U.S. Mental Illness Epidemic

Loss of Meaningfulness and Autonomy: Andrew Kimbrell, director of the International Center for Technology Assessment, reported in 1999, “Studies consistently show as many as 80 percent of workers in our society feel their jobs are meaningless.” The leading growth jobs in the U.S. now include cashiers, janitors, maids, retail clerks, and restaurant servers.  At the end of the 19th century, a majority of Americans still worked for themselves—mostly family farmers—but by the end of the 20th century the overwhelming majority were working for someone else; and most of those still classified as self-employed are in fact at the mercy of corporations and governmental bureaucracies.  

Not too long ago, Americans had far more physically demanding and difficult lives, but these lives included antidotes to mental disability. In addition to genuine community, family farmers and artisans had work with greater autonomy, creativity, and meaning. 

Psychiatric Drug Explosion: Psychiatric drugs given for non-psychotic behaviors can trigger psychotic behaviors. The attention deficit disorder drugs Adderall (an amphetamine) and Ritalin (amphetamine-like) affect the same neurotransmitters as cocaine and can cause mania, hallucinations, and delusions. Antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs that are often prescribed for acute symptoms can result in chronic disabling disorders because of the body’s adaptation to these drugs, e.g., serotonin-enhancing drugs such as Prozac cause the body’s neurons to release less serotonin as well as to decrease the number of serotonin receptors, resulting in an ever-increasing need for more of the drug, without which withdrawal, sometimes with psychotic symptoms, can ensue. 

Extreme Consumerism: Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm believed that the increasing rate of severe emotional problems in modern society was connected to increasing consumerism. Fromm saw Americans as dominated by the having mode— greed, acquisition, possession, aggressiveness, control, deception, and alienation from self, others, and the natural world, resulting in increasing mental illness. Unlike modern mental health professionals who take seriously drug studies that are funded by drug companies, Fromm took seriously Buddha, Jesus, and Spinoza. 

According to Spinoza—not only a great philosopher, but a psychologist (he discovered the power of unconscious passions more than 200 years before Freud)—“If the greedy person thinks only of money and possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not think of them as being insane, but only as annoying; generally one has contempt for them. But factually, greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as ‘illness.’” 

If we take Spinoza seriously and then consider how many Americans take Donald Trump seriously, we may well conclude that perhaps there is a pandemic of mental illness in the U.S. If we take the research and common sense seriously, we will likely conclude that the cause of increasing rates of depression, psychoses, greed, and other self-destructive behaviors is an ill society that is increasingly difficult to transcend.