- I was like so nervous to go.

- [Isabella] At 17, Tabitha Grandolfo moved from Hong Kong to Providence to study at Brown University.

- It was 2021 and there were COVID restrictions.

Meant that if I wanted to go home, I would have to spend three weeks in a hotel in quarantine before I was able to like, go back and see my family.

- [Isabella] She says being so far from home made finding community even more important.

But by the second semester, she worried that other students weren't looking for new friends anymore.

- I was in a play and I was really excited.

It was my first play that I did on campus.

A roommate and a friend came to see it and I came back after the show and they didn't talk about it at all.

And then the two of them went to some, like, party or after party and left me in the dorm alone.

I was just sitting there in my room alone, folding laundry.

(laughs) - [Isabella] When she returned home to Hong Kong at the end of the school year, her depression was overwhelming.

- I remember not being able to get out of bed and my mom was like, "Do you think you can go back?"

- [Isabella] Stories like Grandolfo's are familiar to Richard Weissbourd, a senior lecturer at Harvard University.

- When people think of loneliness, they often think of senior citizens.

But in our data, the people who have the highest rates of loneliness are young adults.

They're people in their 20s and they're people in their 30s.

- [Isabella] Weissbourd did a national survey on loneliness during the pandemic and found that 36% of Americans felt miserable levels of loneliness.

For young adults, it was 61%.

He says, since then, those statistics have improved, but remain a worry.

- The loneliness rates are still high.

They were high before the pandemic.

- What particular challenges do young adults face that you feel contributes to this high rate of loneliness?

- I don't think social media is the main cause of this, but I think social media can really diminish our sense of connection to other people.

- [Isabella] And our social infrastructure has changed.

He says people used to find greater community in work and in religion.

♪ Glory can be found ♪ - There are rituals of gratitude and coming of age ceremonies where you're asked to think about your responsibility for people in your community.

I'm not saying we should become more religious, but I think we need to think about how to reproduce some of these aspects of religion and secular life.

I think that's a very important thing to do.

- [Isabella] That's because loneliness comes at a cost.

Last year, the US Surgeon General warned that there was an epidemic of loneliness.

- And social disconnection is associated with an increased risk of not only depression, anxiety, and suicide, but also heart disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death.

- Loneliness is just as deadly as smoking an entire pack of cigarettes a day.

- [Isabella] Ashley Kirsner has spent much of her career studying the psychology of loneliness.

- It's really impacting our bodies in ways that we're just only beginning to learn about.

- Why is loneliness a tricky problem to solve?

- One of the trickiest things about loneliness is that, the lonelier you are, the more negatively you see social situations and therefore the less likely you are to put yourself in social situations.

Let's say you're at a bar and you see someone look at you and look away.

Very neutral social interaction.

You can make any narrative you want of it.

But if you're already feeling lonely, you're likelier to see someone look at you and look away and you might make a narrative that's something like, "Oh, they don't wanna talk to me," or "Oh, they looked at me, they decided I'm not worth their time."

- [Isabella] Kirsner saw firsthand how damaging this mindset can be.

For two years, she volunteered at a suicide hotline.

It was there that she began to notice a pattern among the people who called in.

- No matter who I was talking to, they generally had someone who cared about them in their life, but when I asked them, "Oh, have you talked about how you're feeling to that person?"

Almost across the board people would say, "Oh no, we just don't talk about that sort of thing."

Or, "No, I don't wanna be a burden."

It was really striking to me that you can still feel lonely even with having someone who cared about you.

It just seemed like the determining factor of whether you were lonely or not was whether you felt comfortable opening up to those people.

I started asking, "Well, if the roles were reversed, would you want them to tell you about it?"

And the answer was, without exception, "Oh, of course I would want them to tell me about it."

So I realized there was this weird gap between how vulnerable people were comfortable being and how vulnerable people wanted others to be with them.

- [Isabella] It gave her an idea.

Creating an event where people could practice being vulnerable.

- I posted it on Facebook and before I knew it, we sold out at 50 tickets weeks in advance.

It was supposed to be a three hour long event and I had to kick people out after seven hours 'cause they wouldn't stop talking to each other.

I told myself, "Okay, I'll just keep hosting these until people stop showing up."

And it's been about eight years.

People keep showing up, so we keep posting 'em.

(indistinct chatter) - [Isabella] Skip the Small Talk has since spread to Providence and more than 20 other cities across the world.

(indistinct chatter) - We use question prompts, designed based on psychology research, to help people have one-on-one conversations that are a little more meaningful and a little more vulnerable than you might get to.

- All right, you got about 30 seconds left, 30 seconds.

- I remember one thing people expressed at the event were, "Oh, I thought I was the only one who wanted to talk about this more vulnerable, deep stuff."

And people were surprised to see that other people wanted to talk about it too.

- [Isabella] Talking about it also proved important for Brown student, Tabitha Grandolfo.

She worked with a therapist on her insecurities, took medication for her depression, and was vulnerable with a friend.

- I told her, I was like, "I don't know how I'm feeling, I'm feeling really nervous."

And I was telling her all the reasons why and she was like, "We can create a routine together."

- [Isabella] Each morning, she and her friend would eat breakfast and then walk to class together.

And each evening, they met up to do homework.

- Thanks for coming.

- [Isabella] She also got involved with a mental health advocacy group on campus, called Active Minds.

- The first day I joined, they're like, "We're looking for someone to do our graphic design."

And I was like, "I'll do it."

- [Isabella] They have a tradition of making friendship bracelets.

- Everyone have their eyes closed.

- [Isabella] Club members give each other beads and then string them together.

♪ Run away with you ♪ - [Isabella] Now a senior with plans to graduate this spring with degrees in psychology and theater, Grandolfo also keeps her bracelets from years past.

- I have some others too, but this one I feel like is special 'cause it's the first one that I did.

- [Isabella] They're a reminder of the community she has found.

- It was my birthday and- - [Group Member] Oh no!

Happy late birthday to Tabitha.

- No matter what happens, I can go on a Wednesday evening and be able to see these people who are willing to listen to me and the Active Minds is really where I found that comfort and community.