There has been much talk of increasing rates of anxiety in recent years. And for good reason: Since 2020, global levels of anxiety have climbed more than 25 per cent, and today anxiety-related disorders are the leading causes of disability. While Anglo-American countries have constantly recorded the highest levels, there has been a striking increase in anxiety rates across the Global South.
Beyond all the data and forecasting around anxiety’s rapid rise and proliferation, however, there is a bigger story to tell about anxiety – one that situates anxiousness within the larger social, biomedical and technical processes of a neoliberal market society. From ads promoting cures for the ‘Sunday Scaries’ and the flood of bestselling memoirs, self-help books and streaming shows romanticising insecurity to the countless exposés decrying millennials as the ‘most anxious generation in history’, the fact that anxiety is repeatedly invoked to describe everything from the stress of a Sunday evening before the work week to a debilitating clinical disorder reveals certain logics within that society.
In unpacking these logics, my recent article in Global Political Economy is focused less on the rapidity of anxiety’s rise – a question more dependent on the metrics developed to quantify and diagnose anxiety than anything else – than on examining why anxiety has become such a pervasive condition in modern life. To this end, I analyse the issue of widespread anxiety as an aggregate of the alienation and isolation produced by the dominant medical, political and economic structures of neoliberal capitalism, which, as a system that privileges productivity and competition above all else, turns every aspect of life into commodities to be bought and sold.
Whereas in the past, a stressed-out and insecure individual might turn to their community, state or religion for support and comfort, people’s ways of processing mental and emotional instability have become increasingly personalised over the last four decades. Therapists and psychiatrists’ certainty have a role to play in this shift but, as I show through a critical interrogation of concepts such as ‘normality’, ‘health’ and ‘productivity’, the issue extends beyond any one practitioner or school of thought into the overarching biomedical framework of mental health management that sets the standards for modern care.
By promoting the idea that health problems are primarily rooted in individual biology rather than social, economic or environmental factors, the biomedical system places the burden of care directly on sufferers, holding them largely responsible for their ‘broken’ brains and ‘negligent’ lifestyle choices. This personalisation not only overemphasises individual drug and treatment courses at the expense of addressing broader societal contributors to health and wellbeing, but it actively obscures longstanding social and political issues such as inequality and racism by reframing them as medical ones that can be managed through biomedical interventions.
The emphasis on profit-driven solutions serves to prioritise financial gain over optimal patient care. For example, when viewed through a strictly biomedical lens, natural processes like menopause or conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are recast as issues of fertility and productivity, which must be medicalised away through personalised drug and treatment courses to allow the patient to achieve their ‘optimal’ productive output. In the long term, such commodifying practices can drive up healthcare costs, limit access to necessary treatments for those unable to pay, and result in the overuse or misuse of medical interventions.
If we peel back the layers of the biomedical influence over how we think about anxiety and mental health more generally, it becomes harder to deny the collective and widespread nature of people’s trauma under capitalism. With this realisation at the forefront, the article moves from a critical analysis of the biomedical industry to a discussion of alternatives grounded in ‘affective political economy’ (APE). The emphasis on APE serves to highlight the interplay between individual experiences of anxiety and larger societal structures, expanding orthodox notions of economics by integrating the circulation and exchange of emotions at a socioeconomic level into a larger analysis of declining mental and emotional health.
Finally, it draws on ‘liberation health modelling’ to recast those experiencing anxiety from passive victims to active agents, capable of understanding, analysing and transforming their life circumstances. The model underscores the therapeutic importance of collective solidarity – what I term ‘anxious solidarities’ – suggesting that forming mutual bonds can be healing. This shift away from the isolating journey of ‘finding oneself’ challenges a biomedical framing mired in personalisation and commodification. Instead, the collective experience of social instability and the underlying logics which drive it becomes a rallying point.
Shifting the framing of mental health from a silo to a community can be a galvanising, activating process. After all, the fact that women and racialised populations experience higher rates of anxiety does not negate the reality that most people are feeling more insecure. Nor does it delegitimise the intense suffering of groups most at risk. Rather, it points to the ways anxiety registers differently depending on one’s material, social and emotional position within the larger systems of neoliberal capitalism. A fact that approaches to mental health treatment and care need to start taking seriously if people are ever going to feel ‘better’.
A.T. (Adam) Kingsmith is a writer, technologist and lecturer currently based in Toronto. He recently completed his PhD on the political economy of anxiety at York University.
Anxious solidarities against the mental health crisis: connecting personal struggles to wider social and economic injustices by A.T. Kingsmith for the Global Political Economy is available on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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Image credit A. T Kingsmith