Are We Over-Therapizing the Youth Mental Health Crisis?

Written by guest author Victor Dubitans

Generation Z—those born roughly between 1997 and 2012—has grown up in an era where talking about mental health is more accepted than ever. Yet paradoxically, they are also the most anxious, depressed, and medicated generation on record. What’s going on here?

Rates of depression and anxiety in young people have been climbing for over a decade, long before the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated this trend. A 2019 study published in JAMA reported a 47 percent increase in suicide rates among 15- to 19-year-olds from 2000 to 2017 (from 8.0 to 11.8 per 100,000). For the 10-14 age group, the suicide rate nearly tripled from 2007 to 2018 (from 0.9 to 2.9 per 100,000). This behavioral data shows that the mental health crisis isn’t just about more awareness or overdiagnosis inflating the numbers—many young people are dangerously unhappy.

Prominent experts like Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt point to smartphones and social media. Around 2012, when over half of Americans had smartphones and social media became nearly unavoidable, Gen Z’s mental health metrics took a nosedive.

Some say it’s parenting: too protective, too fearful. Others cite school stress, economic insecurity, or ecological dread. All of these likely play a role.

But there’s an uncomfortable question we rarely ask: Could the mental health field itself be part of the problem?

When Helping Hurts: The Role of Over-Therapization

Psychoanalysis, therapy, psychiatric medications, mindfulness apps, self-care slogans—these have become the wading pool in which young people play. We’ve built a culture where everyone is encouraged to look inward, to identify symptoms, to name their trauma.

On TikTok and Instagram, therapists go viral for listing signs of anxiety or ADHD, often vague enough to apply to almost anyone. And teens and young adults, fluent in this language, self-diagnose, self-express, and seek treatment in unprecedented numbers.

The result? A generation steeped in mental health language—but still profoundly unwell.

Psychotherapy is consistently shown to be effective in outcomes research, but the field of mental health faces a deeper crisis of knowledge. Despite decades of study, no definitive tests (e.g., blood tests or brain scans) exist for conditions like depression, ADHD, or schizophrenia. Psychiatric knowledge often relies on correlation and interpretation rather than causation. Additionally, while therapy is effective, its benefits appear nonspecific—any explicit, systematic approach (e.g., CBT, family systems, or psychoanalysis) yields similar results.

Given the immature state of the science, psychology is capable of any number of unfalsifiable hypotheses to suggest the cause of the mental health crisis and what might help. However, when a hypothesis cannot be disproven, it holds no greater validity than other unprovable alternatives.

Take this worrisome claim: We keep turning to psychological explanations and solutions to fix our distress, but those explanations may themselves be part of what’s making us sick.

The Hysteric’s Question

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had a provocative idea. He said modern people increasingly relate to the world through what he called “the hysteric’s discourse.” At its core, it goes like this: “Something is wrong, and I demand that someone explain it to me!”

It’s a fundamentally human impulse—when we hurt, we want to know why. But here’s the twist: what if the act of constantly asking what’s wrong actually fuels the crisis? What if the search for a satisfying answer keeps us stuck?

The mental health field, Lacan might argue, plays into this trap. By offering explanations—childhood trauma, brain chemicals, societal stress—it feeds the demand to know. But because these answers can never be complete, they always leave us wanting more.

Like the hysteric’s directive, psychological disorders are notoriously persistent. Successful psychiatric or psychological therapies typically lead to remission and effective coping strategies rather than a complete cure. This type of therapy is vulnerable to becoming a loop: something’s wrong with you, we’re not quite sure what it is, but we’ll keep looking—and billing.

Culture, Capitalism, and the Unconscious

Meanwhile, the broader culture has changed. We’re no longer repressed Victorians avoiding feelings. We’re oversharing them.

Today’s ideal citizen, says philosopher Byung-Chul Han, is no longer the obedient worker, but the endlessly self-optimizing achiever. You’re free—so long as you keep improving, hustling, and “being your best self.”

In this context, even mental health can be another source of self-branding. Rather than healing, influencer mental health (#MentalHealth #Anxiety) can just as easily become about managing one’s image, curating one’s identity, and performing one’s struggles online.

And the field, intentionally or not, participates. Therapists build followings; patients and practitioners become influencers; suffering becomes content.

Cutting Through the Noise

So where does that leave us?

Not in despair—but perhaps in a place of honesty. The mental health crisis isn’t just about Gen Z, or smartphones, or even trauma. It’s about what it means to be human in a world where we’re constantly asked to perform, compare, and explain ourselves—yet rarely just be. And in a system that profits from our dissatisfaction, even our search for healing can be commodified.

The solution may not be more awareness, more therapy, or better diagnoses. It may begin with what Lacan called “the cut”: a refusal to keep playing the game on its current terms.

In Lacan’s treatment of hysteria, the key was not to rush in with answers, labels, or solutions—but to stay with the question. Lacan believed true healing comes not from naming or fixing the symptom, but from disrupting that demand—what he called “the cut.”

This means breaking the cycle of endlessly seeking validation or explanation, and the way that a mental health field can produce this need in offering both validation and explanations, and instead confronting the deeper mystery of desire: not “What’s wrong with me?” but “What do I really want?” From there, Lacan suggests, the goal isn’t to cure the symptom but to make peace with it—even to enjoy it—as something that expresses the unknowable, singular truth of who you are.

Young people today live in a uniquely disorienting time. But they also carry a rare potential: to rewrite the script. To ask new questions not just about their symptoms, but about the world that keeps producing them. And maybe, to begin finding ways of being that don’t rely on endless self-scrutiny—but on real connection, creative freedom, and the kind of meaning that can’t be found in an algorithm or a diagnosis.

After all, maybe the problem isn’t that something is wrong with you.

Maybe the problem is that you were told there had to be.