Mental Health as Signal

What if rising rates of depression, anxiety, and burnout aren't signs that more people are broken, but are instead signs that more people are paying attention?

Depression. Anxiety. Burnout. ADHD. Addiction. Suicidality. These conditions are rising across every industrial country, in every age group, and accelerating fastest among younger generations (Twenge et al., 2019; OECD, 2021). This is not a measurement artifact or social media users being dramatic. The data is consistent across studies, countries, and methodologies so something must be driving this.

The dominant explanation is that more people have faulty brain chemistry. While this may be true in some cases, if mental illness were primarily biological, the rates would be relatively stable across time and distributed more randomly across populations. This is what we see with rates of schizophrenia, for instance (McGrath et al., 2008). Instead, most of the curves appear to track something else. They track social and economic conditions, inequality, precarity, overwork, isolation, ecological loss, and the feeling that is now widespread - that the future has been foreclosed (Patel et al., 2018).

Maybe we are not diagnosing an epidemic of broken individuals, but rather are watching a population accurately respond to broken conditions.

The System That Produces Suffering Also Sells the Treatment

The British cultural theorist Mark Fisher named this mechanism precisely. He called it the privatization of stress (Fisher, 2009).

Here is how it works: A system produces conditions that cause suffering—overwork, insecurity, isolation, meaninglessness, and ecological grief. That suffering is widespread. But instead of examining the conditions, the system locates the problem in the individual. You are depressed. You have anxiety. You have a disorder.

You receive a diagnosis, a prescription, and perhaps therapy. The framework is almost entirely personal: your brain chemistry, your cognitive distortions, your coping skills, your resilience. The conditions that produced your suffering are not part of the treatment plan. You are stabilized and returned to those conditions, slightly more medicated.

Philip K. Dick discussed the same pattern in his fiction novel A Scanner Darkly (Dick, 1977). The novel’s revelation at the end is that New-Path rehabilitation centers are operated by the same organization cultivating Substance D, creating a closed loop where the system profits from both producing addiction and treating it.

This doesn’t require conspiracy on the part of the medical institution. Most clinicians are doing their best within a system that structures care this way. The problem is structural, not individuall, which is itself the point Fisher was making.

The Environment We Were Built For vs the One We Actually Live In

Our nervous systems are ancient. They were shaped over hundreds of thousands of years in a very specific kind of social environment: small, stable communities; intergenerational relationships; meaningful physical work with visible outcomes; seasonal rhythms; reciprocal bonds; and continuous contact with the living world (Lieberman, 2013; Sahlins, 1972).

Industrial civilization, over roughly 150 years, dismantled most of those features. Not through ill will, but through the logic of cheap energy and economic efficiency. Spatial dispersal replaced dense community. Nuclear family isolation replaced extended kin networks. Screen time replaced physical engagement with nature. Gig work replaced meaningful craft. Algorithmic feeds replaced coherent shared narrative (Putnam, 2000; Turkle, 2011).

The result is a mismatch: nervous systems running in a post-industrial environment they were never designed for (Li et al., 2018). What we call mental illness may be, in large part, the physiological response to that mismatch. The body and mind are doing what they are supposed to do—generating distress signals when conditions are wrong.

We are treating the alarm as the problem, rather than asking what the alarm is signaling.

A growing body of research documents ecological grief, climate anxiety, and what researchers call solastalgia—the distress of watching your home landscape change around you (Albrecht et al., 2007; Clayton & Karazsia, 2020; Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018). These are not irrational fears or cognitive distortions to be corrected. The ecological data, the climate projections, the resource curves justify anxiety. The future genuinely looks different than it previously did. Many people, especially younger people, are sensing that accurately (Hickman et al., 2021).

In many cases now, we are medicating correct perception.

The system has no apparatus for processing collective fear about collective futures. There is no clinical framework for ‘your nervous system is correctly detecting civilizational instability.’ And so that fear gets routed back into individual pathology. This is your anxiety disorder, your existential dread, your need for better coping strategies.

The Carbon Footprint Parallel

In 2004, British Petroleum launched a personal carbon footprint calculator, inviting individuals to measure their climate impact(Kaufman, 2020). The campaign was spectacularly effective at relocating responsibility from industrial extraction to consumer choice. Fly less. Drive less. Buy offsets. Meanwhile extraction accelerated. The mental health equivalent works the same way: Track your mood. Practice self-care. Build resilience. Meanwhile the conditions producing the suffering continue undisturbed. In both cases, a systemic wound is repackaged as a personal project.

TECARP & Mental Health

The TECARP framework is, among other things, a tool for naming what many people are already feeling. When the curves of energy, ecological health, economic complexity, and social cohesion all bend in the same direction, individual distress stops being a personal problem and starts being a collective signal. Naming this does not make the situation easier. But it does something crucial: it restores the connection between what people feel and what is actually happening. That connection between inner signal and outer reality is the beginning of agency.

This is not an argument against therapy, medication, or mental health care. Those things have tangible value and often help people. This is an argument about what those things should be honestly called. Medication that helps someone function within difficult conditions is maintenance. Therapy that helps someone manage distress is valuable, but it is not the same as addressing the source of distress. Both can be genuinely useful, but they should not be sold as solutions to problems they do not address.

Honest treatment acknowledges the conditions. It validates that many people’s distress is an appropriate response to real circumstances (Patel et al., 2018). It should support the development of community, purpose, physical engagement, and ecological reconnection—not as add-ons to clinical treatment, but as the primary medicine for condition-produced illness (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010; Bratman et al., 2019).

It would also acknowledge that some of what we feel right now is grief, not disorder. Grief for a world that is changing, for futures that seem to be closing, for a living world that is diminishing. Grief is not a symptom. It is a measure of what we love (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018).

Instead of asking “how do we fix these broken people?”, we should ask, “what are they telling us about the world we have built?”

Understanding the systemic roots of mental illness does not make the suffering less real or the path forward obvious. People still need care, still need community, still need support. The goal is not to replace treatment with politics. The goal is to stop treating accurate perception as pathology, and to start asking what our collective distress is signaling about where we are and what needs to change.

The signal is information, and information can be the beginning of change that could start work on the underlying problem.