Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide, according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social ties in the United States.

A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people Americans have in their closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about zero.

This is an increasingly fragmented America, where intimate social ties — once seen as an integral part of daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic benefits — are shrinking or nonexistent. In bad times, far more people suffer alone.

That image of people on roofs after Katrina resonates with me, because those people did not know someone with a car. There really is less of a safety net of close friends and confidants.”

If close social relationships support people in the same way that beams hold up buildings, more and more Americans appear to be dependent on a single beam.

Compared with 1980’s, nearly 80 percent more people in 2007 reported that their spouse is the only person they can confide in. But if people face trouble in that relationship, or if a spouse falls sick that means these people have no one to turn to for help.

We know these close ties are what people depend on in bad times,” she said. “We’re not saying people are completely isolated. They may have 600 friends on Myspace.com [a popular networking Web site] and e-mail 25 people a day, but they are not discussing matters that are personally important.

My research is based on a high-quality random survey of nearly 1,500 Americans. Telephone surveys miss people who are not home, but the General Social Survey, funded by the National Science Foundation, has a high response rate and conducts detailed face-to-face interviews, in which respondents are pressed to confirm they mean what they say.

Whereas nearly three-quarters of people in 1985 reported they had a friend in whom they could confide and count on, only half in 2004 said they could count on such support and in 2007 almost no one. The number of people who said they counted a neighbor as a confidant dropped by more than half, from about 19 percent to less than one percent.

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