolation can change our brains, making us more fearful of new people and experiences. Could drugs help?
Could pharmacies one day offer relief for loneliness? Beginning in 2017, behavioral neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo conducted a clinical trial that gave participants an oral dose of pregnenolone—a hormone produced by the adrenal gland that acts as the starting material for creating other hormones, including estrogen and testosterone.
A neurosteroid that affects how brain cells communicate with one another, pregnenolone has been shown to calm the amygdala, the area of the brain responsible for threat detection, our fight-or-flight response, and emotions connected to fear. Some research has shown that loneliness can change our brains, causing the amygdala to go haywire. Social situations end up triggering feelings of danger or panic. We mistakenly perceive others as threatening, precisely at the times we’re most in need of connection.
Perhaps, Cacioppo reasoned, doses of pregnenolone could ease the excessive fear of new experiences or people that can come from loneliness, leaving us more open to connection. Self-reported results suggested that trial participants were feeling less lonely—but in 2019, Cacioppo suspended the experiment, worried about possible side effects, including poor sleep and cardiovascular issues.
Cacioppo’s interest in social isolation was in part driven by the intense grief she felt following the 2018 death of her husband, John, a leading loneliness researcher. In her 2022 book, Wired for Love, she writes that there are safer, natural ways to produce the effects of a pregnenolone pill—such as exercising outdoors, which Cacioppo did to cope with her own feelings of isolation. There may not yet be medication for loneliness, but there are remedies.
This article appears in the October 2026 issue of Washingtonian.
