When people mention hikikomori, I think of Japan. Darkened rooms. Young people who haven't opened their door in months. A distant, culturally alien reality, unthinkable in our European societies where, supposedly, no one is truly alone. But the data forces me to look closer. Much closer.
1 What is hikikomori?
Hikikomori refers to a state of severe, prolonged social withdrawal: retreating from all social participation for at least six months in ways that cause significant distress or impairment. It is not introversion. It is not staying home for a weekend. It is disappearing from the world, sometimes for years, while family members live with that silence not knowing how to break it.
The term was coined in 1998 by Japanese psychiatrist Tamaki Saito, who estimated that more than one million people in Japan were affected. By 2025, the Japanese government reported 1.5 million active cases, approximately 1.2% of the national population.
For decades, the West treated it as a Japanese cultural peculiarity. Something tied to their educational model, extreme academic pressure, and culture of honour and shame. “That doesn't happen here.” Wrong.
2 Europe: the numbers that make us uncomfortable
A 2025 systematic review, drawing on 19 studies and more than 58,000 participants worldwide, identified a global hikikomori prevalence rate of 8%. And the most significant finding: that rate did not differ meaningfully between East Asian and Western regions.
Geography no longer protects anyone. Here is what we know, country by country:
Between 50,000 and 100,000 young people in severe social isolation. Hikikomori Italia is now formally cited in government documents on youth mental health policy.
NEETs represent 12.8% of French 15–29 year-olds, over 1.4 million people. Experts estimate several thousand genuine hikikomori cases among them.
Hospital del Mar in Barcelona produced Europe's first clinical study in 2014: 164 documented cases, average 39 months of isolation, 73.8% male.
Hikikomori is not recognised as a clinical diagnosis. In 2025, Plymouth University validated the first risk inventory for the British population, finding strong links to depression and anxiety.
Researchers themselves say Germany is “20 years behind” Italy and Japan. Between 2008 and 2014, only 190 cases were officially recorded — a figure experts consider radically underestimated.
First case documented in scientific literature in 2026: a man who came to psychiatric services by accident after more than 20 years voluntarily housebound.
3 Why European causes are different
In Japan and South Korea, hikikomori is closely linked to academic pressure and the fear of professional failure. In Europe, the drivers are different. Researchers point primarily to bullying, racism, difficulty with social integration, growing urban loneliness and, something I find particularly important, the fragmentation of traditional communities and the replacement of real bonds with digital ones.
Around 75% of those affected in Europe are young men aged 15 to 35. The social rupture lasts an average of two years, though some cases extend to decades. Many don't seek help because they don't know there is a name for what they're experiencing.
“A form of self-sabotage that is more involuntary than chosen — and perhaps a new form of passive rebellion against modern societies.”
— Dr Marie-Jeanne Guedj-Bourdiau, psychiatrist at Hôpital Sainte-Anne (Paris), president of AFHIKI. Encéphale Psychiatric Congress, 2026.
4 The invisible thread between hikikomori and the loneliness of older people
Japan has what they call the “80-50 problem”: parents in their eighties caring for children in their fifties who never left home. What began as a teenage problem became a multigenerational crisis. A 2019 survey identified 613,000 Japanese adults aged 40 to 64 in hikikomori situations.
Social isolation doesn't discriminate by age. A young person who withdraws from the world and an elderly person who ages alone share something fundamental: invisibility. Nobody sees them until the situation has become irreversible.
Loneliness is not a Japanese problem or an elderly problem.
It is a pandemic without a vaccine that cuts across generations, cultures and borders. The WHO recognised it as a global public health crisis in 2023.
We founded CuidadIA after witnessing what happens to people nobody calls. They don't ask for help. They learn to live with loneliness, as if it were part of the furniture.
5 What Europe is missing
There is a shortage of data, diagnoses, and home-intervention protocols. And above all, a shortage of political will to look at what is uncomfortable: the fact that our societies, for all their digital connectivity, are producing profoundly lonely people.
Loneliness is not solved with apps. It requires real presence, sustained listening over time, early intervention before the door has been closed for too long. Wherever there are people nobody calls, there is work to do.
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