Are We Having Fun Yet?

Welcome to a new series I'm starting to get to the root of this question.

For myself and millions and millions of other people living in the US, the past several decades brought incredible advances. Daily tasks like paying bills and depositing checks went from taking hours to taking seconds. We can connect with people around the world in an instant, and talk to them face-to-face through a device we can take anywhere. Diverse, high-quality media became incredibly accessible to consume, as well as to create. And these advances go beyond the frivolous - many medical conditions went from being death sentences to being survivable, many physical differences became less disabling, and civil liberties for many expanded (current threats notwithstanding). More than ever, it can feel like we’re living in a truly modern era, although modernity is a deeply problematic concept.*

Despite progress, there is a strong sense that our mental health and wellbeing is declining. Surveys and other data sources find that rates of depression are increasing across the population, as are deaths from causes related to psychological distress, such as suicide. This has reached such a point that the Biden Administration declared that the U.S. is facing a mental health crisis.

But how could this be? How can we observe such profound suffering amidst such incredible growth and progress? This becomes existentially troubling for our society: if we’re not better off, what is all of this for? When we ask ourselves, as the catch phrase from the cult classic television show Party Down goes, “Are we having fun yet?” the answer should be yes. Is it just that the fruits of this modernity are not equitably distributed? Or is it that those experiencing the sensation of modernity are actually worse off? Or both??

The literature points us in all of these directions. For example, research identifies how growing socioeconomic inequities in recent years have left millions behind, leading to widespread experiences of despair and hopelessness. Other research identifies how new technologies, such as social media, impact our development and daily life, leading to greater loneliness and lower self-esteem. Both of these processes may interact to produce emergent phenomena, such as increasing political polarization, which can bring racism, misogyny, and nativism to the fore, and further impact population mental health.

The literature is also not very conclusive. These theories, and many more, are certainly compelling, and there is some empirical evidence to suggest that they might be true. What we don’t have much evidence about though is which, among the many potential root causes, principally contributed to the decline in wellbeing. It could be, for example, that all three of the theorized causes above contributed, but most of the effect could be explained by another cause, such as changing practices related to family formation and cohabitation.

This lack of certainty puts us in a difficult policy position. If we are facing a crisis of mental health and wellbeing, we need policymakers to act on the upstream root causes. If they don’t, the processes will continue, mental health will further decline, and we will have to rely on increasingly incredible quantities of mental health services to address the population-level distress. The underlying causes may even intensify and exacerbate the crisis, which could spread as other countries follow our developmental trajectory.?

To act on root causes, though, policymakers may need to implement fairly profound policy changes, which may disrupt what we have come to accept as our modern world. Thinking of the theories explored above, this could involve deep redistribution of socioeconomic opportunities, novel regulatory regimes for developing technologies, or national programs to promote social cohesion and solidarity. To ask for the magnitude of policy change likely required, we should be certain that (1) there really is an issue, (2) we have identified its cause(s), and (3) that the intervention we propose will in fact address it.

This series will seek to contribute to answering those three questions, over the course of four sections:

• Is wellbeing really declining and, if so, for whom?
• What do we know about the potential root causes of this decline?
• What specifically were the principal drivers of the decline?
• How can we address the principal drivers?

Ultimately, this series will contribute toward understanding how we, as a society in this present moment, are doing mentally and emotionally, and provide some steps to deliver on the promise of societal progress that advances mental health and wellbeing equitably for everyone.

What do you think is needed to take on the root causes of the mental health crisis in the US? Any early theories about what the root causes may be? Leave your thoughts and comments below!

*Concepts like “modern” and “modernity” are an issue for a number of reasons: it wrongly (or at least over-simplistically) characterizes history as a march of progress toward the present era; it reinforces oppressive and colonial ideas of progress, disparaging peoples that would not be considered “modern;” and lacks clarity and precision that is helpful in understanding the history of our species.