It doesn’t feel like a genuine question you followed it up with a snide jab.
Assuming you didn’t: as a non American who emigrated to the US, the answer is fairly clear. My home country (UK) pretends like if you need therapy you either mentally weak (time to man up!) or on the verge of an inpatient psychiatric hold. Marriage counceling is just a desperate prelude to divorce from people that can’t see the writing on the wall. I would never _ever_ tell anyone on the UK if I was taking psychiatric meds.
America doesn’t have the same stigma, at least in the coastal states. So people get help. People talk about getting help.
Modern life stress is not limited to the US. It’s just the US that talks about it the most. Mental illness is not limited to the US either, they’re just more willing to use medications. And it saves lives. Had I been in the UK with mental illness I have (just the very commmon depression/anxiety power combo) I might be dead by now.
I also take great exception to the idea that there has been some seismic change in life that has resulted in more mental health crises. They were just manifested via more normalized alcoholism and home abuse instead.
If you are comparing to the population of the world as a whole, then I suspect that's because many people in poorer regions simply don't have access to therapy.
If you are comparing to wealthy industrialized nations (e.g. Western Europe and Scandinavia) then I suspect that America's lack of work life balance, lack of social safety net, repressive moral culture, high gun violence, etc. play a role.
I suspect that in some cultures people like pastors and family members play some of the role of therapists to a greater degree than in America.
> I suspect that America's lack of work life balance, lack of social safety net, repressive moral culture, high gun violence
Are Americans in therapy directly affected by those issues, or - how can I put this - merely worried about those issues in general terms?
The Economist wrote recently about how political views appear to affect mental health in the USA. The title feels unnecessarily inflammatory, for which I apologise, the article's content feels much more balanced.
What do you mean by "directly affected?" The lack of a social safety net makes me worry about myself (and loved ones) and what might happen in the event of severe job loss or health misfortune. In my city I see people living on the streets almost every day - it is a recurring reminder of the thin line.
Almost by definition, anyone who is directly suffering from the lack of a safety net -- because they are falling through where it would be, and living on the street -- is unable to gain access to therapy, because they wouldn't have money to pay for it.
>It is possible that liberalism does not just correlate with sadness but may exacerbate it. Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University, has noted that educated, affluent white liberals have come to endorse the idea that America is systemically racist, leading them to view other racial and ethnic groups more warmly than their own. “This tension—being part of a group that one hates—creates strong dissociative pressures on many white liberals,” he wrote in the journal American Affairs. Another hypothesis, advanced by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, and Greg Lukianoff, a lawyer, is that liberals are performing a reverse cognitive behavioural therapy on themselves: promoting not resilience and optimism about incrementally improving the world but catastrophic rumination about problems such as climate change and fearfulness of disagreement even on university campuses. Such habits of mind can deepen depression.
> leading them to view other racial and ethnic groups more warmly than their own
I smell Great Replacement Theory bullshit. Even liberal white people still like white people. Even "diverse" shows have white people. Even comparatively less-racist places STILL have an advantage for white people.
Personally, one of the biggest factors that impacts my quality of life is not my own financial problems but my friends' problems. E.g. having enough money to eat out isn't much good if no one else can go with you. It's hard to have fun when your friends are worried about making ends meet. Etc.
So even if it doesn't happen to them, it may directly effect them.
This comment strikes me as unintentionally helpful in understanding the problem.
"Gun violence" is of course factually a non-issue in America. Being scared of guns is like being scared of shark attacks or being struck by lightning- technically possible, but realistically such a small risk for the average person that it rounds to 0. But, if you follow certain news or get your social media algorithms tuned to show you certain content, it can seem like this big scary thing.
I also can't really fathom what "repressive moral culture" someone is imagining in America today. There has never been a time of greater tolerance for diverse sexual expression, recreational drug use, religious freedoms or alternative lifestyles. In 2024 you can be a tattooed queer polyamorist pagan who goes to Burning Man for a week and then returns to your corporate finance job on Monday.
But, all the "content for you" algorithms everywhere on the internet will have huge swaths of people afraid of their neighbor and society at large and believing they're under attack and marginalized.
I think this may depend on where in the US you live. In the South, a real consideration in interactions is "what if this person decides to shoot me" likewise behaving in a way that is perceived as immoral (read: queer) is a great way to lose your job or (if you are a minor) be thrown out of your home.
Since guns are the leading causes of death for children in the US, I don't think gun violence is correctly considered a non-issue. Comparing it to lightning is laughable.
Around 80 deaths per year, including adults and children, by lightning strikes.
Versus 120 deaths by guns PER DAY, including adults and children.
Additionally, when most of ones accessible news sources are full to the brim with polarizing topics, this leaves with limited options. I'd venture a guess that most people would like to hear what is going on in the world around them, even if the news is as negative as it is.
It's not a question of need, it's a question of want, and available resources to support those wants. The US is sufficiently productive that it can allocate people to relatively less important tasks. If a country barely produces enough to eat, then there's no room for therapists. No knock on therapists - this is basically true of everything. The more productive we are, the more "extra stuff" we can afford to have/do.
Roughly speaking, I'd conjecture that it is because America has always been an idealistic country.
As the Declaration of Independence says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." This is not a uniquely American sentiment, indeed the phrase was largely borrowed from the writings of John Locke, an Englishman -- but it does feel very American to me. (Moreover, the fact that about half the signers of the Declaration were slaveholders puts an odd twist on it, which also feels quite American.)
If some aspects of your life are going well, and not others? It feels American to me to believe that you can have it all, that if you're experiencing problems then you should not grin and bear it, but rather that you can and should solve them.
This is my personal conjecture, and of course is highly debatable.
This is a significant factor in overmedicalization in America I think. Therapy catches a lot of it since it is both broad in scope and difficult to objectify. It is a shame that so much money is wasted to provide worse outcomes in some cases: eg overprescription or overuse of inpatient stays.
If I had to guess, more money in selling people meds that they don't really need, profits get funneled into advertising and media outreach, positive feedback loops, social contagion sets in, etc
Therapists don't typically prescribe medication, but they have a role in the pipeline of prescribing it
I'm not trying to jab or anything, but I think this is highly due to social media. Some people genuinely have issues and difficult mental problems, this isn't aimed at them, and they do need professional help.
But there is a whole cottage movement of people advising people to go see a therapist to deal with all sorts of (controversially and arguably) benign stuff. Everything from bad breakups, to "toxic traits" they need to address, to family issues, to "issues" they got told is the cause of their dating woes, etc. I haven't been able to put a finger on it definitively, but it's present and is definitely influencing people.
If I were to put my "right wing" hat on, I'd respond and say it's because of all those damn lefties urging people to "talk about their feelings and stuff". That might be a tad too dismissive, but there is something to it behind the pointed accusation; and we all know how heavily pervasive social-media is at driving the behavior of the American populace, aided by the heavily-left-leaning tech companies which actively don't allow the natural immune reaction society has to large-scale gaslighting.
For all we know, people are being gaslight on a large scale, and therapy is trying to put a bandage of it because all these affected people can't reconcile the real world with the craziness of "The Narrative". Some people maybe just need someone to talk to too, you know? Maybe there is more of that in America because they're all forced to self-censor and repress themselves.
</rant> This turned out to be a rant and I let my bias show.
Edit. Now that I think about it, there is arguably even more censorship in the EU so maybe that's not it. Perhaps it's more blatant and people all know it's "forbidden" speech, rather than being forced or gaslight into thinking their thoughts are wrong.
