Assailed by uncertainty at work and in love, Italians in their thirties are an increasingly unhappy bunch, according to one of Italy's top telephone helplines.
In general, it was the usual mix of solitude, depression and mishaps in love that made people call up the Voce Amica hotline in 2005, its 50th year of operations. But the association said the most striking development recently had been the emergence of a new group of oppressed souls who had formerly been more at ease in their lives.
They had an age range of 25-45, insecure jobs and a host of practical problems to confront. Most had a family to provide for, making their anxieties even more pressing. According to Voce Amica, the callers in this category believe they have little hope of a better future and often their struggle to cope produced aggressive behaviour and the break-up of relationships.
Monica Silvestrini, the helpline's director, said the association had been in an ideal position over the last half century to monitor how the population was coping with a series of social changes. It had seen the social casualties of urbanisation, the crisis of the traditional family, new laws on divorce and abortion, AIDs and economic slumps.
"We are now witnessing another epoch-making change: the crisis of the young, who have as little security at work as they do in their affections," Silvestrini said. About a quarter of the people who now phone Voce Amica are crushed by problems directly concerned with their jobs. But the biggest and most intractable hurdle referred to by callers boiled down to not being able to talk about things. In some 56% of cases this was the cause of family and relationship problems.
Sometimes it was a question of people with problems having no one to talk to, but sometimes the people they could talk to didn't want to listen. In other cases, the unhappy citizens could not talk because they felt compelled to keep their problem secret.
The most desperate category of the population appeared to be housewives, who complained about hectic lives with little rewards and sometimes a daily struggle to make ends meet. Five years ago Voce Amica's most frequent callers were old people.
