This is not a footnote. It is the heart of the matter.

A clarification on the source is in order. DAAI is the acronym for Dialoghi Adolescenziali Aree Interne (Adolescent Dialogues in Inner Areas), a national research project promoted by the ASL of Benevento and carried out by the Istituto Psicoanalitico per le Ricerche Sociali. The study involved over 900 adolescents between the ages of thirteen and eighteen in five Italian regions, comparing residents of inner areas with those of metropolitan areas through standardised questionnaires. It is therefore neither an opinion poll nor a clinical survey of already-reported cases: it is a population study, with a representative sample, allowing projections across the entire age group at national level. The fact that its findings converge with those of earlier research conducted by the CNR and the Istituto Superiore di Sanità strengthens its value.

The term hikikomori comes from Japanese: hiku, to pull, and komoru, to isolate oneself, to shut oneself away. The psychiatrist Tamaki Saitō coined it in the 1990s to describe a phenomenon that at the time appeared strictly tied to Japanese culture — its hypercompetitiveness, social shame, the suffocating bond between mother and child, the structural absence of the father. Young people, almost always male, who stopped going out. First they abandoned extracurricular activities, then their peers, then school, then any contact with the outside world not mediated by a screen. The room became the only inhabitable space. The world, something to be protected from.

For decades, in the West, this phenomenon was observed with a certain anthropological distance — as a culturally specific pathology, intelligible only within the logic of postwar Japan and its model of development. Then it began to spread. In South Korea, Spain, France, Argentina. And in Italy, where today the data deliver a profile that shares the substance with the Japanese one — the withdrawal, the room, the silence — but not the form. Because here the withdrawal has a predominantly female face, an ever-earlier age of onset, and a precise epicentre: school.

This transformation calls for an analysis that goes beyond the chronicle of distress.

The Reversal

The canonical profile of the hikikomori — male, characteristically solitary, devoted to video games or anime, financially supported by parents into adulthood — has not disappeared. It still exists, and is documented: the association Hikikomori Italia, in a 2019 survey of 288 families, found that 87% of cases were male. But something, in the meantime, has shifted. And it has shifted quickly.

Research from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, from the CNR-IRPPS published in Scientific Reports, and now the DAAI research all converge on one point: in moderate forms of social withdrawal, girls are today more numerous than boys. In severe forms, the reversal has occurred at a speed that surprised the researchers themselves. Marco Crepaldi — psychologist, founder in 2017 of the association Hikikomori Italia, author of Hikikomori. I giovani che non escono di casa (2019) and the very recent Un figlio hikikomori (2026) — interprets this as a structural change: not a statistical anomaly, but a signal that something has shifted in the way Italian society produces distress in young people, and particularly in young women. Crepaldi is today the national reference figure on the phenomenon: his perspective is not merely clinical, but cultural and associative, built through years of direct work with thousands of families. It is from this position that the formula — to which we shall return — of withdrawal as unconscious protest originates.

Why girls? And why now?

The most immediate answer — and a partially correct one — implicates social media. Girls are on average more hyperconnected than their male peers, more exposed to dynamics of aesthetic and performative comparison, more vulnerable to the logics of visibility that social media amplify. But this explanation, on its own, is insufficient. The CNR states it explicitly: those already in an advanced state of withdrawal tend to use social media less and less, until abandoning them altogether. The digital sphere may be a trigger, but it is not the decisive factor. And above all it does not explain why the epicentre of distress is not online aesthetic comparison, but school.

It is worth taking a step back. The Japanese hikikomori was, in its original configuration, a product of the performance meritocracy: an educational and working system that admitted no exceptions, that identified a person's worth with their productivity, that left little room for failure and none for difference. The young person who withdrew was the one who could not fit within that logic — and who, rather than confronting it, chose to exit it. The room was the negation of the system.

In Italy the mechanism is similar, but the subjects have changed. The thirteen-year-old girls withdrawing in provincial capitals today are not fleeing a system of salarymen and rigidly defined work expectations. They are fleeing something more diffuse and more pervasive: an environment in which every performance is visible, every mistake is public, every moment of inadequacy is potentially permanent. School is the first stage of this exposure. But it is not the only scene.

School as a Battlefield

The DAAI research is very precise on this point: the primary terrain of suffering for girls in social withdrawal is not the body — which does weigh — nor romantic relationships, nor social acceptance in the broad sense. It is school. It is there that feelings of inadequacy, failure and exclusion concentrate. It is there that something breaks.

This finding is uncomfortable, because it shifts responsibility. It is no longer only a problem of the individual, the dysfunctional family, the absent or overprotective parent. It is a problem of the institution. School — as it is structured, as it evaluates, as it manages success and failure — produces in a growing percentage of adolescents a suffering so intolerable as to make the room a safer refuge than the classroom.

We must pause on this image. A thirteen-year-old girl who stops going out does not do so out of laziness, nor out of some generic character weakness. She does so because something, in the world she faces every morning, has become unbearable for her. And that something often bears the face of evaluation, comparison, the impossible expectation to satisfy.

The Italian school system continues to be structured around measurable performance, around grades as the primary instrument of identity orientation. In an era in which external pressures have multiplied and accelerated, in which young people's lives are already saturated with continuous comparisons and a visibility that leaves no margin for error, school has failed to transform itself into a space for containing distress. It has remained, too often, a space of exposure to judgement.

Girls, socialised from early childhood toward greater relational sensitivity, a more intense attentiveness to others' gaze, more rigid behavioural standards — more well-behaved, more tidy, more diligent — are the first to yield under this weight. Withdrawal is not irrational. It is, to a certain extent, adaptive: those who can no longer bear the weight of judgement remove themselves from it.

There is a further aspect that deserves attention. The girls who withdraw are not, in most cases, the girls who perform least. They are often girls who perform well, or who wish to perform well, and who find themselves confronted with an unbearable gap between the expectations they have internalised and their perception of their actual performance. The research speaks of feelings of inadequacy, not of objective incapacity. It is the distance between who one would like to be and who one fears one is — amplified by visibility, registered by grades, confirmed by the gaze of classmates — that produces the collapse.

The Paradox of the Metropolis

One of the most counterintuitive findings to emerge from the DAAI research concerns the geography of distress. The initial hypothesis was that inner areas — more isolated, less well-served, with fewer opportunities — would produce more social withdrawal. The data say the opposite: young people from inner areas are less exposed to severe withdrawal than their peers in provincial capitals. In large cities, among girls aged thirteen to fifteen, severe withdrawal reaches 13.3%. In inner areas, the figure falls to 4.4%.

The explanation offered by the researchers is elegant and, on closer inspection, profound: in inner areas, online life does not replace socialising with peers. Families are more present, the relational fabric is denser, the life project retains a community dimension — even when it involves moving to the city to study or work. The metropolis, by contrast, offers everything except proximity. It offers stimuli, opportunities, connections — but delivers them within a system of pressure and comparison that many young people find simply unliveable.

There is something paradoxical, and historically significant, in this finding. Modernity promised that more city meant more freedom, more possibility, more life. And in large part that promise has been kept. But it has also produced an increasingly isolated, increasingly exposed individual, increasingly deprived of the social buffers that traditional community offered — however imperfect, however stifling in other respects. The urban hikikomori is, among other things, a product of this contradiction.

Invoking this finding is not nostalgia. It is analysis. The city as a space of emancipation has a cost, and that cost is paid disproportionately by the youngest and most vulnerable. The small community, with its limitations and its surveillance, offered at least a network of face-to-face relationships that the anonymous city cannot replicate. When that network is absent, or when it is replaced by screen-mediated relationships, the adolescent who cannot cope is left alone with their inadequacy.

The Silenced Variable

There is another element of the DAAI research that deserves to be foregrounded, because in public debate it tends to systematically disappear. It is the economic variable.

In families with a low level of education, the incidence of severe social withdrawal among children reaches 10.6% — more than double that in families with graduate parents, where it stands at 4.2%. For girls in less resourced families, the risk rises to 16%.

These figures tell something precise: hikikomori is not a democratic phenomenon. It has a class distribution. It strikes hardest those with fewer cultural and economic tools to withstand the pressure of the system, those who grow up in families that cannot afford psychological support, private tutoring, extracurricular activities, informal protective networks. Distress accumulates where structural fragility already exists.

Yet the public narrative around hikikomori in Italy tends to present it as a cross-cutting, generational, almost democratically distributed phenomenon — as if the room were the same for everyone. It is not. The room of a girl whose parents are factory workers on the outskirts of Naples and the room of a professional's daughter in central Milan are not the same room, do not produce the same withdrawal, do not offer the same possibilities of exit.

Overlooking this dimension is not merely an analytical error. It is a political choice, even when an unconscious one. It means continuing to treat youth distress as an individual psychological problem, to be resolved with targeted therapeutic interventions, rather than questioning the structural conditions that produce it.

Withdrawal as Critique

Crepaldi uses a formula worth taking seriously: social withdrawal is not only a flight, it is also a protest. Often unconscious, sometimes made explicit. Behind the fear there is also a critique.

It is a formula that risks being misread — as if he were romanticising suffering, as if withdrawal were a conscious political choice. It is not, and Crepaldi knows it. But there is something true in that formulation, and it is worth developing.

A society that demands continuous performance, permanent visibility, total availability for comparison and evaluation, inevitably produces a response of refusal in those who cannot or will not adapt to those rhythms. Withdrawal is not rational, not effective, does not improve the life of those who practise it — on the contrary, it worsens it, in the medium and long term, in a way that is almost always irreversible if untreated. But it is comprehensible. It is the response of an organism that has exhausted its adaptive resources in the face of an environment that leaves no room for imperfection, slowness, difference.

In this sense, hikikomori is a mirror. It shows us, amplified and taken to the extreme, something that belongs to many — the exhaustion of living in the world as we have built it, the difficulty of sustaining an identity under continuous surveillance, the desire to disappear, at least for a moment, from the trajectory of others' judgements. The difference between those who withdraw and those who hold on is not always a difference of character or mental health. It is often a difference of resources — internal and external — and of circumstances.

The room is not a choice. But it is a response. And responses, even dysfunctional ones, always have a logic. Understanding that logic is the first step toward not limiting ourselves to treating the symptom.

What This Generation Is Asking

There is a temptation, faced with this data, that must be resisted: the temptation to transform the problem into a catalogue of solutions. More psychologists in schools, more hours of emotional education, more attention to early warning signs. All correct, all necessary. But insufficient if not accompanied by a more radical question.

What is this generation trying to tell us by withdrawing?

Not the individual girls, each with her own specific history, irreducible to any category. But the phenomenon as a whole, in its acceleration, in its transformation of profile. There is something this generation can no longer bear, and that previous generations bore — not necessarily because they were stronger, but because the world was structured differently, because the rhythms were different, because visibility had limits, because mistakes had a time of forgetting.

Today mistakes remain. Social media archives them, classmates remember them, school registers them. Adolescent identity — which by definition is unstable, experimental, fragile — is exposed to a surveillance that no previous generation has known with this intensity. And girls, more than others, bear the weight: because surveillance over them has historically been more intense, because their bodies and behaviours have always been the object of a public judgement from which their male peers are largely exempted.

There is a word that recurs in many testimonies from hikikomori and their families: exhaustion. Not physical exhaustion, not the clinical exhaustion of depression — though that often comes later. A more subtle exhaustion, more difficult to name. The exhaustion of always having to prove something, of always having to be equal to a standard that moves every time you approach it. The exhaustion of being watched.

The room, then, is not only a refuge from the world. It is also a boundary. A desperate and dysfunctional attempt to establish a limit between oneself and the pressure of the outside. It is not a solution — and those who choose it know this, at some level, even when they cannot find their way out. But it is a response to something real.