Latest
‘The Feeling Of Isolation Is Worse’: How Loneliness Affects Foreigners In Spain
Esme Fox – esme@thelocal.es
Published: 7 Oct, 2026 CET. Updated: Wed 7 Oct 2026 12:30 CET
Add The Local as a preferred source
Loneliness is a recurring theme in online groups for foreigners in Spain, a mental health issue which is almost taboo in a country known for being sociable. The Local spoke to a Spain-based therapist to find out why.
Become a member or log in to continue reading
More
Comments
See Also
Christa Pike, 50, has been hospitalized for almost a week after receiving two injections that allegedly contained lethal pentobarbital. On Tuesday, her lawyers said she had regained consciousness and speech, though her prognosis remains uncertain. The state of Tennessee had attempted to execute her for the 1995 murder of a fellow student, but Pike survived and was taken to hospital. If she stabilizes and is discharged, the state could send her back to death row and try to execute her again.
There is still no official account of what happened last Wednesday afternoon when the execution was briefly halted before the Supreme Court authorized it hours later, but experts say the pentobarbital may have leaked into the tissues around the vein, causing injuries that authorities have not yet confirmed. Because of what occurred during the failed execution, and the medical care required to save her life, Pike’s case raises ethical dilemmas about the obligations of the doctors and caregivers treating her and about the state’s responsibility for her condition.
Dr. Arthur Caplan, a bioethics expert and emeritus professor of medicine at New York University, says there is “no place for doctors, nurses, or any health worker in executions.” “That violates their oath not to cause harm. An execution is not intended to benefit the person,” he adds.
Caplan argues that even when a doctor’s presence at an execution is presented as a way to reduce suffering, there is a boundary between punishment and medicine. “Doctors have no role in executions. Even when someone says, ‘Well, if better-prepared doctors had been present, this execution wouldn’t have gone wrong’ — you don’t need doctors, you need better-trained executioners,” he says.
“Some argue that in parts of the world doctors help terminally ill people end their lives. But remember that is meant to relieve the suffering of someone who is dying. The patient is the focus. An execution is something the judicial system seeks to carry out,” Caplan explains.
Pike was sentenced to death 30 years ago for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow student, when Pike was 18. On September 30, after last-minute appeals that delayed the execution for several hours, she was given two injections of pentobarbital and, because she remained alive, was taken to a Nashville hospital. Over the weekend, her lawyers said she was unconscious and on a ventilator.
Caplan says the question of who legally represents a person who cannot communicate is fundamental. If there is no designated decision-maker to represent and defend her interests, a court must appoint someone. “I don’t think it should be the state of Tennessee, the prison warden, or any official involved in the execution attempt” who decides what care she should receive, he argues.
“Another question is who is in charge of her care. Doctors, absent other instructions, will try to improve her condition. But she may have a mother or other relative who wants to intervene and say, ‘I don’t want that. Let her die. She will be left with disabilities and I don’t think she would want to live like that,’” the expert adds.
Stephen Ferrell, one of Pike’s defense lawyers, said Pike signed a power of attorney naming someone else to make her medical decisions, according to The Associated Press.
The dilemma has precedents in cases of inmates with mental illnesses who do not understand they will be executed, Caplan notes. “Doctors have encountered situations where psychiatrists and psychologists treat someone on death row who has severe schizophrenia or many other mental health issues, and some have refused to restore that person’s competence to be executed so they cannot be put to death,” he explains.
Until the extent of Pike’s injuries — both physical and cognitive — after the failed execution is clear, it will not be known whether the defense will raise this kind of argument. It is also not yet known what steps the state of Tennessee will take in Pike’s case.
“Lending the prestige of medicine to execution”
The American Medical Association has declared it ethically incompatible for a physician to participate in a legally authorized execution because the profession is “dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so.”
Caplan says the presence of healthcare personnel amounts to “lending the prestige of medicine to the execution,” giving the impression that “it is more humane because it is supervised by doctors.”
However, the presence of doctors does not by itself guarantee humane treatment. “We know that throughout history there have been doctors who participated in torture. The presence of doctors does not make things better,” he says.
Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist and critical care physician who advised Pike’s lawyers, wrote in an essay in The New York Times over the weekend that authorities have “tried to make executions appear like medicine,” with stretchers, intravenous lines and cardiac monitors, but that it is a “sinister impersonation of the medical profession” without consent or therapeutic purpose.
The Tennessee Department of Correction has said that all protocol steps were followed.
“We have laws, judges and courts so society does not descend to the level of brutality of its criminals,” Caplan adds. “We try to set punishments that have a rationale and objectives, such as rehabilitation, deterrence — preventing others from doing what she did — or, in some cases, retribution, that you will pay for what you have done. But we also try to remain, so to speak, civilized and mindful of the ethical need for punishment not to reproduce the same cruelty as that of the criminals.” Pike’s case shows that this is not always achieved.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
Benjamin Netanyahu used an official event commemorating the victims of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attacks (held on Monday, according to the Hebrew calendar date) to accuse the world of spreading “blood libels” about Israeli actions in Gaza.
Suddenly, Yaakov Godo, who that day lost his son Tom (killed by Israeli fire, as was determined two years later), approached and interrupted the speech: “You didn’t protect my son on October 7th; you didn’t protect 1,200 victims murdered in one day. Shame, disgrace!”
— “Sabine Tassa, of Netiv HaAsara, lost…” Netanyahu tried to continue.
— “I lost someone too,” the father replied, wearing a T-shirt bearing a photo of his son.
The scene reflected how the deadliest day in Israel’s history (with more than 1,200 people killed) and its greatest security failure — only comparable to the surprise at the start of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 — continues to shape the national debate three years on.
Television, radio, and newspapers have spent days recalling stories of heroism, loss, and pain from that day, which left the country in a state of shock and sharply accelerated a two-decade shift: toward the right, toward religion, toward the dehumanization of Palestinians and the normalization of genocidal rhetoric and support for ethnic cleansing, even among the country’s own Arab minority.
Over these past three years, the Middle East has taken a violent turn. Scenarios once considered unlikely, such as a direct confrontation between Iran and Israel (which had been fighting a shadow war through third countries, cyberattacks, and covert operations), have materialized up to four times — especially last February.
The weakening of Hezbollah, after Mossad detonated thousands of explosive charges in pagers the Lebanese militia had ordered, contributed to the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the end of nearly 14 years of civil war. Israel now faces an open genocide case at the Hague and a prime minister subject to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, where it has not achieved its stated objective: Hamas still controls more than 40% of the Strip.
However, the central issue in the imminent elections is not the present. The vote on October 27 is, above all, about October 7, 2023 and Benjamin Netanyahu’s political responsibility. Even the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir uses it for campaigning. He has put up a billboard in Tel Aviv bearing his face and the words: “If he had been defense minister [the post he has already said he wants], October 7 would not have happened.” In fact, on that day he was minister of national security, the post that oversees the police.
The symbolism of both dates falling in the same month is not lost on many. An online campaign against Netanyahu displays the date 7.10 in blood-red with a 2 added at the front, set against a background of graves and the caption: “The Day of the Fallen.”
“If they had woken me”
Netanyahu is the only senior political or military leader from that day who has not resigned or offered self-criticism. He generally retreats to a vague reference to collective responsibility before promoting the theory that security officials did not wake him that morning because they feared the response he would order. “If they had woken me up, everything would have looked different,” he has said. Unlike then–prime minister Golda Meir (who resigned over the Yom Kippur failure, even though a commission absolved her of direct responsibility), Netanyahu remains in power, is standing for re-election, and has spent the past three years blocking an independent commission from investigating the security errors.
“When he chose the election date — and many advised him not to hold them in October — he did so because he thought the impact of the massacre would have diminished, that three years had passed and everyone’s positions would already be set,” but “the question of responsibility for what happened on October 7 remains a deeply felt issue for Israeli society,” political commentator Daphna Liel of Israeli national television Channel 12 analyzed on Sunday. “The significant point is that public opinion is still finalizing its position.”
Today, according to a poll released Tuesday by that channel, 65% of Israelis consider Netanyahu “largely” responsible — with another 22% saying “to some extent” — for the October 7 security failures, driven by an arrogant strategic view toward the Palestinians focused on managing the conflict rather than resolving it. Warnings from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt were ignored, about 100 soldiers on the Gaza border were relocated days earlier to the West Bank (where settler violence had been increasing), and military commanders treated warnings from female soldiers in control towers with chauvinistic condescension.
Pollsters asked voters in Netanyahu’s coalition — among his party, Likud, the far right, and the ultra-Orthodox — whether “the failure of October 7 and its repercussions” had made them reconsider voting for them. Thirty-three percent said “to a large extent,” 22% “to some extent,” and 41% “not at all.”
Instead of a commission of inquiry, Netanyahu proposes vengeance. After the October 7 attacks, the Israeli security agency, Shin Bet, and Mossad, the intelligence agency, formed a special unit called Nili (an acronym drawn from a biblical verse) dedicated to tracking down and killing anyone who had entered Israel that day. When its creation leaked a month after the attack, reports said it would target roughly 2,500 members of the Nukhba forces, Hamas’s most highly trained units who led the assault. The plan resembled Mossad’s international campaign to kill the Palestinians responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Last Sunday, according to a leak of a political-security cabinet meeting, the head of the army’s Intelligence Directorate, Shlomi Binder, said they have already killed about 4,000 of the 6,000 Gazans who crossed into Israeli territory on October 7. As can be seen in videos from that day, not all were militants: some were civilians celebrating the attack or the breaching of the border barrier, or taking advantage to loot.
“Anyone who was involved in the attack against us, anyone who held our hostages, has their days numbered. We will find them, as we found others. Day after day, we settle accounts with these despicable murderers,” Netanyahu said Monday in his speech.
National security
Gayil Talshir, an expert on Israeli politics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has extensively studied the Netanyahu era, explains that the prime minister is trying to make national security “the main issue of the elections,” even though, a priori, it would be a weak point for him: the surprise attack occurred during his term and had been enabled by a policy that kept Hamas in power in Gaza to fragment Palestinians geographically and politically and weaken the Palestinian Authority, so Israel would not have to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state. “His narrative is that Israel managed to regroup after the attack, wage a war with Iran alongside the U.S., and, basically, change the situation, with the army controlling security zones in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza,” Talshir says by phone.
He illustrated it last month in a speech to a half-empty UN General Assembly: “We didn’t collapse. Instead, we rose and fought like lions.”
That animal, recovering from its wounds in Netanyahu’s metaphor, is today the worst-rated country in the world, with an average perception score of minus 24 — five points below the next two on the list: North Korea and Afghanistan, according to the Democratic Perception Index released in May by global public-opinion analyst Nira Data.
It is visible daily across cultural and sporting spheres. The most recent example: the return leg of a UEFA Nations League fixture in Serbia between Israel and Ireland. Irish players (from one of the EU’s most pro-Palestine countries) wore black armbands for the more than 74,000 dead in Gaza and bowed their heads when the opposing anthem played.
UEFA is investigating whether an Israeli player spat at the Irish coaching staff during halftime. The press conference ended in chaos: they abruptly removed the microphone from an Israeli journalist after he claimed an Irish player called the opponents “monkeys.” Another Israeli reporter asked Ireland coach Heimir Hallgrímsson why “they support people” whose “ideology is based on murder.” Hallgrimsson is calling for the two teams never to be drawn against each other again, as happens with teams from countries at war, past or present — such as Russia and Ukraine; Armenia and Azerbaijan (over Nagorno-Karabakh); or Serbia and Kosovo.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
Economía
La Inspección De Trabajo Regularizó A 47.000 Falsos Autónomos En 2025, La Mayor Cifra De La Serie
La Inspección de Trabajo y Seguridad Social se dedica a vigilar el cumplimiento de las normas laborales. La memoria de actuación de este organismo en 2025 recoge un incremento de la actividad de los inspectores, lo que fructificó en más sanciones (de 541 millones de euros en 2024 a 858 millones en el último ejercicio) y más empleo regularizado. La labor de Inspección consiguió dar de alta en la Seguridad Social a 96.200 personas. Y de ellas, más de 47.000 eran falsos autónomos (personas que deberían ser asalariadas pero trabajan por cuenta propia), la cifra más alta en una serie histórica que empieza en 2015. Antes este era un fenómeno residual, pero ha ido a más con la economía de plataformas.
Fernando Alonso
The Christa Pike Case And The Ethical Dilemma Of Saving Someone The State Is Trying To Kill
‘The Feeling Of Isolation Is Worse’: How Loneliness Affects Foreigners In Spain
-
Uncategorized2 weeks agoF1 Qualifying Today: Azerbaijan Grand Prix schedule, times and TV channel
-
%2 weeks agoIs Your Supermarket Kefir Really Kefir? Spanish Study Raises A Surprising Question
-
Uncategorized1 week agoF1 Bahrain Grand Prix will be live and FREE on TV this weekend
-
Latest2 weeks ago
‘It’s The Law Of The Jungle’: Pensioner’s Eviction Exposes Spain’s Housing Crisis
-
Barter system2 weeks ago
British drug dealer swaps cocaine for Pokémon cards in bizarre barter deal
-
Balearic Islands2 weeks ago
Tourists driving to Menorca could soon need a permit and pay to bring their car
-
Cody Gakpo2 weeks agoXavi Y Klopp Se Reparten Puntos En Su Debut Como Seleccionadores
-
Adamuz2 weeks ago
Deadly crash and landslide chaos wiped out 800,000 Málaga-Madrid journeys
Join the conversation in our comments section below. Share your own views and experience and if you have a question or suggestion for our journalists then email us at news@thelocal.es.
Please keep comments civil, constructive and on topic – and make sure to read our terms of use before getting involved.
Please log in here to leave a comment.