"The pill", "the syrup", "the lunch"... Speaking in a childish way to the elderly increases their loneliness.

In her mature diaries, Susan Sontag writes: "Solitude is infinite. A whole new world. A desert." Three short sentences that describe isolation as an extreme experience. This week, the San Juan de Dios charity launches its campaign against unwanted loneliness—this is the problem Mònica Bernabé addresses in an extensive report that you will find in theNow Sunday– with a commercial in which a man eats New Year's Eve grapes in front of the television, accompanied only by the sound of bells that become tragic, almost as if tolling for the dead. The image is a cliché that serves to illustrate the cruelty of a solitude without alternative. Although, well, it has the spirit of preparing for the New Year's Eve party and following the ritual of turning in the year. The solitude that hasn't been chosen is also a kind of temporal abyss, that desert Sontag speaks of, in which the calendar can be a torture because the days cease to have meaning because there's nothing left to celebrate.

This severe, hopeless solitude isn't always synonymous with an absence of human presence. And it doesn't have to do with special occasions either. There's another isolation, devastating and dehumanizing, that appears when the people who care for you and accompany you speak to you as if you've stopped being yourself. That infantilized speech that, no matter how many years pass, you continue to hear in nursing homes, in hospitals, on park benches, or through the courtyard. Speech full of diminutives, people wanting to give you "the pill," "lunch," or asking you to hold their arm. The "you" or "yous" disappear, and everything becomes a kind of "we" that underlines the loss of autonomy: "We'll put on our slippers," "We'll have a drink," and "We'll comb our hair a little." You'll become the "honey" or regain the status of "child" of someone who has taken that trust without you ever having been able to share a very intimate conversation. Sentences are simplified to such an extreme that conversation becomes impossible. Even listening isn't comforting, because everything is commands that have to do with routines. No one tells you anything. Only the pure chronology of what will happen immediately next. The simple retelling of a situation of control.

Often, when caring for the elderly, the desire for affection and empathy is confused with this childish yet impertinent speech. In English, it is called elderspeakAn exaggerated intonation, artificially empathetic, that limits vocabulary. Scientific studies, academic articles, and books have been written, but it persists even in professional settings in the healthcare field. It's easily identifiable. We might not see the person speaking to the other person, but from the tone we would easily deduce that the person being addressed is someone older. Studies link this condescending approach to resistance to care. It contributes to the erasure of personality, erodes self-esteem, and impairs interaction. elderspeak It's the final sentence of incapacity, the final penance before you leave for the next world. Often, the silence of the elderly is interpreted as proof of decline, but it can also be a defense mechanism against those who think you can't even listen or be treated like an adult. Surely with the best of intentions, this childish way of speaking to the elderly remains entrenched, without considering how it contributes to the cruelest loneliness, because it isolates you even from yourself.