Credit: Mantas Hesthaven on Unspash
A growing number of Americans are deciding they’re done. Done with the friend who never apologizes. Done with the family member whose phone calls leave them drained. Done with the group chat that feels more like an obligation than a connection. According to a new survey released for Mental Health Awareness Month, 38 percent of Americans have gone “no contact” with a friend or family member in the past year, cutting off communication entirely rather than working through whatever went wrong.
Going no contact, once reserved for extreme circumstances like abuse orbetrayal, has quietly become a routine tool for handling ordinary relationship friction. Blocking someone on social media, removing them from a group chat, or simply ghosting them has moved from taboo to tactic. And the generational split is dramatic: 60 percent of Gen Z respondents reported cutting off a loved one in the past year, compared to just 20 percent of baby boomers.
Commissioned by the therapy platform Talkspace and conducted by Talker Research, the survey of 2,000 American adults paints a portrait of a country increasingly inclined to walk away rather than work it out. Mental health experts warn that the pattern may be deepening aloneliness crisisthat was already reshaping American life.
When researchers asked participants to explain their decision, the most common answer was a lack ofrespect. Thirty-six percent said the person they cut off was not respectful toward them. Another 29 percent cited harm to their mental health, and 27 percent said the other person was simply too negative to keep around.
Those motivations line up with a broader cultural conversation about boundaries and toxic relationships. But the survey also captured something more troubling. Seventy-three percent of respondents said that when a relationship hits a rough patch, their instinct is to pull away rather than talk it through.Avoidancehas become the default setting.
Dr. Nikole Benders-Hadi, chief medical officer at Talkspace, connected that avoidance to a broader sense of disconnection. “These results suggest that avoiding relationship challenges is becoming more common, but that approach can come with its own risks, making it harder to sustain meaningful connections over time and leading to more loneliness,” she said.
Once contact is cut, it tends to stay cut. A majority of those who had severed ties in the past year, 59 percent, reported they were still not speaking with the person they had distanced themselves from.
Going fully no contact is only the most dramatic expression of a wider trend. More than a third of Americans, 36 percent, said they had blocked a friend or family member on social media in the past year, and 30 percent had removed a loved one from agroup chat.Each of those actions is smaller than a formal breakup, but each sends the same message of quiet exclusion.
That instinct to shrink one’s social world extends well beyond close relationships. Forty percent of respondents said they would rather cross the street than stop and chat with an acquaintance for five minutes. Thirty-seven percent admitted they would pretend to take a phone call to dodge two minutes ofsmall talkwith a stranger. Gen Z led the pack in both categories.
Source: Drudge Report
