The Sociology of Mental Health and the Twenty-First-Century Mental Health Crisis

In this article, I address the current mental health crisis in the United States, consisting of a rapid rise in anxiety and depression among millennials and growing deaths of despair among non-college middle-aged adults. I argue that the twin crises have much in common, as different as they might appear. Both are crises of subjective interpretation and meaning as much as objective circumstance and opportunity. Yet to date they have been interpreted narrowly, as reflecting environmental and technological change and growing impingements on the individual, whether with respect to a rise in social media or a decline in manufacturing jobs. In research on rising mortality, despair has slowly assumed secondary status to deaths. Here, I argue that there is more to the overall mental health crisis, and for this reason, the crisis is worse than it appears. Generations are exposed to more stressful environments, but the cultural environment has also failed to provide them with the tools to cope and manage the consequences of their suffering. Furthermore, even as social conditions have conspired to increase emotional suffering, the social environment has demanded even greater mental fitness, creating an increasingly mental health-biased socioeconomic environment. A sociological approach to the crisis would incorporate a more expansive view of the person and the situation, allowing for more consideration of meaning-making, adaptation, self-conception, and how mental health problems are received. Among other things, this would recenter mental health among the tangle of problems adumbrated in the literature on rising anxiety and mortality.