There is growing awareness of the rising presence of loneliness among young people at a global scale (WHO 2024), with loneliness being labelled as a ‘global public healthy priority’ (WHO 2024; O’Sullivan et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health 18(19):9982 (2021)). Youth loneliness rates have been rising since 2008 (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2023), one in four young people aged 15–24 in Australia experiencing loneliness in 2022 (Leung et al. 2022). Despite growing awareness of the issue of loneliness among young people, how the phenomenon of youth loneliness is investigated remains contested. Young people’s unique understandings of loneliness are often overlooked in current literature, with adult-derived definitions and quantitative scales often obscuring the diverse, situated, and affective ways young people experience loneliness. In this paper, we investigate how the use of drawing as an art-based method promotes South Australian young people’s perspectives of loneliness, increasing understanding of the social, structural and environmental factors that impact experiences of loneliness.
