Who Do You Talk To When You’re Struggling?
(ANALYSIS) Who do you talk to when you’re struggling? When it feels like you’re carrying the weight of the world and there’s no way out of the mess you’re in — who can you turn to for an honest conversation? I’d bet that for a lot of us, the answer is “no one.”
Many Americans are suffering in silence, without a spouse, a close friend, or even a co-worker they can lean on when times get tough. The loneliness epidemic has real casualties. Of that, I am absolutely sure.
I saw a video on Reddit a couple of weeks ago that got me thinking about this. It was posted in “HumansBeingBros,” a subreddit that exists to make you feel a little better about the world. A motorcyclist comes upon a man walking down the middle of the road, clearly in distress. The rider stops his bike, turns around, and engages with the man—at one point even asking if he needs a hug.
Later in the video, the two of them are sitting against a fence on the side of the road. Here’s the part I love: whoever uploaded it blurred the man’s face and captioned the moment with just a few words—”talked about his struggles.”
No details. I can really appreciate that. We don’t need to know what the man was dealing with. He deserves his privacy. The video ends with the police arriving to offer him a ride home.
But it left me with a question: who can people actually talk to in an open and honest way? I’ve got some data from Pew that speaks directly to this. It’s a simple battery of questions from American Trends Panel 142, hosted on the ARDA.
The preamble is straightforward: “How comfortable would you be talking about your mental health and emotional well-being with each of the following?”
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Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.