Posted on 05/02/2026 6:50:16 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
When it reaches the stage when everyone in the entire country is diagnosed as having mental health problems, will we have to accept that being mentally ill represents mankind’s new norm, thus rendering the whole concept meaningless? This is not some idle philosophical hypothesis. This is a question we will one day have to ask ourselves if matters continue on their current path.
According to new research from Zurich Insurance, 51 per cent of people aged between 15 and 19 now have a mental or behavioural disorder such as anxiety, depression or ADHD, and if present trends continue as they have, by 2030 this figure will hit 64 per cent. We have indeed crossed a momentous boundary. On the face of it, being mentally unwell has statistically become the norm among older teenagers in this country, and as things stand, it will ultimately come to represent normality for everyone else.
Yet we should not accept such findings: not on face value, and not upon the criteria they are based. It’s time to debunk the narrative of this ‘crisis’ and push back against the vested interests who propagate it. Far from being a medical emergency, this ‘mental health crisis’ should be more properly understood as a social phenomenon and a case of social contagion.
This inauthentic crisis has been in long gestation. Long before the fateful Covid lockdowns of 2020-21, which did genuinely make impressionable young people more fearful of the outside world and each other, there had emerged a consensus in society that human beings were fragile and vulnerable entities. This mood emerged in the 1990s, the decade in which we were all exhorted to ‘share our feelings’, when seeing a psychiatrist became fashionable.
This new consensus, as outlined by Frank Furedi in his 2004 book Therapy Culture, a work which still needs to be read today to understand where we are now, was replete with the language of damage, anxiety, addiction and stress. The lockdowns were visited on a neurotic populace that had already been encouraged and inclined to perceive itself as mentally brittle. This was a society whose members in 2020 had been thoroughly enervated and rendered passive, likely to believe a medical diagnosis that would give legitimacy to their feelings of unhappiness and lethargy. For too many, that diagnosis has since constituted a life sentence.
People given a diagnosis are prone to slip into further depths of listless despair. There’s nothing like being told that your body or brain is at fault to reinforce a sense of passivity, the notion that there’s nothing your mind can do to address your predicament. In other words, the Covid lockdowns triggered a snowball effect, one, which as this new research illustrates, is now out of control.
Diagnoses such as ADHD or autism now encompass a whole host of behavioural disfunctions that go well beyond their original remit. Their proliferation through popular demand, and even fashion, is emptying them of meaning. Only last month, Dame Uta Frith, who helped to popularise the term ‘autism spectrum’, warned that has become so accommodating that it was ‘close to collapse’.
Yet it’s not just the overuse of these terms that’s been the issue. Labels can in themselves ingrain problems. As Will Shield, a professor of psychology at Exeter University, told the Daily Telegraph this week: ‘It’s far easier to try to make sense of your experience through that lens of “I fit into this box”, or “this is why I find things so challenging”.’ To give yourself a label is to be defined and determined by it. Rather than imprison yourself with appellations, it would often be preferable to abjure them altogether. Some people who ‘have depression’ would be better off thinking themselves as temporarily ‘being depressed’.
Matters have been compounded by governments since the lockdowns, who, taking self-diagnoses for the most part on face-value, have responded by putting unhappy people on welfare benefits. Notwithstanding the fact that becoming dependent on charity is always humiliating and invariably augments feelings of worthlessness, staying indoors all day to do little but wallow in your predicament will worsen matters further.
Nearly one million 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK are classed as Neet (not in education, employment or training), meaning that they are neither earning nor learning. This a million wasted lives who would feel much better by keeping active and earning a living for themselves.
While there have always been unfortunate souls who suffer from genuine mental disorders which can never be remedied without help, ranging from clinical depression to various scales of schizophrenia, there have likewise forever been those who, to varying degrees and different times in their lives, have felt unhappy or miserable. There’s nothing wrong with that. Feeling bad is normal and nothing to be ashamed of. But neither does that make it a medical condition.
So is the “housing crisis” ™ The housing crisis exists mostly of the under 40 set who, during C19, “doom spent” there enhanced unemployment benefits on frivolous things thinking that UBI and cancel rent was just around the corner.
It’s a whole new constituency that Dem pols are latching onto. The “it’s unfair that we have to pay our own way” crowd.
With credit scores below 550 and ever increasing “tenant protection” ™ legislation, which allows government to incentivize irresponsible behavior, only slumlords will rent to them when they were expecting a turn key, no maintenance Taj Mahal instead.
there=their
You want to see fraud that is multiples larger than Somali fraud? Look around your city and start to notice all of the office spaces filled with mental health, behavioral health, counseling facilities.
Your tax dollars are paying for bogus diagnosis, mood drugs for a lifetime(their goal is not to cure you), and govt dependence.
A lot of “mental illness” seems to be little more than bad behavior. Some people need a punch in the mouth.
Bkmk
If everyone is “mentally ill,” then no one is.
Or a kick in the seat of their pants.
So many in our culture are on antidepressants. You get generations can’t cope.
Younger generations
There be GOLD in them thar “mental health” diagnoses ...
True, but having to deal with is driving the rest of nuts too!
Dealing with them is driving the rest of us nuts too.
Sorry, only typed with one eye open. Need Java before posting.
Democrats love the prospect of getting as many Americans as possible diagnosed with mental illness so they can legally disarm as many Americans as possible during 4473 background checks.
I believe the actual medical term is “liberalism”.
When we started “sparing the rod”, mental health took a nose dive...it’s Biblical...
That's always been true. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
51 per cent of people aged between 15 and 19 now have a mental or behavioural disorder such as anxiety, depression or ADHD.
But we got weed man burn one with the folks huh Moe.
Bad behavior is not a disease. A true disease can’t tell the difference between the parent who was killed by his son and the parent who was not.
You think it was caused by a chemical imbalance? Name the chemical.
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