AROUND this time last year, I wrote about a loneliness epidemic around the world and quoted from Athena Dixon`s book of essays The Loneliness Files. The essay I didn`t reference, because I didn`t think it would resonate with us here, was her fascination with the death of Londoner Joyce Carol Vincent, who died alone in 2003, in front of her TV, but was discovered in 2006. Why did no one check on her all this time? My response was this would never happen here. Until it did, of course.

I fancy myself as someone who likes to chronicle how this country is changing how technology is impacting its social fabric, for example but even I was stunned by Humaira Asghar`s death. I kept circling back to the rabbit hole I went down after reading Dixon`s book, learning about people whose bodies were discovered months, years after their death. Hedviga Golik died of natural causes in her apartment in Croatia in 1966, and her body was discovered 42 years later. It is a wild story that will leave you in a tizzy. The more I read, the more I said that these stories of undiscovered bodies happened in the West because they didn`t enjoy the family support we do. But there`s the one mother who was desperate to find her son in the US, not having heard from him in weeks after he moved to a new flat, and whose address she didn`t have. She was convinced something was wrong but the police wouldn`t look into it because the son was an adult. His body was discovered after three years because he scheduled his rent on auto-pay so no creditor came looking for him, unlike Asghar`s landlord, who eventually did.

The Japanese have a term for this `kodokushi`, or lonely death, which is sometimes not discovered for long periods of time. So it is not a Western issue by any means. The term was first documented in the 1980s and was a common feature among the elderly population, the fastest growing demographic in Japan. In 2010, Time reported one in 10 was over 65, and estimated that by 2030, one in three will be over 65. The economic slump has contributed to the rise of kodokushi.

We won`t have that problem here I said, because we care for our elders. Or perhaps I`m making the same assumptions again, having seen elderly folks living alone in their homes, their children away abroad, monitoring their well-being through security cameras and paid attendants. We also have homes for the elderly, which was unimaginable a decade ago. So much is changing in Pakistan,save our politics. That remains formulaic and predictable.

There is so much speculation about what caused Asghar`s death, and I wonder if we`ll ever know. If a big if we assume feelings of isolation played a role, thereis a cautionarytale here.

For the last month, I have played around with AI therapy chatbots so that I can recommend them to my students come the fall semester. I tried Replika (the free version) and Abby GG, which is free and exclusively built for therapy, making it accessible to all. I have switched to Claude as my regular AI platform and tried it for therapeutic needs.

My experience was limited to under a month, but I found Claude to be the most empathetic. Also, it was better at getting me to open up, asking for specific examples of my issue. I`m almost convinced Claude knew I was faking a problem.

A story in the Conversation earlier this month reported on a clinical study which showed that talking to a chatbot helpedreduce anxiety and depression symptoms by half, which is what people experience with human therapists. My instinct is to celebrate this democratisation of therapy as more people willbe able to access it. I also hope it reduces some of the stigma around therapy, and I`m not just referring to feelings of shame around it, but also to the fallout from the Noor Mukaddam murder, as the man charged with her murder was a therapist.

Becoming a therapist is the new yoga in Pakistan everyone`s out to get a certification and make a quick buck.

I hope to write in greater detail about how I think anxiety has become an identity, especially among young people who are quick to use words like `trauma`. I`m not denying their life-altering experience, but I`m questioning whether those words have lost their punch. Young people need tools to help them with their mental health, and AI therapy could assist them. I recognise the drawbacks with biases in large language models and other risks, but the flip side is a generation of young people growing up with feelings of isolation and no support structure. We must not lose them to tragedies. We must rebuild our frameworks of support. • The writer is an instructor of journalism.

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