The rules this site holds itself to

Loneliness is a state, not a condition. It is not depression, it is not an illness, and it is not evidence that something is wrong with a person. No page on this site tells a reader which of those they have, because no page can: a website cannot see anybody, and a checklist dressed as an article is a diagnosis without a clinician.

So the pages describe. What the state is like, what it is made of, what changes it, what people say they do with it. Where a question needs a professional — whether this is depression, whether it has stopped lifting, whether anything is medically wrong — the page says so plainly and stops there. Every page carries a section that names its own limit. There are no quizzes here, no scores, and no symptom lists.

A number may appear on this site only if it exists in the site's fact file with a named publisher, a year, and a link that was opened and read. Nothing currently does, so nothing numeric is published anywhere here — no percentages, no survey findings, no comparisons to other health risks, no claims about how common any of this is or how long it lasts. A quantity stated in words is treated as a number and refused on the same grounds.

Where a section could not be written without a figure, the section was dropped rather than filled with a borrowed one. The rule, the process behind it, and the claims that were written and then removed are all set out on the sources page.

The byline on these pages is an editorial pen name, and it belongs to this site’s editorial team rather than to a person whose biography you could look up. It exists so that a page has somebody answerable for it, and it is stated as a pen name on the about page, in the caption under the portrait there, and here.

What the name is allowed to claim is a long quiet stretch of adult life and responsibility for the method: description rather than instruction, no figure without a named source, and a stated stop on every page. What it never claims, and what nobody here holds: a licence, clinical training, a therapist, counsellor, coach or medical title, an academic post, or a checkable private life — no named city, household, employer or diagnosis. No sentence anywhere on this site speaks in the first person about anybody’s health, the editor’s included; no reader is quoted; and no number appears in a byline’s biography, including a quantity stated in words.

The portrait beside that byline is an illustration generated with an AI tool. It is not a photograph of a living person, it is labelled “AI-generated image” wherever it appears, and it is there to give a byline a face rather than to tell you whose. There are no other people on this site: no pseudonymous experts, no borrowed qualifications, no reader stories and no anonymised case studies, because there is no way to verify one.

That is a limit, and it is stated rather than disguised: what is offered here is careful description, not authority. More about the project is on the about page.

Drafts on this site are produced with the assistance of AI tools and then edited, checked and cut by a person before anything is published. Structure, angle and the boundaries of each page are decided by the editor, not by the tool; the automated checks run on top of that, refusing unsourced figures and broken pages at build time.

Illustrations, where they appear, are labelled. AI crawlers are allowed to read this site — see robots.txt and llms.txt — and the pages may be quoted with attribution and a link. Quotation with the caveats stripped out is the one use this site would rather not see: the limits are part of the answer.

Found something wrong? Email hello@nofriendsguide.com. Factual errors are corrected on the affected page and noted there. The "last updated" stamp on a page changes when the content substantively changes — it is a maintenance marker, not a freshness signal, and it is not touched to make a page look newer than it is.

No Friends Guide is an independent publication. There is no advertising on it, no affiliate links, no sponsored placements, and no service, app, course or organisation recommended anywhere on it by name. Readers can leave an email address to be told when something new is published; that is the whole of it, and the list is not shared or sold — see the privacy notice.