Is "Mental Health Awareness" Making Mental Health Worse? According to the Research: Probably.
Modern therapy culture and mental health awareness can deny people a sense of personal control and create anxiety over their inner life.
In the modern West, it is taken for granted that “mental health awareness” is making everything better. And to a certain extent, I believe it has. We have come a long way from the brutish ways of our ancestors in Sparta, Rome, and other militant societies where strength was seen as supreme and anyone who dared speak of their mental health would’ve probably been branded “defective” and treated as such for the rest of their lives.
However, everything exists on a bell curve: there is a point at which something becomes too much, and the good effects of that thing begin to taper off, then reverse into something bad. Wealth is a good example. While being dirt-poor tends to make childhood a lot harder, so does being disgustingly rich: just as poor kids tend to absorb the crummy aspects of their environment, the children of the ultra-rich tend to absorb the apathy, entitlement, and laziness of theirs. In the same way, I believe that “mental health awareness” has become too much of a good thing. It may even be rotting society from the inside out. These are not fringe opinions; they are realities borne out by the research.
Furthermore, as mental health awareness has increased, so has the influence of the psychology industry in everyday life. Once confined to the psychiatrists’ couch and the halls of academia—where PhDs tried to coax rats into pushing buttons, or scanned the brains of patients to see which hemispheres lit up in response to different stimuli—psychology has wormed its way into nearly ever sector of American life. In 2023, the American Psychological Association published an article entitled “The Rise of Psychologists.” In a triumphal tone, as if recounting a string of military victories, the article discussed how psychologists have been breaking into new fields as demand for mental health treatment and “advocacy” has skyrocketed. For example:
In government, psychologists have gained prominence as a result of a nationwide emphasis on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI. The District of Columbia recently hired its first ever “Chief Equity Officer”, a former counseling psychologist by the name of Amber Hewitt.
In the entertainment sector, psychologists are working as consultants for movies and documentaries, and as therapists for actors and actresses playing difficult roles.
In sports, psychologists are providing therapy for professional athletes, especially now that high-profile sports stars are opening up about their mental health struggles. According to the article: “As of 2019, individual teams in both the NFL and National Basketball Association (NBA) are also required to have a mental health clinician on-site.”
And since America is a top exporter of culture, American-style “mental health awareness” is quickly replicating its influence in other parts of the world—Britain, Canada, and the Nordic countries, to name a few.
To be sure, some changes are very good. For example, work is being done to make better policies for disabled people, a work that necessarily involves psychologists. But we need not welcome the societal shift toward pathologizing all human behavior, or casting every social problem in terms of mental illness. When society’s problems are reduced to a need for more mental health resources, that necessarily excludes any discussion of alternative causes or treatments. It also excludes any discussion of how the modern, Western variant of “mental health awareness” may be contributing to the problem. Yet the research shows that mental health awareness, in its current iteration, has many awful side-effects, which, taken together, should make us reconsider a lot of what our culture takes for granted. Below are two of those side-effects.
1. DEI stems from a worldview that has an external locus of control. This kind of mindset is associated with depression, and is a reversal of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
To the extent that psychologists push DEI proposals, they also, ironically, push a mindset that psychiatrists tell their patients to actively fight against. Let me explain.
DEI stems from Critical Race Theory, a worldview that sees systems—the political system, the justice system, the education system—as inherently racist, and in need of renovation. By its very nature, CRT strips away a person’s sense of control over their life—namely, where they will end up—and places it in the hands of a government that may or may not care enough to do anything about systemic injustices (if those injustices even exist). It turns out that this sense or locus (location) of control is an integral part of our happiness. In one 1976 study, nursing home patients who were allowed to care for their own houseplants and pick when to have their weekly movie night fared much better than nursing home patients who were not. In another study, people rated their work commute as the least happy part of their day, precisely because it is the part of the day least in their control, subject as it is to unpredictable car accidents and traffic patterns. As Arthur Brooks notes, “a perceived lack of personal control brings misery.”
We see the negative influence of having an external locus of control (that is, a sense of control that is outside oneself) when we look at the mental health of people with a victim mentality. As Musa al-Gharbi writes in American Affairs, “Heightened perceptions of bias and discrimination are robustly associated with mental anguish, social strain, and adverse physical outcomes”, as people with such perceptions are more likely to experience “anxiety, depression, psychogenic and psychosomatic health problems, or to behave in antisocial ways.” Relatedly, young liberals—who tend to support things like CRT and more government involvement in public life—have higher depression scores than conservatives, with liberal women most effected:
Depression patients often say they do not feel in control of their own lives. Could it be that a secular worldview, in which change is primarily the responsibility of institutional forces and not the individual, is causing people to lose their sense of personal control?
Liberals also tend to have lower self-esteem scores than conservatives, according to research by Jonathan Haidt. When asked to rate their agreement with self-derogatory statements like “sometimes I think I am no good at all”, liberals agree with such statements far more than conservatives (again, liberal women report the most agreement). In other words, adopting a victim mentality seems to cause self-loathing. Arthur Brooks sums up the implications of this research when he writes:
in as much as the American left is now a coalition of groups that define themselves as victims of social and economic forces, and inasmuch as liberals encourage these feelings of victimization in order to mobilize more votes, liberal leaders inevitably make themselves and their constituents unhappy.
However, rates of “self-derogation” have gone up for both parties since the mid-2000s. The response to mental unwellness in this area would be some form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, which seeks to empower the individual by focusing their attention on what they can control, instead of on unstable, external forces. CBT has origins in Stoicism, a philosophy that focuses a person’s interior life on their responses to events, not the events themselves. Christians modify Stoicism by adding divine sovereignty: no matter what trial may come your way, God will use it for your good (Romans 8:28). The current psychological trend, especially in higher education, of seeking out “safe spaces” and “counseling” for every perceived slight is the exact opposite of the Stoic-Christian impulse. Indeed, al-Garbi describes CRT as “reverse-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.” Why? Because it trains people to see and worry about things they cannot control; and people who worry about things they cannot control are more likely to develop internalizing disorders, like depression, than those who do not.
2. Constantly focusing on mental health actually makes mental health worse.
Liberals are more likely than conservatives to report having a mental disorder, and consistently report lower levels of happiness. The “happiness gap” between conservatives and liberals is well-documented and has remained relatively unchanged for several decades. But why?
One possible reason—of many—is that liberals are more likely than conservatives to dwell on their emotions, ruminate over the mental health of themselves and others, and seek out diagnoses for mental disorders, according to research by al-Garbi. As a result, they react more dramatically to setbacks and recover from them more slowly. However, liberals are hardly the only ones obsessing over their mental health; a growing body of research suggests that modern “mental health awareness” sowed negative thought patterns in the minds of young Westerners. Jonathan Haidt notes that the rise in Gen Z suicide rates is sharpest in the Anglosphere (the U.S., U.K., Canada, and New Zealand)—and that the rise began after 2010 and hit girls the hardest. In another forum, he notes that the decline of mental health in the West is concentrated among younger generations, and has left Boomers and Gen Xers comparatively unscathed.
In other words, mental health is declining fastest for young, English-speaking people.
To try to see why, let’s start by analyzing the first half of this statement: Mental health is declining fastest for young people. Recent research shows that the bell-shaped curve of happiness has been replaced by more of a diagonal line; in other words, whereas happiness used to peak in youth and taper off in old age, happiness now seems to increase with age, with old people reporting the most happiness of any age group:
To illustrate further, globally, America ranks 62nd in self-reported happiness among those under 30; among those over 60 it ranks just 10th (the findings are based on a survey of 100,000 people across the globe). In response to this discrepancy, some have pointed out that old people are more settled, have less to prove, and are therefore less worried and self-conscious than young people. However, the relative newness of this phenomenon demands another explanation. Could part of the explanation be that young people think about mental health, particularly mental disorders, more than their parents or grandparents ever did?
Prior to Gen Z, “mental health” did not rate much attention. Now, it is obsessed over to the point of causing real anxiety: child psychologists remind their elementary-age patients that their brains are sites of constant, sometimes alarming, activity; teachers start the school day by asking their students to describe how happy or sad they feel; and movies like Inside Out 2 turn neuroses like anxiety into 3-D characters, further reifying the threat of mental illness in developing minds. Along these lines, Dr. James Kalat of North Carolina State University points out a disturbing fact: “On the Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale, the mean score for all children in the 1980s was greater than the mean score for mentally hospitalized patients in the 1950s.” In other words, children fared better in a time when mental health was “stigmatized” than in modern times, when mental health is sacralized and there are more mental health resources than at any point in human history. Why that is is a question that should be at the top of every psychologist’s mind.
That still leaves the second half of the statement to solve: mental health is declining fastest for Western people. One possible explanation is that non-English speakers have less contact with the therapeutic language and ideas that have become so popular in the Anglosphere. For example, though Gen-Z Canadians’ rates of “life satisfaction” have been in decline, according to data cited in the World Happiness Report, the decline among residents of Quebec, 80% of whom speak French, was half that of the surrounding residents of Canada, who speak English. This difference cannot be accounted for by wealth or living conditions; all the survey respondents live in Canada. It’s possible that the difference arises from the fact that French Canadians are more deeply enmeshed in their language and culture, which brings great comfort. And it is just as likely that their culture shields them from the worst effects of therapy culture. The World Happiness Report’s global ranking of youth mental health yields a similar pattern. While war-torn, poverty-stricken nations consistently rank near the bottom (Afghanistan), Western English-speaking nations—the richest and most democratic in the world—almost never top the list. Young Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Brazilians all say they feel happier than young Americans.
Still, how is this all happening? How does modern “mental health awareness” practically work?
First, there is a long-running trend of concept creep that is infecting PhDs at the highest echelons of the psychology industry. Concept creep refers to the inflation of a concept (a good example is “trauma”) to include more and more previously unrecognized manifestations of that concept. Enter the DSM-5: the 1,000-page, 4-pound medical dictionary that psychologists consult when diagnosing and treating mental disorders. Since its publication in 1952 as a resource for psychologists treating war veterans, the DSM has evolved through five editions, each one broadening the diagnostic criteria for existing mental disorders and adding new ones (so far, it has added 200 new mental disorders to its original list of 106). Dr. Allen Frances, who formerly edited the DSM, says the concept creep has gotten so bad that a person grieving the loss of a loved one could be diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, or a child who throws tantrums could be classified as having Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder.
As a result, he argues, the DSM-5 may be inflating the reality of mental illness because it flattens the distinctions between worry and anxiety, bereavement and depression—negative human behavior and abnormal human behavior, in other words. This may cause more people to worry that they are mentally unwell, leading them to interpret normal emotional ups and downs as symptoms of some mental disorder. According to one hypothesis, this “anxiety about anxiety” can morph into real anxiety symptoms, like withdrawal from daily life, which can morph into depression—and on and on in a ruthless cycle. In the words of Dr. Frances, the DSM-5 seems to be turning “‘normal’ people into ‘mental patients.’”
Second, the worldview of modern psychology has spilled over into the broader culture; and through its contact with culture, it has become poisoned. In other words, aided and abetted by social media algorithms, America may be “exporting” anxiety to young English-speakers through therapeutic ideologies that encourage people to pay an inordinate amount of attention to the vagaries of their inner life. Writes Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Anxious Generation:
[TikTok’s] advanced algorithm [picks up] any sign of interest in anything and sent users more of that, often in a more extreme form. Anyone who [reveals] an interest in mental health [are] soon inundated with videos of other teens displaying mental illness and receiving support for doing so. In August 2023, videos with the hashtag #mentalhealth had more than 100 billion views. #Trauma had more than 25 billion.
Indeed, increasing numbers of phone-addled teens are are now identifying with certain mental disorders and seeking out treatment, even though they are perfectly fine. Jonathan Haidt explains that “There is evidence that several… disorders are spreading sociogenically, especially on sites that feature video posts such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.” He adds:
[Dissociative Identity Disorder] used to be rare, but since the arrival of TikTok, there has been an increase, primarily among adolescent girls. Influencers portraying multiple personalities have attracted millions of followers, contributing to an escalating trend of self-identifying with the disorder. Asher, a TikTok influencer who describes themself as a “system” of 29 identities, has amassed more than 1.1 million followers. The growing interest in DID is further evidenced by the billions of views garnered by hashtags such as #did (2.8 billion), #dissociativeidentitydisorder (1.6 billion), and #didsystem (1.1 billion).
Haidt notes that a similar dynamic may explain the recent rise in diagnoses of gender dysphoria. Social contagions aside, it is undisputed that chronic social media users are more likely to develop a mental illness, for a variety of reasons ranging from the self-comparison of photo-sharing apps to the loneliness of disembodied communication. Another reason, often overlooked, is that social media is the primary gateway to “therapy culture” and mental health “influencers.”
So we come to two unsettling conclusions: (1) By expanding the definition of mental unwellness, the psychology industry has, ironically, made people more anxious and fearful about their mental health—in their zeal to contain anxiety, they have turned it into a boogeyman. And (2) modern “mental health awareness” is actually harmful when it markets itself as a cultural status symbol—a status symbol that Gen Z teens are only too happy to accept. So we see both a grassroots movement and a top-down movement toward pathologizing normal human behavior, movements that interact to create a culture of mental illness. At least that’s the theory.
But that still doesn’t explain why teens are flocking to mental health “influencers” in the same way people used to flock to church on Sundays. Could it be that modern therapy culture is part of a growing cultural obsession with the self? Has therapy taken the place of community, faith, and other historical sources of societal well-being? That will the subject of my next article.
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