Highlighting stories by Melanie Challenger, Eve Livingston, M.R. O’Connor, Gordon Peake, and Blair Braverman.

Eve Livingston sensitively draws us into the worlds of two women who share a similar past: abusive partners who committed suicide. Through powerful scene‑setting, we’re there when each woman hears the news, and we feel the complex emotions these deaths provoke. This is a difficult, complicated subject—not often tackled. Livingston bravely shines a light on how, in these particular circumstances, suicide can bring both grief and relief.

Things started as they so often do: he was older, professionally successful in a similar field to Siri’s, and there was something “magnetic” about him. There was also, she came to realise, a darkness beneath the surface. A tragic bereavement in his past had left him struggling with his mental health, something which immediately evoked sympathy in Siri and made him seem a deeper and more sensitive person, qualities she was drawn to. At the beginning of their relationship, he would often turn up uninvited to her home or events she was attending, or bombard her with messages — behaviour she now views as stalking, but found flattering in those hazy early days of a new relationship.

Daniel left school five years ago and still lives with his parents—pretty normal in a country where around a third of young British men haven’t moved out. What is different about Daniel is his identification as “hikikomori”—literally “pulled inward”—a form of extreme social isolation. Since leaving school, he has left his family home “maybe once a month.” Research into hikikomori is limited, though some links with social anxiety and autism have been drawn. In this piece, Eve Livingston explores what day-to-day life is actually like for the families living with this phenomenon, doggedly seeking access to a world built to avoid in‑person encounters.

Dip your toe into the world of hikikomori, and you’ll find that attitudes vary widely, even among the self-identified. Some, like Daniel, display a level of sensitivity and sometimes defensiveness about their lifestyle, while others are more open about a sense of sadness and sometimes hopelessness they felt towards their circumstances. 

“I am [a hikikomori]… it sucks and I hate my life,” reads one such comment on Reddit. “Every single attempt at recovery has ended up in an even deeper relapse and its [sic] so painfully boring and lonely… I fantasise about being free all the time but I know I’m probably just going to die this way.”