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November 5, 2024 – 17:45
Paris, Nov 5 (EFE).- Feelings of sadness and loneliness increased, or have remained stagnant, in most OECD countries, a trend that is largely attributed to the impact of the confinements of the crisis of covid-19 (2019-2022).
This is indicated in the report published this Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) entitled ‘How is life going?, 2024’ and which investigates well-being indicators that are not merely economic, such as the feeling of loneliness, the number and quality of social interactions and the help of loved ones.
The OECD, a multilateral organization based in Paris that brings together several of the world’s main economies, detailed that 10 of the 38 countries in the club registered an increase in people who declared themselves sad between 2019 and 2023, while only five reported an increase. improvements. The remaining 23 yielded a stalemate.
“The percentage of people who reported a feeling of sadness grew in OECD countries, especially in the short term,” indicate the authors of the study, which places the proportion of people in OECD countries who report sadness at 21%. They say they felt “a lot of sadness” the day before participating in the survey.
Israel, with an increase of just over 10 percentage points, and the United Kingdom, with nearly 7, appear as the nations with the sharpest deterioration between 2019 and 2023. Chile is among the four countries with improvements, with a drop in feeling of sadness of just over 3 percentage points.
Spain, for its part, was stable in that period with 25% of its inhabitants acknowledging that they feel sad, the seventh highest percentage among the 38 countries.
The report confirms that “the prevalence of feelings of sadness increased at a pace during the Covid pandemic.”
This health and social crisis that implied rigid restrictions on mobility and confinements in many countries also contributed to aggravating the feeling of loneliness, according to the study, which analyzes 23 of the 38 OECD countries.
“Estimates show that the prevalence of loneliness rose, in OECD countries with available data, from a little less than 4% to 14% in 2023,” says the document, which asserts that COVID social distancing measures “They affected all age groups,” not just the oldest.
Between 2019 and 2023, the feeling of concern also grew or stagnated in many of the countries known as the “club of rich nations.”
Among the 12 in which it worsened is Spain, with an increase of just over 3 percentage points, which places the Iberian country with close to 50% of its population with a feeling of concern, only surpassed by the Portuguese (more than 55%).
Regarding the indicator that measures average satisfaction with life, which ranges from a scale of 0 to 10, it has remained at 7.4 in the OECD as a whole in 2023, which demonstrates “stagnation” of that index since the covid crisis. EFE
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