“Between 2006 and 2023, happiness among Americans under 30 in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand declined significantly [and] also declined in Western Europe,” the report says. But here’s the catch: In the rest of the world, under-30 happiness mostly increased in this period. “Happiness at every age has risen sharply in Central and Easter

A simplistic explanation of Hong Kong’s anorexia surge—along with koro and hysterical fugue—would be that mental illness is always and everywhere a case of social contagion. That’s wrong. What we call worry and sadness are universal human traits, and many psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, show up around the world. Watters’s most interes

“For a very long period of time, our index of negativity in American news articles fluctuated around a stable average,” the UPenn economist J. H. van Binsbergen, a co-author on the paper, told me. But since the 1970s, negativity has gone haywire. “News coverage has just gotten more and more negative every decade in the last 50 years, especially whe

after several conversations with happiness experts and psychologists, I’ve cobbled together a tentative theory. We’re seeing the international transmission of a novel Western theory of mental health. It’s the globalization of Western—and, just maybe, American —despair.

globalization and the internet may be flattening the world’s once spiky terrain of mental disorders

“If you’re looking for something that’s special about the countries where youth unhappiness is rising, they’re mostly Western developed countries,” says John Helliwell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the World Happiness Report. “And for the most part, they are countries that speak English.”

although mental illness is global, the experience of mental illness cannot be separated from culture. If there is a surge of Anglospheric gloom among teenagers, we have to study the culture that young people are consuming with their technology. In the past generation, the English-speaking world, led by the U.S., has experimented with a novel approa

Emergency-room visits for suicide attempts and self-harm have been skyrocketing for Gen Z girls across the Anglosphere in the past decade, including in Australia and New Zealand. But there is no rise in suicide or self-harm attempts in similar high-income countries with other national languages, such as France, Germany, and Italy. As Vox ’s Eric Le

as diagnostic inflation and prevalence inflation combined to raise the salience of our neuroses, something else was happening behind the scenes. The general tenor of America’s political and economic news discourse got much more negative in a very short period of time. To match diagnostic and prevalence inflation, let’s call this negativity inflatio