Before You Diagnose Yourself, Diagnose the Country
People keep walking into psychiatric offices saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” as if their brain spontaneously malfunctioned. A real issue for most people is not internal. It is environmental. We are living in a country where the emotional climate feels like a smoke alarm that won’t stop beeping even though there is no fire and you removed the batteries in 2019.
Scott Galloway (business professor and commentator) said, “We are experiencing a crisis of young people, especially young men, but we are also better equipped to treat it than ever before.”1
Heather Cox Richardson (historian of American political systems) describes this era, perhaps too kindly, as a national realignment.2
George Carlin (comedian and cultural critic) said, “The world is a freak show and if you are born in America you get a front row seat.”3
The Unstable Society
Welcome to America, where everything feels structurally unsound but we keep sprinkling optimism over it like powdered sugar. Housing behaves like a status symbol. Healthcare behaves like a subscription box. Grocery prices behave like a dare. RFK Jr behaves like the scientific method owes him money.
Fareed Zakaria (geopolitical analyst) warns, “Democracies fracture when trust erodes and grievances multiply faster than solutions.”8
John Mulaney (comedian) said, “It is like someone asked what if we took anxiety and gave it a country.”9
Your brain is not malfunctioning. It is reacting to a society that is.
The Purpose Recession
Young adults are not lazy. They are existentially exhausted. They were told to go to college, then discovered the job market is a haunted house. Doors that should open don’t. The doors that do open scream.
Yuval Noah Harari (historian and social theorist) writes that modern instability “generates loneliness faster than it generates meaning.”12
Maria Bamford (comedian and mental health advocate) says, “I like goals. They give me a sense of failing with dignity.”13
Purpose used to be a byproduct of adulthood. Now it is a luxury hobby.
Gender, Education, and the Vanishing of Men
• Women earning 60% of college degrees
• Men earning 40%
• Decline in male enrollment since 2015: 15%
• Skilled trade jobs unfilled: >600,00014
Women are skyrocketing in education and achievement. Men are drifting like abandoned shopping carts.
Scott Galloway calls this “a generation of men lost in the wilderness of low purpose and low prospects.”15
Hannah Gadsby (comedian and social commentator) says, “We built a world where half the population is exhausted and the other half is confused by the exhaustion.”16
The Research Collapse
America is losing researchers the way people lose socks in the dryer. You put two in. One disappears. No one knows where it went.
Peter Zeihan (geopolitical strategist) warns, “Countries that starve research starve their future.”19
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (novelist and cultural critic) wrote, “A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.”20
The Demographic Winter
Women aren’t having fewer children because they dislike babies. They’re having fewer because the math looks like a ransom note.
Ali Wong (comedian and writer) says, “You want me to have kids. Then you pay for them. Because right now the math is mathing in the wrong direction.”22
The AI Panic: Will the Robots Take Your Job or Just Break Your Brain
But AI feels different because electricity never wrote your emails faster than you.
Young adults fear AI will take their dream jobs while refusing the real jobs (trades) begging for humans. It’s not laziness. It’s identity disorientation.
How AI, Joblessness, Economic Identity, and Mental Health Collide
AI amplifies: job scarcity, credential inflation, fear of irrelevance, nonstop comparison, and identity destabilization.
Psychiatrists are seeing skyrocketing anxiety, derealization, internalized inadequacy, and despair among young adults trying to compete with software.25
Are We Medicating People to Cope With the Loss of Necessities?
Partially, yes. We are medicating people because stability, community, income predictability, and affordable housing used to be normal and are now luxury items.
And also because psychiatric treatments have never been more effective or accessible.26
Generational Differences: Seek Help or Shut Up and Cope
The Silent Generation believed suffering-built character. Younger generations believe suffering is treatable. The older coping strategies collapse quickly in a world with AI disruption, attention hijacking, debt culture, and economic instability.27
Why This Impacts Psychiatrists in Particular
Psychiatrists are treating not only disorders but the environmental pressure itself. We are not medicating personal weakness. We are medicating humans living under historically unreasonable conditions.
Your brain is not broken. Your country simply forgot to run its emotional software updates. Psychiatry exists to stabilize humans while society behaves like experimental technology running on a corrupted beta.
I find this whole situation in the US untenable. If this article made you mad, understand something differently, or if you agree with any of it, please leave a comment below, or go to my website:
www.boulderpsychiatryassociates.com.
If you are ever in Boulder, please stop by. I always respond to comments, so please leave one.
