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Plague Of Loneliness Reaches Gregarious Spain

MADRID (dpa) – It seems an unlikely problem to affect people in traditionally gregarious and family-oriented country like Spain: loneliness.

Yet new research shows that one of the most serious social problems of northern Europe has reached the south as well, with 32 per cent of Spaniards aged from 25 to 40 years living alone and 40 per cent feeling that they have no friends.

“Out of 18 patients who come to see me, 12 have no other problem than just needing to talk to someone,” psychiatrist Gonzalez Cajal said. Phone calls to help lines have skyrocketed, and millions of lonely people are listening to radio chat shows in the desolate hours of the morning.

“Robots are already attending to patients at some hospitals, when all of us need other humans to look at us and touch us,” Cajal said. “Even some churches have installed automatic confession boxes where you insert a coin and a machine absolves you from your sins.”

Social changes have made people increasingly lonely in a largely Roman Catholic country where nuclear families have gradually replaced extended ones and divorces have increased by 176 per cent since a law making them much easier was adopted in 1981.

Increased competition in the workplace does not leave people time to develop human relationships, and Spaniards now fear loneliness more than anything else except poor health, polls show.

Many people are terrified of the prospect of ending up alone in an old people’s home with no-one to visit them, the daily El Mundo reported.

“Around 70 per cent of those who call aid phones are women,” said Pedro Madrid of the Telephone of Hope which receives 300,000 calls annually. But men are known to suffer from loneliness just as much – probably even more, because they do not show it and talk about it.

Loneliness has contributed to the rapid increase of behaviour formerly unthinkable in relaxed Spain, such as workaholism.

Many people also flee loneliness to the world of information technology, seeking solace in Internet chat clubs and sexy websites.

“It would have taken a lot more effort to go to a bar and try to talk to a girl than to sit home in front of the computer,” says Fabian, a former cybersex addict.

“We have turned human contact into something merely sexual,” Pedro Madrid says, “when many people desperately just need to be touched.”

Many men are at their loneliest between the ages of 28 and 32 years, when they are not yet married and have no families to keep them company, El Mundo reported.

But for women, loneliness often increases after they start a family, because their workload increases and they feel unable to juggle the roles of wife, mother and employee.

Lonely people are now increasingly seeking to remedy their condition, and a host of services for them has sprung up, from newspaper ad columns and marriage agencies to singles’ bars and discotheques.

Even the Internet has often turned into a weapon against loneliness, when people actually go and meet those with whom they have exchanged e-mails, reported El Mundo.

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