after several conversations with happiness experts and psychologists, I’ve cobbled together a tentative theory. We’re seeing the international transmission of a novel Western theory of mental health. It’s the globalization of Western—and, just maybe, American —despair.

“diagnostic inflation”—the slapping-on of more (and more, and more) clinical labels to pathologize everyday sadness and stress.

there is a difference between destigmatizing mental-health problems and popularizing them to the point that millions of young people are searching their normal feelings for signs of disorders.

globalization and the internet may be flattening the world’s once spiky terrain of mental disorders

Emergency-room visits for suicide attempts and self-harm have been skyrocketing for Gen Z girls across the Anglosphere in the past decade, including in Australia and New Zealand. But there is no rise in suicide or self-harm attempts in similar high-income countries with other national languages, such as France, Germany, and Italy. As Vox ’s Eric

Put it all together—diagnostic inflation in medicine; prevalence inflation in media; negativity inflation in news—and one gets the distinct sense that Americans might be making themselves sick with pessimism, anxiety, and gloom. But that’s not all. Just as the U.S. has long been the global economy’s chief cultural exporter—from Coca-Cola to Mickey

A simplistic explanation of Hong Kong’s anorexia surge—along with koro and hysterical fugue—would be that mental illness is always and everywhere a case of social contagion. That’s wrong. What we call worry and sadness are universal human traits, and many psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, show up around the world. Watters’s most

“Between 2006 and 2023, happiness among Americans under 30 in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand declined significantly [and] also declined in Western Europe,” the report says. But here’s the catch: In the rest of the world, under-30 happiness mostly increased in this period. “Happiness at every age has risen sharply in Central and

“For a very long period of time, our index of negativity in American news articles fluctuated around a stable average,” the UPenn economist J. H. van Binsbergen, a co-author on the paper, told me. But since the 1970s, negativity has gone haywire. “News coverage has just gotten more and more negative every decade in the last 50 years, especially