United Marxist Nations wrote:I think I was unclear, and I apologize, the volunteers would be the friends.
Alright, lets get a few base points that will need to be addressed to successfully treat social isolationism
1. Identify people who are socially isolated
2. Develop a process that can adapt to each individual's problems and issues
3. Finance and run said processes
4. Identify when the patient is "cured" of their social isolation.
1. In order to identify people who are socially isolated, we will need to either look for them through open and belligerent invasion of everyone's privacy, or through self-help. Since we are looking at the demographic people who have not gone to any therapy for help (Since the demographic who look for help and can't be cured can't....Well...be cured), that alone makes the voluntary response method invalid. Therefore, leaving the brutal and abhorrently expensive path of filing every single report on billions of people to find which ones might be feeling socially excluded.
2. Since there is no "one-size-fit-all" treatment, you will need to use methods akin to therapists and psycholigists already use, except done on individuals who never asked for help. One major aspect of therapy is that the patient has to want to be helped in order to be cured. Since we aren't treating actual mental illnesses, but merely the feeling of isolation in this scenario, it will even be more difficult to coerce people to attend help session for isolation.
If the cure is to find friends, then you need to have a demographic of people willing and open to meet complete strangers and be friends with them, however since this is something introverts tend to dislike doing, and since they make up 50% of the population and I would imagine be the larger population within the "isolation" demographic...It will be hard. You also have to convince the PATIENT to hang out and become friends with complete strangers as well.
3. How are you going to finance it? Taxes, donations, fees? Even if somehow you run it ALL on volunteers, you still need to provide funding for supplies and the like.
4. How do you determine when a person is "cured" of loneliness? Merely when they are no longer claiming to be lonely or through extensive behavioral monitoring?