Being Anxious or Sad Does Not Make You Mentally Ill

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If you have recently been told that you have a mental-health malady such as depression or anxiety, you are far from alone. The rates at which these diagnoses are being made have exploded over the past few years. A 2021 literature review in The Lancet measured a 26 percent increase in anxiety disorder worldwide during the first year of the pandemic, and a 28 percent increase in depressive disorder. Such symptoms are much higher among some groups, according to the 2021 publication of an extended afterword to the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and journalist Greg Lukianoff. For example, among politically progressive white women in their 20s, more than half said in early 2020 that they’d been told that they had a mental-health condition.

The coronavirus outbreak and its associated lockdowns isolated people, widespread increases in feelings of loneliness and distress, have shown that the phenomenon began before the pandemic, so other reasons for it must exist as well. One commonly factor is excessive social-media use, which can substitute for in-person relationships, intensify social comparison, and elevate loneliness. Still another reason (which I have about previously) is the increase in political polarization, which can lead people to hate one another—feelings of depression and anxiety are elevated in those who direct hatred toward out-groups.