How the age of emotion gave us the mental-health crisis

It is stated repeatedly these days that we are in the midst of a mental-health crisis. There are endless stories about a steep increase in psychological problems, whether it be depression, anxiety or some other manner of disorder. And the news continues to get darker. On Tuesday, The Times reported that, in the Netherlands, there has been a 60 per cent annual increase in cases of euthanasia motivated by a wish to end psychological suffering. Of the 10,000 patients who died by euthanasia in Holland last year, one in 10 did so out of mental anguish.

Reports of the rise in levels of anxiety and depression are invariably accompanied by the words ‘since Covid’. A more accurate phrasing would be ‘since the lockdowns’, as the long-term psychological effects of enforced isolation clearly played a larger role than the virus itself.

Yet the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 weren’t the primary cause of our mental-health crisis. That is down to the now routine pathologisation and self-diagnosis of otherwise normal feelings of unhappiness, sadness and worry. Lockdowns were visited on a society in which feelings of isolation, disappointment and failure were already on the ascent – feelings that had long been medicalised and established as semi-permanent ‘conditions’. This trend goes back decades and has culminated in the crisis we see today.

Over 20 years ago, in his book, Therapy Culture, Frank Furedi observed that ‘virtually every challenge or misfortune that confronts people is represented as a direct threat to their emotional wellbeing’. He wrote of the widespread ‘belief that we lack the emotional resources to cope with disappointment and adverse circumstances’. He also warned that, invariably, ‘the role assigned to people becomes a passive one’.

How apposite and prescient those words seem today. When they were written in 2003, the transformation of Western culture into one that prized feelings above all else was well underway, as the aftermath to the death of Princess Diana in 1997 made clear. Indeed, the self-styled ‘caring’ Nineties, with its rhetoric of ‘emotional intelligence’ and ‘getting in touch with your feelings’, was the decade in which today’s politicians came of age. After the turn of the millennium, a therapeutic culture became consolidated and entrenched.

While lockdowns were imposed on a younger generation who had been taught to see themselves as fragile, they were enacted by politicians who also believed that human beings were incapable of resilience and fortitude. And so a vicious cycle ensued. After lockdowns, people grew ever-more anxious, distressed and depressed. Their longstanding sense of powerlessness rendered them mentally unprepared for what was a genuinely grim period.

The cycle gets worse still. Five years on from lockdown, a greater proportion of a younger generation, unable or unwilling to face the real world, have now resigned themselves to a life on disability benefit. In this, they will have even more time to brood and wallow. Idleness will deepen further feelings of uselessness and worthlessness.

Now, we see the most gruesome consequence of the idea that individuals are fundamentally helpless: young people in Holland, in the growing belief that they can’t cope with life, are now asking the state to kill them. Our therapeutic culture has a lot to answer for.

A life lived virtually is no life at all

There has been much reflection about the lessons to be learned from the Covid lockdowns. One conclusion, as many have written on spiked over recent days, is that the diktats of politicians and opinions of experts should never be unthinkingly accepted, and that individuals deserve more trust: people often react sensibly rather than recklessly when danger appears.

There is a further, more abstract lesson. The lockdowns should teach us that a life lived virtually is no life at all. When lockdowns arrived, many of us seemed to have forgotten that we were embodied human beings.

By 2020, the digital revolution had ingrained the myth that our bodies were merely fleshy encumbrances, that we are, in essence, mind and thought. Our ‘true’ selves could be represented and transmitted online. What made the lockdowns so shocking was the revelation that this was a delusion. When deprived of bodily contact, from meeting each other, shaking hands, touching, hugging, even having sexual intercourse, we were made aware once more that to be human is to have a mind and a body.

So much dissatisfaction and dysfunction today continues to stem from people living more online and less outside. Loneliness, envy, mistrust, insecurity, polarisation, intolerance, feelings of invisibility: all these emotions have been accentuated by a retreat into the less-than-real world. In this ersatz domain, our full humanity is brutally diminished. All tone of voice or facial cues denoting sarcasm, irony, jocularity, self-deprecation and doubt are absent. Nuance vanishes. What might otherwise be understood as constructive criticism or qualified disagreement in the pub, café or office is, by default, interpreted as hostility or confrontation.

Back in those dark days of 2020 we literally needed to get out more. In 2025, we clearly still do.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.