With more options for therapy than at any time in history, why are loneliness, anxiety, and other mental health challenges still on the rise? When Frantz Fanon—a pioneering psychiatrist of the early 20th century—began critiquing Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, it represented more than skepticism of therapy. His piercing assessments revealed the limits of focusing on individual mental illness without accounting for societal harms shaping how people navigate the world. In Fanon’s push to contextualize mental health beyond the therapeutic couch, he laid the groundwork for a parallel debate today: Does the increased sophistication of mental health science, behavioral health technology, and AI run a similar risk of treating the person only to send them back into a broken system that makes their mental health worse?
At face value, this question may not appear as urgent as global climate crises, repairing relations between war-torn nations, or addressing economic downturns threatening livelihoods. But dig deeper into the origins of many of these large-scale challenges, and you find people making decisions in systems without tools to account for the mental and emotional toll of shifting a policy or incentivizing economic progress over sustained well-being for a community. While mental health services historically addressed an individual’s symptoms, the future has the potential to integrate advancing technology into the fabric of society in a way that foundationally changes our decision-making processes—tipping the scale toward decisions that eliminate systemic harms that keep us from living healthy and fulfilling lives.
To reach that future, nations need an incentive. Few motivators rival growing prosperity. Mental wealth is a framework for expanding the definition of prosperity to include the role well-being has in fostering economic growth. It inherently incentivizes going beyond mental health treatment and building institutions, policies, and technologies that create well-being before people get sick. Understanding how to reach a future where mental wealth shapes national decisions requires an examination of the history of past pain for individuals and a deeper understanding of the present innovations that promise to transform how we live, work, and connect.
Past Pain
Before Freud popularized the unconscious mind as a gateway for guiding people toward healing, everyone experiencing “invisible mental illness”—from the elite to the indigent—received labels that identified a problem. At face value, the problem was a disease. Treatment often suggested a different culprit—a deeply flawed person who generally didn’t warrant the same dignity afforded their unlabeled peers.
Dating back to ancient Egypt and Greece, labels such as hysteria and melancholy aimed to make sense of intense feelings that led people—particularly women—to express their pain in ways that misaligned with society’s expectations. The reasons for uncontrollable crying, intense rage, or sudden isolation from others were attributed to deviant sex practices, possession by a spirit, or disunity between the person’s body and nature. The result was institutionalizing the severely ill and casting a wide net of shame on anyone who may privately struggle with difficult-to-explain emotions.
As the psychoanalysis movement took root beginning in the late 19th century, the science of understanding human behavior was expanding the relevance of mental health beyond the severely sick. By the 20th century, everyday people began to refer to Freudian slips, neuroses, and shell shock as experiences that can afflict individuals experiencing extensive stress or trauma. Even with the advent of talk therapy and psychotropic medications, there was still a big problem: Few were asking whether institutions—ranging from hospitals to schools and government agencies—could do something about the societal conditions intensifying these mental health symptoms. Fanon, keenly aware of the impact of oppressive systems on mental health, advanced a form of treatment with a profound premise: to cure the individual, the institutions that undercut their power and dignity must first transform into facilitators of individual agency and community reconnection.
Present Precision
The wave of cognitive-behavioral treatments, more sophisticated diagnoses from iterations of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the introduction of community health centers, and increased research into trauma during the mid-to-late 20th century reflect innovations that appeared to equip institutions with tools to restore individual agency and dignity. More options for treatment should translate into empowered communities capable of recovering from life’s adversities. And yet, struggles with anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress continued to rise globally going into the 21st century—particularly among communities most vulnerable to trauma.
Maybe the problem with creating increasingly specialized treatments for individuals is that it forces society to focus on reacting to mental health symptoms instead of building systems designed to foster sustained well-being. What if schools designated a class solely focused on strengthening mental well-being because policymakers knew it improved academic performance? What if businesses required mental recovery times during the day, where employees can check their stress indicators from wearable devices and choose a well-being rejuvenation activity, because employers believed this optimizes productivity?
Even as behavioral health technologies proliferate—ranging from telehealth to precision medicine solutions targeting genes—the model for creating a healthy society centers on reimbursing clinicians and practitioners for treating those who are already sick. And when treatment happens in silos that don’t consider the policy and institutional decisions intensifying symptoms, it shortchanges opportunities to integrate new technologies into a redesigned society—centered on collaborating systems compelled to promote a high quality of life because it matters for all the other outcomes leading to a prosperous nation.
Future Integration
As an advisor for a firm investing in behavioral health technology and working with companies like Calm to develop programs for their users, I’m constantly considering the possibilities and pitfalls of redesigning mental health supports as an embedded aspect of everyday life. Wearables provide data on sleep and peak stress moments. AI tools act as health navigators to identify early warning signs. Most innovations are built to work without requiring integration into a larger ecosystem of supports and engage revenue models that maximize access to insurance dollars, such as Medicaid in the United States. Few are designed to go beyond helping individuals and act as a puzzle piece—contributing to the portrait of a society with institutional structures valuing well-being as central to its prosperity as a nation. The reason: They don’t have to.
Without a compelling motivator, why build the next wave of mental health innovations on anything but the current system? Unless, as the innovators who proposed a Well-Being Economy for America predict, there is a better system when mental wealth is integrated as a marker of national prosperity. Mental wealth reflects the social conditions that cultivate well-being and social connection within a nation—ultimately leading to the contributions that make it prosperous. More than a formula for assessing national health, mental wealth presents a unique opportunity to measure and understand how our well-being is directly linked to national economic strength.
It compels a standard for redesigning institutions to integrate activities and policies fostering mental well-being and social connection into everyday life. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s in our national best interest. If our future mental health innovations are going to truly make individuals whole and ready to fully contribute to society (not just free of sickness), isn’t it time for a new conversation about mental health that focuses on rebuilding systems just as much as people? Maybe mental wealth is both the motivator and conversation starter.
To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.