Status: 12/24/2022 3:48 p.m
More and more people in Germany feel lonely – especially at Christmas. This does not only affect the elderly, says patient advocate Brysch. In the case of telephone counseling, every fourth call was about the feeling of being alone.
According to the Patient Protection Foundation, the biggest widespread disease in Germany is loneliness at the moment. Not only the elderly are affected by this, said the board of directors Eugen Brysch.
In contrast to previous years, more and more 60 to 70 year olds reported that they felt lonely, according to Brysch. However, it falls short when Federal Family Minister Lisa Paus appeals to those affected to seek help of their own accord and to use offers such as telephone counseling.
“Doing something against the growing loneliness in society cannot only be left to institutional providers,” Brysch told the dpa news agency. “It is much more important that each of us is made aware of this common disease.”
Every fourth call to the telephone counseling service
It is important to take personal responsibility and to have the “courage to speak up”. Christmas offers a particularly good opportunity to give the single people next door a gesture of togetherness. This could be a greeting or a short conversation. “Let’s press the bell button. That can be the key to a person-to-person connection,” said Brysch.
In the case of telephone counseling, a good one in four calls this year revolves around the topic of loneliness, said the chairman of the nationwide telephone counseling working group on statistics, Ludger Storch, the dpa news agency. Loneliness has been a problem that has been mentioned again and again since the beginning of the corona pandemic and affects all age groups.
“Many callers are now telling us that they are having trouble getting back in touch with other people,” says Storch. According to this, loose relationships broke down over the course of the Corona period.
Paus: Christmas especially painful
In 2022, around 1.2 million people would have called the telephone counseling service. That’s about as many as last year, said Stroch. The approximately 7,700 volunteers also answered around 43,000 emails and 37,000 chats.
Family Minister Paus called on people who are lonely at Christmas not to be afraid to turn to the offers of help. “For most people, the nice thing about Christmas is the community and being together in the family circle. If you can’t experience this sense of belonging and humanity, these days can be particularly painful,” said the Greens politician to the editorial network Germany. Then the telephone counseling and on-site facilities would be available.