The death of Charlotte Leader, a 23-year-old girl whose body was found months after her death in her flat near Manchester, where she lived alone, caused a stir around the world. It seems he suffered from serious psychological disorders, particularly related to eating behavior, and we know this thanks to his conversations with ChatGPT, perhaps his only social outlet. It is not clear why the young woman had severed all relationships with her family, who had no longer been able to contact her for some time. He also likely suffered from a form of extreme social withdrawal, known by the Japanese term hikikomori, which often involves distancing not only from friends but also from parents.

The “kodokushi”

However, Charlotte Leader’s death is part of another sadly known phenomenon in the Land of the Rising Sun: kodokushi, which can be literally translated as “solitary death”. In 2024 alone, Japan recorded over 50,000 people who died in their homes without anyone reporting their passing: bodies found by chance by moving companies or by owners demanding payment of the rent. These are mostly people over 65, but even among those under 40 the numbers appear to be increasing. Between 2018 and 2020, in the Tokyo area alone, more than 700 young people died in complete solitude. As in the case of the hikikomori, here too Japan is merely anticipating a global trend that arises from a common matrix: solitude.

One million people show signs of suicidal plans

We live in a society with increasingly weak and rarefied interpersonal ties, where new technologies (including artificial intelligence) that should have helped us connect and improve the quality of life are instead proving to be, at least in terms of mental health, an almost total failure. However, could they offer us preventative help? Perhaps, if they could intercept cases at risk of self-harm. According to what OpenAI reported, every week, in fact, more than one million ChatGPT users show “explicit signals of potential suicidal intentions or plans”. This is just 0.15% of the total, but the figure remains alarming if we consider that not everyone finds the courage to confide such thoughts to a machine.

Hence the question: is it possible for ChatGPT to report these at-risk people to the health authorities or law enforcement agencies? Similar to what happened, for example, with a student in Florida, arrested after asking the chatbot: “How to kill my friend in the middle of class?”. In the field of mental health, however, such a strategy presents clear risks: if chatbots began to be perceived as insecure confidants, many people would avoid sharing their self-harming thoughts with them, fueling internal rumination and consequently also the risk of moving from passive to active suicidal ideation. From whatever perspective you look at the problem, loneliness remains at the core of everything.

There are no simple solutions

If we do not learn to counteract it, cases of hikikomori, kodokushi and, more generally, psychological disorders linked to anxiety, depression and loss of meaning will increase. There are no simple solutions. We need to start by rebuilding the centrality of the family, which must return to being not only a place of repression and containment, but also an emotionally safe space, where parents are perceived by their children as competent and understanding interlocutors. We need to bring public spaces back to life, replacing meeting places weakened by secularization with new contexts of authentic relationships, free from any ideological interference. And, above all, we must start talking about failure, death and mental health again – in schools, in communities, everywhere – because these topics, even today, remain a taboo that pushes us to wear masks and choose the path of appearance and, ultimately, solitude.