Is the psychological collapse and catastrophe I wrote about in my last post a clearly identifiable reality? Well, why there is no single, clear marker of this burgeoning collapse, consider these suggestive numbers:
+ Worldwide, 700,000 people committed suicide in 2023. As a fraction of the world population, this is “only” one in ten thousand. But if we dig a little deeper, we get that, in the United States alone, 1.7 million individuals attempted suicide, 3.5 million made suicide plans, and 12.3 million contemplated suicide. And who knows what the real number is of people who contemplated suicide? Couldn’t it be much higher?
+ If you take the position that depression is as likely a psychological matter as a biological matter, then the following numbers are likewise suggestive: according to the World Health Organization, 280 million people worldwide are currently affected by depression. If you take the same position with respect to anxiety, we have the following numbers: over 40 million adults, or fully 20% of the American population, are suffering from anxiety.
+ And it looks to be worse for children. It is now being reported that one in six children aged 5-16 are likely to have a mental health problem, problems which may be psychological in nature (since no tests exist to distinguish between what might be psychological and what might be something else). This figure has gone up by 50% in the last three years. Between 2021 and 2022 alone, the proportion of older young people aged 17-19 in England with a probable mental health disorder jumped from one in six to one in four.
+ And if there is a psychological component to addiction—if, that is, people fall prey to an addiction more easily if they are struggling psychologically—then we have these numbers to contend with: 46.8 million Americans (aged 12 and older) battled a substance use disorder in the past year. That’s almost 17% of the population. 10.5% of Americans 12 and older reported an alcohol use disorder in the past year and about 27.2 million Americans 12 or older (9.7%) reported battling a drug use disorder in the past year.
+ And what about unhappiness at work? In the United States, 50% of workers reported feeling stressed at their jobs on a daily basis, 41% reporting being worried at work, 22% reported being sad, and 18% reported being angry. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2022 report found that, along with job dissatisfaction, workers are experiencing staggering rates of both disengagement and unhappiness. 60% of people reported being emotionally detached at work and 19% reported being miserable.
These numbers are not proof of psychological collapse or catastrophe. But that one-third of Americans report symptoms of either depression or anxiety, that countless others are likely not being recorded in the statistics, and that all statistics that measure human difficulty, whether that difficulty is suicidal thinking, depression, anxiety, addiction, unhappiness at work, or another pressing challenge, simply can’t be ignored.
Answers? Let’s begin to look at that next.
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