Perfectionism among college students has become a public-health crisis, and the shape of our economy is likely to blame, according to new research. Rates of perfectionism have soared among college students in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom over the past 35 years, with especially debilitating forms of this psychological phenomenon accelerating sharply since the early 2000s.
While the crisis in youth mental health is often blamed on social media, perfectionism deserves much of the blame, according to London School of Economics psychologist and study author Thomas Curran. Curran and his colleagues analyzed data from 307 studies conducted between 1987 and 2024, encompassing 82,939 American, Canadian, and British college students.
College students are increasingly paralyzed by external pressure to achieve, beset by fear of failure, fear of judgment from others and indecisiveness, Curran and his team found. To a lesser degree, they’re also more prone to striving—motivated to set high goals for themselves and to work hard to achieve them. Though striving is generally considered less distressing than paralysis over mistakes and fear of failure, both forms of perfectionism are linked to depression and anxiety, and these mental-health conditions have been rising in tandem with rates of perfectionism, the researchers found.
One of the main engines of this rise in perfectionism is neoliberalism, says Curran. Our highly individualistic and meritocratic society, which promotes achievement as the basis for self-worth, leads people to orient their lives around maximizing their market value, rather than meeting basic human needs such as autonomy, purpose, and connection.
Fluctuations in rates of perfectionism also seem to track changes in GDP per capita and income inequality, Curran and his team found. Shrinking GDP per capita was linked to increased striving, while growing income inequality was associated with perfectionistic paralysis and fear. The scientists published their results in the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association.
I spoke with Curran about what perfectionism does to the mind, what makes our current moment a perfectionism pandemic, and what can be done about it.
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How do you define perfectionism?
For many decades now, researchers have been squabbling over what perfectionism is. Some people think it’s a one-dimensional trait—essentially excessively high standards. Other people think there’s more to it than that. It’s a problematic relationship with ourselves where we have excessively high standards, but it’s also a problematic relationship with other people. So you expect too much of others, but also you think that others expect too much of you.
My personal opinion is that perfectionism is multidimensional. You can’t really understand perfectionism unless you understand these other more social elements, because it has just as much impact on the psyche of the perfectionist, if not more so. Essentially perfectionism has high levels of striving, so high self-set standards, but also concerns about mistakes, doubts about actions, and worries about other people’s opinions. Those two things together make perfectionism.
Where did this concept come from? When did we start becoming obsessed with perfectionism?
If you want to trace the lineage of perfectionism through modern psychoanalysis, you probably have to consider Karen Horney, a German clinical psychologist. She was the first person to really take on Freud’s ideas around the libidinal drive and penis envy and all that sort of stuff. You had to be very cautious and guarded in those days, particularly when you were criticizing high-profile men, but she basically said, “This is bullshit.” A lot of the neuroses she saw in her clinic were culturally conditioned rather than being the result of a tension between innate drives, desires, and reality. Actually what was going on, she said, was that people were bending themselves out of shape to conform to a societal ideal. It was interesting that it took a woman to observe this, because, of course, women in those days were the people who were most bent out of shape by societal ideals. She’s this really heroic figure in psychoanalysis, but over the years she has been forgotten, which speaks to the patriarchal thrust of psychology that still lives with us today.
Horney was a pioneer, and it was that conflict that she talked about between who we have to be, or should be—she called it the “tyrannical should”—that was bridged through perfectionism. Putting on a facade of perfection to the world, but underneath it, all this turmoil. That’s probably the original genesis of the idea of perfectionism that we see today. And then people like Paul Hewitt, Gordon Flett, and Randy Frost, have taken Horney’s clinical observations and turned them into a sort of empirical tool, which allows us to quantify perfectionism, using numbers and metrics.
In your paper, you mention Horney almost in the same breath with a more recent South Korean-German philosopher named Byung-Chul Han, who came up with the idea of the compulsive “coulds”—the “should” imposed from the outside, the “could” possessing a sense of possibility rather than obligation. Are these different forms of perfectionism, or do they work together?
The “tyrannical shoulds” are really the social elements of perfectionism, because this was Horney’s big idea: We are tyrannized by duties and obligations passed down to us from the outside. In the modern world, that idea still exists. The external honor still holds great power over us, but there’s been this dramatic shift where those outside demands are now internalized. And this is the idea of Byung-Chul Han.
These theorists go in opposite extremes: Horney is all about the external, and Han is all about the internal. Han says that once these external demands are internalized, they’re invisible to us. We see them as freedom. We see them as something positive that we fully embrace. We push ourselves. We exploit ourselves.
Based on the evidence that we’ve presented, I believe that we’re somewhere in the middle, and it’s the worst place to be. Not only do you have these “tyrannical shoulds” that people can see and recognize, but they also have internalized these ideals of optimization and maximization. They see them as personal desires, when actually they’re socially conditioned. In other words, Horney is correct, and Han is correct. But the two also seem to be operating in concert. That’s what the data seems to be suggesting.
You cite Flett and Hewitt who suggest we may have entered a “perfectionism pandemic.” Do your findings suggest that they’re correct?
I think so. These two guys have done the heavy lifting in this area. I sometimes feel like a bit of an interloper. If I have a place in this discussion, it’s really about the philosophical and sociological roots of perfectionism, because I’m very much influenced by Karen Horney. But obviously her ideas require updating for the modern world. Flett and Hewitt have developed scales. They’ve done a lot of recent clinical research. And Paul Hewitt, who runs a perfectionism clinic, has never been busier. His wait list is years long. It’s exploding. That’s what he’s seeing on the ground, but also we’re seeing it in the data. So that’s why they’ve called it pandemic. And we’ve provided the evidence to support this.
How does perfectionism drive some of these mental-health issues like anxiety, depression, self-harm, and even suicidal ideation among young people?
We’ll call perfectionism a trans-diagnostic risk factor. If you look at the evidence, perfectionism has very strong correlations with depression, much stronger than other personality characteristics. But it’s also quite strongly linked with anxiety, self-harm, and suicidal ideation, and that’s because perfectionists are really stress reactive. The theory of perfectionism essentially suggests that perfectionists feel every bump in the road. Any time perfectionists encounter a challenge, their emotional reaction to that challenge is extremely severe. They feel a lot of embarrassment, shame, guilt, and paradoxically, it makes them very adverse to putting forward effort.
You’d think it was the opposite. The perfectionist would try really hard, but the anticipatory guilt and shame that comes from failing at something holds them in place, it keeps them fixed. They frantically do things of low value that they know they can control, but not things of high value where they might fail because of that shame and guilt that they feel. This is one of the reasons why they experience a lot of mental-health difficulties. They experience a lot of shame and guilt, but they also don’t feel like they ever move forward because they’re constantly in this frenetic standstill, where they’re going a hundred miles an hour inside their head, but not actually moving forward. That creates a lot of low self-esteem, a lot of worry about whether other people are judging me or whether I’m good enough. Over time, those self-conscious emotions and that sense of not being good enough has a profound impact on mental health.
There’s a second reason we don’t talk about enough. But it’s also important in this discussion, and that’s that perfectionists move themselves away from other people. Again, that’s paradoxical because you’d think they’d need other people’s validation to feel good about themselves. But the way they interact with others is very artificial. They calibrate what they say and their body language in order for people to like them. They’re trying desperately to gain other people’s approval for their interactions. But that’s a very inauthentic way of interacting. It feels very stilted. Something feels wrong, it feels a bit off. As a consequence, they tend to feel that people don’t really understand them: “I’m trying so hard to be liked, and every time I try to interact with someone, it just falls down or they think that I’m an idiot or whatever.”
Over time, perfectionists begin to learn that they’re not liked or that people don’t understand them, so they move away from others to avoid those feelings of rejection. That’s why perfectionism is quite strongly associated with social disconnection, because perfectionists isolate themselves to guard themselves. One consequence is loneliness, and there’s a very strong link between perfection and loneliness. And if there’s one thing that’s most strongly correlated with mental-health difficulties it’s loneliness. Stress reactivity and loneliness are the two reasons why perfectionists struggle.
A lot of what you’re describing also sounds a lot like certain forms of narcissism. The desperate need for external approval, the low self-esteem that results, and the inability to tolerate rejection or failure. How are they related?
Yes, there’s a lot of narcissistic self-reference going on underneath perfectionism, but it’s important to recognize that it’s not narcissism in the sense of feeling grandiose or wanting to feel superior. The narcissism is really coming from a place of insecurity and fear—“Here I am projecting my best possible self into the world, and it’s not working. It’s all about me, because ultimately I need you to validate me.” On the surface that looks like narcissistic self-referential behavior, but it’s really fear of being rejected in essence.
You set out with this study to ask whether the relationship between perfectionism and psychopathology had changed over time. And you found that it had not. Why did you want to understand that relationship and what did you make of the result?
What we’re trying to do here is build a picture of perfectionism. If we agree that perfectionism is a problem, and we agree that it’s rising, then we have to also agree that it has implications down the line. But this is only true if we can show that these two things are rising together. If perfectionism is going up, but depression and anxiety are going down, then maybe all we’re really seeing is a normalization of perfectionistic tendencies rather than an increase in this personality trait.
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You make a much larger argument about how neoliberalism, as well as rising inequality and slowing economic growth, are fueling the rise in perfectionism. How did we get here?
I’m very interested in how young people interface with the modern world and why my generation is so different from the generation that I’m teaching now, but also very different from my parents’ generation. To explain what’s happening with the data, we have to wrestle with what’s changed over the years.
One thing that’s changed is a fundamental shift in the way that we organize society. In the post-war era of shared prosperity, we had the Rooseveltian New Deal consensus that the middle class was gonna drive prosperity. Then came the neoliberal break, which essentially abandoned that aspiration to focus only on generating as much wealth as possible, giving priority to wealth creators and the entrepreneurs in the top 1 percent. That’s where we started to focus more on individualism, on meritocracy and fairness—this idea of every person for themselves, the sense that you are the author of your own destiny.
We’re trying to unpack the impact of that and show how perfectionism falls quite neatly into that shift. Of course, today these forces of individualism, optimization, and meritocracy are amplified with social media on the scene and other nascent technologies. It’s only a theory, but we’ve tried to test it with various macroeconomic variables, which lend some support to what we’re saying.
I wonder about Japanese culture, which is both highly collectivist but also has really high levels of perfectionism and mental-health troubles. What do you make of that combination of cultural and psychological factors given your findings?
In Japan, you see the same trends, but for different reasons. The one thing that more egalitarian cultures have going for them when it comes to this particular problem is that the drive toward perfectionism is shaped by a certain amount of interdependency. It’s for the greater good of the family, the honor of the family, or the honor of the community, which puts the focus on something bigger than oneself and buffers the harsher edges. But there’s still plenty of perfectionism in Japan, China, and Singapore; it just comes from different sources and has different impacts.
You write that the findings demand urgent attention from not just mental-health professionals, but policy makers and educators. What do you think needs to be done or can be done?
We need to have a grown-up conversation about what the economy’s for, and what are permissible sources of growth. Growth is really important, but as we saw in the data, growth can be a double-edged sword. If you’re getting growth through addictive algorithms that poison children’s minds, that might add a few basis points of GDP, but is it healthy for people? Same with planned obsolescence—it might add a few basis points of GDP, but is that a good thing for the environment?
This isn’t gonna happen, by the way, because we’re so far beyond this discussion now, but if I were in charge, those are the discussions that I’d like to start having. I think we can drive growth and still put people at the heart of the economy. At the moment, we’re not doing that.
You’re an educator, too. How do you work with students? Does knowing about this rise in perfectionism among your students shape the way you teach?
Massive, massive doses of empathy. I spend a lot of my time mentoring, as well as teaching. And most of my time with the first-year students really is to counsel them in the importance of intrinsic motivation, like the learning process itself, to ignore the outcomes and the grades as much as possible and focus more on, are you enjoying this? Are you immersing yourself in the topic and finding it enriching and fulfilling?
Those things are primary. If you’re able to find that, the grades will come. The students get on board. We’ve created learning cultures and a set of principles and practices in our degree where we make sure that the community is important, working together, with curiosity and thinking a bit outside the box. But as soon as they leave our program and go into the workplace, all of these things become meaningless again because they have to focus on the next key performance indicator, or KPI. 
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